The Fat Man Retaliates

There’s a variation to the Trolley problem thought experiment in which, rather than throwing a switch to divert a runaway train from a track on which five people would be killed onto one where only one person will be killed, there is a lever which you can use to open a trap door to drop a fat man onto the tracks and thus avert a greater disaster.

Now, the lever and trap door arrangement is there to avoid you having to physically throw or push the fat man onto the tracks – so there is no visceral reaction to getting your hands metaphorically dirty with killing him, you pretty much have the same separation as you had with the switch and are again sacrificing one life for five.

A no-nonsense utilitarian response to the idea of opening the trap door and putting the fat man in front of the train should be that it is equivalent to switching tracks to kill the one person instead of the five that would otherwise die.  There is however a meaningful difference between the two scenarios – in the standard scenario (switching of the tracks) the single person dies as a consequence while in the fat man variation, the single person dies as a means – in other words the killing of the fat man is instrumental.

The general consensus is that it is wrong to kill a person instrumentally even if, by doing so, you can prevent the death of more people.  A related scenario is that in which a healthy person is sitting in a doctor’s waiting room and the doctor realises that she is the perfect donor for five other patients all of whom will soon die without donated organs.  It’s horrific to think that a healthy person might be harvested for organs, even if a large number of people might thus be saved (which is an expression of our intuitive take on the morality of the suggestion).

Then there is the notion of justified self-defence.  The general consensus here is that a person is justified in acting, even violently or lethally, in order to defend themselves, so long as their action is proportionate.  It should be noted that this is about defending oneself, not necessarily about saving oneself.  If you are set on killing me, and I can’t realistically disable you or run away, then I am justified in killing you.  On the other hand, if some natural disaster is imminent, and I could survive only if you died, then I am probably not justified killing you – at least not instrumentally.  I could be justified in doing something that only consequentially leads to your death but was necessary to save my life or many lives (like dumping CO₂ that may well asphyxiate you but is intended to put out a devastating oil rig fire).

It gets a bit vague about how justified one is to act violently or lethally to prevent harm.  The legal system varies somewhat on how the victim of long term domestic abuse is treated when they crack and kill their abuser.  Sometimes there’s some leniency, sometimes there’s simply a formal continuation of the abuse.  Sometimes there’s a sentence of probation (ie a non-custodial sentence), sometimes it’s jail until you die (or effectively so).

Let’s just consider the right to defend your life.

Consider the fat man, who is on the trap door but who, for some reason, cannot move.  You are near the lever and the runaway train is heading for five people who, if you do not act, will die.  You’ve recently been listening to a podcast that was extremely positive about utilitarianism and you are therefore primed to do whatever you can to minimise suffering.  You are not without feeling however, and you tell the fat man that what you are going to do is for the greater good before you start moving towards the lever.

The fat man, while unable to move, is not entirely helpless though because he has a large shotgun.  To defend himself, he can’t risk merely wounding you because you could still operate the lever, he has to kill you to assure his survival.

Is the fat man justified in killing you?  Alternatively, if you were the fat man, would you be justified in killing me given that I am intending to open the trap door and drop you on the tracks in front of the train?

Note that if the fat man kills our hero, there will not only be that direct casualty but also the casualties due to the runaway train that will not be stopped and will instead kill the five people on the tracks.  So is it okay to kill six people to save your own life, if at least five of those deaths are only consequential?

My initial intuition is that it is justified for the fat man to shoot the person who is going to activate the lever.  The fat man is not responsible for the runaway train or the five people on the tracks and it is not justified to kill him instrumentally to save the five people.  The five who die only die consequentially and there is no other way to save the one life (that of the fat man) other than killing the wannabe lever operator.

Nevertheless, it seems odd to say that it’s okay to let six die to save one.  In an analogous situation, if a car with sabotaged brakes was careening towards a deep canyon and the driver could only save herself by sideswiping a car which was being driven parallel to the canyon, and which would fall into that canyon thus killing the six occupants, then it’s difficult to think that this defensive course of action would be justified – even if the saboteur was known to be in the second car.  We’d possibly further expect the driver of the sabotaged car to avoid unintentionally sideswiping the second car, even if that would (unintentionally) save her life.

Then there is another possible scenario, this time not related to the fat man but rather to the single innocent person on the section of track that the train could be switched to in order to save the five.  Let’s say that, for whatever reason, this person cannot simply avoid the train.  If you switch the tracks, he’s going to die.  Fortunately for him, he has a sniper rifle and the skills to use it.  He sees the runaway train and knows that the average person will decide to switch tracks to save the five.  He raises the rifle, puts his eye to the scope and sees you in his crosshairs, ready to change the direction of the runaway train.

Is he justified in shooting you?  Would you be justified in shooting someone else, if it were you on the tracks and they were about to consequentially kill you, even if you knew that by your actions six people would die?

