Mr. Sandel starts off his very first day with this conundrum: Suppose you're driving a trolley car when the brakes fail. You're about to kill the five men you see working on the track ahead of you—except that you have a split-second opportunity to steer the trolley onto another track where you'll kill only one worker. "What would you do?" Mr. Sandel asks his students. Alternatively, what if you were standing on a bridge overlooking the track and you could save all six workers by pushing that fat man standing next to you onto the trolley's path? What if you didn't actually have to push the fat man but could drop him through a trapdoor?
Read the rest of Charlotte Allen's article on professor Michael J. Sandel's "Justice" class.
1 comment:
I've considered this particular question quite a lot since I first heard it several years ago, and I thought I would share my conclusions.
The main thing which makes the question tricky is the automatic assumption that saving 5 or 6 in return for 1 life is the morally superior choice. However, what is harder to grasp and express is the implied assumption of risk that walking on the trolley tracks has. The men on the tracks know it is dangerous to do so, but they are there because they are either a) being paid to assume that risk, or b) foolish for taking the risk. Looking at it in this light, the moral decision is not how many lives can be saves through one sacrifice, but how can we as a society allow and encourage people to assume risk and act in wise ways.
It would be morally wrong to push the "fat man" (fat being an irrelevant and prejudicial detail) into the trolley path, even though that action would save more lives. This is because the workers on the track have implicitly accepted a certain level of risk when they entered the track, while the bystander had not. Part of their compensation for working on the track is for the understanding that they may indeed die while on it. In that case, you are penalizing a bystander who had no promise of reward for accepting any risk. It is an unjust decision to make, despite the heavier loss of life.
Going to the conductor of the trolley car, the facts that it is his first day on the job and that he has only a split second to make the decision are irrelevant to the moral aspect of it. In this case, the 5 men are foolish for putting themselves in the position to get run over. They should have known the train was coming and may not be able to stop. The one wise worker is being sacrificed to save the 5 foolish ones. Again, the morally right thing to do is to allow the 5 to die and the 1 to live, because the 1 should not be unvoluntarily forced to pay with his life for the foolishness of the 5 by a choice you make.
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