Trolleyology in Oklahoma

Phiippa Foot was an Oxford philosopher, who just happened to be the granddaughter of Grover Cleveland. She was famous for the Trolley Problem, a conundrum of moral philosophy. In short five people are tied to a train track. If you simply divert the train to another track only one person will be killed. There is also the attendant Footbridge Problem whereby a fat man is standing on a footbridge. If you push him onto the tracks, his heft will stall the train. What’s interesting is that the question is both utilitarian and moral. Most people would say it’s always better to save five rather than one. Immanuel Kant might not have agreed since he believed that there was a categorical imperative which defined what was right or wrong. In a review of Would You Kill the Fat Man:? The Trolley Problem and What Your Answer Tells Us About Right and Wrong by David Edmonds ( “How Do We Know What’s Moral?” The New York Review of Books, 4/24/14), Cass R. Sunstein uses the term  “trolleyology" to categorize for these kinds of ruminations. But even though Sunstein employs trolleyological thinking when he remarks, “imagine that capital punishment actually deters murder, so that with every execution, we can save two innocent lives, or three, or a dozen," the recent botched execution of Clayton D. Lockett in Oklahoma gives pause to those who would go with a strictly utilitarian view. It’s something that was also dramatized in Stanley Milgram’s famous obedience experiment at Yale. It might sound like it’s easy to push a fat man off a bridge to save five others, but when you are the one who has to do it, you will or won’t feel some degree of hesitation. Another Yale researcher, Joshua Greene has recently complicated the ethical aspects of the problem by performing brain scans of people as they contemplate it, as a way of testing the emotions that underline a simply rational choice (“Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?  The Uncertain Biological Basis of Morality," Robert Wright, The Atlantic, 10/29/14). Usually the Trolley problem is illustrated without any consideration of the character of those who would or would not be saved. However, by adding this consideration as Sunstein does in his essay/review, trolleyology can be used as an argument for or against capital punishment. Ostensibly you execute a murderer to send a message and prevent further murders. But as is evident in the recent case of the Lockett execution, it’s not so simple. Once you open up the doors of vengeance and say that the ends justify the means, you unleash the prospect of a Pandora’s Box of dehumanizing action, amongst them tortures like the waterboarding of alleged suspects. You take an action predicated on a certain level of expediency. But where does it lead?

Beyond An Unreasonable Doubt

In a review of Joshua Greene’s Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason and the Gap Between Us and Them in The Atlantic (“Why We Fight—And Can We Stop,” November 2013) Robert Wright deals a unique approach to the Trolley Problem. The famous conundrum posed by the ethical philosopher Philippa Foot deals with the decision to sacrifice one life in order to save many by diverting a runaway trolley. “Greene’s inspiration was to do brain scans of people while they thought about the trolley problem,” Wright says. “The results suggested that people who refused to save five lives by pushing an innocent bystander to his death were swayed by emotional parts of their brains, whereas people who chose the more utilitarian solution—keep as many people alive as possible—showed more activity in parts of the brain associated with logical thought.” In an article in Foreign Affairs (“Never Saw It Coming: Why the Financial Crisis Took Economists By Surprise,” November/December 2013)former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan introduces a similar idea in an economic rather than moral context. Citing “’animal spirits,’ the term Keynes famously coined in l936 to refer to 'a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction,’" Greenspan argues that no understanding of “Homo economicus” can be had unless one understands the irrational emotion underlying seemingly rational choices. “From the perspective of a forecaster, the issue is not whether behavior is rational but whether it is sufficiently repetitive and systematic to be numerically measured and predicted,” he says. "The challenge is to better understand what Daniel Kahneman, a leading behavioral economist, refers to as ‘fast thinking' : the quick reaction judgments on which people tend to base much, if not all, of their day-to-day decisions about financial markets. No one is immune to the emotions of fear and euphoria, which are among the predominant drivers of speculative markets. But people respond to fear and euphoria in different ways, and those responses  create specific, observable patterns of thought and behavior.” So what Wright and Greenspun are doing is in essence placing thought itself under scrutiny. The Iowa Gambling Task, devised by the neuroscientists Antonio Damasio, Antoine Bechara, Steven Anderson and Daniel Tranel, which uses card games and skin respiration tests, to measure the presence of emotions as complex as Schadenfreude is another iteration of a similar idea. Reason, like Newtonian physics in a world of relativity, is again left in the dust.