The Trolley Problem is a Bad Thought Experiment

Why your answer to the problem is not important but your reaction is.

Photo by Daniel Abadia on Unsplash

Would you kill one person to save five? 

The trolley problem in moral philosophy has gained unbelievable popularity from its humble start in academic philosophy. It is used in common parlance, as a meme, and is even a video game. Furthermore, with the invention of self-driving cars, the problem has taken on some very real world applications.

Yet, while amateur and professional philosophers alike have thought and argued about which choice is the morally right thing to do, your choice is actually not that important. 

In fact, I would go to far as to say that while the trolley problem helps make important moral distinctions, a solution does little to help us better understand ethics 

What is important is your initial reaction to the problem and this initial reaction should be the focus of our discussions rather than our choice. 

Let me explain.

What is the Trolley Problem

The trolley problem was first proposed by Philippa Foot in 1967 in the Oxford Review. Originally proposed as a thought experiment for moral issues surrounding abortion, the trolley problem asks one to choose between letting people die or causing people to die.

• If you keep on the current track you let five people die.

• If you intentionally switch tracks, then you cause one person to die.

Thus, the original version of the problem presented two simultaneous problems: 

(1) letting vs. causing

(2) five vs. one

In 1976, Judith J. Thomson expanded the problem into the classic version that most of us know today. 

Would you push a fat man off a bridge to stop a runaway trolley from killing 5 workers on the tracks?

This version is not just about switching tracks, but brings the moral issue much closer to home by saying if you want to save 5 people, you yourself have to push someone off a bridge.

To make matters worse, these are also the only two choices that you have. There is nothing else you can do; there is no escaping the problem.

The Conundrum

This thought experiment has become famous because both choices seem extremely bad. Who wants to let five workers die or push someone off a bridge? No one.

So what do you do?

Like many philosophy instructors, I have given this thought experiment to my students many times. In my philosophy classes, Students of all levels and ages are repulsed by the experiment. They think that it is stupid that there are only two choices and that there is nothing else they can do. 

Trying to avoid the two horrible choices my students come up with amazingly creative solutions to the problem such as:

• There must be an emergency stop on the train

• There must be an alarm system somewhere to alert the workers on the track

• I throw myself off the bridge to stop the train!

Eventually, and with much prodding by me, students make their choice; often hating themselves for the choice they make and sometimes me for making them choose. 

As a philosopher, we are taught that the choice, or rather the reason behind the choice, reveals important insights into our moral decision making.

Putting us in a hard spot is supposed to be the point of the thought experiment. It is supposed to push our moral intuitions to the limits to see what happens.

But something I have never seen given much consideration is the initial response that my students and so many others have to the problem. 

I have even been reprimanded by an ethics professor for suggesting that we should take our students’ response to the trolley problem more seriously. 

But what if we did? What if we consider that the trolley problem is, to quote my students, “stupid”?

If we take our initial gut reaction to the problem as serious as the reasons why we make our choice, there is in fact a lot we can learn about our moral decision making. Here are just two examples.

1. Good Moral Actions Should “Feel” Good

The first thing we can learn from the trolley problem is that if we make the “correct” moral choice and it does not feel good, it is hard to call it the “correct” choice.

It is widely accepted that causing a death is morally worse than letting a someone die. (This is why assisted suicide is largely regarded as an unethical thing for doctors to do.) 

However, when students choose to let the 5 workers die, they tell me that it feels so wrong. 

My students often start the thought experiment by saying that the right thing to do is to save people. Saving the rail workers is what “feels” the best, i.e. is the morally right thing to do. They then go about trying to figure out how to save the workers. 

The trolley problem takes the “save people” option away since it states that the only way to do it is to push a fat man off a bridge, an immoral thing to do. 

This is something extremely hard to deal with as it brings up the old idea of doing the wrong things for the right reasons; something we all know is not good.

What we are left with is the “right” choice being one that causes moral uncertainty (i.e. that “bad feeling”) which is so counter intuitive to how we think morality should work. 

If we do the morally right thing, then we should feel a sense of moral satisfaction of a ethical job well done. 

2. Moral Decisions are Not Singular Actions

Second, the most important thing our initial reactions teach us is that we do not think that moral actions are stand alone events. 

People often think that something else has gone morally wrong for them to be put into such a horrible position. 

For example, my students often ask:

• How did the trolley get out of control in the first place?

• Can’t the workers hear the train coming?

• Why are there no safety measures in place to stop a runaway trolley?

Our intuition is that if we are in a lose-lose moral situation where the right moral action does not feel satisfactory, then someone else made a bad moral decision already; leaving us holding the bag. 

A perfect example of this is the police officer in so many action movies that failed to save someone in the past. Their friend tells them time and time again, “It’s not your fault that the hostages died, it was the criminals who put them in that position not you.”

We believe that the police officer is morally innocent as regardless of wether we saved the hostages or not, he was put into a bad moral situation by the immoral actions of the kidnappers. Any result that he is able to achieve should be see as a moral success. 

Conclusion

I hope that by taking the focus away from trying to “solve” the trolley problem I have given you some new insights in how we approach moral decision making. 

I am not sure if it will make much of an impact on moral philosophy or people’s love (or hate) for the trolley problem. But a least it will make us all more aware of the moral world around us. 

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