Legally perhaps, but morally, I've never gotten why so many people think that the physical act of pulling or not pulling makes so much difference.
It's a binary decision with two outcomes, in my personal view it is irrelevant which of the outcomes is caused by physical action and which by inaction (at least, supposing that you have enough time to think about what to do - obviously, if you have to react in a split second, it's understandable to be biased towards inaction because you may need more time to make the right decision, but that's not the point of these problems in the way they are posed).
If you have enough time to think what to do, inaction is a conscious choice and if it does more harm than good, you are guilty of not choosing action.
We could also sacrifice a single person and harvest their organs to save five others.
I guess because there's more wiggle-room with a non-action. If you don't pull a lever, you could argue there wasn't time to pull the lever, or that you were frozen with fear or whatever.
I think non-actions are judged less harshly than actions, so people are more inhibited in making them..
Clearly not. The vast majority of people responding to this problem usually want to pull the lever, murdering an innocent who would otherwise have lived through the day - an utilitarian perspective that holds that by default it's best to maximize the amount of lives saved. It's difficult for those of us that would argue that every life is valuable, and that, not being god, the bystander does not have the right to make this call. The bystander did not place the runaway trolley there, nor are they responsible for the people who are tied to the tracks.
I would ask the person who is (in most of these scenarios) on the diverted tracks what they want me to do. They have the right to make this decision, since they are masters of their own life.
I’ve always presumed you don’t have time to ask those sorts of questions in these problems. You have to decide that you’d let 5 people die so your action doesn’t kill one, or kill the one not knowing how they feel about dying to save five.
What I find…not surprising I guess, but sad is that while a large percent of people would pull the lever only a small percent of people would pull the lever if they were the one on the other track. People not being at least as likely to pull the lever when they are at stake breaks all basic moral principles.
I did notice that. I'd pull the lever if I was the one on the tracks, since in that case I am not robbing someone else of their life through my decision - my life is my own to sacrifice. At that point it's best to save five.
Then again, a sizeable minority wouldn't sacrifice their life savings for lives either, which means this portion of the respondents does not think the lives of strangers have value at all, or at least that they are not in any case responsible for lives other than their own. Which is interesting!
Right now, non-hypothetically, would you be willing to donate your internal organs to those who will die without them, even if it meant you will not survive yourself?
Not right now, no. That would be terribly inconvenient.
Jokes aside, I'm aware of my own moral weakness in this regard. The religion I was raised in - and I'm still a spiritual person - holds that suicide is the gravest of sins, but I don't have that high an opinion of my own life and its potential. The closer I am to the situation, and the more urgent it is, the more tempted I am. So I try to stay aloof, for the sake of those who love me, and out of my own instinct of self-preservation, which is a powerful force in most human beings.
If your mind was exactly like mine, and you were close enough to the situation to make the decision to sacrifice someone else for a group of strangers - and being tied to the tracks is pretty damn close - you would likely be willing to sacrifice yourself. But remember, someone must have tied me to the tracks in the first place for my life to be in danger. As I said in previous comments, in most cases I am, though inaction or stalling, attempting to save the life of the single person in the tracks - the person in the same position. I will not kill to save others, and attempting to not kill myself to save others is consistent with this position.
I would be useless as a soldier!
If that's unpalatable, what about have you donated one of your kidneys yet? You can live a healthy life with just one. If you truly believe you would sacrifice yourself in this trolley scenario, I don't think it is possible to justify not having done something where (excepting the slight risk of more serious consequences) the only sacrifice is time.
There's more perceived wiggle-room with rationalizations, not actual wiggle-room.
The only moment in the scenario that matters is when you've made your choice and as others have said: it's binary. You pull the lever or you don't. The moral act is in making the choice, not what comes after. In that moment of choice you've expressed a hierarchy of your values.
Now, you might value most highly your own mental well-being, and making the most of that by rationalizing to yourself that you didn't actually make the choice that you just made. You might value your social standing or legal disposition the highest and make the choice accordingly. etc.
Of course, the scenario itself is a bit silly and not the kind of everyday living guidance that one will most likely have thought deeply about in anything than abstract moralistic terms. It's pretty rare to face that sort of scenario with that kind of consequence.
Not my circus, not my monkeys. I don't think I can be held morally responsible for inaction in any circumstance. We didn't start the fire etc.
I answered "no pull" to every one except the one where the express goal was pranking the trolley driver (and no implied harm from pulling). This is apparently an unpopular opinion, but the only one I can reconcile with my own concept of responsibility.
