1y ago

A Judicial "Trolley Problem"

Philippa Foot is most known for her invention of the Trolley Problem thought experiment in the 1960s. A lesser known variation of hers is as follows:

Suppose that a judge is faced with rioters demanding that a culprit be found for a certain crime. The rioters are threatening to take bloody revenge on a particular section of the community. The real culprit being unknown, the judge sees himself as able to prevent the bloodshed from the riots only by framing some innocent person and having them executed.

These are the only two options: execute an innocent person for a crime they did not commit, or let people riot in the streets knowing that people will die. If you were the judge, what would you do?

63 comments

Let the people riot.
Condemning an innocent person to death would be the direct responsibility of the Judge, whereas the judge is not directly responsible for the actions of the protestors. Those protestors are behaving outside of the judicial system, and the judicial system may deal with them eventually, but their threat of violence should not be part of the decision-making process.
Caiaphas and his whole “it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not” thing shouldn’t really be seen as a role model for judges. Just sayin’.
- I agree also by rules-based utilitarianism. It's important not just to consider the immediate, short-term utilitarian outcome, but to consider the utility of a world whereby we regularly make the same type of decision.
  In a world where a riot is all it takes to sentence unpopular people to death, you create a perverse incentive for people to riot -- or threaten to riot -- in order to pervert the proper carriage of justice. Who knows how much net harm would be done in this world ruled by mob justice.
  But the alternative is a world where rule of law exists, which I think is a far better world to live in.
- Justice be done though the heavens fall. It's a very old quote, originally in Latin, it's a core principle of a functioning justice system.
- Condemning an innocent person to death would be the direct responsibility of the Judge, whereas the judge is not directly responsible for the actions of the protestors.
  This logic could be applied to the original trolley problem as well - pulling the lever is condemning an innocent person to death and you are directly responsible for it, while you are not responsible for the trolley continuing on its course and killing five people.
  
  The difference, and what makes the trolley problem more effective I think, is that the trolley problem doesn’t give us the framework of a judicial system, rule of law, whereas the judge has that.
  I think, anyway. I only took intro philosophy classes.
  
  True but then that's where personal philosophy comes in. Doing nothing is still an action to me especially if I was aware. It's rather be responsible for one death rather then several.
- This highlights why the trolley problem is in fact a problem, letting worse things happen is seen as preferable to doing a bad thing. But letting a bad thing happen when it's guaranteed is kinda like doing that worse thing yourself, you have control through inaction.
  I know I'd be riddled with guilt but I hope I'd have the courage to do the bad thing to prevent the worse one

If you were the judge, what would you do?
Drive a trolley into the rioters
- Ah, the trolley solution.

This is even worse logically than the premise of the Trolley problem. You're basically reframing a terrorist or criminal holding a gun to a bystander's head and demanding something trying to say it'll be my fault the person dies if I don't give them whatever they ask for.
No. It's got nothing to do with me (or the judge). The criminals threatening violence are the bad people.
The only good "Trolley problem" rewrite I've heard is the crying baby and the hiding refugees. https://www.truthorfiction.com/crying-baby-ethics-question-causes-viral-controversy/
All the others are either too contrived (how did those people get in the trolley tracks? why is there no driver? why am I able to get to the lever or how do I know a fat man will detail the trolley?) Or it's just a terrorist blaming someone else for his actions. The crying baby one challenges me on a very deep level.
- I think you're being a little too quick to judge (no pun intended) by dismissing these scenarips as assigning blame. The point of these problems isn't to decide whose "fault" it is or who is the "bad guy" - they are thought experiments to explore what is "right" to do, according to various schools of thought.
  In the original trolley problem, or in this one, it's totally fair for you to say "whatever happens, it's not the chooser's fault - they were forced into this position, and so they cannot be to blame". That's fine - but even if they are absolved of blame the question still remains of what is right for them to do. If your answer is "whatever they want (because engaging with terorrists' demands is always wrong)", or "whatever is the opposite of what they're being pressured to do", or "whatever is the least action", or "whatever rminimizess suffering", or "whatever minimizes undeserved suffering", those are all still answers to the question, without any implications of blame or guilt to the chooser!
- The crying baby and the hiding refugees in M A S H messed me up as a kid.
  
  Don't you mean chicken?
  
  Messed up Hawkeye too.
- The only good option here is to imprison/kill the rioters. It's not like there's only 2 options in this scenario.
- Critiquing philosophical thought experiments for being unrealistic and angering you this much feels to me like you're missing the core concept here.
- Objecting to the details of the problems is spectactularly missing the point.
  You may as well object to a physics problem on the grounds that the accompanying diagram doesn't show a real rocketship, just a drawing of one. I mean sure, but that's not even remotely relevant to the question at hand. The illustration is just a mental aid to let you relate to the problem in a more hands-one manner, nothing more.
  By what principles do we determine that benefit to one may outweigh harm to another? What are the factors that must be taken into consideration? Do the principles you name generalise as well as you assume, or are there counter-cases that would evoke a different moral intuition despite being entirely analogous?
  It's easy to come up with neat, elegant statements couched in purely abstract terms, but the entire point of the exercise is to build a predictive model of your emotional response - and you test that by considering actual scenarios.
  Trying to kobyashi-maru your way around the scenario doesn't achieve anything, and just makes it harder to test the thing you were trying to.
  
