The Trolley Problem

The first time I sat down and took part in an undergraduate ethics seminar (plebe year, just glad not to be in Bancroft Hall), I was greeted with cookies and the following scenario:

"Suppose you are the driver of a trolley. The trolley rounds a bend, and there come into view ahead five track workmen, who have been repairing the track...[Y]ou must stop the trolley if you are to avoid running the five men down. You step on the breaks, but, alas, they don't work. Now you suddenly see a spur of track leading off to the right. You can turn the trolley onto it and thus save the five me on the straight track ahead. Unfortunately...there is one track workman on that spur of track. He can no more get off the track in time than the five can, so you will kill him if you turn the trolley onto him.

Is it morally permissible for you to turn the trolley?" (Thomson I).

And such was my introduction to the question that Phillipa Foot first posed when addressing the question of abortion in 1978 in her The Doctrine of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect. Although the trolley problem's ties to Foot and the subject of her original essay have been largely forgotten, the type of thought experiment posed by the question has become a critical feature of any number of fields of study.  Judith Thompson, an MIT professor and Foot's contemporary expanded on the problem considerably, crafting all sorts of morally frustrating variations. Law schools soon latched on as well and the question is often posed to first year law students when the question of 'what is morally just versus what is morally permissible' is initially posed (perhaps to hasten the moral cynicism that all law students eventually succumb to).

Study of the trolley problem is currently of interest to neuroscience, as morality thought experiments, when posed to populations observed by fMRI scanners, have revealed how the brain performs moral reasoning and, more interestingly, how members of different gender, ethnic, and social groups actually may process such question differently than other populations. At the forefront of this type of research is a Harvard researcher named Joshua Greene who runs that university's Moral Cognition Lab. (See exemplar studies below.)

Similarly, psychology has found all interesting uses for variations of the trolley problem. Of recent note was a study released by Cornell research psychologist David Pizarro, who used varying nouns to implicate race distinctions in the various descriptions of the problem, revealing telling inclinations of certain political groups towards favoring one ethnic group over another. (See Wired.com summary here, article cited below.)

Those interested in these fields will find each discipline’s study of the problem fascinating in its own right, but the trolley problem and its frustrating rhetorical implications has come to represent thought experiment par excellence of our contemporary age.

(Now if we could just manage to convey the same sort of thing with a video game...)


References:

Ditto, P.H., Pizarro, D.A., & Tannenbaum. (2009). Motivated moral reasoning. Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 50, 307-338. doi:10.1016/S0079-7421(08)00410-6.

Foot, P. (1967). The problem of abortion and the doctrine of double effect. Oxford Review, 5. Retrieved from http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/classes/econ362/hallam/Readings/FootDoubleEffect.pdf.

Greene, J.D., Nystrom, L.E., Engell, A.D., Darley, J.M., & Cohen, J.D. (2004). The neural bases of cognitive conflict and control in moral judgment. Neuron, 44(2), 389-400. doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2004.09.027

Greene, J.D., Sommerville, R.B., Nystrom, L.E., Darley, J.M., & Cohen, J.D. (2001). An fMRI investigation of emotional engagement in moral judgment. Science 293, 2105-2108. doi: 10.1126/science.1062872.

Thompson, J.J. (1985). The trolley problem. Yale Law Journal. Retrieved from http://amirim.mscc.huji.ac.il/law_ethics/docs/Thomson.pdf.