How might libertarians solve the Trolley Problem?

 In applied ethics there is a dilemma known as The Trolley Problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem). It runs like this:

A trolley is running out of control down a track. In its path are 5 people who have been tied to the track by a mad philosopher. Fortunately, you can flip a switch which will lead the trolley down a different track to safety. Unfortunately, there is a single person tied to that track. Should you flip the switch?

I would suggest revising the scenario so that the people have not been tied to the tracks by a mad philosopher, but just happen to be on it. Otherwise we might be able to resolve the problem by ultimately blaming the philosopher.

The problem becomes interesting when we compare it to other scenarios. For instance, from the wikipedia source:

As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by dropping a heavy weight in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you - your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track, killing him to save five. Should you proceed?

The interesting thing is that many people's intuitions about the first trolley case are that it is OK to pull the switch, saving the five people, but resulting in the death of the single person. However, many people's intuitive response to the fat man revised version of the scenario is not to push the fat man. The dilemma comes in explaining the difference, identifying the relavent moral distinctions in the scenarios.

A third scenario is this:

A brilliant transplant surgeon has five patients, each in need of a different organ, each of whom will die without that organ. Unfortunately, there are no organs available to perform any of these five transplant operations. A healthy young traveler, just passing through the city the doctor works in, comes in for a routine checkup. In the course of doing the checkup, the doctor discovers that his organs are compatible with all five of his dying patients. Suppose further that if the young man were to disappear, no one would suspect the doctor.

Again, the popular intuition is that it would be wrong to take the organs of the unsuspecting traveller. But why? Each of these cases seem to involve saving five lives at the expense of one, but the intution seems to favour saving the five at the expense of one in the original trolley problem, but not in the later scenarios.

One popular suggestion is that our intutions in these cases lend support to the doctrine of double effect. The doctrine of double effect says that a foreseen harmful effect of an action is permissable under the following conditions:

the nature of the act is itself good, or at least morally neutral;

the intention is for the good effect and not the bad;

the good effect outweighs the bad effect in a situation sufficiently grave to merit the risk of yielding the bad effect (e.g., risking a patient's death to stop intolerable pain);

the good effect (relieving pain) does not go through the bad effect (e.g., death).

So, for instance, one significant difference between the original trolley example and the fat man trolley example is that in the original trolley example, the death of the single person is a foreseen but unintended effect of saving the five people; whilst pushing the fat man is not unintended, though it is foreseen. Likewise, the five people in the first example are not saved by killing the single one - killing the single person is not a means to saving them, or part of our plan to do so.

Likewise, killing the unsuspecting traveler to harvest his organs for five other people is intended, and part of the plan. Saving the five people tied to the tracks by diverting the trolley onto the track with one person tied to it will result in the death of the one, but that death, though foreseen, was unintended, and the one was not killed as a means to save the five. Meanwhile, in the organ havesting scenario the single traveller's death is intended, and is a means for saving the five.

The doctrine of double effect, then, may answer the question of why, intuitively, pulling the switch is OK in the first trolley case, but pushing the fat man or butchering the traveller is not.

The trouble is that libertarians, like Rothbard, oppose the doctrine of double effect. In the Libertarian Forum (June-July, '84) Rothbard wrote,

a Randian "mocking smile" rather than a sigh of regret.

The innocent bystander is the case most relevant to the question of war and the State. Except that we must postulate a mass of innocent bystanders or shields instead of just one. Ponder this: A is being threatened by B, a sniper, hiding in a crowd of hundreds of innocent people. For various reasons he can't simply leave and he also can't warn the crowd. A must either be shot or else he throws a bomb into the crowd, killing hundreds of bystanders along with the sniper. Is A's action, is mass slaughter of innocents, justified because A's life is at stake? It is hard to believe that any civilized person, much less any libertarian, would justify such an action-not simply because it would be profoundly immoral, but because it commits what for libertarians is the ultimate crime: mass murder. In this case, the Lone Ranger would be happy to pop A before he commits mass-murder, and even do it with 

