Is inaction morally wrong?
Hello, I've been thinking about the general form of trolley problem lately. I think the majority would know what it is, but I'll add a description of what the general form of the trolley problem involves in case someone doesn't:
[i]"There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is one person on the side track. You have two options:
Do nothing and allow the trolley to kill the five people on the main track.
Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person."[/i]
I decided to create this thread not for discussing whether it is morally better to choose to save 1 live or 5, but whether inaction is morally permesible
Is there any way you could prove that inaction (do nothing and "allow" the five people to die) is morally wrong in this situation? Is it wrong to wash one's hands? I am in favor of choosing to kill 1 over the 5 but I couldn't condemn someone for not choosing at all, for they do not hold any responsibility for what is happening and I you can't obligate someone, without violating his rights to freedom, to involve himself in the situation. Someone is going to die anyway. If I have to choose between 1 death and 5 deaths, I rather not have that choice to begin with.
I would like to hear everyone's thoughts about this. Thank you for your time
[i]"There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is one person on the side track. You have two options:
Do nothing and allow the trolley to kill the five people on the main track.
Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person."[/i]
I decided to create this thread not for discussing whether it is morally better to choose to save 1 live or 5, but whether inaction is morally permesible
Is there any way you could prove that inaction (do nothing and "allow" the five people to die) is morally wrong in this situation? Is it wrong to wash one's hands? I am in favor of choosing to kill 1 over the 5 but I couldn't condemn someone for not choosing at all, for they do not hold any responsibility for what is happening and I you can't obligate someone, without violating his rights to freedom, to involve himself in the situation. Someone is going to die anyway. If I have to choose between 1 death and 5 deaths, I rather not have that choice to begin with.
I would like to hear everyone's thoughts about this. Thank you for your time
Comments (49)
Well...just to highlight how screwed up things are right now...my first thought was...
...is there any change that Trump and Pompeo are two of the five, because that might be a very strong bit of motivation for inaction.
Add McConnell, Graham, and Barr to the grouping...and there is no way I would flick any switches.
There are only two choices to make:
1. pull the switch and inform the idiot standing there that he is about to meet his maker if he doesn't shift his body or
2. "Inch Allah!" Nothing immoral about that - if you are a Moslem.
I'm pulling the switch.
On a more serious note...if you were to pull the lever and make the train switch tracks...and the guy on the other side were killed...you would be responsible for his being killed. You will have caused his death by something you did. At best...a first degree manslaughter charge would be lodged.
If you did not pull the lever...no fault...except to the five tied to the tracks. The person who tied them would be in deep doo-doo.
But would a jury of his peers not see the person as more of a hero than a murderer? Depends I suppose.
I guess it comes down to why are you in a control room of a public transport facility vital to national security? Where is the authorized person? He would radio dispatch and be advised on what to do thus absolved of responsibility. Did you break in? Are you trained or therefore have specific knowledge in even what the controls would do? You might be wrong and they might shift a different track causing a collision of greater magnitude. All of this can be escaping from the original premise but. Just facts.
I would like to hear they ways inaction could be proven morally wrong in this situation.
Are you saying that inaction would result would be seen as culpable homicide? In this situation, by not doing anything, we are simply an onlooker. The runaway trolley killed the five people, not I. You could of course say that I have the moral duty to try to save the majority, but when does a moral duty to act create a legal duty of care and therefore give rise to potential criminal liability for breach of that duty? There are several things that must be proven, and one of them is that you have to prove that I have a duty of care towards either that 1 person or those 5. I don't. I have never seen them in my life and even if I had some degree of responsability for, say, those 5 people on the main track, I can't be prosecuted for "Didn't kill A to save B" as I can't be prosecuted under the law for not killing an innocent person.
Yes, I know the legal consequences of the trolley problem are favorable to inaction. What I wanted to talk about is the fact that inaction is almost always viewed as morally wrong. People often say that we have some sort of responsability towards the general welfare, but this would be a violation of my liberty as I haven't chosen out of my own volition to choose; I was coerced into doing the "right" thing. By doing nothing in the case of the trolley problem, I'm not thinking that I am doing the correct thing, but that I am just not doing wrong.
