this post was submitted on 12 May 2024
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The cover-your-ass scenario.
In the Philosophy Crash Course there was a scenario like this. I'll paraphrase:
You're a traveler exploring a semi-devloped nation in South America. Coming out of the wilderness you come across a squad of soldiers. They are forcing twenty villagers to dig a mass grave. The officer to the soldiers tells you these villagers committed the state crime of supporting a rival to their leader, and are to be executed. But as you are a guest in their country, he will make you an offer: if you shoot one of them, yourself, he will set all the rest free, and then can hike to the border and beg for asylum. (A rough trek, but the neighboring country may take them).
Do you shoot one of the villagers?
Actually killing someone is rather hard on the psyche, and most of us cannot bear the thought (and might suffer from trauma as a result). But then, perhaps this is a small price to pay for nineteen human lives.
Thomas Aquinas and Kant were happy to let the soldiers kill the villagers so as to avoid committing the sin of murder, themselves. Aquinas and Kant even would not lie to the murderer at the door, or Nazi Jew-hunters to save the lives of fugitives hidden in their home, since lying was sin enough, and they would count on God to know His own. Both had contemporaries who disagreed, and felt it was proper to suffer the trauma and do what was necessary (assuming the officer of the soldiers seemed inclined to keep to his word and actually spare the remaining villagers.)
So, the cover your own ass response has a long history of backers, including known philosophers.
The soldiers are killing them in either case. Basically I'm being asked to choose whether they kill one or all of them, and they'll make me shoot someone if I choose to spare most of them. Considering the situation, I'm not sure these soldiers won't just kill me with everyone else anyway since I'm a witness after yhey've had their fun.
This is the actual answer. Don't look at them in the face and try to leave ASAP. Philosophical questions are usually very simplified to illustrate a point, and there are usually more than two choices.
In a real life "trolley" scenario, you should wave to the driver and get them to stop. There should be zero people tied to the tracks. And that's only what should happen if you think quickly enough. In real life you may actually just freeze and do nothing.
IRL we typically do what we feel and justify it later, but then IRL there is no right or wrong, except what we construct in the process of organizing with each other to cooperate against outward threats such as predators and the elements. We have agreed to poor conditions because our lords were kinder than the winter and the bears, but then we've also overthrown our lords when we worked out they need us more than we need them.
But yes, if you want to pretend that moral philosophy is just cerebral masturbation, that's valid. All of our philosophy is about the opinions of past thinkers about the perimeters of right and wrong. It will give you a clear answer about as well as religious philosophy might tell you which patheon of gods is the true one.
These scenarios are less about what is right or wrong, but about how you, individually and personally, decide ad hoc what is right or wrong. You might distrust the soldiers, but then if they were inclined to betray your trust with a lie, they might have never intended you to go free either, and the whole story becomes irrelevant.
Another Trolley-like features a stranger come to town who is a perfect match for five transplant patients waiting organs. The surgeon / hospital administrator has a friend in organized crime who can abduct the stranger and harvest his organs quietly and cleanly so that the authorities won't notice he disappeared. Although IRL, having a transplant is a mortal condition. Having the organ buys more time than not having the organ. Also this doesn't get into the risks of other complications of transplant surgery that can occur even when an organ is a good match.
These scenarios are not about real life, but about becoming more self aware of how you'd consider these. And yes, this may mean looking for third options, hoping to find one better than the two obvious ones.
There are almost always better options than the given ones. I remember an answer to the "Ship of Theseus" problem a friend gave; he recommended calling it a different ship once more than 50% was replaced. I asked why and he said that all definitions are just made up, and you have to draw a line somewhere.
That's what people do in real life. They don't just sit there perplexed by a "paradox".
Firstly, if we're talking about the Trolley Problem, that's not a behavior paradox, that's a morality paradox. Animals, including human beings, commonly act first and rationalize their behavior later. We can decide after the fact it was ethical after all, decide that it wasn't but was justifed due to circumstances, decide that it wasn't and wasn't, but we'll reconcile it after the fact. Examples like the Trolley problem are not meant to reflect real life and how we behave, rather are contrived in contemplation of the logical mechanisms we use to determine ethical options can become problematic. (Utilitarianism has its own paradoxes.)
Secondly, in fact, human beings are susceptible to paradoxes that can cause decision paralysis, but they tend to be about either survival or high-stakes situations with incomplete information. A common one is when a green, low ranking enlisted person is given a direct order that is illegal. In the US army, our soldiers are educated as to the rules of war, and what constitutes a war crime, and while they are legally obligated to not act on illegal orders, they also know well before they get out of boot they'll be jolly sorry if ever they do disobey an order. Command them to commit an atrocity on the field and they lock up by the dozens. Hence squad commanders know that if they issue an illegal command -- even one based on incomplete information -- it risks unit cohesion. Getting caught in a SNAFU like this is still common, and the enlisteds seldom come out of them well, so it's on the list of counter-recruitment bullet-points.
