A trolley is running out of control down a track. In its path are five people who have been tied to the track by a mad philosopher. Fortunately, you could flip a switch, which will lead the trolley down a different track to safety. Unfortunately, there is a single person tied to that track. Should you flip the switch or do nothing?
This question is used often when talking about utilitarianism. The dilemma here is that if you do nothing, the death of the five will be on the hands of the mad philosopher, so to speak. But if you choose to act, you will be actively choosing to kill one innocent person. Take the poll and let us know your thoughts in the comments!
do we know anything about the people on the tracks? like, are they all convicted felons and the other person is truly innocent?
No, approach it like it’s in the moment and you don’t know anything about any of them!
The correct response is to leave the switch alone.
If the narrator is honest, then we have two facts and two decent inferences to go by. Whoever is tied on the alternate track is innocent can stand as a fact. The philosopher is mad, or insane. This means that he does not conform to societal or psychological norms, not that he is certainly evil. Since he is also a philosopher we can infer that he is not unreasonable, and since the five are not singled out as innocent by the narrator but differenciated from the loner on the other track by that quality, we can infer the five are not innocent. Otherwise the mad philosopher would not have captured them and tied them to a track. Additionally we do not know who captured the innocent person.
Thus we trust the Reasonable Nonconformist Philosopher’s decision to rid society of five bad people.
As an aside, death by trolley is really lame. Future iterations should revise to ‘Death by Doc Brown’s Time Locomotive’.
A big loose end in this wording of the problem is the mention that the alternate track is safer for the trolley. Unlike the six restrained individuals, we can’t know anything about the passengers on the trolley, if there are any.