Breach of ethics? Picking winners and losers in a disaster
by Anthony Skelton
Assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy
and faculty member of the
Rotman Institute of Philosophy.
You are standing on the edge of a railroad track. To your left is a runaway trolley heading in your direction. To your right is a fork in the tracks.
Left to its own devices the trolley will veer right at the fork, journey some distance, hit and kill five people working on the tracks. You cannot warn them. At the fork is a switch. If you throw it, you will divert the trolley to the left. This will save the five workers. But, alas, there is one worker on the other track. You cannot warn her. She will be killed by the trolley.
You are a virtuous person. What should you do?
One part of our moral thinking attaches significance to producing socially desirable outcomes or good outcomes for the aggregate. If you are attracted to this thinking, you will likely reason as follows:
Being killed by a trolley is very bad. It will entail the loss of all those things that matter to us: learning, love, friendship, pleasure. The loss of one life is very bad indeed. But if the loss of one life is very bad, then surely (other things being equal) the loss of five lives is much worse; it is five times worse. If you have a very strong reason not to divert the trolley, you have a reason at least five times stronger to divert the trolley.
This reasoning leads a vast majority of people to the conclusion that it is permissible to divert the trolley to save the five workers.
This is a schematic example. It is the stuff of the philosophy classroom. These sorts of examples never happen in real life, and even if they did, we would not recognize them as such. But there are real-life cases that are relevantly similar.
What we learn in the classroom may therefore help us in the real world.
Witness Manitoba Premier Greg Selinger, who earlier this month faced a similar dilemma.
The Assiniboine River flows east into Manitoba from Saskatchewan along an area protected by dikes. This year it was carrying an unprecedented amount of water. If left to its own devices it would likely breach the dikes at some point between Portage La Prairie and Winnipeg, flooding 850 properties across 500 square km of land.
But leaving the river to flow east was not the only option open to Selinger’s government.
Read more here:
http://communications.uwo.ca/westernnews/downloads/wnews-pdf/2011/WN_May_26_all.pdf
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