Philosophy: Consequentialism and the Trolley Dilemma?

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

Something that always perplexed me with the Trolley Dilemma and its variants is that I've seen it suggested repeatedly in introductory philosophy courses that the reason students vote differently between the original dilemma and its variants highlights a difference between categorical and consequentialist thinking.

Q: Can't it all be seen as consequentialist? Consider things from the angle of public safety, e. g.

If we were to condone a bystander pulling a lever to divert a trolley, it doesn't pose a public safety hazard since the ultimate hazard is people lying on the tracks.

The original trolley problem.

If we want to correct the hazard in the future, we should impose measures to keep people off the tracks. Whether or not we condone pulling the lever is largely inconsequential as I see it to public safety (although I do think we should not allow random people to be diverting trolleys in the future).

If we take the fat man variant, then we can't condone pushing innocent fat men (or anyone for that matter) off of bridges under any circumstance. To condone that would introduce a new safety hazard (consequence) for anyone standing on bridges.

We can't condone pushing people off of bridges under any circumstance.

Similar case for the organ transplant variant. If we condone harvesting people's organs against their will in hospitals, that would almost certainly present a disastrous consequence in the form of a public safety crisis. No one would be able to trust going to a hospital if they can have their organs harvested against their will.

At least that's one of multiple possible consequentialist angles I see. I'm admittedly not well-versed in philosophy but doesn't this make sense as one possible, purely-consequentialist way to explain variations in answers between the variants without requiring any categorical thinking whatsoever? If not, please let me know!

Updates

3 mo

My interest in the subject comes from how I seem largely incapable of categorical thinking. I've always thought, even as a child, in terms of probabilistic consequences (although I'm not an act consequentialist; a right course of action could still bring about poor results, but could still be the right course in that it has the highest probability of producing the best results). So the idea that variations in answers suggest any degree of categorical thinking just doesn't register with my brain.

[NaultD]

I fundamental reject this thoughtful experiment as it is in a totally sense. In plain English just a red herring to dig into all of our bias in the worst ass backgroundway possible. Our time is just better off in talking about our bias directly then anything the Trolley Dilemma can hypothetically get us to think about.

People of a stronger caliber can have 10,000 set backs made from other people, but it has zero bearing how I choose who I am and who I want to be.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/t_D8chFVHSkhttps://www.youtube.com/embed/fOz4Bd0bmK4

"So what is moral as a final definite answerable solution." Is fundamental wrong for all of humanity.

The endless question of what can we give to morality here and now. The more we grow the more our morality needs to grow

[NaultD]

That's my most charitable take on the Trolley Dilemma.

More honest is just gross negligence of Bourgeoisie capitalism class. The high boss man doing damage control of inflow of profit. Then avoiding responsibility.

"Boss man the whole brake system broke down[ remember boss man is 100% of everything working correctly] I had to chose those people when the brakes fail. broken heartly I choose less people boss. You did what you could.

Now replace the fat man with the boss man. The guy with the big bucks and now responsibility of maintenance of brakes. See how the tables have turn.

[NaultD]

youtube.com/playlist

[CozyCoffin]

Unfortunately, this scenario does happen in real life, but more of the switch being pulled than the fat man being pushed on the track.

The Chernobyl Disaster, a deadly explosion at a nuclear power plant in Ukraine SSR in 1986 and one of the worst nuclear disasters the world has ever seen. The explosion was especially dangerous because it caused a major release of dangerous fission products - radioactive isotopes such as Cesium-137, Iodine-131, and Strontium-90, all of which can cause cancer.

Major Aleksei Grushin, after flying above the Chernobyl plant and Belarus, had the option to allow the particles to affect millions of people in Moscow and other densely populated cities vs the smaller population in Belarus , and used artillery shells filled with silver iodide to make rain clouds that would wash out the radioactive particles in Belarus, causing severe radiation poisoning in the children of Belarus but preventing greater harm.

[purplepoppy]

The trolley would just squash the fat guy before continuing. As for the original problem it doesn't take into account that all lives are not equal and the value of the single man could exceed the sum of the others.

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

A difficulty from my perspective of trying to assign varying value/utility to human beings as a sort of utilitarian weight (even if we knew much in advance about the people on the tracks) is that I don't think any single human being or group of human beings can reliably assess it in a way that can come anywhere close to unanimous agreement.

As a blatant example, consider if the 5 people on one side were MPs/senators of one political party and the other is a prime minister/president of an opposing party. A country might be wildly split, even down the center, on whether the prime minister/president's utility exceeds the utility of the 5 senators/MPs of the opposing party.

So I always thought we must necessarily err towards the side of all lives having equal utility in the majority of cases, if only because of the inability to arrive at a consensus on this topic.

The way I look at ethics though is not in evaluation of a single incident. It's in evaluation of all sorts of future incidents which could be fairly similar. To ethically approve or disprove of a particular human behavior in a particular incident is about whether or not we want to encourage or discourage similar behavior in similar incidents from my perspective.

That's another reason why I think it could often get too messy trying to assess the relative value/utility of each individual human being who is harmed to deem whether an action is ethical vs. unethical and the degree thereof, as that's those relative values are going to vary wildly in similar future incidents. It factors in too many intricate variables to come up with generalized notions of right and wrong, so to speak, along with laws/rules that are simple enough for the masses to understand.

[FunkyMonkee]

Why would these people BE on the tracks in the first place? Do they have a death wish? If so, does it MATTER which track the trolley runs on? How is it MY fault that any of them get hurt or die when THEY'RE the ones who chose to lay on the tracks? What am I SUPPOSED to do, switch the derailer to the middle to trolley wrecks before it hits any of them and then possibly kill everyone on the trolley who didn't WANT to take a chance on getting killed?

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

I think that's another angle that makes a lot of sense too is in terms of liability. The ultimate people liable for being harmed by lying down on trolley tracks are themselves or, in versions where they're tied to the tracks, whoever tried them up. The bystander is actually morally irrelevant from my perspective.

[FunkyMonkee]

And, who's MAKING the bystander pull the switch?
In any case, I'd pull it so the trolley would head for only the one person. Besides, there's a cowcatcher on the front that'd push them out of the way.

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

Nice! 🍻

[FunkyMonkee]

Thanks! Make it root beers!

[andreasderjuengere]

We could ask the trolley driver to stop for a few minutes.
But that is too simple, right?
One other thing to check: do these people on the tracks perhaps DESERVE to be where they are?
"Philosophy" often creates problems where without it, we'd only have solutions.

[jshm2]

To be honest, it's always a daft example as it assumes dichotomy exists in every decision.

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

I always disliked that the consequences were provided as well. No real-world decision gives us perfect foresight into the possible consequences of our actions. So I think something approximating an ethical dilemma might be something like this:

You are a commander of an army and a small group of your soldiers are stranded in deep enemy territory. Intelligence reports suggest that there is an extremely low probability of successfully rescuing the soldiers (a potential suicide mission), but some of your troops have bravely volunteered to take on the rescue mission. Do you give the command to attempt the rescue mission?

Something like that. We don't know if the mission will succeed or fail miserably (don't know the consequences), and maybe even the odds suggest that it is heavily weighted towards failing miserably. That seems closer to me to a real ethical dilemma that at least somewhat approximates the type of dilemmas we might face in the real world.

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

Actually I'll pose that as a question on here. I'm horrible at coming up with questions to ask and it might be interesting to see the answers!