Are those “thought experiments” a sign of bad moral philosophy?
Or do they really prove useful when it comes to determining right from wrong?
If you’re in need of some pseudo-highbrow fodder for your next dinner party conversation, why not pose this famous question to your guests:
There’s a trolley barreling down a track, and if it continues on its straight and speedy way, it will kill five people tied to the track up ahead. If, however, you flip a switch so that it veers onto a side track, it will kill only one person tied to it there. Do you flip the switch?
“How delightfully intriguing!”, your guests will surely say.
Ah, the trolley problem, with its moral implications at every turn (sorry — couldn’t resist there). Is it worse to let five die, or to kill the one to save them?
Well?
And now that you’ve answered that one, let’s change it up a bit:
What if the five are terrorists, and the one is innocent?
Or, what if you instead pushed a fat man onto the track to stop the trolley, instead of flipping a switch — what do you say now?
And what if it weren’t a trolley on a track at all, but five people needing transplants in order to stay alive, and one able-bodied person off the street? What say you, dear reader, what does your moral compass tell you then?!
Bear with me, now. It’s possible that your guests have already heard the famous trolley problem. Maybe they’ve even come up with a few variations on their own. So how about this Oxford-sanctioned philosophical scenario instead:
The people in a small town are living in fear because of a series of horrific murders in their area. The newly appointed — though not yet trusted — sheriff knows that the murderer is dead because he shot him himself. However, no one saw the sheriff do it, and the murderer’s body fell immediately into a fast-flowing river, never to be seen again. Coincidentally, the sheriff locked up a horribly depressed, suicidal vagrant just a few days ago, a man who had lost all of his family, friends, and worldly possessions. The sheriff reasons: what if I find ‘proof’ that the vagrant was the murderer, and then he’s convicted and hanged? This will make everyone happy, and is therefore the right thing to do.
Creative, indeed. (“Just accept it as it is!” wrote my exasperated tutor, after a number of us students thought the scenario too absurd to even entertain with an intelligent response.)
The number of variations of these thought experiments is immense.[1] Of course, why not? There’s no more fun way to pass the time than to argue about impossible moral scenarios that lead you to an un-wholly-satisfying answer, only to be faced with a slightly different, even more impossible scenario, that turns the first answer on its head. It’s intellectual foreplay that Just. Never. Ends. “Addictive” doesn’t cut it.
But maybe it’s even worse than addiction. Maybe we’ve become too dependent on these hypothetical test cases, to the point that perhaps, they’ve become detrimental to moral philosophy as a whole; they’ve become ludicrous, obstructive exercises that distract us from tackling what’s truly important.
Luckily I’m not alone in my thinking — there are a growing number of distinguished law and philosophy academics who agree. I recently came across Barbara Fried of Stanford Law School’s brilliant (and persuasive) paper, entitled “What Does Matter? The Case for Killing the Trolley Problem (Or Letting it Die)” that calls these trolley-like problems “tyrannical”. They have come to dominate the literature in order to prove or debunk this point or that.
Her first argument is that the trolley problem’s dominance has shaped the non-consequentialist’s literature on harm in disastrous ways by focusing our attention on harm that is intentionally directed towards others, which is actually a relatively rare occurrence in real life. Instead, our attention should be focused on the more widespread, practical, and (perhaps in aggregate) morally significant events of life whereby some socially productive undertaking includes risks of harm to some other population of people.
This is in fact one of my biggest issues with these trolley problems as well: they mask the use of ethical thinking in our everyday decisions and actions, both on individual and societal levels, with stripped-bare, extreme examples that can, in the real world, only be accurately morally judged with as much information as possible. But in trolley problems, everything is a given, and anything we don’t know — risk included — is an exogenous factor.
In the real world, risk is often the whole problem. In the real world, it’s usually about drawing some line somewhere, some economic composition of scarcity, resources, abilities, and of course risks, that pull at our decision-making processes, so that we can minimize the risk of harm to one in order to benefit another. Further, it’s often more than one mind poring over the decision.
The real world asks, “should we build a border wall, and if so, at what cost?” It asks, “How many more dollars should we spend to benefit senior citizens at the expense of millennials?”, and “Should I tell my best friend her husband is cheating on her?”, “What rights do criminals have?”, and “What obligations do I have in aiding the hungry — in my neighborhood, city, country, or the world?”