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There is a reason that the fat man is a fat man.  He’s not just fat, he’s a lot fatter than you are – no matter how fat you happen to be.  You can’t simply jump onto the tracks yourself and stop the runaway train.  This caveat is in place to prevent you from taking that option because too many people would choose to sacrifice themselves before sacrificing another person – perhaps because dying as a hero is more attractive than living as someone who killed a guy by pushing him off a bridge into the path of a train.

Ignoring the fact that the potential victims in the scenarios above have guns (or accepting that, despite them having guns handy, they are average decent people), it seems to me that the only difference between allowing someone else to create a situation in which I die and creating that situation myself is the question of agency.  I don’t have a choice if someone else does something to me and I am unlikely to like that, even if I would have chosen freely to put myself in precisely the same situation that I end up in due to another’s actions.

Put that aside for a moment.  Consider instead the moral judgment we would make on the person who, to save five, throws themselves in front of a runaway train.  Or the moral judgment of someone who is able to divert the train onto the track that they themselves are on, and thereby save five lives at the cost of their own.  This is equivalent to the brave soldier who throws himself onto a grenade and saves his comrades.  Or the mother who dies saving her children, or perhaps even the children of another.  Such people are heroes, which implies that they did the right thing.

But if this is so, then why is it not necessarily the right thing for the fat man, or the man on the track to abstain from defending themselves?  They have agency.  They can, if they so choose, prevent what is going to happen to them.  Choosing not to prevent their deaths, when such prevention is an option, is equivalent to choosing to sacrifice themselves actively – which is apparently the right thing to do.  How could they be thus be justified in doing the thing that is not right, which is by definition the wrong thing?

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Going a bit further, it would seem that if you are at the lever, or the switch, and your potential instrumental, or consequential, victim has the ability to prevent you from acting, then you should act to save the five, and two variants become morally equivalent.  If you are not shot in the process, it is only because your victim chose their fate or maybe they missed when they tried to shoot you – but either way, they saved the five, not you.

Thoughts?

Ethical Structure vs the Trolley Problem

This is the first in what I hope will become a series of short(ish) articles in which I address ethical problems and dilemmas from the perspective of the Ethical Structure – as introduced in the Morality as Playing Games series.

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The Trolley Problem is a thought experiment based on a set of scenarios involving a runaway “trolley”.  Most of us would think of it as a runaway train or carriage, or perhaps a tram, maybe even a streetcar or a cable car (San Francisco style, not St Moritz style).  The originator – Philippa Foot – even referred to a tram rather than a trolley, but she was British and some American, when they got onboard, used their own strange vernacular.  So now we’re stuck with talking about the trolley problem, despite a trolley looking like this (according to Google):

Fundamentally, the problem is about making a choice between A) not acting and thereby letting a group of (many) people die and B) acting and thereby killing a smaller number of people but saving the group in the process.  You could, for example, save five by switching tracks so that a runaway train kills one worker rather than five.  Or you could push the fat man standing next to you onto the tracks to stop the train, which would kill him but save the five.  Or you could just let the scenario run its course without intervening.

There a number of variants of this problem intended to pick away at the key issue which is how we tend to utilitarian in one situation and deontic in another.  In other words, most (ie 85%) would flick the switch to save five at the expense of one, but even the most utilitarian among us baulk at getting our hands metaphorically dirty if we had to push the fat man onto the tracks (12%).  I note the fact that it is a “fat man” who is in the firing line.  The reason the man is fat is to ensure that he has the bulk to stop the train, but there’s also a significant bias against fat people (who are seen as slothful and greedy with insufficient self-control) which probably makes it easier to push one of them under a train.  I suspect that significantly fewer than 12% would be willing to kill a healthy, well-proportioned woman or a child in order stop the train.

(Imagine some sort of situation where disruption of power would divert the train onto a safe track, but the only way to do this is to push a smaller person than yourself through a crack where they would be fatally electrocuted, but their sacrifice would mean that five others would be saved.  Even I as write this I feel myself recoiling strongly from the idea – I do note that it’s a step away from using the body of the fat man to wedge under the train’s wheel and thus stop it.  I feel that the more Rube Goldberg-like the mechanism for killing a person to stop the train, where the death happens in the first step, the less likely we are to feel justified in using it.  I suspect that if the death happens later in the mechanism, we might not be quite so squeamish.)

So, if the action is remote, we more willing to be utilitarian – we’ll let (or make) one die to save five. But if the action is up close and personal, we are deontic followers of the injunction “thou shalt not kill”.  How do we explain this?

