Today I follow up on my earlier post on ethics, in which I slammed divine command ethics harder than I intended to. Look at me, with my continuity. Anyway, it's decision time. Why is it decision time? Because there's a runaway train.
Anyway, you pull the lever. Thomas is sent onto another track, where you discover that it has all been a ploy. Thomas the Tank Engine--that's Doctor Thomas the Tank Engine to you, pathetic hero--tied four people to the other track, anticipating your stroke of genius lever-pulling. Fortunately, you're temporarily imbued with phenomenal cosmic power and ctrl-z yourself back to the part where I said "..a dramatic lever is right next to you." Whaddaya do? You've got the same choice. Intervening will make you responsible for the deaths of four innocent people. Not intervening will allow five innocent people to die. You probably pull the lever again. I would. In fact, this part of the post is not the philosophical issue, just background setup. Sorry.
The lever is pulled. You defeat Thomas and attend months of therapy before finally coming to terms with what you did. You no longer blame yourself for what happened. That's when you're awakened in the middle of the night with awful news. Thomas has broken out of Train Prison. Apparently, he spent years fashioning the forks they gave him for lunch into spikes and rails, which he then used to build a railroad through the wall. They're not sure which way he went.
The next day, you're at the train station--tired because you were woken up midsleep. Suddenly, you notice five people tied up on the tracks below the platform. In fact, it's the same five people you saved last time. (This is pure coincidence, Thomas didn't plan it. He does relish the irony, however.) You turn, and see Thomas barreling down the tracks again. Next to you is a fat man--fat enough to cushion a train blow enough to survive it. Well, no. Just fat enough to derail a train by giving his life. You know that with a burst of moral strength, you could fling him to the tracks and save those five people, again. Do you?
Here's where we enter the realm of the philosophical. On one hand, you might see this decision as no different than the first. By taking actions which result in the deaths of x people, you're saving y people, with x > y. Math, amirite? On the other hand, something about this problem is different. You're using the fat man in a different way--as a direct instrument. In addition, whereas the four people from the first situation were solidly Thomas's fault--he put them there, after all--you're the one throwing the fat man into harm's way. This dude didn't do nothin' to you. Here we have, in a nutshell, the greatest divide in ethical philosophies.
Maybe you feel like the fat man is a regrettable casualty, but ultimately we have to listen to the mathematics of the situation. Four people > One person. In this case, you'd fall into a category known as the consequentialists or utilitarians. "Consequentialism" in general means that you judge the morality of an action based on its consequences. To you, an action is moral if it produces the best result. If you're a utilitarian in particular (it's a subset), like Jeremy Bentham or John Stuart Mill, the "mathematics" part of the equation is not a joke. You literally believe in "the greatest good for the greatest number, causing the least amount of harm, using the most effective means possible." This philosophy is sometimes disparaged for requiring a "utilitarian calculus" to maximize happiness. (Happiness can be deftly handled with Lagrange multipliers.) Utilitarianism leads to other interesting quirks. For example, in distributing resources, a utilitarian looks at what a person can do with each resource. If a utilitarian had to split a twenty dollar bill between a millionaire and a homeless guy, he'd give it all to the homeless guy. It's not "fair", but the homeless guy gets many times more happiness for each dollar.
Screw them, though. Maybe you think that it doesn't matter what a psycho train with a face is doing--throwing people onto railroad tracks is wrong. Congratulations, you're what we call a deontologist. Deontologists believe that an action's morality lies is the action itself, and pay no heed to the consequences. Immanuel Kant is probably the most famous deontologist. Generally, a deontologist will define some other standard by which we weight morality rather than its observable results, often centering on human rights, like the right to not be thrown in front of a train. Kant took a slightly different tack and defined what he described as a "universal maxim." Believing that all human behavior was a set of rules, he sought a rule that would be self-justifying rather than "conditional" if-then statements like those employed by situational consequentialism. The universal maxim has multiple formulations, and I know two of them so that's all we're talking about. The first was "Act only according to that maxim which you can at the same time will to be a universal law." Basically, that means that anything you do ought to be applicable to everyone, logically. Stealing is wrong not because you hurt someone, but because if everyone stole, there would be no concept of property and stealing would be ineffectual. This one is a bit hard to apply to our example unless you go straight up "killing is bad, mmmk." The second formulation is a bit better. It states, "Act always such that you treat people not only as a means, but also as an end." In other words, don't use people. We're clearly using this man with his own well-being not taken into account, and so Kant would not sacrifice the fat man. Kant was quite a stickler about these rules being absolute. He was once asked if, since lying was wrong, it was acceptable to reveal to a murderer where his intended victim was hiding, knowing what the murderer planned to do. (Hint: murder.) Kant replied "Well, of course it is. Stupid." In German, though.
So, presented here we have the two great sides in ethical debate, destined to fight until Ragnarok, when they must unite to stand against virtue ethics (which I don't know enough to talk about). I'm not advocating either side--I wrote a lot about Kant because I read a lot about/by Kant, and his ideas are slightly more complicated, warranting further explication. Whichever philosophical tools you prefer, watch out for Thomas. That dude's crazy.
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