Interesting! Do you disagree with the legal traditions that penalize doctors for failure to render aid, even when not at work? Or perhaps that isvlike saying you are actually the (or at least a) trolley switch operator, you just aren't in duty, in which case maybe your position obligates action when it is warranted?
Precisely. I am generally against compelled action of any kind, as it violates mutual consent, a fundamental principle I hold.
A trolley switch operator has explicitly opted in to the responsibility, and consents to same. A bystander has not.
This is why the famous internet video of the trolley problem acted out in the real world was required to offer post-experiment psychological counseling to the test subjects. They had not consented to being placed in a position of responsibility for life safety.
> compelled action of any kind, as it violates mutual consent.
So many of these questions are artificial, and it’s interesting how the legal system gets involved, but to a certain extent I think these questions are meant to describe a persons moral position outside of societies judgement of them. In many of these situations, it’s life and randomness that is putting these people into those situation, not producers of internet videos. I guess if you don’t feel bad your not morally responsible, but if someone was in distress I would feel _compelled_ to act.
I assume by compelled you mean by human forces but I can’t help but compare it to the notion that chance and ‘destiny’ often violate our consent, and compell us to action.
> I've never gotten why so many people think that the physical act of pulling or not pulling makes so much difference.
By pulling the level, one is intentionally killing a person, to save five. In more general terms, a life is taken away for the greater good of society.
A foundation of societies (modern ones, and I guess, some more than others) is that taking a life away has highly specific restrictions, which are usually justified by the person doing harmful acts (representing a danger to other people). To put it in another way, any citizen has the guarantee that, unless they do something harmful, they're safe. It's a contract between the citizen and the society.
By pulling the lever to save one, the contract is broken. To be consistent with the societal principle, it should be the person on the alternate track to decide whether the lever should be pulled, not an observer.
(The above reasoning is based on a very generic vision of the law. If anybody has some details, they're very welcome :))
You go from passively letting someone die to actively killing someone. Which is a major difference.
Now, you might think that it isn't given enough time, but it's easy to argue that you're currently letting kids die in Africa by your inaction (or Ukrainians or homeless people etc.). Being slightly at fault for someones death is basically a permanent state of affairs, whereas actively killing someone is something few people would be willing to do. It definitely makes a difference.
>Being slightly at fault for someones death is basically a permanent state of affairs, whereas actively killing someone is something few people would be willing to do. It definitely makes a difference
It only makes a difference in the eyes of the beholder, not for those actually dying
Not thinking too hard about reality because reality is nasty is something of a huge bug in the human cognition. Trying hard to not know anything is even desirable from that point of view: it's not neglect if you never bothered getting to a state where you are capable of being responsible for anything
> It only makes a difference in the eyes of the beholder, not for those actually dying
Unfortunately, that's the one (not) making the decision in this case.
> Not thinking too hard about reality because reality is nasty is something of a huge bug in the human cognition.
Is, though? I mean, in general we should strive to improve the world, but does getting overwhelmed by all the bad things that you should be doing something about really doesn't help.
Maybe if we were overwhelmed by all the bad things that we should be doing something about it would eventually lead us to a point where we would be doing something instead of just living our lives doing nothing (for the most part)?
If we are already talking about changing the human cognition, might as well add an ability to function while being aware of the issues
In real life scenarios there is a built in uncertainty with doing an action.
Imagine a scenario where you redirect the trolley to kill someone but the people you wanted to save would have survived anyway.
You would enjoy Peter Singer's writing. You are killing children by not donating your wealth to help them.
This seems to me to be the logical conclusion of the "you must pull" framework.
I'm not convinced that's wrong, it's just that we need to accept we can't always act 100% in the best way for humanity. Rather than try to convince ourselves that our actions are somehow moral I think we need to accept we act out of selfishness sometimes and deal with that internally, otherwise we end up crafting philosophies saying that the hoarding of massive wealth is somehow moral just to try and stop the cognitive dissonance.
> I've never gotten why so many people think that the physical act of pulling or not pulling makes so much difference.
One reason could be because your presence at this railroad switch is exceptional or at least unusual in some way. Maybe its worth considering what would happen if you weren't there at all.
When working in a new codebase, it's generally better to assume that something odd is the way it is for a reason, rather than changing it to something that seems right (easier to understand) to you. This is because in the real world, there is so much you don't / can't yet know about a situation that you're thrown in to.
I guess this is kind of reflected in the switch example where its 5 people that tied themselves to the railroad vs. one who didn't, and something like 85% "choose" the 5. How do you know how they got there? That implies so much prior knowledge and background that isn't really considered in the oversimplified "choices" in the website. Maybe they were forced to tie themselves to the railroad at gunpoint, or maybe it's a weird death-by-train suicide cult.
