Kill or let die?

Kill or let die?

Sarthak Gupte, FY BSc.

“Is it acceptable to lie sometimes if it could avoid mishaps or even heartbreaks?”

“Should I cheat in the exam so that I do not have to take a retest (the costs of which would be incurred by my parents!) or should I take the exam with utmost honesty even though it would result in me failing in the semester?”

All of us, at some point in our lives, face such problems where making a decision seems too difficult.  There are times when a particular choice could affect us negatively in one area whereas selecting the other could impact some other aspect of our lives. We wonder what exactly would be the right thing to do. Our voluntary actions are guided by free will and are based on values. They can be either good or bad, right or wrong. Ethics, a branch of philosophy, tries to explain to us how to evaluate whether an action is morally good or bad, right or wrong. It examines the criteria for evaluating our actions.

 There are two criteria in this regard: one is the purpose/intention with which an action is performed and the other is the consequence of the action. The first gives rise to the theory of Deontology whereas the latter leads us to Consequentialism. The actions performed with good intentions may only sometimes result in the desired consequences. For example, when people witness an accident on a road and rush to help the victim. Now, if they are not aware of what is to be done, they might end up hurting the individual unintentionally. If we analyze this example based on intentions then the action taken would be considered right, but if we were to look at the consequences then it would not be the right thing. 

Let’s take a look at another case: Suppose you are a trolley car driver, travelling at a speed of 60 kmph and at the end of the track five workers are working on the track. You try to stop but you cannot as the brakes have failed. You feel desperate as you know that if you crash into these five workers, you’ll end up killing them. Now you notice that there is a side track towards the right but there is one worker working on that track. You still can control the steering wheel and choose to turn the trolley towards the right if you want, killing the one but sparing the five. The question: What would be the right thing to do? What would you do? Would you kill one person and save the other five? Many would answer in the affirmative. 

Now assume that you happen to be standing beside those tracks. As the trolley is in motion, you glance down and see a lever connected to the tracks. Pulling the lever would divert it onto the other path. So, would you pull the lever, leading to one death but saving the five? Or would you simply choose not to act, meaning the five would die? 

Source – Wikipedia

This is the crux of the classic thought experiment known as the trolley dilemma, developed by philosopher Philippa Foot in her 1967 paper titled “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect”. It was, however, popularized by Judith Jarvis Thomson in her 1976 paper “Killing, Letting Die and the Trolley Problem”. 

There exist many variants to this. Assume you are standing on a footbridge above the tracks, observing the trolley hurtling towards the five workers. You know that only a heavyweight could stop it from killing the five. Now, a large man is standing next to you on the footbridge. His weight could stop the trolley in its tracks. So, would you push the man onto the tracks, sacrificing him to stop the trolley and thereby saving five others? The outcome of this scenario is identical to the one with the lever diverting the trolley onto another track: one person dies; five lives are saved. Interestingly, while most people would throw the lever, very few would agree to push the fat man off the bridge.

A similar instance: Imagine you are a transplant surgeon and you have five patients who all need transplants to live. They need respectively two lungs, two kidneys and a heart. In the next ward arrives a healthy person for his routine health check-up. So, would you kill a healthy patient and transplant his organs to save five others?  Or would you choose to let your patients die?

Again, the consequences are the same as the first dilemma, but hardly anybody would agree with the notion of taking a healthy person’s life.

If all the dilemmas above have the same consequence, yet most people would be willing to pull the lever, but not shove the fat man or kill the healthy patient, does that mean our moral intuitions are not always reliable, logical or consistent? Perhaps there’s another determinant beyond the consequences that influence our moral intuitions.

Foot opined that there’s a distinction between killing and letting die. The former is an active, direct effort while the latter is a passive and indirect (though foreseen) consequence.

In the trolley dilemma, the person who pulls the lever saves the five workers’ lives and lets the one die. After all, pulling the lever does not inflict direct harm on the agent. However, pushing the fat man over the side is an intentional act of killing. This is sometimes described as the principle of double effect, which states that it’s permissible to indirectly cause harm as an unintended and merely foreseen side effect or double effect if the action promotes the greater good. However, it’s not allowed to directly cause harm, even in the pursuit of the greatest good of the greatest number.

Neuroscientists have investigated the parts of the brain which were activated when people considered the first two variations of the trolley dilemma.

They noted that the first version activates our logical, rational mind and thus if we decide to pull the lever it is because we intend to save a larger number of lives. However, when we consider pushing the obese individual, our emotional reasoning becomes involved and we therefore feel differently about killing one to save five. Are our emotions in this instance guiding us to the correct action? 

The trolley dilemma allows us to ponder over the results of an action and consider whether its moral value is determined solely by its outcome. It is a remarkably flexible tool for probing our moral beliefs and has been applied to various other scenarios such as abortion, euthanasia, etc. 

The technological advancements in recent times have raised issues regarding the ethics of self-driving cars. Should automated cars be designed to save their owner at any cost even if it is to ignore the lives of other sentient beings? 

You see, ethics makes us question our actions and understand their complications. Moral laws were derived from years of experience and deliberation. However, there can be exceptions to these laws as well. With changing times, they need to be critically discussed from an ethical perspective.