Question: I know this isn't really relevant to your post, but, any thoughts on interpretations of the trolley less as direct "needs of the many vs needs of the few," and more so as a "harm as a passive allowance vs harm as an active and direct action"? When I first encountered the trolly problem I thought the whole point was that you can turn away and pretend the lever wasn't there vs killing someone directly, and learning most people interpret it just as a pure #'s thing only confused me :(
you’re super right, it’s a bit of both!! the original dilemma first showed up in a set of three examples in a paper about ethics and abortion.
the other examples were ‘there’s a riot over an unsolved murder and you can prevent bloodshed by framing one innocent person’ and ‘you’re an airplane pilot and your plane is about to crash; do you steer from your current course to a less populated, but still populated area’.
the examples were there to highlight a critique of the ‘doctrine of double effect’, which, as i understand it, means that it’s particularly important to analyze your primary intention when doing an action rather than just some secondary side effect of it. like according to the DDE, if you intend to cheer up a friend by asking them to go to the movies with you, and your friend agrees to go and it helps, but as a result they forget to do their homework and do badly in a class, your action of asking your friend to the movies is still morally permissible because the side effect wasn’t your intention, it caused the positive impact you wanted, and you did it with good intentions.
so the paper is her pointing out that in the context of abortion, if you believe abortion ends a life, there are a lot of horrifying implications like ‘it’s morally permissible to let a woman die to prevent an abortion, because if you do the abortion, you would directly intend to kill the child, but if you let her die and don’t intervene, her death isn’t your primary intent but rather a secondary effect of it- so it’s better to let her die’. awful, right??
so she basically writes this paper and is like hey, the DDE has some serious problems, and here are a bunch of hypotheticals where you have to choose between actively letting a small number of people die, or passively letting a large number of people die. because in the context of the doctrine of double effect, it’s not okay to pull the lever- if you pull the lever, you directly intend to kill the one person on the tracks, but if you don’t pull the lever, it’s not your direct intent for four people on the tracks to die.
so in the original paper, she talks a lot about whether letting more people die is okay because, well, you’re not intervening and those people’s deaths aren’t your primary intent, whereas intervening means you intended for someone to die. she’s overall pretty critical of this prospect, and she uses a lot of later examples to talk about it.
of course, this problem has taken on a life of its own, and it’s often used to discuss both of these ideas- “is it ethical to create a lot of harm in order to create a whole lot of good” and “is not intervening a more morally permissible choice if doing so would include actively intending to do harm in order to save people?”
they’re both super interesting questions, and in both cases, these examples apply way beyond the context of a trolley. even if nitpickers come up with some way you don’t have to choose, they’re missing the point, because questions like this come up in all walks of life!! these are just examples to get people thinking about philosophical ideas like the DDE
