How The Trolley Problem is Misunderstood

Word count: 4199
Estimated reading time: 21 minutes

Preface

“truth is not a minted coin that can be given and pocketed ready-made” These words were written by the philosopher Hans Georg Wilhem Friedrich Hegel in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, where he was explaining the difficulties of trying to summarise philosophy, or specifically, the impossibility of writing a preface which would adequately explain a philosophical work completed in the pages that follow. Yet, many summaries and explanations of philosophical concepts treat truth as a minted coin, and leave a false representation of the work in the pocket of the reader. If an explanation of a philosophical concept is so simplistic it makes the concept appear commonplace, it is likely a misrepresentation of those ideas. This video will explain how the Trolley Problem is commonly misunderstood. If you watch and carefully follow the explanation made here, you will have a better understanding of the trolley problem than the vast majority of people, including both the layperson and the academic. However, after watching the video, you should read the essay for yourself, as this is only my explanation of the trolley problem via the original article, and you might draw different conclusions than me.

The trolley problem differs from this in that the all the people on the tracks are already about to come to harm when we decide which way to steer, we are simply deciding between two situations of avoiding harm.

It will help to break down these different scenarios in terms of direct and oblique intent and negative and positive rights,

First, we will begin by going through the most basic misunderstanding of Foot’s argument. Then we will go deeper into the nuances, and explain what she was actually getting at and why she actually wrote the article.

She also states that “The steering driver faces a conflict of negative duties,

since it is his duty to avoid injuring five men and also his duty to avoid injuring one. In the circumstances he is not able to avoid both, and it seems clear that he should do the least injury he can.“

However, the negative duty is the right of the potential scapegoat not to be interfered with, the duty for the judge not to cause harm where there is a possibility not to introduce a new harmful chain of events.

Intro

The Trolley Problem is a philosophical thought experiment designed to make the reader interrogate their own moral assumptions and consider how they carry-out ethical decision-making. It has been reproduced into many different memes, referenced in tv shows and even adapted as a video game. The Trolley Problem is often the way many people are first introduced to moral philosophy, as it is frequently taught, in a simplified form, in introductory moral philosophy classes.

The problem is, despite the constant debates around the correct solution to the Trolley Problem, the actual purpose behind the Trolley Problem as a thought experiment is overlooked at best and at worst completely misunderstood.

Often the trolley problem is presented as asking us how we, personally, would solve the dilemma. But the originator of the Trolley Problem, the 20th century English Philosopher Philippa Foot, was not asking which the best solution to the dilemma was, at all. To engage with the problem on that basis is to misunderstand it and to completely fail to appreciate Philippa Foot’s goal in formulating moral dilemmas. In this essay we will review some popular interpretations of the Trolley Problem and compare them with the original article written by Philippa Foot. It should be mentioned that, although Philippa Foot is the originator of the Trolley Problem, it was popularised and systematised by Judith Jarvis Thomson, and thereafter, speculated upon by many others. However, for the sake of brevity, this article focuses solely on Philippa Foot’s article as well as critiquing popular discussions of the Trolley Problem which overlook the original purpose of Foot’s article.

Simple explanation – Utilitarian vs deontological

Often it is claimed that the Trolley Problem shows whether the one has a more “utilitarian” or “deontological” approach to morality based upon whether they think switching the track or not is the correct choice. [Good Place clip] [Vsauce clip] However, utilitarian or deontological (or duty-based) arguments can both be made in favour of saving five lives over the one.Typically it is said that a utilitarian would favour saving five lives over one as this maximises utility, whereas a deontologist may say that interfering in the scenario means using one person’s life as a “means” to save five, which can never be justified, as life should be treated as always an end and never solely a means.

But, if you read Foot’s original dilemma carefully, she never says that the trolley is going towards the five people and thus must be diverted into the one, which many interpret as introducing the moral question of intervention into the dilemma. She simply says “he is the driver of a runaway tram, which he can only steer from one narrow track on to another; five men are working on one track and one man on the other; anyone on the track he enters is bound to be killed “. The entire reason for this example by Foot is that there is no option for non-intervention, it is merely more or fewer lives that will be lost. This is further emphasised by the fact that Foot considers the Trolley Problem to be a parallel to a situation in which a “pilot whose airplane is about to crash is deciding whether to steer from a more to a less inhabited area”. In both scenarios there is no “non intervention” choice, and by introducing that question it muddies Foot’s argument.

Later commentators introduced the idea of intervention by having the trolley already on one path and needing to be switched: this was not in Foot’s original article.

