The original point of Trolley Problems (before they even got that name!) was NOT to say that there was some singular, right answer everyone was supposed to get. In fact, it was exactly the
opposite! This class of philosophy questions was originally proposed by Philippa Foot (one of my favorite philosophers) in 1967, and then refined and given the name "Trolley Problems" by Judith Jarvis Thompson in 1976.
Foot, you see, was a "virtue ethics" proponent, which means (more or less) the theory that ethics questions are best answered by determining what the components of good character ("virtues") are, and then seeking practical means to develop those attributes. However, she was writing at a time when two other theories, "utilitarianism" and "deontology," had been dominant for quite a while, with utilitarianism by far the most dominant. Utilitarianism, again hyper-distilled, claims that we can (in some sense)
calculate the ethical value of actions, e.g. actions that increase pleasure and reduce pain, and thus doing whatever gives the calculated best outcome is correct. (More advanced versions recognize "higher" vs "lower" pleasures, with the former categorically better than the latter.) Deontology is complicated so I won't get into it, but the TL;DR is that it's about moral
duties, identifying them and fulfilling them.
I give all this context to explain why Trolley Problems were so influential, and why they're now badly misunderstood and usually used wrongly. Foot used this argument in its raw form to say, "Look, for all of your claims about utilitarianism,
people don't actually behave that way. And I can prove it, through the way people respond differently to this moral thought experiment." Her original framing gives a contrast between the following three scenarios:
- A judge or magistrate is presiding over a court where there are rioters demanding that a culprit be held responsible for some crime. The rioters have five innocent hostages, and will kill them if their demands are not met. The magistrate has no idea who the real culprit is, nor even if the real culprit is available to be punished; they have a choice between framing one innocent person who will definitely be killed by the mob, or allowing the five hostages to die.
- A pilot is flying a single-person airplane with a heavy cargo, when the engine cuts out. She has the choice of aiming toward a densely-populated area or a sparsely-populated one. However, recognizing that this has too many open variables (e.g. it's possible to hit no one in either location), she proposes...
- You are a trolley driver on an otherwise empty, runaway trolley. You cannot stop the trolley and the tracks are narrow and difficult to escape. You must choose whether to allow the trolley to stay on a track that has five people working on it, or switch it to a track that has one person on it.
She posed this because, from a purely utilitarian view, the answer to all three problems should be identical: fewer deaths is always preferable to more deaths, and thus we should choose to pilot the plane toward the low-population area, we should direct the trolley to the track with one person, and we should sacrifice one innocent life in order to save five innocent hostages. But the thing is, actual people
don't do that! While almost everyone agrees that the correct decision is to crash the plane in a low-population area, a lot of people are very reluctant to
change the path of the trolley in order to save five people, even if they are otherwise heavily committed to utilitarianism. And then the courthouse example is even worse, with most people considering it utterly unacceptable to sacrifice one person in that way, even though from a utilitarian/consequentialist perspective the two situations should be entirely identical.
