Keep it simple
Don’t make ethical reasoning harder than it has to be
You can always count on the trolley-transplant problem to generate discussion, and I thank the many people who wrote in offering their take on a solution to last week’s column. If you didn’t read it, what follows won’t make any sense. You can find it at
First a little grammatical housekeeping. Several people were nice enough to point out to me that I should have said that the Salem witches were “hanged,” rather than “hung.” I thanked them for bringing it to my attention and was somewhat red-faced because I thought I knew better. But after a few days of breast-beating, I decided to see whether my contrition was called for.
Wouldn’t you know it? According to Webster, either form is acceptable. So I still appreciate the concern, but I recant all my contrition. The pedantic can still say “hanged” and the rest of you can say “hung.” I suppose if you’re at the wrong end of the rope, it really doesn’t matter.
I also didn’t mean to imply that Judith Jarvis Thomsom invented the trolley or transplant cases, but she did use them together very successfully in her work on rights. I also didn’t mean to put an errant “P” in her last name. I do know better than that.
In terms of actually solving the conundrum, there were a few people who came up with answers that made a lot of sense. (That’s philosophy jargon for “They came pretty close to the way I see it.”)
Other people started out on the right track, but went astray. Most, however, tried to come up with ways to make the cases come out the way they wanted, but spent time wandering around in logical circles. The most unsuccessful were those who tried to say the trolley killing was accidental, but the transplant killing was “murder.”
The problem with this approach is that you need to define murder. To make it simple — although there are more complex definitions — let’s just say it’s an “unjustified killing of a person.” Now, in the cases under discussion what we’re trying to determine is whether the killing is justified. So to say that it is unjustified because it’s murder is the same as saying “it’s unjustified because it’s unjustified.” That gets us nowhere.
A fair number of people got themselves bogged down when they violated Occam’s Razor. William of Occam, a 14th Century philosopher, advised us: “Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate,” or in simple English, “don’t create unnecessary entities.” Or, more elegantly put: “Find the simplest answer to the problem.” People ended up creating dubious rights, teasing out distinctions that just weren’t there, and coming up with complex ethical principles of dubious parentage that would serve these cases and these cases only. That just doesn’t work.
I’m most attracted to theories that are simple and can be applied to a broad range of cases. So although there may be many workable theories, I’ll propose several and let you take you pick — or you can reject them altogether and find your own.
Some people subscribe to ethical theories that are described as “contractualist.” In many of these, the underlying thesis is that if we could have a meeting of all people involved, what would everyone agree to — or at least what would they not be able to reasonably reject?
In this case, if you could have a meeting of all trolley workers and explain that sometimes there might come a situation where five of them were threatened and could be saved by killing one. If asked — and if they would have no way of knowing which group they would be in — they would probably agree to turning the trolley to save the most lives.
However, if everyone in the world could be brought into a meeting and asked about the transplant scenario, people could reasonably reject the idea of a random person being used as a non-voluntary organ donor.
While this has some appeal, it creates new problems. For example, if the person on the side track were not a trolley worker, would that change the outcome? Or would it be different if it were a child? So, the contractulist approach works only in a very limited number of cases.
Then there is what some people call the “lesser of two evils.” The official name is the Doctrine of Double Effect. This deals with cases in which we want to perform an act that has two predictable outcomes — one good and one bad. We are allowed to perform the act under certain conditions, even though we know we will be doing something undesirable. The conditions are:
1. The act itself must not be wrong.
2. The good effect must not be brought about by the bad effect.
3. The good effect must outweigh the bad effect.
In both cases, the good effect will outweigh the bad effect, one death vs. five deaths. So on the third condition, both pass muster. But in the trolley example, turning the trolley onto a siding is, in itself, not wrong. Whereas in the transplant case, killing an otherwise healthy person to take his organs is wrong. So there is a major difference between the two cases there, and the transplant case fails the test.
However, the most interesting and compelling point is the second condition. In the trolley case it is not the death of the single worker that saves the other five. Turning the trolley saves the workers; the other one dies as a result of that. If the other worker weren’t there, you would still turn the trolley and save them.
In the transplant case, the single patient is essential to saving the other five. If there were no single patient, there would be no case at all. So it is the patient’s death that brings about the good result. Thus, it fails another test of the Doctrine of Double Effect.
But you can get to that point more easily. For those who are attracted to Kant’s theories, you can refer to his Formula of the End Itself: “Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.”
In this case, we would be treating the single patient solely as a means, unlike the trolley case in which the single worker was an unfortunate victim, and not the means to the survival of the five. This, I feel, is a much simpler, more workable solution and applies to so many other cases.
