A moral dilemma
June 23rd, 2008 | Published in Morality, Psychology, Religion | 2 Comments
Put yourself in this situation.
You are at a train track and see five people tied to the track ahead. A switch is in front of you which will divert the train, but as you look down you see a man is strapped to that track and will be killed. Is it permissible to flip the switch and save the five people at the expense of one?
If you are like most people, you said yes.
Now imagine in order to save the five people, you have to push a stranger in front of the train to stop it. You know for certain it would stop the train in time to save the five people tied to the tracks. Is it permissible to push the man and save the five people at the expense of one?
You probably said no. But the results are the same — the only difference is the method (passive vs. impassive). But in both cases you sacrifice one life to save five.
So why do we see one as moral and the other as immoral?
Here’s the answer Michael Shermer gives:
In the first one the subject is emotionally detached by being one step removed from the killing process—to save five lives by killing one person, one has only to flip a switch to detrail the trolley car. The trolley killed the individual, not the subject. In the second scenario the subject is emotionally involved—to save five lives by killing one person, one has to be directly and viscerally responsible for killing another person.
Moral judgment is not calculatingly rational. It is intuitively emotional. (The Science of Good & Evil, p. 177)
Do you agree?
June 23rd, 2008 at 9:52 am (#)
“If you are like most people, you said yes.”
There’s the rub, eh? Apparently I’m not like most people. (I get that a lot, though… and it seems it’s not usually intended as a compliment.)
Flipping a switch and pushing a body make no difference in my mind. If I were to flip the switch, I would be acting as executioner for those five. For all I know, the five are mass-murderers and the one is a faithful husband and father of six.
As I see it, the true “moral” choice would be to track down the person who tied them in the first place, and make sure s/he had a “front row seat” for the next engine to roll down those tracks.
June 27th, 2008 at 1:31 pm (#)
I would never be able to sort through the implications and make a decision before the train tore through the five.
Whether my burger has onions or not is too difficult for me.