I do not mean to make much of that fact about what the driver’s driving his trolley into the five would consist in, for it seems to me to be right to say that if he does not turn the trolley, he does drive his trolley into them, and does thereby kill them. (Though this does seem to me to be right, it is not easy to say exactly what makes it so.) By [20]contrast, if the bystander does not throw the switch, he drives no trolley into anybody, and he kills nobody.
But as I said, my own feeling is that the bystander may intervene. Perhaps it will seem to some even less clear that morality requires him to turn the trolley than that morality requires the driver to turn the trolley; perhaps some will feel even more discomfort at the idea of the bystander’s turning the trolley than at the idea of the driver’s turning the trolley. All the same, I shall take it that he may.
If he may, there is serious trouble for Mrs. Foot’s thesis (I). It is plain that if the bystander throws the switch, he causes the trolley to hit the one, and thus he kills the one. It is equally plain that if the bystander does not throw the switch, he does not cause the trolley to hit the five, he does not kill the five, he merely fails to save them – he lets them die. His choice therefore is between throwing the switch, in which case he kills one, and not throwing the switch, in which case he lets five die. If thesis (I) were [1399] true, it would follow that the bystander may not throw the switch, and that I am taking to be false.
I have been arguing that
(I) Killing one is worse than letting five die
is false, and a fortiori that it cannot be appealed to explain why the surgeon may not operate in the case I shall call Transplant.
I think it pays to take note of something interesting which comes out when we pay close attention to
(II) Killing five is worse than killing one.
For let us ask ourselves how we would feel about Transplant if we made a certain addition to it. In telling you that story, I did not tell you why the surgeon’s patients are in need of parts. Let us imagine that the history of their ailments is as follows. The surgeon was badly overworked last fall – some of his assistants in the clinic were out sick, and the surgeon had to take over their duties dispensing drugs. While feeling particularly tired one day, he became careless, and made the terrible mistake of dispensing chemical X to five of the day’s patients. Now chemical X works differently in different people. In some it causes lung [24]failure, in others kidney failure, in others heart failure. So these five patients who now need parts need them because of the surgeon’s carelessness. Indeed, if he does not get them the parts they need, so that they die, he will have killed them. Does that make a moral difference? That is, does the fact that he will have killed the five if he does nothing make it permissible for him to cut the young man up and distribute his parts to the five who need them?
We could imagine it to have been worse. Suppose what had happened was this: The surgeon was badly overextended last fall, he had known he was named a beneficiary in his five patients’ wills, and it swept over him one day to give them chemical X to kill them. Now he repents, and would save them if he could. If he does not save them, he will positively have murdered them. Does that fact make it permissible for him to cut the young man up and distribute his parts to the five who need them?
I should think plainly not. The surgeon must not operate on the young man. If he can find no other way of saving his five patients, he will now have to let them die – despite the fact that if he now lets them die, he will have killed them. [1400]
We tend to forget that some killings themselves include lettings die, and do include them where the act by which the agent kills takes time to cause death – time in which the agent can intervene but does not.
[26]In face of these possibilities, the question arises what we should think of thesis (II), since it looks as if it tells us that the surgeon ought to operate, and thus that he may permissibly do so, since if he operates he kills only one instead of five.
There are two ways in which we can go here. First, we can say: (II) does tell us that the surgeon ought to operate, and that shows it is false. Second, we can say: (II) does not tell us that the surgeon ought to operate, and it is true.
For my own part, I prefer the second. If Alfred kills five and Bert kills only one, then questions of motive apart, and other things being equal, what Alfred did is worse than what Bert did. If the surgeon does not operate, so that he kills five, then it will later be true that he did something worse than he would have done if he had operated, killing only one – especially if his killing of the five was murder, committed out of a desire for money, and his killing of the one would have been, though misguided and wrongful, nevertheless a well-intentioned effort to save five lives. Taking this line would, of course, require saying that assessments of which acts are worse than which other acts do not by themselves settle the question what it is permissible for an agent to do.
But it might be said that we ought to by-pass (II), for perhaps what Mrs. Foot would have offered us as an explanation of why the driver may turn the trolley in Trolley Driver is not (II) itself, but something more complex, such as
[28](II’) If a person is faced with a choice between doing something here and now to five, by the doing of which he will kill them, and doing something else here and now to one, by the doing of which he will kill only the one, then (other things being equal) he ought to choose the second alternative rather than the first.
We may presumably take (II’) to tell us that the driver ought to, and hence permissibly may, turn the trolley in Trolley Driver, for we may presumably view the driver as confronted with a choice between here and now driving his trolley into five, and here and now driving his trolley into one. And at the same time, (II’) tells us nothing at all about what the surgeon ought to do in Transplant, for he is not confronted with such a choice. If the surgeon operates, he does do something by the doing of which he will kill only one; but if the surgeon does not operate, he does not do something by the doing of which he kills five; he merely fails to do [1401] something by the doing of which he would make it be the case that he has not killed five.
I have no objection to this shift in attention from (II) to (II’). But we should not overlook an interesting question that lurks here. As it might be put: Why should the present tense matter so much? Why should a person prefer killing one to killing five if the alternatives are wholly in front of him, but not (or anyway, not in every case) where one of them is partly behind him? I shall come back to this question briefly later.
[30]Meanwhile, however, even if (II’) can be appealed to in order to explain why the trolley driver may turn his trolley, that would leave it entirely open why the bystander at the switch may turn his trolley. For he does not drive a trolley into each of five if he refrains from turning the trolley; he merely lets the trolley drive into each of them.
So I suggest we set Trolley Driver aside for the time being. What I shall be concerned with is a first cousin of Mrs. Foot’s problem, viz.: Why is it that the bystander may turn his trolley, though the surgeon may not remove the young man’s lungs, kidneys, and heart? Since I find it particularly puzzling that the bystander may turn his trolley, I am inclined to call this The Trolley Problem. Those who find it particularly puzzling that the surgeon may not operate are cordially invited to call it The Transplant Problem instead.
It should be clear, I think, that “kill” and “let die” are too blunt to be useful tools for the solving of this problem. We ought to be looking within killings and savings for the ways in which