> How do you know how they got there? That implies so much prior knowledge and background that isn't really considered in the oversimplified "choices" in the website. Maybe they were forced to tie themselves to the railroad at gunpoint, or maybe it's a weird death-by-train suicide cult.
This kind of reasoning really defeats the point of the thought experiment, which is to construct a scenario where those considerations aren't a factor so we can reason about ethics and moral intuitions without the greater complexity of real-world situations.
Morally is different but it's also the gist of the problem. Inaction makes you exempt because you didn't took part.
People choose inaction all the time. When we see a bully abusing a colleague... A homeless person on the street... A car aciddent. This is the metaphor.
You probably use a consequentialist meta-ethical framework. This is great -- I do too -- but in a deontological or virtue-based system it may or may not work out this way. We've already got an example of such a deontological system here: if one takes the (somewhat unusual but not unheard of) view that legality implies morality, then there's a moral difference because there's a legal difference.
The trolley problem is meant precisely to highlight these differences, and I think it's one of the best arguments for consequentialism. In my less charitable moments, I like to refer to the concept of privileging inaction as an informal fallacy. It's not really, though; it's just that folks have different philosophical starting points.
Then again there are also deontological aka categorical morality frameworks that see pulling the lever as acceptable, that it is not “killing” but the life of the man in the other line is lost as a secondary effect, which must be gravely considered. There are yet other versions of the trolley problem that have you push a man in the way of the trolley to stop it and save the five. Sometimes people pose that variant as though it must be accepted as morally equivalent, but I find the importance lies in why we find the situation different.
That's correct, in deontological or virtue-based systems it varies a lot from system to system.
In the deontological view, both pulling the lever and inaction may be perfectly permissible.
Consider: Who knows what happens? It's perfectly possible the problem description lied, and the opposite thing happens. Either way real life doesn't come with problem descriptions. Since "what happens" is profoundly inaccessible, the more important question is what you wanted and why.
So, it's permissible to redirect the train away from one and towards many, if directing it away from the one was what you wanted. It's equally permissible to redirect the train away from the many and towards the one, if directing it away from the many was what you wanted. It's easy to imagine a world where you got what you wanted, but the bad thing that looked like would happen as a side effect didn't happen. Maybe that's the one we live in.
However, if you really wanted a specific person on the track to die, then you should pull it away from them. Not for their sake, but for yours. What happens is still uncertain, but the important thing is that you did not act on this bad desire.
(By the way, virtue ethics is just a stupid "third way" branding exercise. To say goodness isn't derived from outcomes is fine. To say it is, is at least a coherent position. But thinking you can dodge that problem by talking about "virtues" instead is just nonsense.)
Inaction is overwhelming if you think about it. by inaction you are guilty of every sufering person around you. And you can expand that pool by saying that your inaction to find out more sufering people is also part of your guilt. of course provided you are already not doing your max right now to help tham. but hey, youre on HN, so i assume you still got free time to spare ;)
It gets tricky. Should you kill an innocent guy from the street if you can save 5 people with his organs?
The main difference between action and inaction is that with inaction it's much less likely the other monkeys will conclude you are dangerous and should be killed (because they're not any worse off by your inaction, almost by definition).
Because the real world is more complex than a lever, and there are many unknowns in how either physical or human manifestations respond to actions, and doing nothing removes your intent from the mix.
A very clear example of this is medicine with the "do no harm" principle - that the actions of the physician should be chosen to minimize the scenarios of harming the patient under any circumstance - under chance, under lack of patient compliance, etc.
Furthermore, the actions in the real world have also different experiences and meanings. Its easy to think about pulling a lever to kill 1 instead of 5, but not easy to think of killing one to harvest their organs and save other 5, though they are, with a lot of abstraction, "equivalent moral actions".
The trolley problem is specifically about a situation that is ongoing regardless of your presence.
You're not running the train, nor own the railway, you didn't bind the people on the rails. You just happen to be there, and can perhaps improve the outcome.
In case the worst outcome happens because of your inaction, the biggest moral fault lies on those who created the situation in the first place.
(If you're looking at a bank robbery and don't push the alarm button, you have some moral responsibility, but the robbers are the villains.)
When you take action, you become part of the situation and take full responsibility of the outcome.
So, no, I don't think the choice are morally symetrical. Taking action is morally a high risk high return strategy, while inaction is low risk mild returns (best case is you did nothing and that was the right choice, so you could have been absent, it wouldn't have made a difference)
What does having enough time actually mean? I am almost certain that I would freeze if I encountered such a situation in real life, or panic and be unable to figure out how to flip the switch ...