In terms of the Ethical Structure, our primary concern is our continuation as a moral agent, in other words our survival.  And our chances of survival are increased when we clear signal to others that we are not a threat.  There is a much more worrisome signal sent when we act to kill someone than when we fail to act to save someone.  Recalling the pyramidal structure, “do not kill (destroy)” is at the pinnacle.  There is no specific “do not fail to save” but there is quite likely to be a general rule that, if you can, you ought to try to save people which falls into the “do not break the rules” category right down the bottom.  It’s for this reason that it takes in the order of five lives saved to motivate us to (remotely) cause the death of one person.

It’s this “remotely” that is key.  As far as signalling goes, there is a substantial gulf between flicking a switch (even if, as a consequence, someone dies) and physically putting your hands on someone and directly causing their death.  Few of us want to be the sort of person who kills another person (because it makes it much easier to convey the impression that we would never kill anyone and that we are therefore no threat to others).  It’s much more palatable to see yourself as the person who saved five lives by just flicking the switch when you can gloss over the consequences.

The tuning of our positions with regard to each scenario (the vanilla trolley problem and the fat man scenario) is indicative of how there is variation across the population as to when to break with the ethical structure.  Only 85% of the participants in an experiment were willing to switch tracks and save five.  I suspect that, for the most part, the remaining 15% were either overly cautious (meaning that they’d be roadkill in hard times) or overly coy (perhaps meaning that, in reality, they’d be more willing to kill, but you wouldn’t be aware of it until the blade was sliding into your chest) or they just didn’t think it through.  The proportion could probably be determined by pushing the numbers of potential casualties up.  If you’ve got someone holding out when there are 20 lives stacked up against one, then there’s a serious problem with that person.  (Of course, if that one life is that of your mother, or your beloved, or your child, then it’d be understandable, but in the scenario they are all nameless strangers.)

The bottom line is that, when seen through the prism of the ethical structure, it is no mystery that we lean towards utilitarianism when forcing the train to switch tracks to kill one and save five but lean towards deontology when it comes to more directly sacrificing the life of another person to save the five.

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It’s interesting to think about the trolley problem in terms of psychopaths, or people who have damage or some other impairment in their dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.  Psychopaths would probably fall into the 12% who would kill the fat man, since they are strongly utilitarian.  On the other hand, why do they care about the five?  As a psychopath, would you not care about the fact that more were going to do.  After all, it’s not your problem.

In the article on psychopaths, the authors talk about “wrongness ratings” and this might be another area where the Ethical Structure can be brought to bear.

It is not the case that flicking the switch to redirect the train into one person rather than five is good and pushing the fat man into the path of the train is bad.  They are all bad options.  There is a problem in many discussions about morality, even by ethicists who should know better.  We cannot point to an action associated with the trolley problem and say “this is the right thing to do”.  At best we can point to one option and say “this is less wrong than the other option” and try to justify it.  We can do wrong via an act of omission and let five die, or we can do wrong by an act of commission and let one die.

The study assessed only how wrong the act of commission was and effectively ignored how wrong the potential act of omission was.  A valuable variation of the study would be one in which the participants were asked to assess the wrongness of both the act of commission and the act of omission before being asked how likely it would be that they would perform the act of commission.  Would anyone say that killing the fat man was less wrong than letting the five die and also say that they would not kill the fat man anyway?  It’s possible that some people would have the self-awareness to admit to that, knowing that while intellectually they are aware that it’s the better thing to do (in terms of the greater good), but they simply could not bring themselves to do it (because, like, you know, they aren’t psychopaths).

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Parenthetically above, I mentioned Rube Goldberg machines.  Here’s an example:

(And here’s another.)

The idea behind a Rube Goldberg machine is that there is a ridiculously complicated series of steps to achieve a relatively simple task – and the steps themselves are likely to be ridiculous.  I was going to suggest that if the death of a stranger (fat or otherwise) involved in saving the five was a side-effect then that would make it far more palatable than if it were an essential part of the “machine”.

I also noted that there are a number of variants of the trolley problem, some of which involve relocating the fat man – for example the loop variant in which the train is diverted temporarily onto a side track on which there is a worker who is large enough to stop the train, but if he wasn’t the train would continue on and kill the five anyway.

It occurs to me that, in the initial version, the death of the single worker is in fact a side-effect.  If we break up the problem differently we can see that a train is heading towards five workers who will be killed.  We can flick the switch without any cost to ourselves and divert the train onto another track to prevent the five deaths.  It would be difficult to argue that we should not act to save those five people.  We should, of course, check to make sure that our action is not going to result in a worse outcome (for example if there were six people on the other track), but so long as the consequences of our action are not worse than the consequences of inaction it would seem to me that failure to divert the train is a moral failure, totally aside from any considerations of “greater good”.

On the other hand, choosing to kill the fat man is a moral failure because you will cause an instrumental death, rather than a consequential one.  The impression that one is a utilitarian decision and the other a deontological decision could well be an illusion.