My understanding is that John M. Taurek suggests that, in the trolley problem we should flip a coin when deciding between saving 5 lives versus 1 life (assuming we do not know any of these people). He says that this gives everyone an equal chance of survival, which is most fair/reasonable to him.
This seems inherently wrong to me, but I can't understand why without appealing to utilitarianism. How can I argue against this without appealing to utilitarianism?
The ethical problem is that you pretend to avoid making a decision - but you actually already made a decision, namely that both of these outcomes are equal enough to justify a 50/50 choice.
This is known as the trolley problem. There is a runaway trolley and people tied to the tracks: switch to kill 1 and save 5 or do nothing and let the 5 die. Perhaps the most effective reductio of Taurek's proposal is to up the ante, instead of 1 vs 5 take 1 vs 5 billion, his logic still suggests that a coin should be flipped, "let the world die but the justice prevail". However, all standard ethical systems would not endorse Taurek's solution. A Kantian deontologist would have to do nothing because either switching or flipping a coin is against the moral duty (to not willfully kill), and "inherently wrong". A virtue ethicist would have to switch, because switching is a compassionate act, and compassion is a virtue. And most forms of consequentialism, not just utilitarianism, would endorse switching because consequences of the 5 surviving are likely to be superior even if there is no single utility, and hence some calculus on human lives. Indeed, it is hard to come up with ethics that does endorse Taurek's solution: it would have to be a form of deontology where "equal justice for all" is the highest moral duty.
Empirical studies show that about 90% choose to switch unless the 1 is a relative or a lover, and then it drops steeply. This does not bode well for general ethical arguments, and suggests situational ethics with "the devil in the details", abstracting from which trolley problems are often criticized for.
From an existentialist point of view, this strategy wrongly places a human decision in the hands of an effectively random, physically determined process. Existentially speaking, the decider still bears full and undiminishable responsibility for the final choice. The intermediary of the coin is the decider's attempt to deny this to himself, as further disguised by recourse to an odd and seemingly unworkable mechanistic notion of justice.
So in the larger picture, the crisis here is the illegitimate abrogation of the burden of human judgment through deferral to a mechanical process or algorithm. There's a lot of relevance here, both looking backwards, to the entire question of the rule of law, and forwards towards the increasing likelihood of being judged morally by computerized justice.
of the coin is the decider's attempt to deny this (responsibility) Likely so, but not necessarily. Imagine a nihilist, and hardly any information on the six people available. Then his/her resort to chance can be a personal, authentic solution without any flight from responsibility. He/she could, for example, think of a russian roulette session doing for those people.
EDIT:
I would like to note that nowhere in the original post does it posit that the moral agent in question (in this case, the Kantian Deontologist) is only able to pick one of these two choices (flip or don't flip the coin). The question isn't: either you do flip a coin to determine the death of the 1/5, or you don't and they all die. If this was the question, then my answer would be very different. The question is instead: the best possible way of choosing who should die when faced with a decision between x and y (where the only difference between x and y is, according to the knowledge available to us, the number of potential victims) is to flip a coin. Yes, under a Kantian framework, we might have a moral requirement to do something - but I don't think it would be to do this.
Original Answer:
In response to something Conifold wrote, I will first say that I do not think the Deontologist would automatically choose to do nothing when presented with this issue. A Kantian Deontologist might have certain moral duties, but to willfully choose to have a coin-toss be the decisive factor in the life or death-sentence of 1-to-5 people goes against the first Categorical Imperative (and the Second, in my opinion): "Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law" (Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, Section 2).
Imagine the consequences that would result if, whenever we were presented with moral issues concerning life or death, such matters were universally decided upon with a mere coin-toss? Under Deontology, it is a contradiction for moral agents (with genuine powers of will and critical thinking) to make such decisions on the basis of luck alone. Similarly, consider that this Categorical Imperative is usually interpreted as being akin to the golden rule: treat others as you wish to be treated. Suffice to say, I think we can agree that we would not want people to judge the worth of our lives based on a mere flip of the coin.