We can see this error even on the Wikipedia article for the Trolley Problem:

“A utilitarian view asserts that it is obligatory to steer to the track with one man on it. According to classical utilitarianism, such a decision would be not only permissible, but, morally speaking, the better option (the other option being no action at all).^[15] This fact makes diverting the trolley obligatory.“

There is no “diverting” in Foot’s original dilemma. There is no option for “no action”. Of course, it is probable that most utilitarians would assert the stance from the passage, and allow the one to perish rather than the five, although Philippa Foot does not mention utilitarianism anywhere in her original article, but she does discuss whether minimising harm or the intent matters in moral dilemmas, which we will cover in more detail later. For the sake of simplicity, we will say that “utilitarian” refers to the belief that what matters most in ethical decision-making is maximising the benefit and minimising the harm of a given situation, although this is a generalisation and in reality there are many different types of utilitarnism – Bentham’s utilitarianism can be contrasted with that of Mill, for example.

Having said most utilitarians would steer towards the one rather than the five, there are still possible utilitarian arguments for steering towards the five. For example, a utilitarian may take the stance that it is preferable to steer towards the five because it ameliorates the harm caused by overpopulation. Another reason a utilitarian may steer towards the five is because they may be a pessimist: they may simultaneously hold that it is wrong to intentionally take someone’s life, and yet, if an incident where loss of life is inevitable occurs, we should opt for more deaths, since, if they believe suffering in life always outweighs pleasure, and we should always minimise suffering and maximise pleasure, the trolley problem serves as a scenario where suffering can be minimising by opting for more deaths, without the problem of intentionally taking lives.

Now these are two absurd arguments for steering towards the five, and it seems unlikely that anyone would seriously accept them. Nonetheless, these examples show that you cannot make conclusive statements on whether a given moral framework would advocate for one path of action or the other, without examining the underpinnings, the reasoning and calculations, which go into those moral frameworks.

A side note should be made that deontological, duty or rights based ethical philosophies may trivially argue that the trolley should steer on the track which only kills one, as we have a duty to minimise suffering as long as human life isn’t used as a mere means and we do not deprive people of their rights, the deprivation of the victims’ rights occurred when they were tied to the tracks. So both utilitarians and deontologists have ways to argue for the trolley to steer towards the one individual over the five. The person choosing the path of the trolley did not infringe upon the rights of the victims not to be harmed, as there is no option not to cause harm, only to minimise harm.

However, the Wikipedia excerpt gives the false impression that Philippa Foot was defending utilitarianism, when in reality, she was agreeing that most people would save the five over the one in the trolley problem, but, when given other scenarios with the same quantitative outcomes (five deaths vs one death), but with qualitative differences in intent or rather, as Foot argues, differences in the types of rights in question people will consider more than the utility. We will explore these cases soon, but first we will further contextualise Foot’s article. Bizarrely, the Wikipedia article for the Trolley Problem includes the part of the passage where Foot is outlining that, in order for her argument to make sense, the Trolley Problem must be contrasted with other moral dilemmas. Simply put, the Trolley Problem was originally formulated to be contrasted to other dilemmas, not to be questioned on its own. Presumably because it would contradict the simplistic utilitarian interpretation provided, that context goes completely overlooked.

Deeper explanation – what was the real point in the Trolley Problem?

So if Philippa Foot was not looking to defend utilitarianism when she originally presented the idea of the Trolley Problem in her 1967 essay “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect”, what was the point in the Trolley Problem? To start with, The Double Effect Doctrine to which Philippa Foot refers in the title is a preexisting concept explored in theology, chiefly among Catholics, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states:

“The doctrine (or principle) of double effect is often invoked to explain the permissibility of an action that causes a serious harm, such as the death of a human being, as a side effect of promoting some good end. According to the principle of double effect, sometimes it is permissible to cause a harm as an unintended and merely foreseen side effect (or “double effect”) of bringing about a good result even though it would not be permissible to cause such a harm as a means to bringing about the same good end.”

The “double effect” means, as Philippa Foot says: “ the two effects that an action may produce: the one aimed at, and the one foreseen but in no way desired.” The “doctrine” seeks to explain when it is possible to permit a bad effect in the search of a good outcome, from the Stanford Encyclopedia again:

The New Catholic Encyclopedia provides four conditions for the application of the principle of double effect:

The act itself must be morally good or at least indifferent.
The agent may not positively will the bad effect but may permit it. If he could attain the good effect without the bad effect he should do so. The bad effect is sometimes said to be indirectly voluntary.
The good effect must flow from the action at least as immediately (in the order of causality, though not necessarily in the order of time) as the bad effect. In other words the good effect must be produced directly by the action, not by the bad effect. Otherwise the agent would be using a bad means to a good end, which is never allowed.
The good effect must be sufficiently desirable to compensate for the allowing of the bad effect (see Connell, 1021).

