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?

Lives of Our Leaders: War Games

The prisoner’s dilemma, devised by scientists at the RAND Corporation in the ’50s, and the trolley problem, articulated by the English philosopher Philippa Foot (who also happened to be the grand daughter of Grover Cleveland), are both problems of philosophy frequently used in game theory, a branch of mathematics that attempts to apply abstract thought to moral dilemmas. So take Iraq, with its Sunnis and its Shiites and its ever-dwindling Christian population: let’s say you invent a game called Iraq War. The object of the game is to topple a ruthless tyrant (Saddam Hussein) whose fascist inclinations find their roots in a branch of pan-Arabism that bears some similarity to India’s right wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In the trolley problem, one person is sacrificed to save a larger group. Transposing the problem to Iraq, the challenge becomes that in order to save the country’s Shiite majority, a number of Sunnis will have to be killed. In the prisoner’s dilemma, you have two prisoners that are presented with a variety of scenarios in which they either remain silent or rat each other out. As with the prisoner’s dilemma, the two elements in society vying for power, the Sunni and Shiites, can both rat on each other or make mixed choices in which one rats and one doesn’t. If the Shiites play ball with the invading forces, the Sunnis will be extinguished. If the Sunnis play ball with the invading forces, the Shiites may again find themselves on the wrong end of the stick. If both refuse to play ball with the invading forces there may be a state of peace (the equivalent of the simplest possible outcome in the original prisoner’s dilemma). If both “defect,” to use the original nomenclature of the problem, giving up the goods on each other, then there will be some strife, but not nearly as much as there would have been for any one party if one had talked while the other hadn’t. Would that there were a game called Iraq War, which, while not winnable, might still provide some rational explanations. 

The Trolley Problem

Philippa Foot, the English philosopher who put forth the Trolley Problem, recently died (“Philippa Foot, Renowned Philosopher, Dies at 90,” NYT, l0/9/10). The Trolley Problem is one of those conundrums like the Prisoner’s Dilemma that presents ethical decisions in a utilitarian context. In short, a run-away trolley is about to kill five track men, but can be diverted so that it will only kill one worker. What should the driver do? Clearly, by diverting the tram, the driver is playing God, deciding who shall live and who shall die. In addition, implicit in the seemingly rational decision to kill one man over five is the notion that life can be quantitatively valued. Surely five lives are worth more than one. But are they? The United States sentenced many of the inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to horrible deaths in which they were literally incinerated in order to force a Japanese surrender. But this nuclear holocaust saved many lives. The firebombing of Dresden is a lesser example. Ironically, the U.S. implementation of similar tactics in later wars—napalming in Vietnam and massive air assaults, most recently in Iraq—proved to be far less successful. It’s as if the tram that mowed down the one track worker became a possessed evil spirit and returned to knock off the other five. However difficult these arguments become, underlying them is a belief in the power or reason, rationality and logic. Significantly, Foot, who was the granddaughter of Grover Cleveland, was an activist and obviously a believer in the possibility of making decisions for the Greater Good, as evidenced in her having helped to create Oxfam.