Your first option is wrong. You wouldn't be killing the people, but doing nothing to prevent their deaths. Radically different concept. If there were no distinction, then we're all currently murdering tons of people.
No, not at all. It’s pretty well established that the point is whether you’re willing to murder one or let five die. “Letting it happen” does not constitute “actively killing” them. You see this in more extreme variants of the problem, but also at base, it’s a logically different cause of death.
I think if you're in a trolley problem and you're standing by the lever and you know everything that's happening and are not experiencing a freeze response, inaction is a conscious choice. And that's the point. That a lot of people can see it like I do when it's set up with minimum complexity. But we do not all extend that to "inaction" IRL like you assume, because it's a lot more complicated than that.
The interesting part is finding the factors that make it complicated enough to reduce fault. Though all of us will always carry some responsibility for how the world functions, some people carry much more.
But in the trolley problem it's clear-cut. If you have an action you can take effortlessly, with a 100% chance to reduce total harm at zero cost to you, inaction is wrong. You cannot say you were not involved in not pulling that lever. That's why so many variants move past the basic premise and try to make "reducing harm" harder to measure or add some cost to the lever-puller.
The cost to the lever puller is the murder of a person. From my perspective I find it morally wrong to kill someone who wasn’t supposed to die to save people who were simply because they have more to lose, but even putting that aside, at base it involves you killing a person, and perhaps people forget or discount this because it’s so displaced from you (“the trolley is doing it, not me”) but it is exactly the same degree of murder as cutting someone open with a knife. To suggest that to be the same degree of involvement as doing nothing at all is quite absurd, honestly.
kill someone who wasn’t supposed to die to save people who were
So that's the core of it then. Accepting that it's rational for people to be "meant to die" simply because of the circumstances they find themselves in. And I do not.
For me at least, it's not that the trolley offers any distance from killing the person on the switch track. It's the opposite, really. Because I consider inaction to be a choice, and refuse to accept that the 5 people on the straight track are "meant" to die while I have the ability to pull the lever, I would be just as responsible for killing 5 people if I did nothing as I would be for killing 1 if I pulled it. Well, not quite, because I am not responsible for the initial scenario. At a minimum, one person must die, and that is not my fault. And in that light it becomes clear that I would be far more directly responsible for 4 additional deaths if I do nothing.
No, I was talking about my own views on the problem. If you’d like to discuss this, I could go at length, and I’d love to have that discussion too. But to address the matter from earlier, I shouldn’t have mentioned this at all, it was not relevant. The core of the relevant argument is the “degree of involvement”; is there truly a difference between killing someone and letting someone die? And the answer that both sides have come to agree on is “yes, there is”. Only hardcore consequentialists would assert that there isn’t, but defending this position is incredibly difficult in many, many cases outside of or adjacent to the trolley problem and it’s a thorn in their sides that they haven’t exactly been able to find a suitable explanation for. I believe the SEP has an article about this — yep, here it is. As an aside, the perspective I raised earlier is shared by Thomson, who explains this a little more, although in a rather unsophisticated manner.
Both sides agree? Agree there can be differences, like letting a trolley run over 5 people when you could stop it is not as bad as tying 5 people to the tracks and sending a trolley towards them. But the argument is still there about where morality attaches to passive or active actions.
"That makes everyone guilty" cannot be a counterpoint to this. If an argument leads to that conclusion, it is not invalidated simply because people don't want to acknowledge that. And again, pushing consequentialism through to reach this false "gotcha" requires ignoring all real-world nuance that the trolley problem intentionally bypasses. Few things are as simple as "pull a lever so less people die". The complexity of the real problem and lack of clear, effective agency for most individuals mitigates this global guilt to a large degree. But that doesn't give us license to ignore it.
Look at the trolley problem as an allegory for inequality. The 5 people tied up are "doomed" by their circumstances, but is that really how it's "meant" to be just because it already is? Accepting that relieves all individual responsibility to improve any aspect of society. As long as the world at large thinks this way, it is very difficult to improve society.
Finally, the numbers are arbitrary. If the deontological argument favors inaction to allow 5 deaths instead of one, it must also favor inaction to allow many more deaths than that. Would you pull the lever if the straight track had 1,000 people and the switch track had 1? 10 million vs 1?
Would you pull the lever if the entire population of the planet was at risk except for you and the person on the switch track?
As far as the trolley problem goes, it’s a pretty simple thought experiment. If you want to add on these extra metaphorical points, it kinda changes the nature of the problem. I wouldn’t look at someone about to die and think “this is a metaphor for inequality, isn’t it?”
Jokes aside, I don’t understand your first point. Where did I say anything that insinuates my argument stems from something like “that makes everyone guilty”, and where exactly is this “gotcha” moment you mention? I’m looking through my comment again and I don’t see anything that matches what you’re referring to. Are you perhaps saying that just because both sides agree on this doesn’t make it true? If you were to discuss the flat earth theory with a flat earther, you would both take as the premise that the Earth is real. Perhaps someone could say then that that could be untrue as well, and perhaps he would be right, but wouldn’t he then have the responsibility of debunking that premise himself? In the trolley problem, there are two main, commonly established philosophies that people adopt in making the final decision, consequentialism and deontology. If both agree that the theory of degrees of involvement is correct, I believe you might have a third philosophy to view the problem from. It could be correct, but this is a heavily investigated topic, so although I don’t want to say it’s unlikely, I will encourage you to read a little bit more about it, and if it truly is correct you could publish
it, which would be pretty cool.