... which brings up the real problem with these scenarios. In real life, the person at the switch would be trained. While that training is unlikely to include hypothetical scenarios created by philosophers, they would be expected to assess the safety of the act. This would put them into a position where the physical act of pulling or not pulling the switch would not, as you say, make much of a difference. They would have to answer for their actions down the line, even if their only answer was that it put them into an ethical conundum where they had insufficient information to assess the value of that one life verses five. A court may, or may not, accept that argument. It could be based upon the numbers (e.g. five lives are more valuable than one). It could be based upon the psychological impact of the decision upon the switch operator (e.g. a calculated sacrifice of one life may be frowned upon relative to an emotionally crippling indecision that led to the loss of five lives).
In turn, that brings up another issue with these artificial scenarios: they virtually always include follow-ups that are intended to raise doubt in decisions made. What if that one person was a child with their entire life ahead of them, and the five lives elderly people who have less to look forward to? What if that five included a "Hitler" plus four regular people, and the one was a "Gandhi" (i.e. the one slaughtered many orders of magnitude more people, and the one was revered for their regard of life)? Those are the sorts of things that are usually raised to justify indecision, even though they are highly unlikely.
The trolley problem is usually phrased with a "bystander" making the decision, but is simplified to the point of ignoring most of what is important about being a bystander, in ways that makes people's moral intuitions look unnecessarily silly precisely because it's an artificially simplified scenario. In particular, typically bystanders in the real world are both numerous and uninformed. As a result, assuming that each bystander has a randomly biased estimate of the truth, if everyone followed the simple logic of pulling the lever iff they believe doing so will net save lives, the lever is likely to be pulled far more often than it should be, because the person with the most extreme belief will conclude that doing so is worth it. In the real world, it's typically the case that "action" is much more difficult to reverse than "inaction".
There are other thought experiments that elucidate this more clearly, like a soldier deciding whether now is the right time to fire the first shot to start a battle.
People's moral intuitions have heuristics that attempt to deal with this ("bystander effect") although they definitely can be poorly-calibrated in the real world, and are almost always badly calibrated in artificial thought experiments because that's not the environment they were designed for.
There's a version of the problem that tries to highlight this:
A runaway trolley is heading down the tracks toward five workers who will all be killed if the trolley proceeds on its present course. Next to you is a stranger who happens to be very large. The only way to save the lives of the five workers is to push this stranger onto the tracks where his large body will stop the trolley. The stranger will die if you do this, but the five workers will be saved.
Does the act of physically pushing a person onto the tracks make it different than pulling a lever?
Personally I agree with you and it seems obvious to me to pull the lever. Here is my take on why there are people that believe it’s obviously the other way around:
There is a fundamental branching point of ethical systems between consequentialism (eg utilitarianism, which says the outcome is what matters) and deontology (which says basically that some set of rules exist, and ethical behavior equates to following those rules, no matter the consequence).
If you are a deontologist, “the ends don’t justify the means” and it’s rarely ok to just kill someone to save someone else. If you are a consequentialist then the choice to live in the better world is obvious.
Western morality, being heavily influenced by Judeo-Christian systems with Ten Commandments and books of God’s Rules, has a lot of deontological assumptions baked in (as does the legal code). So even with time to ponder the problem, “thou shalt not kill” will weigh heavy on many.
It seems overly simple to me to reduce it to "more is better". What if the five people are 100 year old dementia patients moaning in agony and the one person is an infant? Do you still pull the lever because "more people alive is better"? What if the five people are infants and the one person is an elderly convicted murderer, does that change how easy it is to pull the lever? In "more is better" neither shouldn't change your view, but they feel different.
> "(eg utilitarianism, which says the outcome is what matters)"
Speaking of the outcome - before you are involved, the person who tied six people to the tracks is attempting murder; if society finds the person it will punish them. After you pull the lever, should society try you for murder? For aiding and abetting a crime? Celebrate your rescue? A society where any individual can kill any other individual, if they think it is for the greater good, feels like it would be unable to hold together. The outcome of more people being alive but the destruction of society seems like it could be bad enough to outweigh the loss of five people.
It’s a thought experiment for studying ethics. You can modify all of the variables as you choose, but in general you want to pick the simplest form that suffices to demonstrate the point.
In this case making the people different would make the experiment needlessly complex. The problem as-stated (assuming identical individuals) already illustrates the consequentialist/deontologist conflict.