If the intent behind the inaction is to enjoy the carnage, then it is wrong.
Why is my presentation not complete? I wrote that you have two options in this dilemma we are considering:
Do nothing and allow the trolley to kill the five people on the main track.
Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person.
If you choose to pull the level then one person dies.
Kantinianism in this trolley problem calls for inaction, because the action of killing a human being would be viewed as immoral.
Also, I'm not sure I'm following what your point is. Could you perhaps rephrase it so I could understand it better?
Fair enough
In the trolley problem, we should save everybody and also not kill anyone but both are impossible - we can't do either. Thus, if ought implies can is a sound moral principle, the trolley problem is actually not a moral problem at all. The problem makes as much sense as telling a child that she should never eat candy and then offering her a choice between one and five candies.
I didn't mean that inaction is "doing nothing". With "(do nothing and "allow" the five people to die)" I was talking about how everything would play out if you chose inaction.
I think of "inaction" as "absence of action". It is an action that doesn't exist. If there is no action then there no effect. I think that inaction is neither moral nor immoral as you cannot define moral or immoral something that cannot exibit characteristics.
If you choose inaction, according to Kantianism, you make the decision to not utilize the life of that one person on the side track as a means to an end (saving the 5 people, that is, the majority), violating his autonomy as an individual, which is unacceptable. You are not responsible for anyone's life because this would be a violation of my liberty as I haven't chosen out of my own volition to choose
No I suppose. Though in some jurisdictions it can be argued if you witness someone having a heart attack and they begin pleading for you to call 911. And you have your phone, in your hands even, and can easily do so and instead you just sit there and watch them die. Then continue using your phone. Especially or most importantly on camera, you could face something. Wouldn't you want that if you were said person?
Why would you do nothing? Fear? Bystander effect?
I‘m sure others would not hold you responsible for doing nothing, but I suspect anyone with a conscience would have a hard time living with themselves afterwards.
Luckily, I swim like an anvil, so whoever I attempted to save would be doomed.
Bad things may still happen, but there is a difference between good or bad outcomes and right or wrong actions. A right action can’t be one that causes a bad outcome, but bad outcomes can nevertheless happen despite nobody doing anything wrong.
Do you think there are no moral obligations to act? Its just about what not to do rather than what you should do? If not, how do you justify excluding the trolley problem from the list of actions morality compels you to do?
Yes.
So what is the ideal moral person in your view? The one who acts the least is the most moral?
What does “doing nothing/not doing anything” actually mean? It seems obvious that actions such as breathing should be included in “nothing,” but anything else? Is it only actions that have an effect on the outcome that should be considered?
Also, I think intentions are relevant to the discussion. If I have the urge to act, but suppress it, that is different than not having an urge at all. Maybe I intend to cause harm, so I flip the switch so that I can feel the gratification of knowing that I’m directly responsible for one death. Conversely, maybe I intend to derive pleasure from witnessing 5 deaths, so I do not flip the switch.
Lastly, can’t the same situation be phrased either as action or non-action, or even both? Let’s say I don’t flip the switch. Phrased this way, it is a non-act. But if I say I refrained from flipping the switch, isn’t “refraining” an action? Or I can combine both phrasings so that it appears that I did both (I didn’t flip the switch. I wanted to, but chose to refrain from doing so.).
Ok, but what Im asking is how you decided the prevention of greater loss of life in the trolley problem isnt obligatory. Walk me through your reasons for excluding it from obligatory in your diagram, I dont understand.
Of course, to be is to do, so everyone is always doing something to some degree just by existing, but there is a continuum of different degrees of doing something in different contexts, and "doing nothing" / "not doing anything" in a given context is just doing negligibly much, such that the things that happen in that context are not noticeably different to what would have happened if you hadn't existed there at all.
