The Right Choice Paradox

Let’s take the trolley car problem.

Suppose you are in a trolley with no brakes, moving at full speed towards five people tied up to the tracks. The bunch will most certainly die unless something is done. There is also a lever which will divert the trolley toward a different track, where only a single person is tied up. You have ten seconds to decide whether to pull the lever or not.

After cursing the son-of-a-bitch who keeps tying people to trolley tracks just to make philosophy students feel important, you pull the lever. Most of you anyway.

Upon being asked why, the common answer is that saving five lives is better than saving one. Basic math. Grim math, but math.

Now suppose, as before, a trolley is hurtling down a track toward five people. You are standing on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by putting something very heavy in front of it. As it happens, there is a large man next to you, and your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track, killing him to save five.

Should you proceed?

In this case, most people disagree. Suddenly the noble principle of “five is greater than one” starts looking around nervously for a lawyer.

“But uncle PJ, we can’t just push someone to their death. It makes us killers and-”

Blah-blah-blah. Welcome to the paradox.

Those of you who would push the man follow consequentialist moral reasoning, which basically means judging the action by its outcome. In this case, the greater good is saving more lives.

The other type of reasoning is categorical moral reasoning, which takes into account that each person has individual rights. It says some lines should not be crossed just because the final scorecard looks cleaner.

Those of you looking for the correct answer, there isn’t one. At least not one that survives contact with the situation. Saving five lives is noble, but maybe not at the cost of turning an innocent person into a tool.

Personally, in this case, I lean toward Immanuel Kant’s categorical moral reasoning as opposed to Jeremy Bentham’s consequentialist moral reasoning. That sentence sounds like something you write in an exam when you want the teacher to think you read the book. But the point is simple: I don’t think a person becomes disposable just because a situation is desperate.

Some of you smart asses will say this cannot happen in real life. Stop being such spoilsports all the time. A similar moral mess did happen in the nineteenth century, in the case of R v Dudley and Stephens. Four sailors were stranded at sea. One of them, a cabin boy named Richard Parker, became very weak after drinking seawater. Dudley and Stephens decided to kill him so the others could survive. When they were rescued, they were charged with murder.

The argument was necessity. They were starving. They were desperate. They believed one death might save more lives.

The court still said necessity is not a defense to murder.

Again, since this is my blog and my opinion is obviously much more important than your trivial and insignificant opinion, I think the court was right. Desperation explains why someone did something. It does not automatically make the thing right.

Peace.