Trigger Happy

Shoot first, ask questions later

- STEVEN POOLE

Between the 1960s and 1980s, the philosophers Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thomson wrote about a class of ethical questions that canonically became known as 'trolley problems'.

Think of a trolleybus, or a tram, rather than a supermarket trolley. One of those is thundering, out of control, towards a fork in the tracks. You are standing by a switch in the points. If you do nothing, the trolley will continue on its path and kill five people tied to the tracks. But if you switch the tracks, the trolley will be diverted and kill only one person tied on the other side, thus saving the original five. Should you pull the lever?

Such thought experiments became wildly popular in academic philosophy because they seem to capture something important about our intuitions: in particular, it emerges that most people feel that inaction which leads to harm (not diverting the trolley in the above case) is not necessarily any better than positive action which leads to smaller harm (pulling the lever). A whole mini-industry arose in philosophy of expanding the zoo of such cases, making the questions more tricky by, say, stipulating that you had to push a fat man off a bridge to save the others, or that the single person tied to one of the tracks is your mother.