Philippa Foot is most known for her invention of the Trolley Problem thought experiment in the 1960s. A lesser known variation of hers is as follows:
Suppose that a judge is faced with rioters demanding that a culprit be found for a certain crime. The rioters are threatening to take bloody revenge on a particular section of the community. The real culprit being unknown, the judge sees himself as able to prevent the bloodshed from the riots only by framing some innocent person and having them executed.
These are the only two options: execute an innocent person for a crime they did not commit, or let people riot in the streets knowing that people will die. If you were the judge, what would you do?
If you were the judge, what would you do?
Drive a trolley into the rioters
Ah, the trolley solution.
This is even worse logically than the premise of the Trolley problem. You’re basically reframing a terrorist or criminal holding a gun to a bystander’s head and demanding something trying to say it’ll be my fault the person dies if I don’t give them whatever they ask for.
No. It’s got nothing to do with me (or the judge). The criminals threatening violence are the bad people.
The only good “Trolley problem” rewrite I’ve heard is the crying baby and the hiding refugees. https://www.truthorfiction.com/crying-baby-ethics-question-causes-viral-controversy/
All the others are either too contrived (how did those people get in the trolley tracks? why is there no driver? why am I able to get to the lever or how do I know a fat man will detail the trolley?) Or it’s just a terrorist blaming someone else for his actions. The crying baby one challenges me on a very deep level.
I think you’re being a little too quick to judge (no pun intended) by dismissing these scenarips as assigning blame. The point of these problems isn’t to decide whose “fault” it is or who is the “bad guy” - they are thought experiments to explore what is “right” to do, according to various schools of thought.
In the original trolley problem, or in this one, it’s totally fair for you to say “whatever happens, it’s not the chooser’s fault - they were forced into this position, and so they cannot be to blame”. That’s fine - but even if they are absolved of blame the question still remains of what is right for them to do. If your answer is “whatever they want (because engaging with terorrists’ demands is always wrong)”, or “whatever is the opposite of what they’re being pressured to do”, or “whatever is the least action”, or “whatever rminimizess suffering”, or “whatever minimizes undeserved suffering”, those are all still answers to the question, without any implications of blame or guilt to the chooser!
The crying baby and the hiding refugees in M A S H messed me up as a kid.
Messed up Hawkeye too.
Critiquing philosophical thought experiments for being unrealistic and angering you this much feels to me like you’re missing the core concept here.
Executing an innocent person is never just. A judge of the justice system must be just above anything else like politics or outside consequences.
The judge does not “let the people riot”. Saying it like that misleads into thinking so. The judge is not the active part in that. The rioters are the actors and can and must be brought to justice when they can/later.
It’s not on the judge to weigh on outsiders and outside consequences. They must gather and assess the concern at hand concerning a person at hand. Outside factors are irrelevant. Influences onto the case may be relevant, but not the other way around.
If a judge and by consequence the justice system loses it’s justice and fairness it loses all of its most important, primary, and possibly single responsibility and trust. Without a just justice system, it is bound to end up will all manner of corruption, arbitrariness, and secondary factors of no societal trust in a justice system (leading people to execute self-justice; what the example tried to evade in the first place).
State violence is always worse, less acceptable, than interpersonal violence. Moreover, the judge has no reasonable reassurance that her wrong action now will lead to a satisfactory outcome later; that is to say, she could execute an innocent and the rioters might still attack.
All versions of the trolley problem are rooted in utilitarian ethics and inherit the flaws of that philosophy.
Said the guy saying state violence is always worse than lynch mobs…
Not a utilitarian, but goddamn what a weak line to lead with.
A lynch mob is terrible, a state-sanctioned lynch mob is worse, a state-enacted pogrom is even worse. I stand by what I said.
All versions of the trolley problem are rooted in utilitarian ethics and inherit the flaws of that philosophy.
What? The point is to demonstrate different approaches. Yes a utilitarian will answer a predictable way. You can answer a different way. That’s fine. That’s the point. There’s no right answer, it’s a thought experiment.
a utilitarian will answer a predictable way
That’s the point. The “thought experiment” is constructed in a way that makes only utilitarian ethics have a clear right answer. Deontologists and virtue ethicists have to argue their positions and are still in a grey area, making their arguments appear dubious. It’s structural favoritism.
Okay? So? A utilitarian having an easy answer doesn’t actually mean there’s ‘structural favoritism.’ First of all, utilitarians always have an easy answer to most thought experiments that don’t address the prediction problem. The value in a thought experiment isn’t in the ease of your answer. That’s just stupid. The value in the thought experiment is stepping in and evaluating a stance, philosophy, belief, or lack thereof, and in getting one step towards applying and comparing them.