In the abstract to the work, "Kantian Ethics and Economics: Autonomy, Dignity, and Character", Mark White wrote that the "key aspects of Kant's moral theory ... [include] autonomy, judgment, dignity, perfect and imperfect duty, and the categorical imperative"; note the emphasis on the rational faculties of autonomy, judgement, and the like. I don't think you need to defer to Utilitarianism to reject Taurek's claim. I think you can merely defer to the definition of what ethics is supposed to be about (under a Kantian Deontologist's interpretation, at the very least). A coin toss leaves our moral choices and actions entirely to chance, stripping us of the need for critical thinking, compassion, rationality, and ethical debate - things that I believe are crucial to the foundations of our moral decision making.
This question is strongly related to the current debate about autonomous driving. When a crash is unavoidable, how can/should the car's computer decide what it should crash into, the group of five to the left or the single person to the right?
The answer is more or less obvious: It can't make an ethical decision.
Why is that? Simply because the car's computer has no information about the individuals it has to decide over.
And I think that is the point the original statement makes: When you have no information about the members of the two groups you cannot make an ethical decision. Hence, you should not make the decision and can only randomly pick one alternative.
Extreme example: The larger group may be a chain gang of convicted serial killers working at the side of the road, and the smaller other group may be elementary school kids waiting for their bus. If you know this, your decision may be different.
More mathematically speaking, you cannot know the probability for individuals to belong to one group or the other ("how they got there"). Thus the coin flip (50% chance) is fair in that it extends the previous (relative) probability unchanged to the probability of survival. If an individual had a 90% chance to find himself in group A, and 10% for group B, then after the coin flip it will be 45% (90% x 50%) vs. 5% (10% x 50%) overall probability to get killed. The 9:1 ratio is maintained.
Of course, if you accept the "no information = no ethical decision" conclusion this implies that you should try to acquire relevant information. ("Look, people in group A all wear orange suits and are chained together.") However, you can never acquire all information about the past of the individuals, or their ethical 'value'. And you cannot even know if you received enough information yet. Hence, how can you be sure to make the ethically right decision?
If you are in group A (one of the group of 5) you have the same chance of survival as group B (the group of one). That is the logic. Of course, the utilitarianism part can come into debate, but it's not related to the chance itself. It should be clear that each individual has a 50-50 chance if there are 2 groups and a coin; it is irrelevant how many are in each group.
-Later Edit-
The ethical part in this would actually be if to toss the coin. Because if you do, you may choose the 5-group unwillingly. But is that worse than choosing the 1-group ? There can be situations where 1 must be saved instead of 5, although most would choose to save the 5. But if you make a choice to save the 5, because they are more lives, where do you draw the line ? Will you terminate 999998 to save 999999 ? Such things cannot be put into math, there can be way too many factors involved in such decision.
Mathematically the assumption that "everyone has an equal chance at surviving" swings on how the groups where formed. Let us call them groups A and B.
Say people are indistinguishable, and they are picked from pool of 6 and assigned randomly with uniform probability to groups A and B. No matter which group you kill everyone has an equal chance at surviving because they had they had equal chances to end up in either group in the first place. In this version the coin toss is a red herring. No matter how we pick the group to be killed everyone has equal chances of surviving.
Now let us consider the alternative, people have names and are distinguishable. The probability of a person being assigned to group B is proportional to the log of the length of their name. So the assignment is still random, but the probability is not uniform. Now tossing a coin gives everyone an equal survival rate, when choosing based on group letter would not.
So the conclusion is that the problem is not well enough defined mathematically. If you have indistinguishable people then no need to flip a coin at all, they all have equal chance no matter what you do. If people are distinguishable, then there is by definition another parameter available for the choice to be made on. Without knowing what that parameter is it is not possible to say if it should effect our decision and determine who should be saved.
Edit: To put this in the practical context of a self driving car, I think we can be fairly certain that there will be no random number generators (coins) in the software of a self driving car. If the programmer is trying to account for a situation were more that one party is in peril they will almost certainly make use of inequality symbols. Given the architecture dependency of of floating point arithmetic it is likely that even the programmer will not know what combination of inputs would lead to two perfectly equal chances. They don't worry about it because these numbers have so many significant figures that it will be vanishingly rare.
