Every few years, someone asks me what I would do to solve a Trolley Problem. Sometimes, they think I’ve never heard of it before—that I’ve never read anything about moral philosophy (e.g. Plato, Foot, Thomson, Graham)—and oh do they have a zinger for me. But for readers who are well familiar with these problems, I have some thoughts that may be new. For those who haven't done the reading, I'll provide links and some minor notes and avoid recapping in great detail.

Ask a dozen people to explain what the trolley problem is and you are likely to get a dozen variations. In this case, my contact presented the scenario as a modified Bystander variation format—though far evolved away from Philippa Foot's original version in “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect*” in 1967, used as a tool to discuss direct versus oblique intention and the moral confusion within abortion doctrine given by the Catholic Church. Foot’s original proposal has then been refined, re-examined, and tested by Judith Jarvis Thompson for the 40+ years following 1976, and practically everyone in philosophy has discussed it since.

The Query

“What is your answer to the famous Trolly Dilemma? A trolly is heading down a track towards five people who are tied to the tracks. There’s a lever and if you pull it it switches tracks where only one person dies. We don’t know who the people are. It could be five Hitlers or five Nobel laureates. What would you do and WHY?”

Now, I have to spend some time going into great detail to break this down because unlike my inquisitor who claims that “It’s a very simple question” and you should flip the switch to “save five people because each of them has equal value and under utilitarianism, you want to maximize good,” I have spent many years researching and thinking about this problem—and while there are many ways to tweak this question or clarify it that end up changing many people’s answers (if it’s your job to operate the lever, or if the one person is also tied to the track, or nobody is actually tied to the tracks, or if you are alone, or if you are pushing a man onto the track instead of pulling a lever, or if there’s another option to jump onto the track and sacrifice yourself, or by changing the question entirely to judges, pilots, large men blocking caves, harvesting organs from dying patients, etc), my own answer to the Bystander variation...

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