If you think the idea of a thought experiment is to score points by answering quickly and feeling smug, then I think you’ve missed the point dreadfully.
Half the interest in a given thought experiment is changing or adding nuance and seeing how that changes answers! Your position just feels angry, and not for any good reason, but because of a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of a thought experiment and how you should navigate them, combined with feeling outrage preferentially because the internet just does that.
- argv_minus_one ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) 12•10 months ago
Option 2. If innocent people die, it won’t be by my hand.
And then you get to convict and execute the rioters that murdered people just because they got their nickers in a twist.
This is an interesting question. From Foot’s own neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalist perspective, I don’t think she would accept executing an innocent person.
Her account of the practical rationality of the Sudetenland farm boy who chose death over joining the Nazis seems to indicate her preference for avoiding participation in others’ evil acts.
Just as well, it seems to conflict with virtues such as courage (giving into fear of a riot), wisdom (abandoning the rule of law to placate a mob), justice (murdering an innocent person), and so on.
Moral responsibility initially lies in the people responsible for creating the situation. The rioters are responsible regardless of which choice is made because they are the ones creating the circumstance in which there is no option to avoid injustice. If you’re the judge, you’re not responsible for the rioters killing more than one person, however unfortunate that is. You would be responsible for knowingly killing a known innocent.
Likewise, with the trolley problem, regardless of what choice the operator makes, whoever tied up the people and put them on the tracks and whoever caused the trolley to barrel out of control is at least initially responsible.
It also drives home the point to anyone in a position of authority and responsibility: you will be asked to make compromises. You will be asked to make sacrifices. You must be willing to accept your own responsibility in that decision making, because you put yourself in position to do so.
Sometimes, when faced with only negative choices, you have to be willing to accept the stain of the least evil of them.
Kind of like every American president is an unindicted war criminal. We can imagine that most, if not all, of them didn’t go into it to commit evil acts, but they had to be ready to do so if the other options were worse based on whatever calculus they were able to do at the time.
A judge is to apply the law without bias. If the judge stops doing that, then they just become a dictator and are no judge.
There’s no such thing as “without bias”. But I mostly agree.
It’s actually an excellent illustration of the systems of ethics that different branches of the government operate under. The judicial is explicitly dentological. There is no place for anything else. It’s the legislature that needs consequentialist and utilitarian perspectives.
This is an interesting take, but why shouldn’t both be deontological? If what matters is the inherent moral worth of the action in the case with the judge, why shouldn’t that be the salient feature when making laws for groups of people?
I honestly don’t tend to argue metaethics because I’m largely ignorant, so the legislature could really be based on whatever. Maybe it’s better to say even a consequentialist view would favor using dentological ethics in the judiciary since that’s the only way a judiciary would work in the long run. Maybe the same with utilitarian.
I guess there’s also a democratic argument here - the judicial branch is not accountable to the people directly but merely to the laws stemming from the people, so a deontological approach to upholding these laws is basically the basis of their democratic legitimacy. When they start making consequentialist or utilitarianist arguments it basically means they’re engaged in judicial activism, which is often seen as a bad thing - that’s not what the role of judges is traditionally supposed to be.
For the other branches it’s much more complicated, as they’re supposed to represent the people more directly. They don’t choose their moral code - the public does when it votes for them.
I just got home, it’s Friday night here and I’m a little drunk, so I don’t know if that makes sense haha. It’s an interesting question.
Just accuse the riot’s leader of the crime. Riot is settled and a person is punished for orchestrating violence. Get 2 birds stoned at once
The answer is dependent on context I think.
In a universe where the whole future of the world is laid out before you and you can choose 1 death or many deaths, then sure, pick the greater good.
The weakness of simplistic “greater good” automatic arguments is that in a real universe it opens you up to manipulation.
In the end, there’s no avoiding thinking through the incentives from all perspectives. And that indeed suggests not giving in to the rioters, to protect the integrity of the entire legal system and reduce the risk that every trial becomes a show trial dictated by whoever has the biggest mob.
These sort of thought experiments are helpful to drive home the point that in creating public policy, sometimes you do need a way to quantify the value of human life, which gets to the ugly truth that we do value lives differently everyday in society. ER triage will save the sickest person first, all else being equal. But when things get swamped children often get prioritized up. We value young life more. The trolley problem forces the concept of assigning value to life and taking action based on that.
This second problem doesn’t do so as cleanly. In my opinion, the right answer is to let them riot, but also alert the police and seek to mitigate the harm they cause. This problem feels less about the quantification of human life than about moral culpability of actions. The trolley is acting as it must die to physics. It isn’t good or evil and has no agency. On the second problem, the rioters have agency, are choosing to do evil, and should be fought against.
Just my quick take though.
Commit suicide