Quoting DingoJones
Preventing any loss of life is good, but only a supererogatory good; nobody can be obliged to prevent everything bad that happens, or even everything bad that they could possible prevent, or else you'd run into classic utilitarian problems like everybody who doesn't give everything they have and spent the entirety of their lives working exclusively for the benefit of those less fortunate than them are doing something wrong, that any concern for oneself at all is morally wrong. Sacrifice for others is good, but taking care of yourself is not wrong, impermissible; it is permissible to let bad things go unfixed (even though it's supererogatorily good to fix them), it's only impermissible to cause new bad things yourself.
In the trolley problem, the choices presented are either do an impermissibly bad thing (kill someone) to achieve a supererogatory good (save some people), or else do nothing, in which case you fail to do the supererogatory good, but you also do not do something impermissibly bad. As permission and obligation are DeMorgan duals, you are obliged not to kill anyone, and conversely permitted to not save people, so if you would have to kill someone to save people, then it becomes impermissible to save them, at least that way.
Otherwise, it would be obligatory (or at least permissible) to kill one healthy patient and harvest their organs to save five dying people. I think that counter-example pretty clearly illustrates the problems with people's usual intuitions about the trolley problem. It's not okay to murder innocents to save more innocents, even though it's still good to save those more innocents -- but only if you can do it without murdering others.
I don't think there is a standard definition of inaction that is considered as correct, but I would define it as how I did in my previous post. So yes, you could say that I just believe it, at least in the situation of this situation of the trolley problem.
A decision and an action are different things. If I decide to pull the lever and save the 5 people, then I still have to physically act. If I don't decide to pull the lever, I decide inaction, but as inaction is absence of action then what remains of my choice is just the decision.
Yes, inaction in that situation, while in the common law of most English speaking countries there would be no punishment for not coming to the rescue of someone except for 2 situations, one of which I have mentioned earlier (if there is a duty to care between the 2 individuals, example: spouses have to save each other in case), would be seen as a crime in most civil law systems as you could have called 911 easily, but that doesn't apply to the trolley case. I also think that philosophically it's also different from the trolley problem. In the trolley problem you are choosing between inaction (allowing the 5 people to die) and intentionally killing 1 to save 5. Someone is going to die anyway, no matter what you choose, while with you example there is a choice in which no one will die. According to Kantianism, you would have to choose inaction, but in your example you don't have to necessarilly choose inaction as if you choose to act, no one will die.
Your example is different than the situation with the trolley case. In your case, I don't intentionally kill anyone if I choose to save one of the people drowning. In the trolley case, if I choose inaction then I just let things take their course (I don't interfere in the trolley killing the 5 people by pulling the lever and changing how things were bound to happen) so if I choose to pull the lever, I act and kill 1 person to save 5. In your case I just can save one without killing the other. He dies not because I allowed him to die, but because I couldn't save him even if I wanted. 1 person dies either way, but I am not killing the other.
I don't see why I would feel any kind of fear now while thinking what I would do if the situation was real. Fear would perhaps be able to play a role only in the real situation, if you would feel any to begin with, that is. Bystander effect is also not it, as it would only work if there are other people around you and I assumed in this situation that you would be alone in the train yard. I think a reason one would choose inaction is that there is no good solution to the trolley case. You are to choose between a minor sacrifce and a major one, and no matter what you choose you are still going to sacrifice someone. If I could, I would just go in front of the trolley and stop it with my bare hands.
But the fact is that you still decided not to pull the lever in the end. Your final choice was inaction. Even if you were about to choose action (pull the lever), you still decided not to (inaction)
Maybe that’s the key to it: do what you can instead of washing your hands of the situation and walking away. Warn the conductor, call the police, make a gallant attempt to get the people off the tracks.
False dilemma. Stop the trolley. It's just a "thought experiment" after all.
Ok, I see what youre saying.
I dont think its “impermissibly bad” to shift the track to the one dude over the 5, youre just defining it that way. Your framing is “shifting the track to the one is killing one” and its just as easy to frame it as “shifting the track to the one is saving 5”. Semantics.
Also, you use the impossibility of preventing all bad things from happening as a justification to not prevent something bad where its entirely possible to do so. Thats fallacious reasoning.