I think you are perhaps engaging on a different level than intended; “what are the legal consequences of this action” is downstream of the problem. In other words, we should make our legal system conform to our ethical system, not take the legal system as some fact that must guide our ethical principles.
This is not intended as some legal case study to test law students’ understanding of culpability in homicide. (Although that might well be an interesting discussion in its own context).
> It seems overly simple to me to reduce it to "more is better".
No consequentialist would claim this, and to be clear that’s not what I claimed either.
Morality is an evolutionary adaptation to improve group cohesion. It is much easier to attribute blame/praise to active behaviors rather than passive ones, since it's plausible the passive person isn't there's a problem in the first place.
That said, if you do actually care about consistency and the consequences, and don't care about what others think of you, then active/passive makes no difference.
There are metasocial reasons for this that are probably best illustrated by one of the classic variants on the trolley problem. Imagine you're a surgeon in a hospital. You have a healthy patient who is under for knee surgery or something. At the same time, five people come into the trauma ward from a trolley accident down the street, all of whom will die without an organ transplant. All of them are compatible with your patient.
What should you do? If you're going to take the view that failing to save a person you could have saved is morally equivalent to killing, then clearly you should kill your one patient to save the other five.
But think of the longer-scale effect this would have. Would anybody ever go to a hospital and get elective surgery knowing they might be killed to harvest their organs? A more general form of trolley problem doesn't necessarily present that exact dilemma with such clear consequences, but at any scale, think of the consequences of being concerned with what happens because of your inaction. Do you donate blood once a week or whatever the max frequency is at which your body can regenerate the red cells? Do you still have both kidneys? Do you ever spend money on anything except bare minimum shelter, enough grain to stay alive, and every other cent going to the AMF or whatever the maximum QALYs saved/dollar donated charity is? How many people have died in your time on Earth that could have lived if you'd done something different? If we all seriously made that a primary concern in our daily decision-making, virtually all productive action would be paralyzed. Everybody would be trying to become a hedge fund manager living like a pauper and giving all their money to the AMF, but the AMF would no longer be able to do anything, because everyone would be a hedge fund manager and there would be no one left to manufacture mosquito nets.
> Legally perhaps, but morally, I've never gotten why so many people think that the physical act of pulling or not pulling makes so much difference.
As Henry David Thoreau said:
It is not man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.
It's not your duty to fix the world. It's not even your duty to optimize the outcomes of the world as best as you could. The world is not in your hands. There was one trolly problem on this page where everything was blurred, but in the real world you don't remotely get clean problem statements at all, let alone clean outcomes. Not only are the outcomes profoundly unknowable, but the world is full of other people pulling their own levers!
To illustrate it, maybe he should have added one trolley problem where you were given the classic #1 description, but regardless of what you picked, the opposite happened. Or you got a random pick from one of the other people on the site. Or one where a third, entirely unexpected thing happened.
> It is not man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.
Classic appeal to authority. The above quotation contains grand declarations with no supporting logic or evidence. Just because Henry David Thoreau said it doesn't make it true.
> in the real world you don't remotely get clean problem statements at all, let alone clean outcomes. Not only are the outcomes profoundly unknowable, but the world is full of other people pulling their own levers!
The outcomes of inaction are equally as "profoundly unknowable" as the outcomes of taking action. From an "unintended consequences" perspective, it's a wash. So we might as well focus on the first order known consequences, which are pretty clear.
If we're going down the road of appealing to authority, I'm partial to "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing"
I explained at length why I agree with the Thoreau quote.
> The outcomes of inaction are equally as "profoundly unknowable" as the outcomes of taking action.
Absolutely.
> From an "unintended consequences" perspective, it's a wash.
Indeed. That's exactly what I said.
> So we might as well focus on the first order known consequences
Sure. Or we might not. Either is permissible because...
> which are pretty clear.
That's where you've been lied to. And the site author absolutely should have added an example where the description didn't match up with what happened at all.
The Copenhagen interpretation of ethics: you're automatically morally neutral if you don't take action. https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/ https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...
>> if it does more harm than good, you are guilty of not choosing action.
True. Yet some large subset of people seem to highly value plausible deniability in their own head - they fear more having to think about the one person they kill by pulling the lever vs. just feeling like they can ignore the 5 dead because they did nothing, expecting that they can say that they had nothing to do with it.
Also seems like they can't recognize the inherent limitations of the situation -someone's already dead,you're just trying to make a least-worst choice,and I've seen many who fail to recognize such situations and just think that a good option must be available when it isn't, and that delusion ends up causing the worst outcome.