It should be clear by now, having only just begun to explain the original purpose of the trolley problem, that although it is often claimed that the Trolley Problem is a straightforward dilemma about whether one prioritise outcomes, minimising the number of deaths or intent, whether it is ever permissible to will someone to die, that Foot is trying to explain and describe something much more complex than the simple outcome vs intent argument.

Before bringing up the Trolley Problem, Philippa Foot discusses the example

“Suppose that a judge or magistrate is faced with rioters demanding that a culprit be found for a certain crime and threatening otherwise to take their own bloody revenge on a particular section of the community. The real culprit being unknown, the judge sees himself as able to prevent the bloodshed only by framing some innocent person and having him executed.”

Foot then goes onto compare this with the trolley problem:

“Beside this example is placed another in which a pilot whose airplane is about to crash is deciding whether to steer from a more to a less inhabited areaTo make the parallel as close as possible it may rather be supposed that he is the driver of a runaway tram which he can only steer from one narrow track on to another; five men are working on one track and one man on the other; anyone on the track he enters is bound to be killed. In the case of the riots the mob have five hostages, so that in both the exchange is supposed to be one man’s life for the lives of five. The question is why we should say, without hesitation, that the driver should steer for the less occupied track, while most of us would be appalled at the idea that the innocent man could be framed.”

The amount of lives exchanged for one life is equal in both scenarios, five. Philippa Foot regards it as slightly obvious that most people accept that the driver should steer for the track which only kills one person rather than five, quote: The question is why we should say, without hesitation, that the driver should steer for the less occupied track, while most of us would be appalled at the idea that the innocent man could be framed.

She also states that “The steering driver faces a conflict of negative duties,

She points out that most of us would be appalled if an innocent man was framed for the sake of saving five lives in the riot. So the Trolley Problem, as it was originally conceived by Philippa Foot, was an argument against utilitarianism, or more specifically, Foot argues that even if we claim to to care about outcomes rather than intent or right ,in the example of the Trolley Problem vs the judge framing the innocent man, regardless of what we profess to believe, most people seem to include the duty not to intentionally inflict harm as relevant in their reasoning when deciding which course should be taken in the dilemmas, even if the outcomes are the same in terms of the measurable loss of human life.

However, even though we have outlined a couple of the most common misunderstandings of the Trolley Problem, those misunderstandings being, firstly, that it’s an argument in favour of utilitarianism, and secondly, that the dilemma all hinges around a lever, which when introduced to the dilemma, actually muddies Philippa Foot’s argument. This still leaves another misunderstanding: that Philippa Foot is making an argument in favour of prioritising intent rather than outcomes in moral decision-making. This is a less egregious error than the first one, that first misunderstanding is interpreting the trolley problem as a defense of utilitarianism, despite Foot using the examples to argue that those who profess to only care about outcomes also care about intent.

It has been claimed that the trolley problem is about the intent, despite the fact that in the original essay Foot says: “My conclusion is that the distinction between direct and

oblique intention plays only a quite subsidiary role in determining what we say in these cases, while the distinction between avoiding injury and bringing aid is very important indeed.”

In order to show this, Foot brings in a third type of example:

“Suppose, for instance, that there are five patients in a hospital whose

lives could be saved by the manufacture of a certain gas, but that this inevitably releases lethal fumes into the room of another patient whom for some reason we are unable to

move. His death, being of no use to us, is clearly a side effect, and not directly intended.”

Foot then goes on to speak of positive and negative duties:

“Let us speak of negative duties when thinking of the obligation

to refrain from such things as killing or robbing, and of the positive duty, e.g., to look after children or aged parents.”

Quite simply, negative duties are things we have a duty to refrain from doing, whereas positive duties are things we have a duty to do. This is quite different from oblique or direct intention, although the two appear similar. Philppa Foot gives the example of a medical procedure in which five patients will be saved, but as a side effect, harmful gas will be created which will result in the death of another patient. So here we have an example, similar to the trolley problem, where either five lives can be saved with the death of one, or five deaths will occur with the other patient surviving. However, unlike the trolley problem, we are creating a new sequence of events which result in the death of the one patient who would otherwise be fine. The trolley problem differs from this in that the one person on the track is already about to come to harm when we decide which way to steer, we are simply deciding between two situations of avoiding harm. Whereas, the gas example is measuring the duty to help the five against the duty not to harm the patient who would be killed by the gas. It is an example of weighing positive duty against negative duty.

