Will you pull the lever at the crucial moment and kill a person, or you won’t do anything and let a trolley kill five people? This famous dilemma, shown in the illustration, in modern philosophy, is known as the trolley problem, which is the name that has recently been accepted in our country as well.
Seemingly, an easy problem to solve, however, it delves deeper into contemporary ethics problems and has brought about fierce debates in philosophy, mathematics and popular culture.
In the basic set-up of the iconic problem, there is a runaway trolley which is speeding uncontrollably on rail tracks (although it could be a carriage or a draisine), and, as a pointsman, you are standing at the junction, next to the lever, which can redirect the trolley to other rail tracks. In this thought experiment, you are not endangered, but you have a dilemma – if you follow the rule never to kill a human, whatever the reason may be, and you do not switch the lever, the trolley will later kill five tied down people. What will you do?
Although perfectly hypothetical, similar to numerous other philosophical paradoxes, the trolley problem has recently become a rather practical one, and not because trolleys have suddenly gone awry, and there are tied people lying about.
With the accelerated development of smart, autonomous vehicles, such as Google cars, these kinds of dilemmas have become algorithm questions – should a smart car make such a decision about killing a person in a critical traffic situation, thus sparing multiple lives?
If the choice to kill one person seems the right one, will it change your mind if you are in a smart car and the machine decides on its own to save a group of pedestrians by hitting a wall and killing you? Or should vehicles save drivers’ lives no matter what? Will you rather buy a vehicle from a manufacturer which, along with other equipment, advertises such a moral algorithm?
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), within the Media Lab, the so-called Moral Machine has recently been created to examine people’s attitudes on this dilemma. Concurrently, a considerable number of researchers have been trying to understand what people would really do, so there are numerous studies on this topic being published, which indicate that most people would choose consequentially, i.e. the so-called benefit improvement, and save more people. However, the problem with all studies is that participants know the question is hypothetical.
Seven years ago, researchers from the University of Michigan conducted a well-known study in which 90% of the participants said they would pull the lever and save five people, and similar results came from other researchers. The percentage is a bit lower when the participants are suggested that the tied person is their spouse, although it is not clear whether this adds more motivation to some of the participants. An interesting fact is that in a study conducted exclusively among philosophers, only 68 % of them said they would save five people.
Researchers from Ghent University in Belgium set up a real-life experiment to get a more real-world answer. In the experiment, whose findings were published in the journal Psychological Science at the beginning of this month, mice were used instead of people, and the participants pressed a switch which chose whether to kill one mouse or five mice.
As reported by the New Scientist journal, it turned out that 84% of participants decided to save five mice. However, there is a glitch with this experiment as well, since the participants realized that the mice would not be killed – as many as 55% of them did not believe in the storyline of them hurting mice if the switch was pressed.
Although it existed in history, the trolley problem was defined in 1967 by the British philosopher Phillippa Foot (1920-2010). After the initial setup, multiple versions of this ethical dilemma sprang up. In one of these, a surgeon has to choose between harvesting organs from a person to save five lives, the second one have you choose whether to push an overweight man onto rail tracks and stop the trolley, in the third version you derail the trolley by having it hit a house where an innocent victim is sleeping, completely unaware of the situation.
According to unproven but urban legend, in the 1920s, a railwayman really faced the same dilemma. Apparently, he chose to divert the train and save five lives, thus killing his four-year-old son. This example, although unconfirmed, was featured in films, as well as in theories, as analogous to the child sacrifice in the Bible.
S.B.
Ilustration: David Navarrot/Cienciacognitiva