One of my favorite television shows of all time is Charmed. I grew up with it and even have a tattoo of a triquetra. One episode that has stuck out to me throughout the years (Apocalypse Not) involves Phoebe asking her sisters a question about ethics: If you were in a burning building and had to make a choice between saving one sibling or five strangers, who would you save? At the beginning of the episode, they both answer one sibling, but by the end, due to events of the episode, when all three are asked the question again they change their answer to five strangers.
When I was in college, a professor asked the class the same question. He also followed up by asking similar ethical/moral dilemma questions, including the famous trolley question. I'm sure you've heard of it. You are standing at the lever for a trolley track. The track divides into two separate tracks, one with one person tied to it and one with five people tied to it. As of right now, the trolley is on track to run over and kill five people. If you do nothing, those five people will die. If you pull the lever, they will live, but the other person, who would've otherwise survived, will die. You don't have time to make it down to the track and untie them. There is no possible way to save everyone. What do you do? What are the ethical implications of your choice?
On the one hand, if you don't actually pull the level and make the choice to kill someone yourself, then you didn't really kill anyone. You didn't really kill those five people; someone else tied them to the track. You simply chose not to act at all because you didn't have time to save everyone and you didn't want your action to have the direct result of murdering someone else.
On the other hand, you technically have the opportunity to save four lives. By choosing to kill one person, you let five other people live. Only one life is lost instead of five. You save more lives that way, four more to be exact. However, then you undoubtedly did make the choice to kill someone. You made the choice to flip the lever. That one person who would've survived would now be dead because of you. But five other people who were doomed would survive.
Is it more ethical and more morally correct to let more people live even if it means you have to choose to actively get involved and make the decision to kill one person? Or should you never choose to do anything that would kill someone even if it means more people will die if you don't?
There are variations on this question of course to make it more complicated. One of the more common ones I've seen is that you are standing on a bridge above the track. A fat person is standing next to you. They are fat enough to stop the trolley. If you push them over the bridge, they will land on the track, get hit by the trolley, and die, but it will prevent any of the people tied to the track from dying. Would you push them over? Often, the same people who would flip the lever say they wouldn't go so far as to push someone over the bridge. Why is that? What difference does it make if it's just a matter of "five lives are more important than one?" Is it because pushing someone seems more violent than pulling a lever? What causes the difference in answers?
What if you personally know the one person tied to the track by themselves but you don't know the other five people? If the one lone person tied to the track is a friend, family member, lover, etc. and the five people tied together are strangers, does that make you more likely to let the trolley kill five of them rather than flipping the switch? Often, people who would otherwise say they would pull the lever would suddenly change their minds and not pull it if the one person tied up alone was a loved one.
But what if it were opposite? What if the trolley was headed towards the one person that you knew and cared about and you had to make the choice of whether or not to pull the lever and have it instead kill five strangers? That would involve actively making a choice to kill five people rather than having it go on course to only kill one. This particular scenario is rather similar to the burning building question from Charmed, with the extra moral implication of not only would you not be saving the five strangers, you would actively be pulling the lever to kill them.
Then of course, there's another famous question that I've heard asked a lot: If you could go back in time and kill Hitler when he was just a baby or a small child, would you do it?
I recently heard another one, a rather interesting one at that. Let's say you are a paramedic and you come to the scene of an accident to find that the victims are your spouse and their other lover. You are the only paramedic at the scene. No one else can get there in time. Both are still alive, but your spouse's chances of survival are slim to none even if they receive medical attention right away. Their lover, on the other hand, will definitely survive but only if they receive medical attention right away. You only have time to give medical attention to one, because by the time you get to the second one they will surely be dead. Do you: A. walk away and save neither of them, letting both of the cheaters die because you are hurt and betrayed B. attempt to save your spouse first, knowing that it will almost certainly be a futile effort, and let their lover who would have otherwise survived die or C. save their lover and let your spouse die, since you know their lover will definitely survive with medical attention and that your spouse will almost certainly die anyway?
All of these scenarios are things that the average person would never find themselves in or hopefully would never find themselves in. The most realistic is the original Charmed example I heard of the burning building and the least realistic of course is the time travel. However, they are interesting questions for self-exploration on our views on morality and ethics. What would your answers be?
My Answers (not based on what I think would be the most ethical option, but what I would really do in the situation)
For me, personally, I would likely flip the trolley switch to kill one person instead of five unless the one person was a loved one. If the one person was a loved one and the other five were not, I would not flip the switch. If the trolley was headed toward the one person originally and they were a loved one and the other five were not, I would make the choice to flip the switch and kill five people while letting my one loved one live. This is assuming that everyone tied to the track was a healthy adult, as the question becomes much more complicated if that's not the case. I would likely never ever think of throwing the fat person onto the track in the first place so it's highly unlikely that I would ever do that. Even if for some reason the thought did cross my mind, I would almost certainly be physically unable to do it. If for some reason the thought did occur to me and I was suddenly strong enough to pull it off, I still almost certainly would not do it. I absolutely would never do it if I knew the fat person personally and/or if all the people on the track were strangers.
As for the burning building, if the five strangers were all healthy adults, I would let them die and save my sister. If they included children, such as a family of five, then I would save the children instead. It's what my sister would want me to do.
For the paramedic example, well, I personally would never be a paramedic so I would never be in the situation. However, let's say for example I was somehow in that scenario. I would try to save my husband first. I would certainly never walk away from them. Even knowing that my husband would almost certainly die anyway and even knowing that his lover would have lived with medical attention, I would still try to save my husband. I would want the last thing he saw in his life before dying to be me trying to save him and being with him. Even though he betrayed me, I would still try. I wouldn't be able to ignore him. I wouldn't have withheld the medical attention from his lover out of jealousy or malice, and certainly if I could've had time to work on her too I would have, but I wouldn't be able to just ignore my husband in his last moments, even if the cost was her life.
The Hitler one is probably one of the most controversial questions. It could never possibly happen, but it's an interesting scenario to think about. This may be an unpopular opinion, but I would not go back in time. However, that's more to do with me being afraid of the butterfly effect than it is of me refusing to kill a child that hadn't done anything evil yet even though I knew they someday would become one of the most evil people to ever live. I wouldn't want to mess with time travel. However, it would be very hard to live with knowing I could have saved millions of people from a horrible death (most of whom would be dead by now anyway from old age though) if I had just been willing to go back in time, murder one child, and then quite possibly cease to exist since both sets of my grandparents may have never gotten together had circumstances surrounding the time period of WWII been different.
I'm interested to hear other people's opinions on these questions! Do you agree with me? Would you do something differently? Let me know what you would do and if you know of any other questions post them in the comments!
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