An adherent of the doctrine of double effect may not disagree with Rothbard's conclussion here, because the bad effect of throwing the bomb (killing tens of people in the crowd) is not proportionate to the good effect (A saving his own life). However, one can revise the scenario such that B has an even bigger bomb that would kill far more people in the crowd if he threw it at A. In this case, the doctrine of double effect seems to justify A throwing his bomb at B. A does not intend to kill anybody in the crowd: His intention is to kill B, not the bystanders. Killing a few to save many might make the bad effect proportionate to the good, too. And A would not be killing the crowd members as a means to kill B, the good effect of his action is not accomplished by killing the crowd members.

However, this seems to violate rights. If, then, we may never violate rights, then how would a libertarian solve the trolley problem?

 

 

 

I would solve the Trolley Problem by installing air brakes and a brake catch on the tracks since PLC's would monitor the track cricuits and switches and send the information down an RS485 cable to a FEP providing information to a real time server.

The application I would use would activate the brake catch when there is a "permanent occupancy" reading for a certain period of time and send the trolley into BIE (brakes in emergency).  This would activate before the switch was thrown.  Then a track crew would go on site to see what the problem is and release the people tied to the tracks while a dispatcher tried to re-route trolly traffic around the area.

I bet you never expected someone who designes systems like this to answer this question, huh?

 

 

 

 

 Lol! OK, solution by evasion!

I fail to see how harvesting the organs is even intuitively moral. It is outright violation of one's bodily integrity. Only the most depraved of minds would find this moral in any sense. Such a proposition would sit uneasily with me even before I became a libertarian.

 Harvesting (unconsenting) people's organs is intuitively immoral. That is the point: how do we reconcile that intuition with the intuitive support for pulling the switch in the original trolley example? And what would a libertarian, sworn not to violate rights, do in the first trolley example?

Ah, I misread the OP on that matter. I'll take a shot at answering this tomorrow.

Richard A Garner:

The innocent bystander is the case most relevant to the question of war and the State. Except that we must postulate a mass of innocent bystanders or shields instead of just one. Ponder this: A is being threatened by B, a sniper, hiding in a crowd of hundreds of innocent people. For various reasons he can't simply leave and he also can't warn the crowd. A must either be shot or else he throws a bomb into the crowd, killing hundreds of bystanders along with the sniper. Is A's action, is mass slaughter of innocents, justified because A's life is at stake? It is hard to believe that any civilized person, much less any libertarian, would justify such an action-not simply because it would be profoundly immoral, but because it commits what for libertarians is the ultimate crime: mass murder.

Well, now, I would tend to disagree with Rothbard on this to some degree. I consider A's decision to toss the bomb morally neutral. Certainly, any bystander should do what was necessary to stop A, yet if A went through with his action, I do not think we would be justified in going after him as a criminal afterwards. The crime, in this case, was solely the sniper's who left A with only the choice between his own death and that of many others. What I see this as really being is an aggressor using a mass of innocents as human shields. Should A just lay down and die because B was willing to use such a ruthless tactic? I don't think so.

I haven't though about the trolley problem, but I have thought about human shields, which seems slightly similar.

Let's say a leftist is firing shots into a crowd while holding an innocent person as a shield. It's not your fault if you inadvertently kill or injure the human shield while trying to stop the leftist; it's the leftist's fault and should be added to his list of murders.

Richard A Garner:

The interesting thing is that many people's intuitions about the first trolley case are that it is OK to pull the switch, saving the five people, but resulting in the death of the single person. However, many people's intuitive response to the fat man revised version of the scenario is not to push the fat man. The dilemma comes in explaining the difference, identifying the relavent moral distinctions in the scenarios.