Shifting the track does both of those things. One is supererogatorily good: saving peope. The other is impermissibly bad: killing someone. That makes an act that does both of those things impermissibly bad.
Like if a hypothesis implies some things which are contingently true, but also some things that are impossible. That makes that hypothesis impossible. The true things are still true, but you need a different explanation for them. And the good thing (saving people) is still good, but you need a different means to achieve it.
Quoting DingoJones
No, I use the unreasonableness of saying that anyone who does anything short of absolutely everything they can do to help everyone they can is morally wrong (that that is impermissible) to conclude that failing to do good things is permissible, and therefore that failing to do a good thing because it would require an impermissible thing is permissible.
P => Q
P => R
Q
[]~R
.: []~P (from 2 and 4 modus tollens)
Consequentialism commits the fallacy of affirming the consequent when it argues:
P => Q
P => R
Q
[]~R
.: P (from 1 and 3 affirming the consequent)
Confirmationism in philosophy of science commits this exact same error regarding epistemic modalities. Yet another thing that my Structure of Philosophy draws attention to:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/8303/the-structure-of-philosophy
Real world example (no trolleys involved):
One of four police officers on the scene of a nonviolent crime kneels, knee on the neck of an arrested man (who is handcuffed and laying on the ground). The officer keeps his knee on the side of the man's neck for between 5 to 7 minutes. The arrested man says he can't breathe, and finally stops speaking. He arrives at a hospital DOA.
Three of four officers on the scene (standing near the officer and the arrested man) did nothing to help the man, and did not remonstrate with the officer whose knee is on the man's neck. They say nothing. (All this is captured on a phone cam.)
Are the 3 do-nothing officers who did nothing guilty of, or accomplices to, a murder?
Killing something isnt impermissibly bad. That's a convenient framing to service your conclusions.
Quoting Pfhorrest
There is no different way to achieve it, thats implicit in the trolley problem, its designed to exclude creative, problem solving ways around the moral dilemma posed.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Thats still fallacious. I can’t eat 1 chip cuz I cant eat the whole bag. I shouldnt save one of my kids from falling off a cliff cuz I cant save all of them. I shouldnt try to save any jews from the holocuast because I cant save them all. Plus, you are taking something you yourself posited as unreasonable and using it as a basis to form your conclusion. Thats fallacious, like saying “a deeply unreasonable guy thinks the earth is flat, so Im going to use that as a basis to conclude NASA has been faking all the round earth stuff”. Garbage in, garbage out. We shouldnt trust conclusions with unreasonable basis.
So you think not saving someone is impermissible (you have to save them if you can), but killing someone is permissible (you can kill them if you have to)? That’s pretty backwards. Also contradictory: if you can save someone by not killing them, and you must save them if you can, it would follow that you must not kill them, yet you say also that you may kill.
Quoting DingoJones
Sure, in which case it’s a contrived morally intractable situation. That doesn’t mean you get to murder someone.
Quoting DingoJones
No, you’re still misconstruing it. It’s: you can’t be expected to stuff yourself sick on as many chips as you can possibly eat, so it’s okay to leave some chips uneaten.
If for some reason eating chips was a morally good thing to do, that principle would make it a supererogatory good: you should, but you are permitted to not. If you had to do something you otherwise aren’t permitted to do, like stealing, in order to eat more chips, that would pit eating chips, a morally good but only supererogatory thing, against not stealing, a morally obligatory thing. So you have to not steal, even if it means you can’t eat as many chips, even though eating chips is (we’re stipulating for this example) a good thing that you should do.
Well I dont think anything in particular is always permissible or impermissible ethically, I dont go by a principled approach to ethics. Its only contradictory if you do. Even if I did though, that still doesnt necessarily mean my principal is that You must always save someone if you can. It could be either, or any number of other principals.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Its designed that way precisely to challenge a persons principals. Your answer results in greater suffering and loss of life, and you call It the moral high ground. That has peaked my curiosity. In your view, where does suffering factor in, if at all?
Quoting Pfhorrest
Ok, im trying to find out where you're losing me here, because you said I sounded backwards and now id say the same to you.