Edit 2: @supercat points out in the comments that my knowledge of algorithms is a bit lacking. There may well be randomness in some algorithms used to process data. It is still likely that actual decisions would be based in floating point comparisons though.
It's arguable whether or not it's even a matter of ethics when there are only bad choices. What you should do in the situation depends on factors which are not ethical.
If my wife was on the train tracks I'm pulling the lever for the train to go in the other direction no matter how many people are on that track.
Obviously, "save your wife if you have to choose who dies" is not an ethical rule. It's clearly of a different category of rule than "do not murder".
The amount of focus on Flagpole scenarios (like the Trolly "Problem") is a distraction from ethics and only serves to paralyze the thinker.
How am I supposed to deal with questions of rising crime rates if I can't even decide which strangers I'm going to kill in a completely non-existent absurdity?
Ethics don't apply when you don't have a choice. This isn't so much a choice as an appeal to nihilism.
According to the question, John M. Taurek says that giving everyone an equal chance of survival seems most fair/reasonable to him. This seems like something you might not agree with. You might decide instead that you don't like killing people regardless of how unfair it may be that only 1 person dies and the other 5 survive.
In order to understand why your understanding of the solution suggested by John M. Taurek seems wrong, we can consider what other implications may arise from deciding that giving everyone an equal chance of survival is most fair/reasonable. In the following situations, John M. Taurek represents a person who wants to give everyone an equal chance of survival above all else.
Consider a similar choice between 0 and 6 people killed. In this case, John would still be happy with the coin flip, as everyone has an equal 50% chance to die. You may not be happy with this case as there is an equally fair option of just killing 0 people and saving all 6. This seems better for everyone involved, but without some definition of utility, you would not be able to say that.
In fact, it gets worse than that, as John M. Taurek would also be equally happy with the fair option of just killing all 6 if he was given the option. He might even prefer it if he expected that living people would be treated less fairly than dead people in the future.
It gets worse again if we consider a trolley with 1 person before a junction who is always killed, and 5 people after the junction who could be killed if John pulls a lever. In this case, John will decide to kill the extra 5 people in the interest of fairness.
All of these cases being worse requires you to have some reason to prefer living people to dead people. If you don't prefer living people to dead people, then your understanding of John M. Taurek's solution is one you should be happy with and you shouldn't argue against it.
In the 1 vs 5 case, you could appeal to ethical egoism instead of utilitarianism and claim that you don't like killing people, and would prefer to kill 1 than 5, and therefore should do that.
Whether there are ethical problems depends on the premise.
If we agree that mankind and its survival has some sense and destination (including unlimited breed, perhaps), then the coin must be left out of the play. Otherwise the coin would also apply when one single human on the one side and the rest of mankind on the other side were concerned.
If we agree that mankind is without any destination but simply a meaningless accident, then every individual has only its own feelings including its survival instinct and there is no higher justice or aim. Then the coin may be the right choice.
The problem and the whole point of using the coin is to relieve yourself from personal responsibility on the choice of who lives and who dies.
Both groups have a 50:50 chance, but are not equal in size, so the coin toss is far more likely to lead to more deaths than just choosing yourself to sacrifice the 1 guy, leading to a potential ethical problem where you're involved in a scenario where more people are likely to die than if you we're to do a different thing, which is a problem for most ethics.
You can extend the coin toss excuse (in this case against 1<5) to cover anything that you don't feel like you want to take personal responsibility for, but it is pretty much always a cop out.
Saying that you should toss a coin for the trolley problem is just a way to cop out of the whole trolley problem itself.
There are 6 people whose lives are at stake. With the coin toss, for any given person he has a 50/50 chance of living. Assuming that each person only cares about himself, than it doesn't matter whether he is on the "1" side or the "5" side. Either way, he has a 50/50 chance of surviving.
The utilitarian, of course, would reply that killing 5 people is worse than killing 1 person. Presumably that argument is not so convincing to the 1 person.
In any case, the whole point of these sort of questions is to create hypothetical moral situations where no good answer is allowed to be considered, and we are only allowed to discuss which immoral action is least bad.
In this example, surely the right answer is to find a way to stop the trolley, or to get the people out of the way, so that no one is killed. Why can't you jump on the trolley and put on the brakes? Or drag people off the tracks? Of course people who frame questions like this always have some reason why such good answers are impossible: you're too far away, there's no time, etc.