Seems pretty simple to me as the scenarios are not similar at all.  In scenario one, I did nothing to coerce anyone -- some other villian put 6 lives in danger (or 6 idiots put their own lives in danger), and I am simply trying to save as many as possible.  In all the other scenarios, my choice is between coercion and non-coercion.  I'm relieved that people understand intuitively that the means justify the ends and that coercion is wrong, even to allegedly save a bunch of innocents (allegedly because these contrived scenarios always involve certainty about the outcomes, when of course in real life there is no such certainty).

 

Wow, in skimming over the original post, I completely misread the trolley question.

I tend to agree with maxpot, but what if the circumstances were slightly different?

Let's say that two cars broke down, one on each track. The first car has only the driver, but the second car has the driver and four passengers. Of course, none of the car doors are working. What do you do?

JCFolsom:

Well, now, I would tend to disagree with Rothbard on this to some degree. I consider A's decision to toss the bomb morally neutral. Certainly, any bystander should do what was necessary to stop A, yet if A went through with his action, I do not think we would be justified in going after him as a criminal afterwards. The crime, in this case, was solely the sniper's who left A with only the choice between his own death and that of many others. What I see this as really being is an aggressor using a mass of innocents as human shields. Should A just lay down and die because B was willing to use such a ruthless tactic? I don't think so.

 

 OK, I think many would agree with you. But what impact does this have for rights theory. If killing (innocent) people is a violation of rights, and violations of rights are immoral, and A's throwing his bomb at B will kill innocent people, then It would appear that throwing the bomb would be immoral. Your argument suggests that this is not the case, though, which would make one of the premises false.

I suggest that perhaps the argument could be modified so that intended rights violations are wrong, but unintended, though foreseen ones, are not. This would square rights with the doctrine of double effect.

Ego:

I haven't though about the trolley problem, but I have thought about human shields, which seems slightly similar.

Let's say a leftist is firing shots into a crowd while holding an innocent person as a shield. It's not your fault if you inadvertently kill or injure the human shield while trying to stop the leftist; it's the leftist's fault and should be added to his list of murders.

 

 Yes, I suppose that blaming the leftist is a solution to that scenario, but not for the trolley case.

Richard, that would strike me as an acceptable resolution of the issue. My original approach would've been to push back culpability towards the individual who necessitated the potentially immoral action in the first place, given that they are the ones who forced the individual into taking the actions they took.

One of the classic discussions of this issue can be found in chapters 6 and 7 in Judith Thomson's book, Rights, Restitution, & Risk.  If you have access to the book through a library or something, I'd recommend checking it out.  You might also check out Peter Unger's essay, "Living High and Letting Die," which discusses the problem from a really interesting utilitarian perspective

 

Doing nothing is the way to solve the "problem".  If a trolley is flying towards five people tied on a track and you have to kill someone in order to save them it is still morally wrong.  That would be like saying a hungry man should be allowed to come into your house and steal your food just because of the fact that he is hungry.

Thing is, most people don't feel that way, and I think I agree with them.

Which statement do you mean?

That the obviously correct response would be to let the five die.

 

But it is! Why don't you ask the lone person on the track if he's willing to die to save the five? Or do you intend to make the decision for him?

Yes, I'm with Ego - I don't feel any "intuitive support for pulling the switch"; as long as you had nothing to do with tying the people to the tracks or (knowingly) setting the trolley rolling at them, you have no responsibility in the case at all; but if you pull the switch that directs the trolley on to the other track, you are responsible for that guy's death (and the survival of the other five).  If someone I cared about were among the five, I'd pull the switch, but that's a different question.

justinx0r:

Doing nothing is the way to solve the "problem".  If a trolley is flying towards five people tied on a track and you have to kill someone in order to save them it is still morally wrong.  That would be like saying a hungry man should be allowed to come into your house and steal your food just because of the fact that he is hungry.