  The entire point of these problems is that they serve as an intuition pump for what people are morally prepared to do.
  If the scenario doesn't make sense, people will respond to it in unpredictable ways.
  In the real world, if I push a fat man in front of a train it won't slow the train down and save the lives of five people people further down on the tracks, it'll just kill six people and I'll be a murderer.
  So when we find that people are more uncomfortable with pushing someone under a train vs throwing a switch to make the train hit them, does that mean that they instinctively don't trust the premise and think maybe that they've killed someone for no reason, or that they prefer the extra layer of indirection. We don't know, and this really reduces the value of the thought experiments.

Executing an innocent person is never just. A judge of the justice system must be just above anything else like politics or outside consequences.
The judge does not "let the people riot". Saying it like that misleads into thinking so. The judge is not the active part in that. The rioters are the actors and can and must be brought to justice when they can/later.
It's not on the judge to weigh on outsiders and outside consequences. They must gather and assess the concern at hand concerning a person at hand. Outside factors are irrelevant. Influences onto the case may be relevant, but not the other way around.
If a judge and by consequence the justice system loses it's justice and fairness it loses all of its most important, primary, and possibly single responsibility and trust. Without a just justice system, it is bound to end up will all manner of corruption, arbitrariness, and secondary factors of no societal trust in a justice system (leading people to execute self-justice; what the example tried to evade in the first place).

A judge is to apply the law without bias. If the judge stops doing that, then they just become a dictator and are no judge.
- There's no such thing as "without bias". But I mostly agree.

State violence is always worse, less acceptable, than interpersonal violence. Moreover, the judge has no reasonable reassurance that her wrong action now will lead to a satisfactory outcome later; that is to say, she could execute an innocent and the rioters might still attack.
All versions of the trolley problem are rooted in utilitarian ethics and inherit the flaws of that philosophy.
- Said the guy saying state violence is always worse than lynch mobs...
  Not a utilitarian, but goddamn what a weak line to lead with.
  
  That settles it. We will kill one person in a lottery every few months to placate the masses
  
  A lynch mob is terrible, a state-sanctioned lynch mob is worse, a state-enacted pogrom is even worse. I stand by what I said.
- All versions of the trolley problem are rooted in utilitarian ethics and inherit the flaws of that philosophy.
  What? The point is to demonstrate different approaches. Yes a utilitarian will answer a predictable way. You can answer a different way. That's fine. That's the point. There's no right answer, it's a thought experiment.
  
  a utilitarian will answer a predictable way
  That's the point. The "thought experiment" is constructed in a way that makes only utilitarian ethics have a clear right answer. Deontologists and virtue ethicists have to argue their positions and are still in a grey area, making their arguments appear dubious. It's structural favoritism.

Moral responsibility initially lies in the people responsible for creating the situation. The rioters are responsible regardless of which choice is made because they are the ones creating the circumstance in which there is no option to avoid injustice. If you're the judge, you're not responsible for the rioters killing more than one person, however unfortunate that is. You would be responsible for knowingly killing a known innocent.
Likewise, with the trolley problem, regardless of what choice the operator makes, whoever tied up the people and put them on the tracks and whoever caused the trolley to barrel out of control is at least initially responsible.
- It also drives home the point to anyone in a position of authority and responsibility: you will be asked to make compromises. You will be asked to make sacrifices. You must be willing to accept your own responsibility in that decision making, because you put yourself in position to do so.
  Sometimes, when faced with only negative choices, you have to be willing to accept the stain of the least evil of them.
  Kind of like every American president is an unindicted war criminal. We can imagine that most, if not all, of them didn't go into it to commit evil acts, but they had to be ready to do so if the other options were worse based on whatever calculus they were able to do at the time.

If you must kill the one to save the many, then ceterus paribus, you kill the one. It's shit, it's always shit, but it's less-shit than not doing it.
And you never, ever pretend that it was actively good. It's not a vector sum. You've still killed someone, the score isn't +9, it's (+10, -1), and those are not the same thing. You bear the blood on your hands forever, you accept the mantle of killer and you do it anyway. That's a shit deal, but life throws you shit deals. If you ever try to paint yourself the hero for it, you're a killer and a fucking coward.
Kid going for a nuclear bomb trigger disguised as a teddy bear, you're 250 meters away and only have a sniper rifle: sorry honey, :bang:
You may have saved the city, but you still killed a kid, and you're supposed to feel shit about that. And if you don't, something is very very wrong with you.
But ceterus is rarely paribus, is the problem. Couching the problem in this particular formulation robs the problem of its purity, and now you're tying in externalities like what happens to your society when you put the force of law behind decisions like this - and whether there are knock-on effects that skew the balance.
What you've got here is a hostage situation with extra steps. They're ill-defined hostages with no specific identity or location, which prevents you from just sending in a SWAT team, and that gives you a clear choice: capitulate with their demands, or sacrifice the hostages outright.
For an individual to capitulate is likely the better choice, as they aren't likely to be in this situation again, and a one-off less-worse situation beats the alternative.
But for an institution like the justice system to capitulate is pretty much guaranteed to be the worse choice, as they're going to be involved in the great majority of hostage situations going forward, and a reputation for capitulating will invite many, many more such cases. That anticipated harm can easily be expected to far outweigh the harm of sacrificing one set of hostages, and so the only reasonable choice, shit though it is, is to be a hardass about them and sacrifice them.

