An article in this month's Prospect magazine describes how the original 'Trolley dilemma' has been elaborated by so-called 'trolleyologists' to serve as a kind of test of moral perspective. The basic mind game is fairly well-known: an unoccupied train trolley is hurtling down the tracks towards 5 people. They are chained to the tracks and cannot avoid their fate: if the trolley hits them they will all die. However, there is a spur off this track, operated by a lever. On this spur of track lies a single individual, also chained to the track. You, the observer, have the choice of allowing the trolley to crush the group of five, or to pull the lever and divert the trolley onto the spur, killing the single individual. What do you do?
The next step of the game has a variation. As before, 5 people lie in danger before a runaway trolley. However, Instead of a spur there is a 'very large man' on a bridge. You are standing behind him, and a single push will place him in front of the trolley, certainly stopping it in its tracks and saving the five people, but of course killing the big guy in the process. Do you push him?
(Image taken from October issue of Prospect Magazine)
Moral philosophers among us will refer to Thomas Aquinas and his 'double effect' rule, which in a way is a precursor to utilitarianism, whereby an action can be judged morally correct if it does more good that harm. Thus most people tend to pull the lever in the first example, saving five people. Perhaps they feel that all six people are potential victims, so saving five is a better result than saving just one. We do not wish anyone's death, and if the single man was able to escape we would be delighted - he has no part to play in our plan to save five lives. Conversely, with the second conundrum, most people are reluctant to push the large man onto the tracks, as to do so is to deliberately wish his death, indeed his death is the only way in which the other people can be saved. If he escapes, our plan is foiled.
I imagine many papers have been written by philosophy students to discuss this model and tease out what it tells us about our moral sensibilities. But for me there was an interesting detail in the development of the model. The large guy on the bridge used to be called a 'fat man', but is now more commonly the 'large man'. I recall reading somewhere (though I may have imagined it) that the reason for this change was the increasingly negative image of fat people. When the test was first conceived back in the 1970s a fat man may have been seen as a jolly, corpulent fellow, showing his keep but otherwise blameless. This conception has probably been fairly common until recently - for instance contrast gregarious (though admittedly not very admirable) Falstaff with the 'lean and hungry look' of the duplicitous and cadaverous Cassius. This image still persists in many developing countries, where obesity is a sign of wealth and success, and is an attractive characteristic in a mate. Whereas in western culture we have Homer Simpson (a modern day Falstaff if ever there was one).
Nowadays, it seems that trolleyologists are concerned that subjects may chuck the fat man off the bridge because they may feel that being used as a buffer is a fitting end for failing to comply with our modern norms of beauty and self-discipline. It is ironic that as we become more hopelessly consumerist and unable to defer consumption or save rather than spend, we value virtues that we no longer possess. Back in the days of frugality, over-consumption was revered, now it is deplored. But I digress...
The point of this is that the trolley test is designed to exclude confounding variables. It is carefully worded so the decision to pull the level or push Homer off the bridge is a choice arising out of pure moral reasoning, rather than prejudice. It invites us first to accept that all humans are equal and have equal rights, and then to consider if one human can be used as a tool in the service of another. It then attempts to trap us into making the utilitarian calculation that sums the aggregate value of utility of any action - in which case a utilitarian would flick the lever and probably also shove the big guy.
I got to thinking about how this game changes if we substitute animals for humans. Apparently this has been tried before - but only with a direct swap (say, monkeys for humans), with the effect that the large monkey always gets pushed to save his simian cousins. Perhaps we find utilitarianism more comfortable when discussing animals. But just as the 'fat man' changes the game by introducing prejudice, perhaps we could offer a choice between species. Would you exterminate one species to save another? What if the five potential victims on the track are the last remaining tigers in the world, and standing in for the fat man is the last remaining polar bear?
It may sound far-fetched, but there is a real world example that approximates this dilemma. A 2004 New Scientist article told the story of a parasite called the 'rhino maggot' that afflicts rare white rhinos, leading to their death. To save the rhino, we need to exterminate the maggot. But this parasite can survive only by using the rhino as a host as part of its lifecycle - no other species will do - so if we eliminate the maggot we make it extinct. Of course, many people may prefer rhinos to maggots and see little difficulty in making this choice, in the same way as we would not weep if mosquitos became extinct tomorrow. But the lesson of moral dilemmas is that they tend to become universal, in fact their universality is a test of their robustness. If we start making preferential choices between species based on prejudices about charisma or cuteness, then we are eventually forced to decide between increasingly harder choices, such as tigers and polar bears.
So, a strictly utilitarian construct will allow us to kill the maggot to save the rhino, even though, like the fat man on the bridge, the maggot's death is a deliberate precondition to save the rhino from extinction. Note that the maggot is as blameless as the fat man - it is the rhino's scarcity that has created the conditions for extinction, not the maggot's voraciousness. And that scarcity was caused by us. We are the trolley.
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