Thus thinking is fundamentally evil, because it leads people to think in terms of accepting immoral solutions rather than searching for moral ones. I've heard plenty of exercises like this that postulate a group of people stranded by a ship wreck or plane crash with limited supplies deciding who lives and who dies. That encourages people to think in terms of, "how can I get my neighbor before he gets me" rather than "how can we work together for the good of all".
Yes, in real life people do sometimes face harsh situations where they must choose the lesser of two evils. But even ignoring the extreme life-or-death scenario, in real life, how often do you have to wrestle with, Should I hurt person A or hurt person B? Much more often the question is, Do I have the character to do what is right even if it will inconvenience me?
Why not flip a coin ? You can't ask this question without answering why in this case the matter can reasonably be resolved by flipping a coin. After all, we don't usually resolve ethical dilemmas or respond to moral problems by flipping a coin. Is abortion at 20 weeks right or wrong ? Flip a coin. Scarcely anyone would go along with that because we assume that the matter is to be decided by taking into account a range of considerations and weighing them as best we can.
My suggestion is that we might indeed reasonably resolve the trolley problem by flipping a coin. But this would only be so if we were unable on deliberation and in all conscience to decide which applies : (a) it is permissible to turn the trolley one way rather than another, (b) it is morally obligatory to turn the trolley one way rather than another, and (c) it is morally wrong to intervene in the situation and cause the trolley to do anything.
Stuck between this irresoluble uncertainty, what better than to flip a coin ? Note that I do not suggest that this is 'the' solution to the trolley problem. My remarks relate purely to the special situation in which a moral agent is, no matter how conscientiously s/he deliberates, genuinely unable to determine which of (a), (b) and (c) applies. This is plainly a possible state of affairs and if a moral agent is in it, what is more reasonable than to toss a coin ?
My own views on the trolley problem are quite deliberately withheld because they are irrelevant to the special situation of agential indecision on which the answer focuses.
It's a bit cowardly or sitting on the fence, but it isn't very wrong.
In the situation described, your action or inaction will lead to one dead person or five dead persons. We all know that one path is the right one, and the other one is wrong. Unfortunately, there is universal disagreement which one is the right one and which one is the wrong one.
Do you think that by thinking about the problem you will have a better than 50% chance of making the right decision? Maybe you will, but maybe you are bad at making that kind of decisions, and are highly likely to get it wrong. By throwing a coin, you ensure a fifty percent chance that the right choice is made.
PS. The point of this answer is that sometimes problems are difficult, so what about throwing a coin instead of trying to find the best decision? That's independent of the actual problem.
sometimes problems are difficult, so what about throwing a coin That thought is a rationalization in self-excuse. The real thought behind the scene is that the problem is not worth worrying and is easily solvable by throwing a coin.
Many valid points have been made by the previous contributors. I would propose that one could argue it is better to save 5 people versus 1 person if one accepts the premise, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that people are inherently “good” and, therefore, it is morally superior to have more “good” people survive. Granted, we are left with the dilemma that perhaps all 5 people who are saved turn out to be “bad” and the 1 fatality is a “saint”. But, unfortunately, we don’t posses this foreknowledge.
I think the approach is worthy of consideration.
I also suspect that some would say this is just utilitarianism in disguise. But the choice is based solely on the morality of “good” versus “bad” and not on which makes the most people “happy” and/or which is more “useful”.
I'll use a word I know people use in moral judgements, even though I don't know where, if ever, moral philosophers have given it a technical discussion.
I'm sure many non-philosophers would intuitively feel it is "irresponsible" to take a risk like this, meaning that their objection to the policy is not that it reduces the mean number of survivors relative to the utilitarian kill-1-to-save-5 approach, but that there's too much uncertainty in the outcome. Feel free to quantify that with as much or as little of a mathematician's rigour as you like, but there's evidence to suggest people care not only about the mean result of a policy but also the uncertainty inherent within it.
