Our Global Trolley Car Problem
What philosophy tells us about killing people to save other people.
With the aggressive war in Ukraine in high gear, some are wondering why we don’t simply kill the instigator, Russian President Vladimir Putin. Some are even advocating that out loud, like South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, who asked on Twitter if someone could ‘take this guy out’. Graham received a lot of negative press about his statement from both left and right, but is that fair?
Graham is by far not the first to consider killing one person in order to save many others. In 1967, English philosopher Phillipa Foot (1920–2010) introduced the much-used allegory called the Trolley Problem.
Imagine the following situation. A trolley car is speeding down the tracks and its breaks seem to be malfunctioning. Up ahead are five people working on the tracks and if they don’t move, they are going to get run over by the trolley car, probably getting killed. There’s a switch right in front of you, and if you pull the lever, the trolley is going to be diverted to another track. There is one catch though. On the other track, there is one worker who is not following the situation either, and that person will be run over and killed if you pull the lever. What do you do? Pull the lever or not? Let five innocent people be killed if you do nothing, or let one innocent person be killed if you pull the lever? If you put this dilemma forward to people, most will say they would pull the lever and have one innocent life be taken, instead of five. In general, that seems to be the most moral choice.
What now if we change the circumstances a little bit? Let’s assume the same basic beginning — a runaway trolley car is hurtling towards five innocent track workers. If nothing is done, five innocent lives are taken. Here comes the twist. There is a pedestrian bridge over the tracks, and you’re standing on it, together with a very, very fat person. As a matter of fact, if you would push this morbidly obese person over the railing, their big fat body would surely cause the trolley car to derail, and thus save the five innocent track workers. Would you push the corpulent person over the edge, or not? The end results are the same — if you do nothing, five innocent lives are lost, if you do something, only one innocent life is lost. When this dilemma is put forward to people, most will choose not to push the voluminous person in front of the trolley car. Somehow this is different for most people. Apparently, pulling a lever from a distance of the drama is much easier than actually physically touching and partaking in the drama.
“Is there a Brutus in Russia? Is there a more successful Colonel Stauffenberg in the Russian military? The only way this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out. You would be doing your country — and the world — a great service.”
- US Senator Lindsey Graham.
Now let’s go back to the current real-life situation of the war of aggression by Putin on Ukraine. From my point of view, Putin is not the innocent worker of the first situation and neither is he the fat person from the second situation. Rather, he is driving the speeding trolley car — pushing the pedal to the metal — headed straight for a huge crowd of innocent people. Moreover, the trolley car itself is also full of people. And he has bombs on board to create an even bigger disaster.
If we now pose the following question: ‘You have a sniper rifle and you are pretty sure you can kill the driver with one shot, which will lift his foot from the pedal and make the trolley-car slow down and save all the other people. Would you take the shot?’
I bet a lot of people would. I certainly would.
