The trolley scenario that we
talked about in class today is a very interesting because it provides many
different scenarios with extreme moral dilemmas. Mill would clearly argue that
switching the trolley and having it kill only one person would be the proper
choice, because it is causing the “least amount of pain to the most amount of
people” (Mill). I would agree with that in situations where the most amount of
people either didn’t deserve the pain or had no reason to receive it. This is a
very slippery slope, since it is very hard to define who deserves what and why
they deserve it, but in this example of the trolley, and I am taking it very
literally here, the ten people standing in the middle of a trolley track with a
trolley running full steam directly at them, it is only an act of natural
selection for those people to die. These people are not innocent bystanders who
were thrown into harms way, they placed themselves in the middle of a trolley
track with active trolleys running. I am not saying that they deserve to die,
but the one person on the other track, no matter who it is, placed themselves
there so as not to get hit by a trolley, and they therefor should not be killed
by switching the track.
This idea of “deserving” brings us to what we talked about
in class today with the concept of ten murderers or old people on the track as
compared to one “baby Gandhi” or any potentially great child. In this case, I
would argue that the morally correct thing to do is to let the ten criminals
day and keep the innocent child alive, and I believe that Mill could say the
same thing, if one tinkered with the concept of pain. When Mill mentions pain
in his statement “the least amount of pain to the most amount of people”, I
feel like he is talking about both physical and emotional pain. In this
instance, if you let the ten murderers live, you do cause the least amount of
pain to the most amount of people originally, but over time, you would have to
think that those ten murderers would cause more pain down the road to other
people, while the potentially great child could take some of that pain away
from others. It is clearly impossible to foresee what either party might do in
the future, but looking at the situation in the most logical, rational way, it
would be better to late ten murderers die then to let one child or baby die that
could potentially cure cancer or liberate people.
Yeah but the problem is the trolley scenario is there is never just 2 variables i.e. kill two or kill 10 in reality. That's only in theory, there are always more possibilities, or the possibility of unknown possibilities. So ethical decisions have to be made in best predictable judgement possible, with the greatest intentions to save the most amount of people (if the goal is saving people).
ReplyDeleteIf the morally right thing to do is to save the most people, then the correct decision is save 10 people, which just so happen to be labeled as "criminals". You also can't tell what kind of person the baby will be, what if the baby has a terminal disease and will die in a year? You don't know, you can't just make assumptions. Assumptions are what gets people in ethical situations. What if the criminals were over-prosecuted, or unfairly convicted, and were about to be released to then go become great citizens. These theoretical situations are always reductionist because in reality there are always the possibility for more variables to make a consequentialist argument upon. I would argue your choice is unethical because you're causing more death, based upon a reductionist bias towards the baby.
Apologies for the few typos and grammar errors, I didn't know I couldn't go back and edit them.
ReplyDeleteYou raise a lot of objections that spark many interesting thoughts about Mill's moral dilemma and the trolley scenario. One thing that I would add is that pain is not always objective. Pain has a subjective element as well. When you raise questions about the potential of an individual and causing the least amount of pain for the most amount of people, there is definitely a subjective element to that. That would be one objection I raise towards Mill, is that there is a subjective element to his moral code that he seemingly ignores.
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