The Trolley Problem and its variation

Last time, I talk about a dilemma about benefit. This time, I will come to another dilemma which is about morality.

Actually, this dilemma is well-know. It is The Trolley Problem: A madman tied 6 people up. He put 5 of them in one railway which trolley supposed to pass by and put 1 of them in another railway. Now, the trolley is coming and 5 people are going to be killed. You have a chance to switch the trolley to the other railway. If you do so, that means only 1 man will be killed instead of 5. Should we choose to switch it?

This problem seems quite easy because it is obviously that only 1 man died is better than 5 man die. But according to our morality, if you switch it, you should take some responsibility to the death of one man. However, if you just do nothing, you also should take some responsibility for do not do anything to save these 5 men. So, whatever you do, you are reversing the morality. That is the dilemma.

Maybe you still insist that this guy should switch the trolley and actually you are right. According to a survey involving more than 10,000 people, about 70% people choose to switch the trolley.

However, in another similar problem, people behave completely different.

In this question, 5 men are tied up in a railway and the trolley is coming. You have a chance to kick a fat man down from a bridge. If you do so, this fat man will certainly die and the trolley will certainly be stopped. Will you kick the fat man down?

It is not difficult to find out that this question is essentially the same as the first question. But when it comes to a survey, 70% people choose not to kick the fat man down. This result is totally contrary to the first question!

That is strange. I think this happened because the latter situation give people an indication that they are killing someone with they own hands. That makes people feel guiltier. As for the first one, people may soothe themselves by cheating themselves that it is the trolley that kills this guy not them.

Let’s back to the topic. In fact, these questions have no standard answers otherwise they won’t be called ‘dilemma’. What these questions tell us is that there is no perfect morality in the world.

From these 2 questions, we can expand them to another topic:

It is just to kill some innocent people in order to save more people’s life?

Will the situation change when we only need to kill 1 innocent people to save 100 people’s life or we need to kill 100 innocent people to save 101 people’s life? Besides, is it an OK choice to kill innocent people in order to save equal people?

What is your opinion?