 

Well, now, if he's starving, I'd say that in a sense, he does not act immorally to do so. Yet, at the same time, you are fully within your right to resist him. Unlike some of those here, I believe that two people can be in conflict without either actually acting immorally. What I mean is, as with the man that throws the bomb as his only method of self-defense, no retaliatory justice ought be sought against him should he succeed. A starving man ought no be prosecuted after the fact for stealing food, nor ought a man defending that food be prosecuted for taking any action necessary to defend it. Duress removes moral culpability from the one, yet it does not remove the rights of the current possessor to defend himself and what he owns. Not as simple a world as some would like, but the one I think exists nonetheless.

JC, I have a much weaker sense of property than most people here, and I'd love to agree with you. I don't think your view makes sense, though.

Does the right to own property end once someone else needs it to survive? How do we define that? What if I'm acting on behalf of someone else who is too weak to steal food for himself? Why is that different?

JCFolsom:

Well, now, if he's starving, I'd say that in a sense, he does not act immorally to do so. Yet, at the same time, you are fully within your right to resist him. Unlike some of those here, I believe that two people can be in conflict without either actually acting immorally. What I mean is, as with the man that throws the bomb as his only method of self-defense, no retaliatory justice ought be sought against him should he succeed. A starving man ought no be prosecuted after the fact for stealing food, nor ought a man defending that food be prosecuted for taking any action necessary to defend it. Duress removes moral culpability from the one, yet it does not remove the rights of the current possessor to defend himself and what he owns. Not as simple a world as some would like, but the one I think exists nonetheless.

 

 

The most basic purpose of an ethical system is allow individuals to avoid conflict over goods. If an ethical system grants rights over a good to two parties simultaneously, it fails in this basic task and is useless.

JCFolsom:

 

The crime, in this case, was solely the sniper's who left A with only the choice between his own death and that of many others. What I see this as really being is an aggressor using a mass of innocents as human shields. Should A just lay down and die because B was willing to use such a ruthless tactic? I don't think so.

Talk about moral hazard! You have just proposed the EXACT opposite of libertarian thought.

A person is free to live, unless he does so at the expense of any else. My claim on my life is not superior to anyone else's. I am not entitled to kill someone else in order to preserve my own life. If I am starving, it is not morally neutral to kill someone and take his food to save my life. It is theft and murder.

By your own logic, if a member of the crowd finds out that A is going to throw the bomb he is morally allowed to kill A. You have created the Hobbien world of war of all against all, where only B is capable of murder and all other actors are morally neutral towards each other.

If a person is forced to choose between dying and becoming a murder, the only moral option is death. I find trying to mask a completely selfish act of murder(better him than me) as morally neutral to be disgusting. You havent even replaced libertarian moralism with utilitarianism, you've declared morality to not exist! A person can perform any action to benefit himself.

 

 

Jon, I hate to start two arguments with two people in the same thread, but I think I'm going to have to!

Let's say that a man walks into a local daycare, weapons drawn, and proceeds to tie several of the babies to his legs, torso, arms, and head in a manner that made it nearly impossible to kill him without killing one of the babies (not to mention what happens if his dead body were to hit the ground). Upon leaving the daycare, he stumbls his way to the nearest crowd and began to open fire

Does that mean that it becomes immoral to stop him? Does that mean that I become an aggressor if I shoot and kill him (of course, killing at least one of the babies as well).

I think if an agressor creates a situation where innocent life must be lost in order to stop him/her, any life lost should be blamed squarely on the aggressor.

Richard A Garner:

. However, one can revise the scenario such that B has an even bigger bomb that would kill far more people in the crowd if he threw it at A. In this case, the doctrine of double effect seems to justify A throwing his bomb at B.

I disagree.

The premise assumes that individuals have perfect knowledge of the future. I have no way of truly knowing how someone else will act or if my actions achieve a smaller amount of damage. What if B has two small bombs and A has 1 big one, but smaller than B's combined? Can A assume that B will throw both, thus can claim immunity in using his first?

