Pondering the ‘Trolley Dilemma’

Austin Wells, Editor

(ROCKWALL, TX – Feb. 10, 2017) Many of you might recognize the following scenario – especially those of you who have taken an ethics class – known as The Trolley Dilemma:

Let’s say you’re the driver of a trolley. As the trolley rounds the bend you see five workers repairing the track ahead. The trolley is going through a valley at this point, and the sides are steep, so the only way to avoid running the five workers over is to stop the trolley. So you step on the brakes but alas, they’ve stopped working! You suddenly notice a section of track veering off to the right, and realize you can thus steer the trolley onto that section of track to avoid hitting the workers. But unfortunately, there is one worker on that spur of track leading off to the right. He can no more get off the track in time to save his life than the other five workers can. You’re faced with a tough decision: will you kill one person to save the lives of five others?

It’s a terrible situation either way, but if it were me I would have to kill the one worker to save the other five guys. I think in any scenario like this, it’s always “better” to save as much lives as you can. But the decision is not so clear cut in my mind, especially if I start thinking about the poor worker who I’ve just condemned to die simply because I felt five lives are more valuable than one. What about his family, his loved ones who will never see him again? What if he was young guy who still had his whole life ahead of him? It’s definitely not an easy decision, and I’m sure even though I had saved five people’s lives, I would never feel like I had made the right decision in that case. The weight of having to kill a human being would be too much for me to bear. And I would have to live with that until my dying day.

Some might argue that you shouldn’t throw the switch and send the trolley to the right because you would effectively be killing the lone worker, and killing is wrong. But in my mind, even if you were to justify that killing is wrong and therefore you shouldn’t throw the switch, you’d still be killing the five workers on the main track. So either way you’re going to have to make a decision that will result in another’s death. I think in this extreme situation where you have no options that involve saving everyone at your disposal, saving the most lives seems to be the most logical and ethical decision.

Now, let’s up the stakes a bit: what if the one worker on the spur of track leading to the right is someone you love?

I gotta say this one stumped me for quite some time. I thought about who that loved one could be. What if it was my girlfriend? What if it was my twin brother, my mom, my dad? After much deliberating, I finally concluded that in this scenario my answer would stay the same. I would choose to throw the switch and save five lives. My reasoning is that I couldn’t live with knowing that had I not thrown the switch, I would be killing five people and ruining the lives of all their loved ones. Even if they’re random people I don’t know, that’s still five human beings who will never get the chance to live out the rest of their lives, to see their loved ones and tell them they love them. I mean, it would be one thing if there was no section of track leading off to the right. In that case I have no other choice, I literally can’t do anything to save them.

Still, the grief of knowing I had just killed someone I love to save five other random people’s lives would be just as devastating. I guess I really don’t have a definitive answer for this one. If I were ever in that situation, there’s really no telling what I would do. All I can say is I couldn’t blame anyone for wanting to save the life of their loved one in this scenario.

I don’t know if there’s a right answer here. But it certainly would make for an interesting discussion.