It will help to break down these different scenarios in terms of direct and oblique intent and negative and positive rights, so we can clarify the moral nuances that arise when we compare our inclination or distaste towards different paths of action in different contexts.

Trolley Problem

One death versus five deaths
Oblique intent, neither outcome is desired by the actor, the one man who dies in order to save five is not an intentional means to save five, but rather, a victim of circumstance
“The steering driver faces a conflict of negative duties” as Foot says. A negative duty (the duty not to cause harm) would take precedence over the positive duty (the duty to bring aid) but because these are both negative duties, as Foot says “ it seems clear that he should do the least injury he can.” and choose to set the trolley on the path of the one person rather than the five.

The Judge

Again, this is weighing one death, of the judge’s scapegoat, versus the five deaths that would occur in the riots.
This is direct intent. As Foot writes “The real culprit being unknown, the judge sees himself as able to prevent the bloodshed only by framing some innocent person and having him executed.” The judge desires that the innocent person be framed and executed as a direct means to save the five hostages.
This is a conflict of positive duty and negative duty. The positive duty is for the judge to aid the five hostages who will die if no scapegoat is found. However, the negative duty is the right of the potential scapegoat not to be interfered with, the duty for the judge not to cause harm where there is a possibility not to introduce a new harmful chain of events.

This is why the scapegoating seems distasteful, despite having the same potential outcomes of the trolley problem – five have died to avoid killing one, or one is killed to avoid five dying. We seem to prefer avoiding harm when possible rather than bringing aid, if harm is necessary to bring aid.

The Patients and the Organs

This example does not need to be explored in detail, it is again like the judge in terms of intent, but differing in terms of positive and negative rights, killing one person and using their organs to save five. It is direct intent that the one is killed, and the negative duty of avoiding harm would seem to take higher precedence than the positive duty to help the five in need of organs.

The Patients and the Gas

This example is at first glance similar to the organ example, but it is the most important in proving Foot’s point in suggesting that it is not the outcome alone or the intent alone that matters in moral dilemmas like these.
Five patients in a hospital will be saved if a certain gas is released, however, for another (sixth) patient, this gas will cause them to die. So again the question is whether we can justify the death of one in order to save five
Looking at the intent, it is not the direct intent of the creation of the gas to kill the patient. The judge needs the execution to have the five hostages released, the surgeon needs the organs to save the five patients, simply said, in the plan of action which both the judge and surgeon is taking in order to save the five hostages or patients, the death of the one is a necessary party of their plan.However, the doctor does not need the patient to succumb to the lethal fumes in order to save the five – it is merely a side effect of the releasing of the gas.

The Patients and the Gas (cont…)

If the utilitarian position was all that was needed to explain what we should do, we would be fine with releasing the gas and having one perish to save five, since the least deaths is all that matters. If the Doctrine of the Double Effect, “the permissibility of an action that causes a serious harm, such as the death of a human being, as a side effect of promoting some good end” as Foot says, as we’ve explored through contrasting “direct” and “oblique” intention, were all that was needed to explain what action we should take, then we would be fine releasing the gas.
And yet, there is still a distaste we may feel in allowing the gas to be released and the individual to perish. This is the most brilliant part of the essay, where philosophy is at its best, using clear reasoning to uncover subtle truths and articulating that which was only tacit. The issue with releasing the gas is that it is violating the negative right of the other patient, which we are measuring against the positive right of assisting the five patients. It is not about intent, as often claimed, or about utility. Even if it is claimed that you can still justify releasing the gas and having the one patient die to save five, it is still clear that this situation offers a more difficult dilemma than the trolley problem, which Foot regarded as almost trivially obvious that we should opt for driving on the track with fewer people on.

Abortion

Finally, we return to the actual topic of the Trolley Problem, scarcely mentioned despite it being the real moral topic which Foot was trying to clarify the discussion of. Abortion, which is rarely mentioned when the trolley problem is discussed, despite it being in the title of the original article. Simply put, Foot uses her analysis of intention and negative and positive rights, and compares it to various situations in which either the mother or baby will die as a result of childbirth. She concludes that her line of argumentation does not conclusively settle the question of abortion, as they only apply if people do not have the “ inclination to accord to the fetus or unborn child anything like ordinary human status in the matter of rights”