Trolleyed or just carried away?

You're the one with your hand on the switch!

In Philippa Foot's trolley problem, you are faced with a dilemma. Should you flick a switch to save the hurtling trolley from hitting the fives people bound to the track? Of course you should, but then you see that flicking that switch would mean diverting the trolley down another track where one fat man - as he's usually described - is tied up and is bound to die as a result of your saving the others, if in fact you do that. Should you save the first five at the expense of condemning one fat man or should you do nothing?

Let us take this second possibility first. Why should you do nothing? You might end up doing nothing in the very short space of time available simply because you were struck with horror at being involved in the death of another person, even if it just one fat man. Such a reaction is instantaneous, but it is an entirely understandable reaction. It may also be philosophically respectable. For who would want to be mixed up in such a mess. if we assume that it is not just a desire to avoid getting involved - which would be cowardice - but a genuine sense of horror at not wanting to be the cause of anybody's death, then this is surely an understandable reaction. 

Of course the Utilitarians would say, 'Hang on, you're getting a little sloppy and sentimental here; surely it is all very simple - you can surely see that the choice is between saving one life or saving five lives'. The Utilitarian's assumption is that five lives are in some arithmetical sense five times more valuable than one life. He certainly has a point. A pilot struggling to prevent his plane from crashing into a crowded built up area would be applauded for managing to steer it away to a less densely-populated area. No doubt he dies in the accident, but everyone praises him for his generous, altruistic concern for others, except perhaps the people who did in fact die as a result of the plane crashing onto their houses. 

What should we say? Should we say it's all simply a matter of arithmetic. Flick the switch and let the fat man die and learn to just live with it. Or should we do nothing? I myself think that one should flick the switch, but I think that I would go away desperately ashamed and shaken at having caused the death of the single fat man. And I think I would be right to feel like that because that fat man's life is not an arithmetical unit but something unique and irreplaceable. It is not a life like any other precisely because it is his life, because it is that strange once-in-a-lifetime experience that is being alive on the surface of the earth. In philosophical jargon, human lives are not commensurable. They are no more commensurable than rabbits and jokes, but they almost are, though there might be some weird market where so many jokes bought you one rabbit, but in the situation we are considering there is a loss in one life that makes it a loss that is like losing our own. The reticence we feel has something to do with the strength of the solidarity - the bond of human sympathy - that we feel for others of our kind. For some, like perhaps Indian Jains, that sympathy might well extend beyond humans to other species.

'Kill no flies, not even inadvertently'

It might be worth saying a word about the Jaina priests and monks. The one on the left has a fine cotton mesh over his mouth to prevent him inadvertently swallowing or killing some insect or bug. Care must be taken when walking to make sure that no living creature is injured by one's walking. He will not own a house and he probably left his wife once his family duties were complete. Only a single person could hope to live up to such a demanding ethic of mutual support for living creatures. There may be a kind of connection between this extreme moral universalism and the abandonment of particular loyalties. Only monks are expected to follow this path of extreme commitment. People recognize that it is not something for people caught up in the maelstrom of life. Perhaps a Jain monk would refuse to flick the switch. Utilitarians wouldn't hesitate. We might have the moral instinct of Jaina monks, but we know we belong to a more ordinary world where things and even people seem to be interchangeable. Where do you stand?