Unfortunately, it's unclear (to me, at least) whether this counts as not bringing in utilitarianism. "Don't unnecessarily make the outcome stochastic" might be construed as a deontological principle. On the other hand, caring about both the mean and variance of a policy might be considered a more advanced version of the utilitarianism people usually talk about, and on that view "being responsible" might be seen as a utilitarian principle. (Mind you, if the reason why someone would want to avoid utilitarianism is in part because its ignoring variance makes it seem naive, this "new utilitarianism" might be acceptable. The fact that a felicific calculus is in general not formulable doesn't really apply to the trolley problem, since we can literally count the number of survivors.)
Assume there were six people, someone has to be the single one and dice will be thrown in a fair way to decide who is the one on his own. And then you are asked what you will do, before the dice are thrown.
If you say “I will let the five die” everyone’s chance to die is 5/6th. If you say “I will kill the one” everyone’s chance to die is 1/6th. If you say “I will throw a dice so everyone’s chances are the same”, everyone’s chance to die is 3/6th.
Because dice are thrown to decide who is the one person, the outcome is fair to everyone whatever you do. But killing the single person maximises everyone’s chances.
The problem is that pretty much every action in the trolley problem is unethical.
You are about to make a decision which will cause the death of at least 1 person and you'll be aware of that consequence and do it anyway. So technically you are the one sealing their fate and killing them. it's not an accident, but homicide, despite being caused by an accident. Likewise it's most likely not murder and you have a good chance to defend yourself against accusations of guilt and deliberate wrongdoing.
But if your moral compass includes "Don't cause other people's death if it is preventable" then you're screwed. Because either death is preventable by pulling or not pulling the lever. However that causes another preventable death and so you'd be toggling the lever as fast as you can until the trolley passes the switch. Which is essentially equivalent to flipping a coin.
Though technically both that and flipping the coin are still cop-outs because at the end of the day it's not the coin or the end position of the lever after toggling that determines the outcome it is you deciding to accept that outcome and not overturn it. You didn't give up that agency you simply chose to ignore it, which is still a decision.
Like if you told anybody, with the clam rational expression of someone thinking they did everything right, that you flipped a coin, they still look at you with an expression of horror and the explicit or implicit question of: "You did WHAT?"
And it will probably immediately dawn on them that it was still not the coin but you who made the decision and that you just try to pass on the responsibility to the coin, which likely won't work.
So as said there is no ethical action in the trolley problem. Either way you did something wrong, but it's unsatisfying and problematic to say you did something wrong without being able to say what you should have done instead and if you can't do something right, can it be even called "wrong".
So you could tinker with variables in that scenario. Like you could argue that you head no agency. That a choice between two bad options is not a choice.
In that case you're best option is to be less wrong. Which would prompt you to quantify and compare the options. But according to what metric?
As you can't infer anything about the specific people you just have their numbers. Now what? Are humans differently abled and the bigger group has a bigger chance for extraordinary talent? So going by some sort of stochastic utilitarianism, which could very well be wrong even according to it's own metric. Are all humans equal? But then you'd also have to answer equal to WHAT. Like do you assign a value of 1 and argue 1*5=5 > 1*1. But you could also that the value of human life is unmeasureable and infinite so 1*infinity = 5*infinity and you're back at your coin flip. Or probably uncommon but you could also argue that the value is negative because of negative human impact on the environment and so -1*5=5 < -1*1.
Or you could question whether that don't do preventable deaths is to be dropped, but most people like that for a reason. Or you could focus on "being the cause" and not act and thereby ignore your agency in being the cause, though as said that doesn't really work either. Or you could argue with harm reduction, though that again is subjective and reliant on information that you don't have. Or you could hold a referendum ask people for their opinion and go with the majority. Which is why I think asking about the trolley problem itself is unethical.
There are a ton of different paradigms that you can test and look how they would play out with the trolley problem, which is what makes it interesting. So you can make a decision (literally any one of them and defend it), but you can't really find a solution (inside the box), because none of them would strike me as good or ethical.
The only real solution that would also be a cop-out is if you died of a stroke or fell into paralysis upon the weight of that decision without being able to act at all. That is to naturally lose your agency. Then it's truly not your fault and genuinely an accident. But if you could prevent that by keeping your calm you'd likely ethically be required to do so, setting you back to square one.
