It's the philosophical thought experiment that launched a thousand memes. The trolley problem. The trolley problem. The trolley problem.
Do you divert a runaway train to kill one instead of leaving it to kill five? Is there a solution in this situation? Actually, there is, and I'll get to that later. But what you need to know is, the problem that I've just described is not actually the trolley problem. In this video, I'm going to tell you what people are getting wrong about this question, and what it can tell us about how philosophy is done.
Philippa Foot first proposed the tram case in 1967, using it as a small part of a much larger discussion on the ethics of intent, thinking about the difference between what we plan to happen and what happens as a result of our plans. Things really took off for this thought experiment when the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thompson used it in her 1976 paper, Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem. Thompson was trying to decide on the relative goodness or badness of killing a person.
versus letting someone die. We're not going to get into the specifics of what followed, but long story short, some journal articles were published, someone wrote about it on a blog, and people are still talking about it today. So at this point, maybe you're thinking that solving the trolley problem must be really hard. And you're right.
The problem has been engaging philosophers and psychologists for decades. But the case of deciding to divert the train, tram, trolley, or whatever to kill one rather than five, that's simple. That's easy.
Of course you kill one to save five. Obviously, you want to minimize the people dying. I don't know why that's such a hard question for people. Thing is, that's not actually the trolley problem.
If that's not the trolley problem, then what is? Well, in Thompson's 1967 paper, she compares the trolley case with the case of a surgeon who's considering killing one patient to harvest their organs, which they can then use to save five other patients. The problem is why killing the one seems to be okay in the trolley case. but disturbingly bad in the surgeon case. The trolley problem is about why we make very different moral judgments between the trolley case and other similar situations.
In other words, the trolley case is not an isolated problem of action, or a question of what would you do, or what you should do. Instead, it's a problem of how to explain seemingly contradictory judgments about right and wrong. Some people even get annoyed at the simplicity and obviousness of the trolley case. It's so crudely artificial, so sterile, so far removed from our everyday lives. What could it possibly teach us about doing the right thing in the real world?
It's just that it's so theoretical, you know? At times, it just feels like a bit of a stupid question. And I agree, it is a stupid question. But stupid questions can be really, really useful.
What do I mean by stupid questions? I mean questions where the answer is obvious, and it doesn't seem relevant to our practical lives. But here are two points in defense of stupid questions.
First, stupid questions help to simplify problems, breaking them down to their barest parts and removing complicating factors. You can see this as similar to science experiments that create very controlled conditions to remove irrelevant variables. In both cases, the lack of realism is actually a strength. Real-world moral dilemmas are so filled with muddying details that it can be hard to pull any clear moral lessons from them.
Thought experiments like the trolley case provide clear situations where we know what will happen and what's at stake. We can then change and tweak the examples to reveal the underlying intuitions, beliefs, and principles at work. Second, any debate or discussion has to have a starting point.
Usually, this common ground is left unstated. However, when people start with different assumptions, the dialogue between them can get confusing. Philosophical questions are hard enough, so trying to reduce any unnecessary confusion is a good idea. So that's one reason why philosophers ask stupid and easy questions, to establish common points of agreement that make a useful discussion possible.
Do we agree that murder is bad? Okay, then we can talk. But if you want to ask, what does bad really mean anyway?
Is anything actually bad? Then that's cool, but you're having a different conversation. Like if you're in the lab and your fellow scientist asks you to check something in a microscope, and you want to start pondering about whether what we see is real or not. then maybe the lab isn't for you. To sum up, we can't reinvent all human knowledge from the bottom up every time we want to talk about something.
In each case, we need to have a shared starting point. So the answer to the trolley case is not the solution to a dilemma, nor is it even necessarily a premise or a data point from which we reason to a definite conclusion. Instead, we might just use it to construct a clearer, more sensible understanding of our world and what we believe to be right and true.
Of course, we may eventually just bottom out at some point, with differing feelings and intuitions about morality. Sticking points that we may never come to agree on. But still, there is some value in understanding the shape of our disagreements and the limits of what we can hope to agree on.
And very often, that process of discovery starts with a simple and stupid question. Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one.