The Trolley Problem is a famous thought experiment and ethical dilemma that originates from Philippa Foot’s “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect,” wherein she poses a series of ethical dilemmas, one of which, about a tram, being what would become known as the Trolley Problem. She says to imagine that a judge is “the driver of a runaway tram which he can only steer from one narrow track on to another; five men are working on one track and one man on the other; anyone on the track he enters is bound to be killed.”[1] The judge in question had just prior been put to another test, wherein he was expected to choose between mass violence or condemning someone who is innocent. She says that the controversy surrounds problems such as this:
Suppose that a judge or magistrate is faced with rioters demanding that a culprit be found for a certain crime and threatening otherwise to take their own bloody revenge on a particular section of the community. The real culprit being unknown, the judge sees himself as being able to prevent the bloodshed only by framing some innocent person and having him executed.[2]
Foot is particularly interested in addressing these dilemmas as they relate to the Principle of Double Effect, which suggests that it is permissible to do foreseen harm in the case that it is not intended but only of secondary consequence. She gives examples such as hospitals refraining from giving an abortion to save a woman’s life, but allowing a hysterectomy of a cancerous uterous that results in the same fate, due to the fact that abortion is intended to kill the baby and the other only allows the baby’s death to occur as a consequence of saving the woman. Foot ends her paper by letting the reader know that she was just shedding light on the existence of these dilemmas and was not posing a solution.
Today, the Trolley Problem sometimes includes also her fat man (who, in another example, gets stuck leading others out of a cave, to leave them the dilemma to blast him out so they can survive or not), or else just another random person, who is lashed on one set of tracks while five other individuals are lashed to another, leaving the listener to answer if they pull the lever to kill the fat man in order to save the five others.
These are ethical dilemmas because there is no obvious answer to any of them. The answer from utilitarianism is that...
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You can find more like this on my real blog, Ambiarchy Blog, where I cover topics such as:
- Pantheism: The Belief that Nature is God
- Mutualism: The Belief in Anarchy and Cooperation
- Antapodism: The Belief in Friendship Between Humanity and Nature
... as well as other topics related to natural philosophy, natural theology, science, and history, including but not limited to:
- Witnessing Shell Theory: An Alternative Natural Cosmology
- Henogenic Volution Out-of-Everywhere: An Alternative Approach to Evolution
- Ambiarchy: An Alternative to Neo-Anarchism
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