Why I am a progressive

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Anyway, on to business.

Today I’m going to do something a little different. It might seem like an odd digression into philosophy and ethics, but it comes back around to politics. In fact, it explains my core political orientation about as well as anything can.

I’m going to explain why I hate the Trolley Problem.

The Trolley Problem and its variants

The Trolley Problem is a famous “thought experiment” in ethics. It traces back to philosopher Philippa Foot, who first wrote about it in 1967, but in the years since there have been dozens upon dozens of variations, in both the philosophical literature and the popular press.

You’ve probably heard some version. The most basic goes like this: There’s an out-of-control railcar hurtling toward five people who are tied to the track. You’re next to a switch that could divert the car to another track, but on that track is a single worker who would be killed if you do. What do you do?

Variations are endless. What if the person on track two is your son? What if the choice is between five people you know to be murderers and one good person? What if the choice were made from a switch house where you couldn’t see any of the people?

The point of these thought experiments is to probe your intuitions and principles. Is it better to do nothing and allow five deaths or to take affirmative action that leads to one death? Does the difference between acting and refraining from acting matter? Does the number of lives matter? Etc.

The recent development of autonomous vehicles has brought the Trolly Problem back into popular consciousness yet again. If robots are going to be driving, how will they make these decisions? Will they be utilitarians, maximizing the number of lives saved at every juncture, or Kantians, refusing to knowingly sacrifice one life for another? Presumably however we program them. So maybe we have to decide after all.

The Trolley Problem served as the basis for a fan-favorite sequence on the show The Good Place:

And of course, times being what they are, it has inspired all manner of memes.

Despite its enduring appeal, the Trolley Problem is Bad. It is misleading about moral decision making and, more importantly, misleading about how to improve moral decision making.

It’s not moral principles but moral agents that matter most

Some of you know that I spent several years in the late 1990s getting an MA in philosophy and then starting on (but not finishing) a PhD. Anyone who studied analytic philosophy — as I did, at least at first — has spent lots of time with thought experiments.

I spent a semester reading the pinnacle of pure intellectual gymnastics, Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons, which is full of thought experiments moral, epistemic, metaphysical, and otherwise. The book is revered in the field, considered one of the great philosophical works of the 20th century, and it completely turned me off. It’s one of many things that led me away from philosophy entirely.

As the Trolley Problem is structured, you, the moral agent, have an utter paucity of knowledge about the situation. You don’t know why you’re there, any of the people involved, any history, any detail. All you know is, one life or five lives.

The problem is designed to make the agent (the decider) invisible, to isolate the decision itself away from embedded, embodied experience. Which is fine, if you’re just having a think. But discussing the ideal ranking of moral principles is like discussing Kant’s noumena, the thing-in-itself. No human can directly perceive it and wouldn’t know if they had, so there’s an angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin aspect to it.

All we have are the perceptual and analytic tools available to us, so we should focus on improving them. If you want trolley-style decisions made better in the real world, in real societies, you’re much better off focusing on agents than on any set of final principles.

How to be a good trolley decider

Consider if you ended up in the Trolley Problem in real life. How would you make a good decision in that situation?

Ideally, you would be coming to it with a history; you’d know how you got there and something about how situation developed, who the other people are, why they hell they’re tied to the track, etc. You’d have a good sense of how fast the railcar is traveling and the force necessary to stop it. You’d have a good sense of the chances of success of various options: flagging down the car or the man working on the tracks, finding something to throw on the tracks, jumping on the track yourself. You’d know whether the people tied to the track are real or dummies, whether you’re being tricked.

You’d also need the ability to make a quick decision in extremely difficult circumstances. You couldn’t let your fear or over-analysis paralyze you (as happens to Chidi in Good Place). You’d need the ability to keep your cool, to maintain some emotional distance from the situation, to rapidly consider the options from different perspectives, to notice if there are other non-obvious alternatives.

You’d need to be alert, well-rested, well-fed, not distracted, attuned to circumstances — what the man on the tracks is doing, how securely the other people are attached to the tracks, whether the ground and tracks are wet and slippery, the speed of the railcar, the age of the equipment, etc. And finally, you would need to be motivated to do the right thing.

To make the best possible decision, you would need to be p