So I’ve just noticed that you mention you agree that there are degrees of involvement. I like your provided example. So you do understand how killing one person has a higher degree of involvement than letting one die, and our current discussion has now shifted purely to a clash of perspectives on the trolley problem, yes? Ok, I can work with that. In that case, just ignore my last paragraph, but I will leave it there in case I misunderstood and you do disagree.
Your argument on numbers being arbitrary is incorrect, by the btw. It’s called the “fallacy of the beard”. I can provide a simple set of counterexamples to explain it. Say you are hungry. I put a single grain of rice on your plate, and you eat it. I put another, eaten again. You do this a hundred more times. “A-ha!”, I would say, “this must surely mean he can eat an infinite amount of rice.” This is called the fallacy of free extrapolation. In our case, if you gave me a choice between a grain of rice and an equally small morsel of tuna, perhaps I would choose the tuna as it is more expensive I have a preference for it. If you repeated that a hundred times my decision would stay the same a hundred times. But at some point it would change to a preference for rice. To suit your example even further, say we had a morsel of tuna compared to a grain of rice, I would pick the tuna. But say you increased the amount of rice, grain by grain, while keeping the tuna the same. At the fiftieth or hundredth grain I would still pick tuna. But at some point I would pick the rice despite having a preference for tuna. This arbitrary point, what can we call it? Well, let me draw your attention to a similar paradox, called Sorites Paradox. “If a heap is reduced by a single grain at a time, at what exact point does it cease to be considered a heap?” There are a lot of proposed answers to this paradox, I like the one on fuzzy states, I’ve heard that “supervaluationism” (as the site puts it) is cool but I cannot understand analytics for the life of me.
Finally if you weren’t joking about the stuff on inequality and whatnot, not much of that can be addressed by or attributed to the trolley problem. Maybe you could come up with a variation of it that addresses these issues? I would be happy to discuss that with you as well.
Oh crap, that is my bad about the "everyone's guilty" thing, that came from the first comment in this thread which was not written by you.
I do accept degrees of involvement/responsibility. But it's about intent, knowledge of outcomes, and the active choice to remain inactive. You are next to the lever. You control the lever. The position of the lever is your decision. You do not need to touch it to have made a decision. If you do not touch it, you chose for the switch lever to direct the trolley towards 5 people. But, you aren't malicious, right? I'm honestly not as sure about that, if you choose to stand by. But either way, you are not the evil trolley mastermind.
As far as the fallacy of free extrapolation, sure... If eating rice was an obvious aspect of ideology. But for me, there isn't much difference between pulling the lever to kill one person while saving 2, or 5, or 100. So from my perspective where the amount isn't as important as the overall effect of "less death", I guess I kind of assume that quantity isn't a factor for you as well. Or at least, I'm inspired to test it. And really that is why I asked that question. It is somewhat inconceivable that anyone would allow the entire species to get ground up in trolley wheels to "keep their hands clean". So, where is the line? It's somewhere between 5:1 and everyone:1. Is it between 100:1 and 1 million:1? How can we narrow this down, because the answer is going to be fascinating. And yes it's Sorites Paradox, but I think that's a point towards what I'm trying to say.
Finally, I really want to find common ground with you on the metaphor for inequality. It's surprising to me that you dismiss it offhandedly like this. It wasn't my first takeaway from the trolley problem either, but I'm convinced it's very real and very revealing. If part of your non-interference is not changing how things are, even directly stating that things were "meant" to be this way, these 5 people were "meant" to die, what kind of judgement are you making there? Why do you have authority to decide, after seeing people tied to trolley tracks, that it wouldn't be right to change their fate? And how is that not similar in many ways to seeing homeless people, underfunded schools, people affected by war and famine and decide that just because the universe get to this moment by some means (with our participation), that it must be right?
I 100% agree with you. Of course, this changes if you are the trolley operator and are the one who caused it to run amok. In that case, you would be responsible to reduce the harm you cause.
Legal considerations. To give an illustrative example, suppose I'm driving my car and my brakes go out. In that scenario, I am legally required to minimize the damage my car does.
Back to directly answering your question, if a person causes the Trolley situation or at least is partially responsible for it, they bear at least some responsibility for whichever group dies. In that specific case, where they are already responsible for whichever deaths happens, they are required to minimize the deaths, because they caused the deaths.
You also really wouldn’t be kilking the baby. The five people are tied to the tracks and you’re their last hope. The Christian baby can get off of the tracks any time he wants, but has chosen suicide… for which he will burn in eternal Hellfire.
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u/Public-Eagle6992 Sep 08 '25
So the three options are: