A634.1.5.RB - The Train Dilemma: When no Choice is a Good One!

When faced with decisions that offer no attractive options, a critical thinker’s mind is likely to go into overdrive, desperate to work out the best course of action or find an alternative option. It is likely common in these kinds of scenarios for the thinker to rationalize after the fact, convince him/herself that the right decision was made, if for no other reason than to avoid a lifetime of guilt or doubt. Some decisions, however, have to be made quickly and, in those cases, it’s helpful to have a “guiding light”: a set of principles that govern the way in which a person makes choices.

To get a better understanding of these types of no-win decisions, we can analyze three different scenarios in a classical ethical dilemma involving a train.

Scenario 1: Five or One

In this scenario, the choice is simple: You can risk hitting five children with a train, or you can change course and risk hitting only one child. In this case, for me, the “right” course of action seems relatively clear: You change course, move to the side track, and hope that the one child remaining is able to get out of the way in time. If not, you still minimized the potential damage and saved five lives (a fact, I’m sure, that would seem like a very small piece of moral vindication at the time, but vindication, no less).

Scenario 2: An Elderly Man

This scenario is more difficult to work through because, in order to avoid hitting the same five children with the train, you must throw an elderly man in front of a train — the implication being that, by sacrificing one life, you saved five. Whereas the first scenario is a matter of taking action in order to minimize damage (the train is on a path to hit someone no matter what), this scenario is different because it implicates you directly in the damage. Instead of attempting to thwart an external force (mostly) outside of your control from harming others, this scenario implicates you directly in the action. If you throw the man into the train, you become a murderer. There’s nothing passive about it. You saved lives, but only through actively ending a life by your hand.

For the sake of consistency, I could say that I would throw the old man into the train. The logic would track that doing so would be no different than changing lanes to risk hitting one child rather than five. One person could be killed in either scenario. Because the scenario does not clarify that hitting the five children (or the one) is guaranteed (only that “five children are standing” on the track), though, I would hold steady, do nothing, and hope that the children get out of the way. If the children are able to move in time, killing the old man would have been for naught. Whereas the first scenario offers a probability-based choice — would you rather risk hitting five people or one? — this scenario is more difficult to unpack — it asks, would you rather risk killing five people, or remove that risk by personally killing one?

If there is no doubt that the children on the track will die if you don’t take action, then the “right” choice, in my eyes, would be to kill the man. Whether or not you would be able to live with that choice is another story, but five lives are more valuable than one, and so the decision to take one life would be justified. If the children’s death is not assured, however, murdering a man is too high a price in order to simply remove risk from an equation.

Scenario 3: Five or My Child

This scenario is the same as the first — five children on one track, one on another — except the one child is your son/daughter. Because the scenario is the same, my answer would also be the same. If I believe changing tracks toward the one child to be the “right” course of action when it wasn’t my daughter in the first scenario, there would be no logic to choosing a different path now simply because I would be more emotionally invested. The scenario is brutal, and making it personal absolutely raises the stakes of these no-win situations, but the choice would have to be the same: Change tracks, lower the odds of catastrophe, and pray your child moves before it’s too late.

The value in thinking through these tough scenarios is that they help in recognizing what’s morally relevant in the decision-making process, and in highlighting the consequences and principles involved, both of which have to be considered (LaFollette, p. 19-21). They remind me of the plot of the film “Fail Safe” (Maguire, 1964), in which a system malfunction leads to the United States accidentally dropping a bomb on Moscow. In order to avoid war, the President of the United States chooses to drop a bomb on New York City, killing many (including his own wife) in order to avoid the even greater death toll that would come with a full-on war with Russia. Did the President make the right choice? It’s arguable. He ordered the deaths of thousands of his own people, but he did so in order to save millions. Whether or not he will be able to live with his decision, however, is decidedly another story.

References

LaFollette, H. (2007). The Practice of Ethics. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

Maguire, C.; Youngstein, M. (Producers), & Lumet, S. (Director). (1964). Fail Safe [Motion Picture]. United States: Columbia Pictures Corporation.