The trolley problem is a beloved chestnut in moral philosophy. It proposes a moral dilemma. You’re driving a trolley on a track that bifurcates. Tied to one track is some class of persons the philosopher posing the problem wants you to sacrifice. Tied to the other track is some person or persons you care about. What do you do? Who do you kill? The question is virtually always hamfistedly architected to achieve only one outcome to the “dilemma”: kill the person or persons the person designing the question transparently wants sacrificed or face condemnation as a morally blind monster.
The trolley problem saw many iterations during the Bush years, when “prolife” larval MAGA desperately fought to justify torture and proposed a ton of “What will you do? Let the BOMB IN THE ORPHANAGE GO OFF AND KILL HUNDREDS OF PRECIOUS, PRECIOUS CHILDREN or torture one worthless hairy Ayrab?”
Nobody ever asks what would happen if we had everyone we love and care about safe at home while, tied to the railroad tracks, we had every single person who has ever tried to construct a rationalization for killing people they want to kill.
Not that I would advocate such a hypothetical scenario. It’s just that I notice that the people who love creating such scenarios to rationalize their lust for violence against untermenschen never seem to put themselves in the role of the victims of the violence they love and want to push us to commit.
Nor do they admit for one second that their carefully designed and highly manipulative scenarios are as carefully engineered to force a desired outcome as a garden hose is to direct water at a specific target. The notion that trolley problems and similar fake “moral dilemmas” are intended to “make us use our minds” is one of the biggest lies in philosophy. They are designed and built to force us to arrive at one deeply and emotionally manipulated conclusion without a movement of the grey matter.
And, of course, so far from teaching us to “face real life” they are, in fact, among the the most artificial and manufactured things in the universe. In Real Life[TM], you don’t know whether the person you’re torturing knows anything at all. That’s why you are torturing them. Nor do you even know there is a bomb under the orphanage for the very good reason that, in real life, as distinct from shows like 24, you don’t have a camera following the Bad Guy around and clearly showing us the location of the bomb. What you have is some guy you have grabbed and are now torturing in the vague hope that whatever they babble will be actual information and not, as it usually is, just stuff he says to make you stop torturing him. That’s why torture is forbidden: not only because it’s evil but because evil is stupid, rather like the trolley problem.
Instead of the evil and stupid pastime of creating trolley problems to rationalize doing evil that good may come of it, we should create conundrums about how to avoid anybody ever subjecting people to a trolley problem again.
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One Response
This is also one of those questions that in my mind says more about the questioner than the questioned. As you point out, the real aim of the question is to justify: Okay, who do I get to kill with a clear conscience? It’s an ill-motivated question.
The other one I often get is, “Are you telling me, you pro-lifer you, that if you could go back in time and find baby Hitler, you wouldn’t kill him? To save millions of other lives you wouldn’t kill one baby who grows up to be a monster? Doesn’t that make you a monster?”
The correct answer, of course, is: Why is killing the only option? Who is the monster here where killing is the only option you see?
To answer your question: If I could go back in time, no, I still wouldn’t kill baby Hitler. I might try to take him and find a nice Jewish couple who have been praying for a child, then give them the blameless baby with the plea, “Please love this kid and teach him kindness and love.”