So this is essentially about the lesser of two evils, a choice you abstain from on moral grounds. Would you agree with that assessment?
This is like how a sound argument cannot merely be a valid argument, and cannot merely have true conclusions, but it must be valid — every step of the argument must be a justified inference from previous ones — and it must have a true conclusion, which requires also that it begin from true premises. If a valid argument leads to a false conclusion, that tells you that the premises of the argument must have been false, because by definition valid inferences from true premises must lead to true conclusions; that's what makes them valid. If the premises were true and the inferences in the argument still lead to a false conclusion, that tells you that the inferences were not valid. But likewise, if an invalid argument happens to have a true conclusion, that's no credit to the argument; the conclusion is true, sure, but the argument is still a bad one, invalid.
I hold that a similar relationship holds between means and ends: means are like inferences, the steps you take to reach an end, which is like a conclusion. Just means must be "good-preserving" in the same way that valid inferences are truth-preserving: just means exercised out of good prior circumstances definitionally must lead to good consequences; just means must introduce no badness, or as Hippocrates wrote in his famous physicians' oath, they must "first, do no harm".
If something bad happens as a consequence of some means, then that tells you either that something about those means were unjust, or that there was something already bad in the prior circumstances that those means simply have not alleviated (which failure to alleviate does not make them therefore unjust). But likewise, if something good happens as a consequence of unjust means, that's no credit to those means; the consequences are good, sure, but the means are still bad ones, unjust.
Moral action requires using just means to achieve good ends, and if either of those is neglected, morality has been failed; bad consequences of genuinely just actions means some preexisting badness has still yet to be addressed (or else is a sign that the actions were not genuinely just), and good consequences of unjust actions do not thereby justify those actions.
The trolley problem tries to force you into a circumstance where you must choose between unjust means or bad ends. Preventing those bad ends does not justify injustice. You must act justly. That bad things will still happen is something that those who contrives this situation have forced upon you. The bad things aren't a consequence of your actions. You only have to do the best that you can do. If bad things still happen despite you doing no wrong, that's not your fault; but if you do wrong to try to prevent bad things, that is.
What’s stopping us from assigning moral judgements to certain mental states (intentions, choices, decisions, etc.)? Perhaps the better place to put blame or praise is these states? This also goes along with my question about what an action is. Why can’t mental states be actions? It seems like you’ve chosen to only consider observable actions as actions, and haven’t explained why. You also seem to think, again without explanation, that only observable actions are capable/worthy of moral judgement. In doing so, you are praising/condemning only the effect (the outcome of flipping a switch or not), but not the cause (the mental states involved in the act). This is like blaming the bullet for the damage it causes, but not the pulling the pulling of the trigger.
I put that up in the school cafeteria once, they made me take it down because they thought it would cause unfair competition with the chapel next door. :lol:
In a case like this, where inaction is given as a definite choice at a definite moment, inaction is no different from action. You can’t choose not to get involved because you are already involved.
It’s very different in a case where inaction refers to a remote possibility. If you acted now you could save a starving child in Africa, you merely had to go there and find the child, ignoring all your other obligations and make this a priority over any other good deed you may think of. Your inaction towards this child is no more morally wrong than all the other millions of theoretically potential actions that you abstain from doing.
However, most of the time “inaction” refers to something more intermediate than these two extreme examples. The action is considered a realistic possibility, but it may not be obvious when and where it is to be done, or if you are the person who should do it. It would have to be a separate moral question in each particular instance: Is inaction here the same as action? Is it somewhat similar or different?
Quoting Marin
The question of freedom is not relevant here since any obligation is a restriction of freedom. Of course you can obligate someone to do his duty even though it means a restriction his freedom.
What about the systematic genocide by repeated lever switch choice? Say there's a team of 5 on the track and one in the trolley driving it and they kill one person at the time "by a well meaning wanna-be philosopher"? Reductio ad absurdum? I think so.
If you have a job as police or surgeon or important politician, then inaction is clearly immoral.
So the surgeon ought to kill a healthy patient and harvest his organs to save five dying patients?
Gotcha! :lol: