The Trolley Problem and Reversibility

Let’s suppose that someone flicks the switch, but then realises the deontologists were actually correct and that they shouldn’t have flicked it. Do they now have an obligation to flick the switch back?

That's a great question!

My guess is that at the moment you touched the switch for the first time, you have violated the deontologist rules, and they are not reversible, so further touching the switch can only increase your sins.

(The whole idea of reverting your action to revert the result belongs to the consequentialist area. Deontologists care about the way, not the destination.)

As an analogy, imagine crossing the street at a red traffic light, and then crossing it back to "undo" your traffic violation. Sorry, does not work this way. You were supposed to stay where you are. You cross the street, you broke the law. Now you are guilty of breaking the law, and again, you are supposed to stay where you are now. Crossing the street again only means breaking the law twice.

Similarly, when you redirect the trolley, you are gulity of murdering one person and you are supposed to stop there. Redirect it back, and now you are guilty of temporarily endangering one person's life and killing five people. On the other hand, if you don't touch the switch, you are not guilty of anything.

I think you mean "consequentialism", not "utilitarianism". And only some flavors of deontology make that strong a distinction between action and inaction. There are plenty of deontologists who'll tell you that standing still and letting 5/6 of a group die when you could change it to 1/6 is a wrong action.

The trolly problem is useful in examining one's intuitions, but doesn't tell us much about reasoned philosophy.

Bluntly: You don't know what you're talking about.

You're reasoning about deontology as if it were consequentialism. Deontology is primarily concerned with means, not ends, and your reasoning is based on the ends of non-interventialism (which is not, in fact, even the ethics of deontology), rather than the means taken to achieve this. The state of the switch, or of past actions, doesn't matter to deontology; it's what you do that matters.

A deontologist may think the consequentialists' actions in this scenario are unethical. This is not the same as desiring to undo those actions. What you miss is that the deontologist, just as much as the consequentialist, desires the end state where fewer people die, NOT the end state that is unchanged from a "natural" state - the deontologist, however, don't see the means as justifying the ends, and indeed don't see ends as justifications whatsoever. The deontologist sees it as wrong to sacrifice a person, even to save several; likewise, it would also be wrong to sacrifice several people, regardless of the justification, including your extremely contrived justification of undoing somebody else's actions.

In short, your caricature of a deontologist is merely a bad consequentialist, and doesn't follow deontology at all.

My trouble with the trolley problem is that it is generally stated with a lack of sufficient context to understand the long-term implications. We're saying there are five people on this track and one person on this other track, with no explanation of why? Unless the answer really is "quantum fluctuations", utilitarianism demands considering the long-term implications of that explanation. My utility function isn't "save as many lives as possible during the next five minutes", it's (still oversimplifying) "save as many lives as possible", and figuring out what causes five people to step in front of a moving trolley is critical to that! There will surely still be trolleys running tomorrow, and next month, and next year.

For example, if the reason five people feel free to step in front of a moving trolley is "because quasi-utilitarian suckers won't let the trolley hit us anyway", then we've got a Newcomb problem buried here too. In that case, the reason to keep the trolley on its scheduled track isn't because that involves fewer flicks of a switch, it's because "maintenance guy working on an unused track" is not a situation we want to discourage but "crowd of trespassers pressuring us into considering killing him" is.

I am not a deontologist, but it's clear you're painting the entire school of thought with a fairly broad brush.

However, deontologists would say that you don’t have the right to make that decision.

It is hard to argue against this conclusion, assuming that there is a strong moral obligation for Aaron not to flick the switch, along the lines of “Do not kill”.

I can’t see any pathway to find a logical contradiction, but I can’t imagine that many people would defend this state of affairs.

It is hoped that this post won’t be oversimplified into a, “this is why you are wrong” post, but to help deontologists understand and refine their commitments better.

The entire tone of the post reeks of strawmanning. There is no discussion regarding how different sets of deontological rules might come to seperate conclusions. Each premise is assumed to be correct and there is zero effort made to exploring why it might be wrong (see: steel manning). And finally, almost every paragraph ends with a statement along the lines of:

• "...it seems..."
• "...seems consistent with..."
• "...I can’t imagine that..."
• "...this doesn’t seem..."
• "...seems strange to suggest..."
• "...this seems like a very hard position to defend."

If you ignore the ethical prescriptivism, there's not a whole lot of substance left.

It seems to me that there is an important difference between 'flipping the switch' and 'flipping the switch back', which is the intent of the action.

In the first scenario, your intent is to sacrifice one person to safe many.

In the second scenario, your intent is to undo a previous wrong.

Thus a deontologist may perfectly consistently argue that the first action is wrong (because you are never allowed to treat people only as means, or whatever deontological rule you want to invoke), while the second action is allowed.

There is a third approach to the trolley problem, which I have not often seen discussed: whose property are the trolley tracks?

In other words, does this require a universal answer, or can this allow for diversity based on property and agreement? When you board a ship, you know that the captain has the last word when it comes to life-or-death situations, and different captains may have different judgement. The same goes for trolley tracks. The principles can be explained beforehand (such as "the mission comes first"). Another question that seems relevant to the person in charge (owner) is whether the 5 people are to blame for putting themselves at risk.

This might be a different thougt experiment but it could be plausible that what appears to one subject to be a situation where 5 people are going to be crushed by a trolley might appear as a situation where 5 people are ready to jump away from trolleys path. Or to phrase it another way in order for the consequentialist position be alluding one needs to be reasonably sure that the difference in consequence is reasonably big.

One could argue that if you know that your perception of reality is distorted it might be a properous way of being as less agenty as possible. That is a fool migth be capable of redirecting a trolley towards an unsuspecting victim based on a delusion of non-real danger to other persons. That is while the harm is lesser that estimation might be truer. Thus if there are two people disagreeing whether to pull or not the one that is more unsure of his position should yield.

But I guess the intention is to assume that the danger is real. In a way if you assume you are not fit to make decisions discussing what decision you should make is somewhat selfdefeating. But it migth be relevant for reduced capacity.

I could also believe that one could phrase it as "What should the guideline for such situations be?" but I guess that would raise the question on whether the rules to follow are subject to some kind of rules. But it can highlight that such rules are inadequate to provide a choice. That in a way if you choose one way and state a principle as the guideline you followed it is an unsystematic choice as you could have chosen another rule that would have favoured the other option. Or it can lead one to claim that doing that way or another is not a moral choice as the book doesn't cover it.

Ask Alicorn, the resident deontologist.