Hacking the Trolley Problem

When humans perpetrate awful things they are usually numb or indifferent to the awfulness of their actions. By contrast, most ordinary people -- even ones who may eventually do something awful -- will recoil when presented with the proposition that circumstances might compel them do something evil or reprehensible. It is perhaps this prospect of mechanically necessitated evil that makes what's commonly known as the Trolley Problem such a frequent and favorite topic of conversation. The original statement is due to Philippa Foot:

A trolley is running out of control down a track. In its path are 5 people who have been tied to the track by the mad philosopher. Fortunately, you can flip a switch, which will lead the trolley down a different track to safety. Unfortunately, there is a single person tied to that track. Should you flip the switch?[1]

It would be great to fall back on a straightforward exhortation: "Don't be a tool, man!" Unfortunately, this won't work if we stay within the bounds of the thought experiment. In this, and any other standard formulation, you are inextricably caught in the machinations of a sinister mastermind; you have no choice but act out some part in what seems to be an evil deed. You can make choices, of course, but you still come out a tool.

This sort of problem is very characteristic of a certain mode of thought. The question itself, by the information it gives and the boundaries it draws for itself seems to suggest that (1) there is such a thing as some sort of "net-goodness" or "net-benefit" of an action, (2) it is possible to determine what the net-goodness of a particular decision will be, and (3) such notions of goodness are quantifiable. In fact, this dilemma is strikingly mechanistic: the passengers are imprisoned within a machine hurtling out of control, a situation that leaves them no apparent choice but to use the highly constrained controls set in place for them by a scheming architect. (I am tempted to borrow from XKCD here to make a joke: "The passengers should just type 'sudo stoptrain'.") The dilemma itself is almost a statement of a sort of frustration and despair regarding our late technological society that has been expressed elsewhere, in recent popular culture:

We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine
and the machine is bleeding to death[2]

What I am suggesting is that this popular and appealing thought experiment exposes a great deal about how many people are accustomed to thinking about ethics: that 'goodness' is something that you can measure objectively and apply to the world through an effective and well-understood mechanism of control. The Trolley Problem is so persistently provocative of discussion because it takes these intuitive notions of ethics and responsibility and uses them to produce what seems to an unpalatable situation, wherein we are forced to choose only between greater or lesser evils.

A variant of the problem will, I think, bring the assumptions of the original sharply into focus. Consider the following restatement:

A trolley is running out of control down a track. Its passengers consist of members of two families unrelated by blood. In the path of the trolley are five members of one family. The passengers can flip a switch, which will lead the trolley down a different track. Unfortunately, five members of the other family are tied to that track. Should the passengers flip the switch?

I am not aware of any similar restatement of the problem, though I would not be entirely surprised to learn that there is one. Think about this variant for a moment. The utilitarian argument applicable in Foot's original statement won't work here: both families stand to suffer a terrible and tragic loss, and there seem to be no obvious criteria -- at least not generally applicable criteria -- that would make once choice clearly superior to the other. Moreover, this situation involves a very serious and troubling kind of distributed responsibility: if either party of passengers has its way as to whether or not to flip the switch, it will do so at the expense of the others. Thus, the interests at stake are not only commensurable, but necessarily in conflict with one another. Certainly one family will not sit idly by and let their loved ones perish for the sake of sparing the other family and equally deep and awful grief. The two parties will be collectively responsible for any possible outcome, and in either case, someone with the ability to affect the final outcome will suffer terribly. Foot's trolley problem seems to let us choose between a greater or a lesser evil, while this variant, which adds only a consideration of normal human social relations, appears to be truly impossible to resolve, either for the passengers, or for us as observers.

We might resort to constructing special cases where one or the other decision might seem preferable. Case-based arguments, however, are really a retreat from the sort of objectively knowable idea of net-goodness that Foot's problem proposes; they attempt to get around the problem by adding new parts to it. The very phrasing of the original Trolley Problem presumes that there is an optimal course of action, and that this course of action necessarily hinges on what the passengers do with the limited controls before the train hits. If we start asking about other elements of the situation, we are really admitting that there is more to the problem than just its mechanisms and its victims.

