Trolley problem

Trolley problem, in moral philosophy, a question first posed by the contemporary British philosopher Philippa Foot as a qualified defense of the doctrine of double effect and as an argument for her thesis that negative duties carry significantly more weight in moral decision making than positive duties. The trolley problem, as it came to be known, was first identified as such by the American philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson, whose essay “Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem” (1976) spawned a vast academic literature on the topic. The problem immediately suggested a broader application of the doctrine of double effect beyond the morality of abortion, a common context of modern discussions of the doctrine, and prompted a variety of proposed solutions, many based on novel variations of the question designed to lend insight into Foot’s original formulation and to further explore the philosophical issues it raises. The problem appeals to both consequentialist (utilitarian) and deontological (rule- or duty-based) moral intuitions but does not admit of any simple solution from either perspective.

In her essay “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect” (1967), Foot defined the doctrine of double effect in terms of the distinction between what a person strictly (directly, explicitly) intends as the end and the means of a contemplated action and what a person “obliquely” (indirectly) intends as a foreseen consequence of the action but not as an end or a means. Indeed, the foreseen consequence may be completely undesired and regrettable. “By ‘the doctrine of the double effect’,” she explained, “I mean the thesis that it is sometimes permissible to bring about by oblique intention what one may not directly intend.” Somewhat more specifically, the doctrine is “the thesis that sometimes it makes a difference to the permissibility of an action involving harm to others that this harm, although foreseen, is not part of the agent’s direct intention.” In the 20th century some moral theorists, in particular those associated with the Roman Catholic Church, invoked one or another version of the doctrine to distinguish between cases in which an action taken to save the life of a pregnant woman foreseeably results in the death of the fetus—e.g., the removal of a cancerous uterus—and cases in which the fetus is killed as the only means of saving a pregnant woman’s life—e.g., a craniotomy performed on a fetus (or infant) in breech position (the example presupposes a medical context in which a cesarean section is not possible). Catholic theorists generally regarded actions such as the hysterectomy as morally permissible and actions such as the craniotomy as morally wrong, because the death of the fetus is only obliquely intended in the former case but is directly intended in the latter. Critics of the doctrine of double effect, of which there were many, tended to dismiss the distinction it drew as specious and to characterize the doctrine’s application to such extreme cases as a sophistical attempt to justify the Catholic church’s nearly blanket opposition to abortion.

The doctrine of double effect, as Foot herself pointed out, is vulnerable to counterexamples if it is formulated too broadly as the principle that actions that have foreseeable bad consequences are morally permissible as long as those consequences are not directly intended—i.e., as long as they are intended only obliquely. For example, merchants who sell as cooking oil a concoction that they know to be poisonous, resulting in the deaths of many innocent people, are not free of blame merely because they only obliquely intend their customers’ deaths, their direct intention being only to make money. Nevertheless, according to Foot, the distinction between directly and obliquely intended consequences should be taken seriously, because it is useful in explaining the difference between certain cases in which it would be morally permissible (if not obligatory) to perform an action that one knows will bring about an innocent person’s death and parallel cases in which performing such an action would be clearly morally wrong. Absent an explanation based on the doctrine of double effect or some other principle, Foot argued, actions of the latter sort would have to be accepted as at least morally permissible, despite most people’s strong intuitions to the contrary.

As an example of a case of the first sort, involving an action that foreseeably results in an innocent person’s death, Foot imagined the dilemma of “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.” If asked what the driver should do, “we should say, without hesitation, that the driver should steer for the less occupied track,” according to Foot. (Foot’s description of this example has been generally interpreted to mean that the tram is traveling down the track on which five people are working and will kill those people unless the driver switches to the track on which one person is working, in which case the tram will kill only that person.) Foot then compared this situation to a parallel case, which she described as follows: “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 five hostages. “The real culprit being unknown, the judge sees himself as able to prevent the bloodshed only by framing some innocent person and having him executed.” In both cases, she notes, “the exchange is supposed to be one man’s life for the lives of five.” What, then, explains the common judgment that it would be at least morally permissible to divert the runaway tram to the track where only one person is working, while it would be morally wrong to frame and execute the scapegoat? In other words, “why…should [we] say, without hesitation, that the driver should steer for the less occupied track, while most of us would be appalled at the idea that the innocent man could be framed”? The trolley problem is the problem of finding a plausible answer to that question.

Foot’s first, provisional solution to the problem is to say that the relevant difference in each pair of cases can be articulated in terms of the doctrine of double effect: the tram driver only obliquely intends the death of one track worker, while the judge directly intends the death of the scapegoat—a contrast made vivid by Foot’s observation that, should the scapegoat prove hard to hang, the judge would be forced to kill him in some other way, but the tram driver would not look for another way to kill the track worker if the latter somehow survived being run over by the tram. The doctrine of double effect thus explains the contrast in moral assessments of the cases by making clear that “it is one thing to steer towards someone foreseeing that you will kill him and another to aim at his death as part of your plan.”

Similar problems involving drastically different moral assessments of parallel cases are fairly easy to imagine and seem equally amenable to solution through the doctrine of double effect. For example:

We are about to give a patient who needs it to save his life a massive dose of a certain drug in short supply. There arrive, however, five other patients each of whom could be saved by one-fifth of that dose. We say with regret that we cannot spare our whole supply of the drug for a single patient, just as we should say that we could not spare the whole resources of a ward for one dangerously ill individual when ambulances arrive bringing in victims of a multiple crash. We feel bound to let one man die rather than many if that is our only choice. Why then do we not feel justified in killing people in the interests of cancer research or to obtain, let us say, spare parts for grafting on to those who need them?

