it still isnt your fault that brakes failed and so your conscious is still clear, if you choose to kill a person then you made that choice. 10000000 people or not — David Solman

Although I agree with those who say the situations described are unrealistic and unhelpful (and silly) from an ethical standpoint, your point is also a good one. There must come a point when the ethical fault caused by actively killing one person is balanced by passively allowing many to die.

I agree with the solution presented in this article: https://orthosphere.wordpress.com/2017/09/28/the-trolley-problem-solved/

Thank you for providing moral clarity here:

It is not morally permissible to kill innocent people no matter how handy it might be to get rid of someone. The trolley problem is trying to get people to engage in sacrificial conduct. — Thorongil's Link

it still isnt your fault that brakes failed and so your conscious is still clear, if you choose to kill a person then you made that choice. 10000000 people or not — David Solman

Oh, wait. I misunderstood. You think it would be ok to let the Death Star destroy Alderaan rather than drop Jar-Jar Binks down the vent pipe into the reactor core.

Oh, wait. I misunderstood. You think it would be ok to let the Death Star destroy Alderaan rather than drop Jar-Jar Binks down the vent pipe into the reactor core. — T Clark

If you are choosing someone to die then you are the cause of someone's death. If you let the 3 workers die then you played zero part in the accident because none of it was caused by you. Lives will be lost either way and there will be suffering either way I don't think you have the right to doom someone's life just to save more lives if they were safe to begin with.

If you are choosing someone to die then you are the cause of someone's death. If you let the 3 workers die then you played zero part in the accident because none of it was caused by you. Lives will be lost either way and there will be suffering either way I don't think you have the right to doom someone's life just to save more lives if they were safe to begin with. — David Solman

You would let billions die in order to keep your conscience clean? So you can say "It's not my fault?"

Once again I say - Arguments like that are why people don't take philosophy seriously. Hey @Baden - How do I set up a macro that will print that phrase out automatically. I'm getting tired of typing it in so often.

Which might sound good, but probably doesn't accurately reflect the actual business of doing ethics or being in an ethical conundrum. Instead of 'feeling' ethics we just problematize it, and instead of practicing or considering the practice of more real world situations which demand ethical attention we shift our efforts toward a puzzle-solving motif where the focus becomes theory construction and the categorization of ethical attitudes based upon a seemingly unrealistic hypothetical. — Larynx

Excellent point. I usually enjoy these problems as parodies of philosophy at its most tone-deaf. It's like the tragicomedy of a Vulcan working out an algorithm to maximize virtue. Everything profound and high is reduced to a maximization or minimization problem.

Very interesting remark. Point well made. The Trolley problem is, as you said, a hypothetical and, thereby you claim it misses the mark in being practical ethics.

However, as @Michael showed the scenario isn't completely unrealistic. I read a true story of a sinking ship where one sailor was put in the exact same situation and he made the decision to sacrifice the few for the many. I believe he was honored as a hero.

Also, the Trolley problem is specific in its criticism. It's about Consequentialism (maximal happiness) and how its foundational premise, to the say the least, needs more work.

Some say rationality is paramount in all human endeavors; that being rational is akin to carrying a bright torch in the darkness. If you believe this then the Trolley problem carries weight for it exposes a hole in Consequentialist moral theory. It needs to be modified or discarded.

Strangely, I think we are all, instinctively, consequentialists in moral outlook. We always look to the effects of our thoughts and actions. Consequentialism seems to be our moral principle. All the reason to evaluate it thoroughly don't you think? The Trolley problem is important, even if only hypothetical.

Well it's not the hypothetical nature of the trolley problem that I believe bothers most critics - as I mentioned it's the distance from more common real world applicability and the structure of the hypothetical that is the problem. I would have no problem believing that at some point in since the dawn of the railroad there has been a true-to-life example of the trolley problem. But we might simply ask: how many times has it actually happened? How applicable is that one example to all of us? As I mentioned in my second post those sorts of high-stakes, life or death, and relatively flashy ethical dilemmas do not play a role in our day-to-day determinations. To a degree that's fine if our objective is puzzle-solving, right? After all we can hypothesize various participants, change variables, and have a lot of fun trying to solve a puzzle, but - as I mentioned - that procedure tends not to reflect the actual doing of ethical problem solving that we encounter in our lives.

Let me re-frame the criticism differently before going to far down the path of practical ethics as I think I may have miscommunicated the role of the hypothetical. What Michael mentioned with the war-time general, and what you mentioned with a sinking ship are examples that do happen - that's just fine. But those sorts of events are exceptions rather than rules - specific instances of ethical problems encountered very rarely by a select few and ethical problems themselves that do not have the common content that most of us encounter. Now I casually mentioned this in my first post I think: the argument in favor of this suggests that the applicability and/or exceptional nature of the circumstances are irrelevant - instead we're just attempting to extrapolate a mode of thinking from the example; that's essentially the point of these sorts of puzzle-solving activities. But the overarching issue I believe most critics have is that the grossly unrealistic nature of the hypothetical (and please read the term "unrealistic" as "not something likely to ever be encountered by the vast majority of people in real-world ethical scenarios") tends to the muddy the waters of our ethical judgement.

Ethical judgement becomes the medium of exchange when looking at the difference between a far more applicable ethical problem (e.g. helping the homeless person you pass on the street corner) and the exceptional case of the standard thought experiment. Take the trolley problem for instance - our ethical judgement(s) take on a very different character when we have to abstractly determine quantities of potential dead people, the nature of trolleys in the role of their death, and act of attempting to "solve" the problem. In and of itself that does may not sound as though it would cloud our judgement, but the critical response is to note that because of the structure of the trolley problem (which is used to categorize, compare, and evaluate ethical attitudes) we might cultivate a propensity to look at the far more common ethical problems in that same way. In order to truly articulate the distance of applicability and highlight the role of ethical judgement we need only inquire, "why not simply look at real problems that most of us face, have faced, or will face?" And I think that's the approach that is coming into favor with some contemporary ethicists.

