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?
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!
If you were the judge, what would you do?
Drive a trolley into the rioters
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.
Kill exactly enough people to keep pop growth under replacement levels, chosen randomly of course.
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.
As usual with variations of the trolley problem, there's a lot of hidden assumptions baked into the question to oversimplify a more complex question, which leads to weird results.
For example, I'm given perfect knowledge of a lot of future events. I know that the crowd will riot if I don't convict, and I know that any attempt made by myself or anyone else to reason with them will fail. I also know that people won't riot over convicting an innocent person. There are all sorts of social consequences that could result from my decision, people gaining or losing faith in the system, an effect on my own career and ability to make future decisons, setting a precedent of expanding state power, the possibility that closing the case would let the actual perpetrator run free and cause more problems, etc.
If you ask me to make all the assumptions necessary to frame in the same way as the original trolley problem, then my answer has to be the same (lose one to save five), but those assumptions cause the hypothetical to be utterly divorced from reality. The real answer is not to convict because you're not a psychic.
I take your point but this is more a complaint about thought experiments in general. They're useful tools to test our intuitions (moral intuitions in this case) but at some point they break down. Still, I like this example because (as you imply) the answer that people give to this scenario often contradicts their answer to the Trolly Problem. That's interesting enough to warrant posing the question.
Yeah, it is a general criticism that can apply to a lot of thought experiments. And don't get me wrong, I enjoy the problem, it's just that I also enjoy critiquing it.
I believe most people's initial response to the original problem is to pull, but far fewer people will push the fat man, and this is framed as highlighting a contradiction in people's beliefs. In reality, it shows that if you create an unrealistic scenario, it trips up people's intuitions. One reason people's intuitions tell them not to push the fat man is because their moral intuition is outweighed by their physical intuition. We all know that pushing a guy off a bridge won't actually stop a trolley (and even if it would, we can't know that), so if we start to consider doing something like that, our brains say, "No stop it idiot don't do that." But it's not telling us anything about morality, it's just telling us "that's not how physics works, dummy."
Our intuitions are grounded in a world where physical and scientific laws apply and where we can never have perfect knowledge of future events, and the further you break from that, the less useful they are. But if the idea with the trolley problem is to help us identify what (if any) consistent logical precepts we can apply that match our moral intuitions, then we need to have simple, straight-forward questions. The original trolley problem is a little contrived, but doesn't break from reality nearly as hard as variations like the fat man. That means that the intuitive response to the original problem is more trustworthy and reliable, compared to whatever we feel about the more contrived ones.
Imo pulling the lever is the correct answer, and whenever I see a variation that tries to contradict that, I look for ways that that variation breaks from reality in ways that would trip up my intuition. So in this case my intuition tells me not to convict, in "contradiction" of saying I'd pull the lever, but that's because my intuition hasn't internalized all the assumptions about magical psychic foreknowledge and stuff. When I consider the problem with all those assumptions, then I say, "Oh well in that case it's just like the trolley problem so pull," and in some cases that answer might make me come across as a psycho, but that's only because the hypothetical doesn't allow me to consider the full effects, risks, and ramifications that the action would have in the real world.
So that's my full solution to the problem. I studied physics in uni so sometimes I might be a bit too inclined to find a final objective answer to a problem that's supposed to be open-ended lol
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas was written in the 70s. So the Trolley Problem came first. But, obviously, consequentialism predates them both
Great story for anyone who's interested btw
Ursula Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf
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.
This is the shortest comment here, and perhaps the most elegant answer I've seen. Instead of shooting all of the rioters to prevent them from causing harm, you trick them into turning on each other, devouring just one of their number, and then after their internal melee you round up the survivors and throw them in a paddy wagon.
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.
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.