The same kind of thing also appears in game shows (where its contrived) and in the strategic command chain of command, because a lot of officers do not ever want to be a guy who nuked two million people, even if they're the enemy. And yet those officers routinely got to serve as key-turners to arm (or launch) our nuclear arsenal. (I don't know how the situation is since the new century, if those stations are even manned at all times anymore.)
In the end, we are animals, and typically when we're confronted with moral choices, it's a matter of survival or high stakes, in which case we often don't have the time for measured contemplation on what we're doing. Moral philosophy questions what behavior may be right or wrong according to a given standard, but it doesn't get into how people actually behave. For that, consider psychology and sociology.
How are you sure the soldiers will follow though with their end of the bargain? Once they give you the gun, can you try and shoot the soldiers? Could you bribe the soldiers to release all the prisoners?
Thought experiments like this have two options, but real life is never only two options. Getting into that mindset can lead people to accept things for the greater good without exploring all the options.
You just described an alternative version of the well known trolley problem, which the post is referencing.
The answers to the problem from the philosophers is interesting.
The Trolley problem is a schoolbook example of the failure of creed-based philosophy (deontological ethics), but is also used (the various scenarios) to illustrate that circumstances that don't affect the basic scenario or outcome do affect our feelings and our response to the scenario.
It's easier to pull a lever from a remote position than to actually assault someone or kill them by your own hand, for example.
There are other scenarios that don't necessarily involve trolleys, but involve the question of doing a wrongful act in order to produce a better outcome. Ozymandias in The Watchman killing millions of New Yorkers to prevent a nuclear exchange, thereby saving billions of people. (Alan Moore left it open ended whether that was the right thing to do in the situation, but it did have the intended outcome.)
We like the trolley problem because you can draw it easily on the blackboard, but other situations are much better at illustrating how subtle nuance can drastically change the emotions behind it.
Try this one:
The Queen of the land dies. On the day of her sister’s coronation, she declares that Anglicanism is now the faith and Catholics are now unlawful — a reversal of the old order — Catholics are to report to a town or city hall to convert or be executed. You are Catholic. Do you obey the law or flee? And if you obey the law, do you convert or perish at the hand of the state? Do you lie about your faith to state agents or to the national census?
To a naturalist like myself, I'm glad to lie or convert to spare my own life, but to the devout, pretending to be another faith, or converting by force was a terrible sin, so it's a very sober (and historically relevant) look at religious principle.
@uriel238 @mondoman712
In the days before Wannsee Conference (Nazis setting up death camps) but after the invasion of Poland where most executions occurred by firing squad, there were German tourists who would travel to partake in the firing squads. So the trauma is not universal across the human experience and there's some circumstances that would cause individuals to kill. Lynchings and massacres in the US, are examples of this occurring without a war to give cover to killings.
We've seen a similar phenomenon in some of the red states in the ideology conflict here in the US. There are people eager to kill someone just to have the experience, and who volunteer to hunt targeted groups (trans folk, lately) or as participants in an execution by firing squad. I remember in the John Oliver's first segment on the death penalty (he did a second one recently) executions were stalled due to difficulties obtaining the drugs used in lethal injections, and firing squads were brought up. The expert pointed out the difficulty finding one executioner, let alone seven. The officials suggested recruiting volunteers from the gun-enthusiast citizenry, which the expert saw as naïve.
I can't speak to firing-squad executions during the German Reich and the early stages of the holocaust, but I can speak to the Einsatzgruppen who were tasked with evacuating villages (to mass graves) who harbored Jews, harbored enemies of Germany or otherwise were deemed unworthy of life. The mass executions were hard on the troopers, and as a result Heydrich contended with high turnover rates.
This figured largely into the movement towards the industrialized genocide machine that pivoted around the Auschwitz proof of concept. Earlier phases included wagons with an enclosed back in which the engine exhaust was piped. The process was found to be too slow, and exposed to many service people to the execution process. The death camps were staffed to assure no-one had to interact with the prisoners and process the bodies, so no-one would have to confront the visceral reality of before and after. They were staffed so that anyone who engaged a mechanism was two steps away from the person authorizing (and taking responsibility for) the execution. The guy who flipped the switch was just following orders.
Interestingly, we'd see a repeat of this during the International War on Terror, specifically the Disposition Matrix which lead to executions of persons of interest on the field by drone strike (Hellfire missile launched from a Predator drone). During the CIA Drone Strike Programs in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the drone operation crews suffered from high turnover rate, with operators suffering from combat PTSD from having pulled the trigger on the missile launches. It didn't help they were also required to scan the damage to assess the carnage, and identify the casualties.
Interestingly, this also presented an inverted demonstration of how the human mind can tell the difference between violent video games and the real thing. Plenty of normies play Call of Duty without dealing with the mental after-effects of war, but even when we conduct war operations from continents away, our brains recognize that we are killing actual human beings, and suffers trauma from the act. War continues to be Hell, and video games not so much.