Although such examples appear to show that the doctrine of double effect is valid, Foot ultimately concluded that they are better explained through a distinction between what she called “positive” and “negative” duties. She offered an approximate definition of a positive duty as a moral obligation to aid or benefit others in a given way in situations where they are in need of help. (Foot purposefully employed the notion of positive duty in a broad sense to encompass acts of charity that would ordinarily be considered supererogatory—i.e., laudable or commendable but not obligatory.) A negative duty, in contrast, is approximately defined as a moral obligation not to harm or injure others in a given way. Foot contended that this distinction of duties could account for the contrast in moral intuitions in all variants of the tram problem explained by the doctrine of double effect—and in other variants of the problem that the doctrine seems unable to handle—provided that negative duties are understood to significantly outweigh positive duties in cases where the two conflict (i.e., where the duties prescribe conflicting actions). Because this assumption helps to explain most people’s moral intuitions in the contrasting pairs of cases, and thus to offer a plausible solution to the tram problem, the solution itself constitutes an argument in favour of the view that negative duties are more important than positive ones. The solution also assumes, and thus demonstrates, that in cases of conflicting duties of the same kind (positive or negative), the duty that ought to be carried out is the one that either maximizes aid or minimizes harm.

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According to Foot, the tram driver faces a conflict between the negative duty not to kill five track workers and the negative duty not to kill one. Because the circumstances make it impossible to act on both duties, the driver should carry out the duty that entails the least number of deaths, a conclusion that accords with most peoples’ intuitions. In the case of the scapegoat, the judge faces a conflict between the positive duty to save the lives of five people and the negative duty not to kill one. The intuition of most people that the judge should not carry out the execution is explained by the assumption that the negative duty is more important than the positive one.

Since the publication of Foot’s essay, many analyses of the trolley problem, as Thomson called it, have been offered—including several that dispute her defense of the doctrine of double effect or her thesis of positive and negative duties—and a broad range of conclusions have been drawn from it.

In her essays “Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem” (1976) and “The Trolley Problem” (1985), Thomson introduced provocative variants of the original scenario that seemed to undermine Foot’s duty-based analysis. In one of them, the driver of the trolley faints after realizing that the trolley’s brakes have failed, and a bystander on the ground, understanding the emergency, notices a switch that could be thrown to divert the trolley onto the one-worker track. Most people would agree that it would be at least morally permissible for the bystander to throw the switch. On Foot’s analysis, the bystander would thereby violate a negative duty not to kill one person. If the bystander does nothing, however, the negative duty not to kill five people would not be violated, since, in doing nothing, the bystander would not be engaged (in any reasonable sense) in active killing—as would the driver of the trolley, who is understood to (involuntarily) drive the vehicle into the worker(s) in both Foot’s account and Thomson’s. At most, the bystander would be violating a positive duty to save five people. Foot’s analysis, therefore, incorrectly predicts that most people would consider it morally wrong for the bystander to throw the switch. Thomson also offered a similar example in which the “bystander” is a passenger on the trolley, who likewise would not be driving the trolley into the five workers if he did nothing.

Another much-discussed variant by Thomson involves two bystanders who witness the emergency from a footbridge over the track leading to the five workers. One of them, understanding that the trolley can be stopped only if a heavy object is thrown in its path, pushes the other, a “fat man,” off the bridge and onto the track, thereby halting the trolley and saving the five workers but, of course, killing the fat man. If the pushing takes place, the pusher will have violated a negative duty not to kill one person. If, on the other hand, the bystander does nothing, no violation of a negative duty not to kill five people would occur (because the bystander would not have engaged in any active killing); at most, the bystander will have violated a positive duty to save five people. As Thomson noted in a later essay, “Turning the Trolley” (2008), the case of the fat man is similar to the case in which the judge frames and executes a scapegoat to save five hostages and the case in which a surgeon kills a healthy person (against that person’s will) and transplants the healthy person’s vital organs into five patients who need them to survive (compare Foot’s example of “killing people in the interests of cancer research or to obtain…spare parts for grafting on to those who need them”).

Although Foot’s duty-based analysis correctly predicts that most people would consider it morally wrong to push the fat man off the bridge, its apparent failure to account for most people’s moral intuitions in the cases involving the bystander on the ground and the passenger on the trolley indicates that there must be other, heretofore unnoticed, differences between the cases in which the action taken seems permissible and the cases in which it seems wrong. Likewise, there must be other similarities between the cases in which the action seems wrong and other similarities between the cases in which it seems permissible. In “Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem,” Thomson tentatively suggested that the relevant similarities between the “wrong” cases are either: (1) the person killed has more of a claim on a benefit or good of which he or she is deprived or more of a claim against the harm that he or she suffers, than do the other person(s) involved, or (2) the action immediately taken involves doing something to the person deprived or harmed rather than doing something to some other thing, which then results in that person being deprived or harmed. Thus, Foot’s examples of the executed scapegoat and the person killed for body parts, as well as Thomson’s example of the fat man and the involuntary donor of vital organs, all exhibit feature 2, while the two surgical cases exhibit both feature 2 and feature 1—the latter because the victims in the surgical cases obviously have a decisive claim on their own body parts. In contrast, the original trolley problem, as well as the cases of the bystander on the ground and the passenger in the trolley, exhibit neither feature.

Thomson’s aforementioned essays, written over the course of more than three decades, contain several other variants and analyses of the trolley problem. (Interestingly, in her 2008 essay, “Turning the Trolley,” Thomson argued that the common intuition that it would be permissible for the bystander on the ground to divert the trolley is mistaken.) The academic literature that her work has inspired encompasses descriptive as well as normative accounts and contributions from psychologists, physiologists, and legal scholars as well as philosophers. Somewhat simplified versions of the problem have also been presented in nonacademic publications.