Surely, if everyone went around presuming the worst about others, this line of thinking would maximize violence, rather than minimizing it. Once preemptive war is justified we are on a slippery slope towards permanent warfare. With every conflict the parties would want to declare war one stage earlier in order to ensure a first strike.

Within the boundaries of that scenario:

A should not throw his smaller bomb because he does not possess the right to judge life and death for others. Even if A ends up killing less people with his bomb, he has chosen which died and which lived, so still has the bloods of his victims on his hands. If A does not throw his bomb, the deaths have occurred in spite of his actions and not because of them.

No person has the ability to choose who should live and who should be killed, even if the criteria for choosing is only location.

 

Richard A Garner:

However, this seems to violate rights. If, then, we may never violate rights, then how would a libertarian solve the trolley problem?

I don't think the trolley problem has enough information to be solved from a libertarian perspective because the scenario does not address the issue of property, and property rights are the source of all other rights.

 

 

 

Ego:

Does that mean that it becomes immoral to stop him? Does that mean that I become an aggressor if I shoot and kill him (of course, killing at least one of the babies as well).

I think if an agressor creates a situation where innocent life must be lost in order to stop him/her, any life lost should be blamed squarely on the aggressor.

If I use a nuclear bomb to stop the man, killing him, the babies, and the entire city, should that be blamed on the aggressor?

As I previously said, I have a right to defend myself but I do not have a right to sacrifice others in order to do so.

If innocent life is going to be lost whether the man is stopped or not whats so desireable about stopping him?

 

It's desirable to stop him because

• He will continue to kill more people
• He deserves to die

No one is saying to use a nuclear bomb to stop him; you have to try to minimize the loss of innocent life.

It seems like you are creating a scenario where -- assuming everyone followed your moral code -- any murderer who employed human shields would never be stopped. You would rely on someone who doesn't follow your moral code to do it for you.

Yuck, I don't like taking this side...

 

Ego:

It's desirable to stop him because

• He will continue to kill more people

So will you.

Ego:

He deserves to die

Serious blood lust issue.

But no he doesn't. If killing him can protect me, without endangering others, I am allowed to do it. But certainly I am not obligated to do it, nor is there some superhuman code that sentences him to death that us humans must submit to.

Ego:

No one is saying to use a nuclear bomb to stop him; you have to try to minimize the loss of innocent life.

So whats most moral is whatever achieves the fewest deaths?

 

 

 

Ego:

It seems like you are creating a scenario where -- assuming everyone followed your moral code -- any murderer who employed human shields would never be stopped.

You've created a false scenario where the only way to stop him is to use deadly force.

You have also gone against the ideas of self ownership and self determination by allowing your actions to be attributed to a third party.

 

I hold a gun to your head and inform you that unless you kill a particular person, I'll kill you.

You kill that particular person.

Who gets charged with murder?

Ego:

I hold a gun to your head and inform you that unless you kill a particular someone, I'll kill you.

You kill that particular someone.

Who gets charged with murder?

Both. But I would get special circumstance, of course.

I was going to use the example earlier actually.

How can you trade someone else's life to ransom your own? You don't own their life.

If you, out of cowardice, kill an innocent to save yourself, why should anyone have mercy on you? This scenario is no different than the man killing his neighbor to steal his food. He must choose to commit aggression or to not commit aggression.

What if the man who threatened to kill me was bluffing and was never going to kill me? Does anything change?

 

Earlier, you stated that you can't "allow your actions to be attributed to a third party". To be consistent, why should I be charged with the crime if you were the one who pulled the trigger?

What if I were brutally torturing you instead, and I told you that I would stop torturing you if you killed that particular person. Who gets charged with murder?

If someone is being actively coerced, you have to blame the coercer.

How about this, I hold a gun to your head and tell you that unless you pay a hitman to kill a particular person I'll kill you. Now who's the murderer?

The coercer and the hitman!