Well, you're right. Consequentialism has practical uses; as I said we instinctively look to effects of our actions. In a sense it's like scientific theory that is approximate in nature - works most of the time except in rare instances e.g. a blackhole singularity. I think the Trolley problem and others like it are evidence for the case that a complete and consistent theory for morality isn't possible or is difficult to achieve. What do you think?

Well, you're right. Consequentialism has practical uses; as I said we instinctively look to effects of our actions. In a sense it's like scientific theory that is approximate in nature - works most of the time except in rare instances e.g. a blackhole singularity. I think the Trolley problem and others like it are evidence for the case that a complete and consistent theory for morality isn't possible or is difficult to achieve. What do you think? — TheMadFool

Except people aren't particularly rational and we don't make our moral judgments on a primarily rational basis. And that's a good thing. We follow our hearts, and we should. Hearts aren't stupid. They're not ignorant of consequences.

My heart tells me - "Drop Jar-jar down the effing vent pipe. What are you, an idiot."

You know, it's funny: when I started teaching ethics a few years ago I was quite a bit more in favor of consequentialist approaches and the standard modes of teaching and talking about that style of ethical theorization. I think as I've started to talk with students and colleagues a bit more about these sorts of things and I have had the opportunity to see the typical pedagogical structure of ethics in school I've started to shift away from those standardized models. I think one of the driving factors for me was that I noticed students shied away from personalizing moral reasoning. Complex problems, perhaps problems we might ask each other in a day-to-day situation (e.g. is political policy A good for B, what is our responsibility to disadvantaged group C, etc.) took on a more theoretical character that tended to insulate the student from the criticism of their peers and their grader (me) rather than encourage them to really feel their way through it and determine what they believed was best (I owe a portion of this to reading Bernard Williams by the way, I don't claim to be the architect).

I mean you're certainly not wrong - I think the comparison to a scientific theory is fairly appropriate with one minor addition: scientific theories rely on a specific notion of verification criteria and consensus. Ethical theorization of the variety that comes about through puzzles like the Trolley Problem have the same procedural objective as a scientific theory but lack the constituent elements that transform the observation process into one of concrete theory construction. Don't get me wrong: I'm not trying to drive some wedge between science and philosophy here - that's far beyond the scope of this post. Rather I think it's important to acknowledge the aim of the scientific theory and how that aim is shared in consequentialist ethical theorization while lacking certain aspects of scientific theorization.

One way to potentially frame that lack is in terms of personalization. We needn't and often times shouldn't begin the long and detailed process of scientific theory building with a vested personal interest in the outcome or, technically speaking, the content and means of interpreting our data. Ethical problems however often do take on a deeply person character - and with that comes a certain level of mental and emotional complexity. What happens if we start to depersonalize ethics though? What happens if we try and remove the moral agent with all their feelings, reservations, and thoughts in favor of a model that facilitates an abstraction of content that might have a serious impact on our lives? Now to be fair - I am painting this in unfair terms, and I do not which to suggest that the process of ethical abstraction is sociopathic in someway as compared to a more virtuous structure of personalization (it might well be, but that's a big claim that would need a lot of backing). But it's important to observe that something is lost in translation when we move the ethics from the personal to the abstract; the specific to the approximate.

We follow our hearts — T Clark

That's something very interesting. Contrary to what you think I feel our ''heart'' is a misconception of the ancients. Modern science has ''proven'' that our brains do the thinking AND feeling. Keeping the terminology for the discussion, do you really think our ''heart'' reasons through in its interaction with the world and ourselves? I don't know. Our ''heart'' is instinct-based or call it intuition. In neurological terms our ''hearts'' are reflexive - the seat of the much-maligned knee-jerk response. Do you think this involves any kind of mental processing to which we can apply the term ''rational''?

But it's important to observe that something is lost in translation when we move the ethics from the personal to the abstract; the specific to the approximate. — Larynx

I think @T Clark might have something to say about this. I don't know. Speaking in very general terms, rationality applied to ethics hasn't resulted in anything practically useful. All moral theories, rationally generated, have holes in them. This makes me believe that morality is, well, irrational. The heart has reasons the mind knows not. Too radical a view?

The heart has reasons the mind knows not. — TheMadFool

Last time I checked our thoughts did not have labels attached to them; 'heart' or 'mind'.

Its not an unreasonable principle that our intuition (which is what I'm presuming you mean by heart) is privy to information that our conscious brain is not, but then we are still left with distinguishing one from the other. What reason do we have for thinking our first thoughts are more 'intuitive' than our later ones?

Last time I checked our thoughts did not have labels attached to them; 'heart' or 'mind'. — Pseudonym

The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of... We know the truth not only by the reason, but by the heart. — Blaise Pascal

Its not an unreasonable principle that our intuition (which is what I'm presuming you mean by heart) is privy to information that our conscious brain is not, but then we are still left with distinguishing one from the other. What reason do we have for thinking our first thoughts are more 'intuitive' than our later ones? — Pseudonym

I believe that there are many rational theories on morality out there and also that each one of them has imperfections. The end result is that none of these moral theories can pass as a comprehensive guide for moral decisions.

Yet, we, all of us, have a sense of morality.

What does that speak of?

May be it's not correct but, given the above is the case I find it convenient to make the distinction of mind and heart. Morality comes from the heart and the mind, reason, can't make sense of it.