The trolley itself is an interesting element of the problem. To see why, compare Foot's ethical dilemma to the one of persecuted early Christians being forced to fight one another to the death in the coliseum spectacles of Imperial Rome. This problem has almost all the same elements as the Modified Trolley Problem presented above. Two parties are forcibly put into a position where their incommensurable interests are in necessary conflict, so that whoever prevails must do so at the expense of the other. Moreover, responsibility is distributed; assuming that the combatants are sincere and Christ-like christians, neither one will want to harm the other, even for the sake of his or her own well being. However, this dilemma readily admits a "poetic response" that the Trolley Problem does not: in his classic of Christian fiction, Quo Vadis, Sienkiewicz has the two would-be gladiators throw down their weapons and embrace, refusing to fight[3]. This, of course, results in their being mauled to death by captive lions. Notably, however, this response does not result in either party compromising their interests or those of the other. The two combatants, though they die anyway, seem to reach agreement that theirs is the best course of action.

The trolley forces a mechanical necessity on the situation. It is a sort of perverse deus ex machina; whereas the gods who appeared ex machina in classical tragedy did so in order to reconcile what seemed to be irresolvable conflicts of duty or justice among humans, the machine that appears as a premise of our thought experiment seems to create an irresolvable ethical conflict for the people entangled in it. The mechanical necessity of the imagined situation is an important part of what makes the thought experiment seem plausible. The passengers cannot stop the trolley, except by using the one problematic switch. The passengers cannot outrun the trolley, in order to rescue or warn the people ahead. The passengers cannot stop the trolley outright, since presumably its break mechanisms are malfunctioning. The machine (the trolley) essentially forces its passengers to evaluate outcomes in terms of a single point of control (the switch that changes tracks), thus forcing a lose-lose situation because, being only a machine, it can only do so much.

How one views and states a problem has a profound impact on what the accepted courses action will be. (This is a theme that came up earlier in "Paradox and Specification".) Foot's original Trolley Problem understands the problem as one of constraint by machine and evaluation of net-goodness. Thus, it only makes sense that the ethical question is phrased as "Should you flip the switch?" If this were a computer program, we would ask "What form does the output take?", and our response would be "A one-bit signal indicating whether or not the trolley changes tracks." However, I would argue that the Modified Trolley Problem articulated above is impossible to resolved by either flipping of the switch. In the Modified Problem, something awful will happen no matter what the passengers do, and neither the passengers nor any observer is able to leverage this one decision (whether or not to flip the switch) into anything like a commensurably better outcome. To me, this suggests that "Should you flip the switch?" is the wrong question. Answering it tells us nothing helpful.

What, then, is the right question? How about, "What does each family owe to the other in the wake of the tragedy?" Or, "How should each family behave toward the other?" Confining the scope of the ethnical question to within the boundaries of the machine is mistake, and precludes any kind of useful ethical directives. Asking "Should you flip the switch?" is characteristic of a myopic view in which we assume that problems can be solved once and for all by a single decision; in this case, by simply flipping a switch. (Does this mean that the modern world is promising us "push-button" ethics?) What I contend to have constructed here is a problem that cannot be solved in terms of the mechanisms actually available in Foot's formulation, or in any of the standard formulations. Tragedy cannot be averted or even mitigated. Rather, the participants of the tragedy must look to themselves, and to one another in order to understand how to cope with and accept something truly horrible. We must not localize our notions of consequence to only short-term outcomes, and we must not constrain our notions of possibility to those made explicitly available us by people that it seems do not have our best interests at heart.

There is a great deal more to ethical behavior, it seems, than the mere exercise of control.

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[1] Foot, Philippa. The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect in Virtues and Vices (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978)

[2] Godspeed You Black Emporer. "The Dead Flag Blues", F#A#∞. Constellation Records, 1997.

[3] Sienkiewicz, Henryk, Stanley Conrad (Trans.). Quo Vadis?. Ignatius Press, 1992. (Also available through Project Gutenburg.)