These moral questions aren’t the tragic, split-second decisions that trolley problems ask us to make. Trolley problems are more like Situation Room crises on LSD. Imagine judging everyday cases based on the outcomes of those kinds of moral test cases? As Professor Fried states, “hard cases make bad law,” and it’s an analogy I think moral philosophy would greatly benefit from. Outlier situations will result in exceptional results; but when we’re seeking practical wisdom on decision-making from an ethical standpoint, concentrating on basic and common situations would prove more effective and valuable.
So, given the tyranny of the trolley problem, is this the best moral philosophy has to offer?
I don’t think it is. Nor are thought experiments always bad. On the contrary, they’re necessary — but with purpose, not ad infinitum.
In fact, hypotheticals as a strategy to test our human intuitions and assumptions have always had an important place in both the humanities and sciences. We can’t, after all, observe every example in the real world, nor would we want to; if we did, moral philosophy would likely end up inflicting more harm than good. Plato’s allegory of the cave in The Republic is a narrative that asks us to imagine a slightly ridiculous scenario that nonetheless gives insight into human nature, ignorance, and truth. Great scientists like Newton, Einstein, and Schrödinger made revolutionary discoveries by examining nothing but their imaginations. It’s even been said that quantum mechanics would be practically impossible without thought experiments.[2]
When and why did these hypotheticals begin gaining more importance in philosophy in particular? Though I don’t have the research to prove it, it seems plausible to blame the mature Enlightenment. It was during this time when reason, science, and empiricism became the ultimate source of validity: one had to set out a hypothesis, design and execute an experiment, and draw reasonable conclusions based on what was observed. (Modify hypothesis, repeat.)
But philosophy isn’t empirical, and it’s not a science. So perhaps they had to make it more scientific: thus the thought experiment. And in the past 50 years alone, it seems like the ultra-rapid developmental pace of technology, globalization, and human interaction has made nuance that much more important in our ideas about how we should live: thus the hundred variations of the trolley problem.
I want to make it clear that I’m not arguing we get rid of thought experiments altogether. We can’t. Hypothetical examples have a very important use in showing us how our philosophical ideas work, and where there are holes, inconsistencies, or new moral distinctions to be developed. And like we do in other related fields such as law, it only makes sense that we distill situations down to their simplest forms to help us then make sense of more complex ones. They bring philosophical theories down to earth, and help us understand our own intuitions by attempting to separate emotions from actions.[3]
Unlike Professor Fried, I’m not even suggesting we kill the trolley problem — or, uh, let it die. I do believe it has helped us refine issues related to harm, for instance with the very distinction made by the Professor in her title between “killing” and “letting die”, which is the doctrine of double effect.
The doctrine of double effect explains the moral permissibility of performing an action toward a good end that has an unintended but known and harmful side effect, even if we may not intentionally perform the harmful action as a means toward attaining the same good outcome. In other words, it explains why it’s OK to flip the switch on the trolley track in order to save five people even though I know it’s 100% likely that the trolley will kill one person on the side track, but not OK to push the fat man onto the track to stop the trolley to save the five. Fine-toothed comb, indeed.
Whether or not you agree with this doctrine and the things it might allow in real life is another story, however.
So I’ll leave you with this last question:
You’re out for a walk alone and find yourself passing by a large pond. In the pond you see a small child flailing about, gasping for air, clearly about to drown. You happen to be a great swimmer, and you know that if you tried, you could with 100% certainty save the child without any threat to yourself. Calling 911 and waiting for help would take too long, and the child would die. Do you have a moral obligation to rescue the child?
What moral obligation do you have to the child across town who eats just one meal per day?
Or to a child starving to death in Yemen?
Does this thought experiment do us good?
***
[1] Frances Kamm’s The Trolley Problem Mysteries is a tome, and recently, Derek Parfit’s On What Matters has received a lot of attention, not to mention the myriad papers and articles written in response to individual trolley-like problems and other hypotheticals.
[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thought-experiment
[3] While I think more often than not hypotheticals — especially far-fetched hypotheticals that have no analogous basis in the real world — can help separate our emotions from actions, one could argue that certain hypotheticals could actually hijack our emotions and force us to make decisions based on those emotions. For instance, euthanasia arguments could make us see it as horrible unjust or horribly unjust not to allow. That said, rational arguments post-emotional breakdown should ensue!
Danielle Mund is an art historian by training and moral philosopher by nature. She writes from Puerto Rico, sometimes holed up in a cool dark room and sometimes beachside at the Ritz.