IMO, this scenario highlights a limitation in traditional natural rights ethics. Can we say that the presence of a villain alters the preferred outcome? Why? If the cause of the problem is a conscious decision as opposed to an engineering mistake, why does that alter what the 'best' outcome is? What if the villain is a qualia-less zombie or machine AI?

Danny, don't you think ethical philosophers should first turn to the natural sciences for an explaination of what ethics are before they try and figure out what ethics should be? I realize this is off-topic, but its not something I see explored very often (I also tend to share Robin Hasons' view of the intersection between philosophy and other disciplines).

Of course, I don't think any of these scenarios are really helpful when it comes to political or economic moralizing. They assume perfect information of outcomes, something which seems almost nonexistent in real-life social sciences.

In all of these scenarios, noone has a positive obligation to do anything.

You are still the murderer as in both cases, you have decided with your own free will to coerce another individual. It does not matter what forces have caused you to commit murder, you have still committed the act. As towards claims that you were acting in self-defense since you could still live if you murdered Smith when Jones put a gun to your head, you weren't. For it to be self-defense, you would need to combat Jones' aggression. Thus, its always and still be murder in those situations. You would just have special consideration when go to court. That's the logic behind gun ownership in a free society, hopefully yourself or others could simply kill Jones with their superior marksmanship. As for the trolley problem, we must decide first who _owns_ the switch you must press to save the 5 persons. Obviously, switching it would aggress against the property right of the owner of the trolley. Second of all, a person doesn't always have full knowledge which the problem assumes. How do you even know that there is another person on another tract, that the switch will save the 5 people, etc. Third of all, since it was by your free will exercised that led to the death of that single person, you would be held to murder. If the 5 people survived, you would still be charged with murder as your _own_ actions contributed to the death of that single person. Again, with all these moral dilemmas, they are vague, assume a lot, and don't really add much to practical theory and always imply some zero-sum situation. In the real world, these rarely happen and in a libertarian society as for the case where you have to murder someone else to survive, we would have more gun ownership, more and efficient police protection and other safety mechanisms of the free market. In the trolley problem, we wouldn't be using the city's municipal trolley which is total crap and kills people in operation. We would have our trollies provided by free market which wouldn't lead to these situations. P.S.: Utilitarian considerations may justify flipping the switch in the trolley problem, but pure utilitarianism lacks a sound theory of justice in property rights. Your _actions_ contributed to death of that single person whereas the death of the five (including yourself presumably depending on how the problem is worded) did not involve any internal actions among participants. Theres also no such thing as moral arithmetic, assuming 5 people are more valuable than 1 is silly. Theres no such that as some kind of intrinsic value in human beings to start this kind of addition and subtraction unless you assume explicitly in your theory that there is.

justinx0r:

Doing nothing is the way to solve the "problem".  If a trolley is flying towards five people tied on a track and you have to kill someone in order to save them it is still morally wrong.  That would be like saying a hungry man should be allowed to come into your house and steal your food just because of the fact that he is hungry.

 

 Doing nothing would be a way of solving the problem. The idea that doing nothing to save five people from death is moral would be counterintuitive, but not necessarily wrong. You could argue that it is not immoral, whilst pulling the switch would be, because allowing the five people to die is an ommision, whilst pulling the switch kills the one by an act.

I'm not sure that the situation is analogous to breaking into a house to steal food if you are hungry, though. You will have to explain that.

Interestingly, thinking about this, the trolley situation is kind of like that scene from the first Spiderman film where Spidey has caught the cable car full of children in one hand and Mary Jane with another, but can't hold both. Taking the Spiderman scenario we remove the act/ommision dictinction present in the trolley case, since Spidey must either let the cable car go or Mary Jane, both of which are overt actions, not ommissions.

I'm not sure how the doctrine of double effects would resolve that case either, though.

 

Ego:

But it is! Why don't you ask the lone person on the track if he's willing to die to save the five? Or do you intend to make the decision for him?

I suspect the scenario is that you don't have time to ask him.