Trolley problems

A train is rushing out of control down the track. 5 people are tied to the track, unable to get out of its way. If the train is allowed to continue, they will all be killed. Watching from a nearly signal-box, you are given an opportunity to influence the scenario. A pull of a lever will divert the train, and send it into a side-track, where there is only one person tied up. The five people will be saved; however, the one person will be killed if the train is diverted. Do you pull the lever?

From a utilitarian perspective, there is only one good answer - pull the lever, minimizing the cost to human life. The consequences are what matter, and in this case, pulling the lever will mean that 1 person dies instead of 5 people. However, a person may still have some worries about pulling the lever nonetheless - for in pulling the lever, you make yourself directly responsible for a person's death. Considered in isolation, removing the 5 people on the original track from the scenario, your act is equivalent to murder.

 Whether any human is 'stop-a-train fat' is a separate question...

The scenario can be tweaked to isolate differing moral intuitions in different cases. Consider:

1. The scenario remains the same, except that the single person on the side-track is your brother. Divert?
2. You stand on a bridge above the railway. There are 5 people on the track who will be killed by the train. However, the train can be stopped by pushing a fat guy standing on the bridge alongside you into its path, and then the 5 people will be saved. Push him? (most find this a harder choice than the original example).
3. The same scenario obtains as in (2), except the fat guy is a villain, who was responsible for the train being out of control in the first place. Push?
4. The same scenario obtains as in (2), except the fat guy is your brother. Push?

Discussion of these examples has been widespread in philosophy and online. The philpapers survey (see previous post) reported that almost 70% of philosophers would pull the lever in the original case.

I think I’d probably pull the lever in the original scenario, and push the fat bloke in both 2 and 3 (though the fact that he’s a villain doesn’t seem to affect things particularly). At least, I think doing these things would be the right thing to do, whether or not I had the courage to do them myself. However, the family cases raise some of the most profoundly difficult moral dilemmas in moral philosophy. It’s a tough question as to whether one’s personal relationships should affect one’s moral outlook in such tricky cases.

Animal suffering

A cat suffering through a bad pun

A common argument for awarding animals moral rights is based on the notion of animal suffering. Since animals can suffer pain, some argue, they have moral rights. Thus we are morally obliged to prevent animal suffering. This conclusion is often directed at supporting the animal rights movement, and opposing the maltreatment of animals in the production of meat for human consumption, or animal testing.

Arguments such as this raise interesting questions surrounding how we view the relationship between humans and animals. Due to considerations surrounding human consciousness (see previous post - the Explanatory Gap), it might be tempting to place human beings in a fundamentally different category to animals, and use the fact that we are intellectually, morally and sociologically ‘transcendent’ as evidence for this. However, many supporters of the above argument (most notably Peter Singer) swing to the opposite extreme. On account of our common evolutionary origins, Singer argues, we are fundamentally just highly developed animals and nothing more. To discriminate against animals thus amounts to ‘species-ism’ - something analogous to racism. It is on these grounds that animals should be awarded moral 'rights'.

Perhaps Singer is right, and only through a misplaced sense of worth do we assume that we have transcended the evolutionary order. However, consider an unwelcome consequence of this reductive view. It would seem to follow that, since animals have moral rights on account of their ability to suffer, we have a duty to do all in our power to prevent animal suffering (apart from in extreme cases, where there are over-riding moral grounds not to do so). This would include actively intervening in nature to prevent one animal causing another animal to suffer. On this basis, we might accuse David Attenborough and his team of gross moral indecency for not intervening when sitting back and watching a lion hunting an antelope.

The advocate of animal rights cannot appeal to the old dictum ‘let nature run its course’ here to rule out this case, as on their view, human beings are as fundamentally part of the natural order as lions or antelopes. Since we have an obligation to prevent animal suffering, why not intervene? The case is especially forceful if one argues that, on the whole, there is more suffering overall in the (non-human) animal kingdom than good.

I (and I’m sure many others) don’t agree that we are morally obliged to intervene to save antelopes from lions - it’s a bizarre and impractical thing to suggest. But since we would ordinarily feel morally obliged to help a suffering human in need, and given Singer’s view that there is no fundamental moral difference between humans and animals, where and how can we draw the line?