Trolley Problem Variants

The famous “runaway trolley problem” goes like this: an out of control trolley on tracks is hurtling down towards 5 people and will certainly kill them; would you be OK killing some 6^th person to save the five?

Robert Sapolsky in his best-selling book, Behave, analyzes it at length with more and more variations. First, it matters how the scenario is phrased:

1)      If the option is to pull a lever that diverts the trolley onto a different track where the 6^th person is standing, 70 to 90% would do it;

2)     But if the option is to push the 6^th person physically into the path of the trolley, 70 to 90% would not do it.

As Sapolsky says:

“The same numerical trade-off, but utterly different decisions.”

So is the key difference is that we don’t want to get our hands dirty (literally)? They changed the option from pushing physically to push with a pole. No difference: people were just as reluctant as the push physically option.

Did physical proximity to the “victim” make a difference? Nope, people were willing to push the lever even if it was right next to the 6^th person.

Did it matter that the lever option involved collateral damage (the diverted trolley kills the 6^th person only because he happened to be in the way. Had he not been there, nobody would have been killed), not deliberate damage as in the case where you pushed him into the way? What if there was no need to kill the 6^th person, but lunging towards the lever means you will inevitably push the 6^th person onto the way, thereby killing him? About 80% said Yes, they’d do it. So it looks like intentional v/s unintentional harm matters.

What if the diverted track loops back onto the main track where the 5 people are standing? In this case, diverting doesn’t help unless the 6^th person is on the diverted track and gets killed. Would you pull the lever? Now it’s intentional, so the numbers should be the same as in the intentional v/s unintentional case, right? Wrong, most people said they’d pull the lever.

“Killing someone intentionally as a means to save five feel intuitively wrong, but the intuition is strongest when the killing would occur right here, right now; doing it in more complicated sequences of intentionality doesn’t feel as bad.”

Sapolsky calls it the “effects of proximity (space and time) on moral intuitionism”.

Ok, so morality is complicated. There are no easy answers at times. No surprise there. But I wonder if this explains why analytical people tend to be atheists? Because they think deeper, consider alternatives, and then find any messiah/guru professed rules of morality always seems to have some exceptions?