by Marcuse » Tue Mar 31, 2015 3:02 pm
Hmm, I think the problem here is that the trolley problem, or any other "kill one to save many" thought experiment isn't to ascertain what you would physically do or not do in a particular situation, but is intended to be an examination of the relative ethics thereof.
A utilitarian would, of course, say that you are justified and right to sacrifice the one to benefit the many. Spock agrees with that logic. However, it's not the whole story, and there are value systems that offer alternative viewpoints that are worthy of consideration.
For example, several people here have indicated that they would be uncomfortable with being responsible for the death of one person, even if this resulted passively in the death of five. This may result from a few ethical systems. The primary one is one of sentiment, that one doesn't wish to be responsible for a death, even to save life. This might stem from the idea that life is sacred or otherwise valuable and shouldn't be deliberately ended wherever possible. Of course the utilitarian may respond that if one considers life valuable, then one should act to preserve as much of it as possible by saving the five people.
But many ethical systems consider the wilful ending of human life to be immoral in and of itself, and cannot consider that ending a life to save a life is justified because it would require one to break an absolute prohibition on killing. This would be common in deontological ethical systems, and it makes sense to express this in the context of the situation being pre-arranged and unchangeable. One is not responsible for the people on the track, one is responsible for the life or death of the fat man, and if his life is not valuable, then why are the lives on the track valuable? One cannot consider life to be sacred, and then throw one of them away in favour of others. Numbers seems like a poor metric to commit murder.
Indeed, what is it about life that is, itself, valuable? This is an important question the example raises. Should one act to preserve life at all? Self preservation leads us to the instinct to preserve life, but in the context of the situation presented by the problem, it is assumed that one will act in the most moral fashion, and that one will presumably act to preserve the maximum life possible. However, what value does this additional life have?
The concept of valuing lives is interesting because when one considers that one life is moral to sacrifice in favour of five, then what objective value does life have? It only has relative value to the surroundings. If, for example, no people were on the tracks, one would never consider it moral to push the fat man in front of the trolley. No lives would be saved by this action, so the value one places on the fat man's life is relative to the situation. What value then, can we place on the life of the fat man when his life's value is negated by the plurality of the five prisoners?
If one takes the opposite tone however, and claim life does possess some objective value, then said value cannot be negated by the presence of any number of lives in the balance. In that context, we cannot feel that the killing of the fat man has no moral weight. There is value there that has been lost. It may therefore be preferable, useful even, to kill the fat man, but it is very difficult to refer to that as moral.
By contrast, failing to act to save the lives of the five prisoners is an indirect moral question. You didn't put them there, you are not responsible (morally) for their predicament. In the context of the example, you are merely in a position to prevent their death by causing another. Failing to act is a different situation to acting to kill. In the former situation one either wills no action or does not will at all. In the latter, one wills to act to kill. If one considers life to have relative value then willing to kill the one man holds no moral weight, but one must question what motivation one has to act. Those five lives have no weight compared to ten lives.
Again, considering lives have objective value means that one has clear motivation to act to save the five prisoners. However, one also has strong motivation to not act to kill the fat man, as his life also has objective value. In this context, numbers might be the only metric we have to differentiate between the two. Even then, a system claiming objective value would equate the one with the five as equally valuable.