Option 2. If innocent people die, it won't be by my hand.
- And then you get to convict and execute the rioters that murdered people just because they got their nickers in a twist.

Isn’t this just a ripoff of the magical realist story about the utopia being propped up a single boy being tortured in the basement? Or did that story come after?
- The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas was written in the 70s. So the Trolley Problem came first. But, obviously, consequentialism predates them both
  Great story for anyone who's interested btw
- Ursula Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf

It's actually an excellent illustration of the systems of ethics that different branches of the government operate under. The judicial is explicitly dentological. There is no place for anything else. It's the legislature that needs consequentialist and utilitarian perspectives.
- This is an interesting take, but why shouldn't both be deontological? If what matters is the inherent moral worth of the action in the case with the judge, why shouldn't that be the salient feature when making laws for groups of people?
  
  I honestly don't tend to argue metaethics because I'm largely ignorant, so the legislature could really be based on whatever. Maybe it's better to say even a consequentialist view would favor using dentological ethics in the judiciary since that's the only way a judiciary would work in the long run. Maybe the same with utilitarian.

As usual with variations of the trolley problem, there's a lot of hidden assumptions baked into the question to oversimplify a more complex question, which leads to weird results.
For example, I'm given perfect knowledge of a lot of future events. I know that the crowd will riot if I don't convict, and I know that any attempt made by myself or anyone else to reason with them will fail. I also know that people won't riot over convicting an innocent person. There are all sorts of social consequences that could result from my decision, people gaining or losing faith in the system, an effect on my own career and ability to make future decisons, setting a precedent of expanding state power, the possibility that closing the case would let the actual perpetrator run free and cause more problems, etc.
If you ask me to make all the assumptions necessary to frame in the same way as the original trolley problem, then my answer has to be the same (lose one to save five), but those assumptions cause the hypothetical to be utterly divorced from reality. The real answer is not to convict because you're not a psychic.
- I take your point but this is more a complaint about thought experiments in general. They're useful tools to test our intuitions (moral intuitions in this case) but at some point they break down. Still, I like this example because (as you imply) the answer that people give to this scenario often contradicts their answer to the Trolly Problem. That's interesting enough to warrant posing the question.
  
  Yeah, it is a general criticism that can apply to a lot of thought experiments. And don't get me wrong, I enjoy the problem, it's just that I also enjoy critiquing it.
  I believe most people's initial response to the original problem is to pull, but far fewer people will push the fat man, and this is framed as highlighting a contradiction in people's beliefs. In reality, it shows that if you create an unrealistic scenario, it trips up people's intuitions. One reason people's intuitions tell them not to push the fat man is because their moral intuition is outweighed by their physical intuition. We all know that pushing a guy off a bridge won't actually stop a trolley (and even if it would, we can't know that), so if we start to consider doing something like that, our brains say, "No stop it idiot don't do that." But it's not telling us anything about morality, it's just telling us "that's not how physics works, dummy."
  Our intuitions are grounded in a world where physical and scientific laws apply and where we can never have perfect knowledge of future events, and the further you break from that, the less useful they are. But if the idea with the trolley problem is to help us identify what (if any) consistent logical precepts we can apply that match our moral intuitions, then we need to have simple, straight-forward questions. The original trolley problem is a little contrived, but doesn't break from reality nearly as hard as variations like the fat man. That means that the intuitive response to the original problem is more trustworthy and reliable, compared to whatever we feel about the more contrived ones.
  Imo pulling the lever is the correct answer, and whenever I see a variation that tries to contradict that, I look for ways that that variation breaks from reality in ways that would trip up my intuition. So in this case my intuition tells me not to convict, in "contradiction" of saying I'd pull the lever, but that's because my intuition hasn't internalized all the assumptions about magical psychic foreknowledge and stuff. When I consider the problem with all those assumptions, then I say, "Oh well in that case it's just like the trolley problem so pull," and in some cases that answer might make me come across as a psycho, but that's only because the hypothetical doesn't allow me to consider the full effects, risks, and ramifications that the action would have in the real world.
  So that's my full solution to the problem. I studied physics in uni so sometimes I might be a bit too inclined to find a final objective answer to a problem that's supposed to be open-ended lol

This is an interesting question. From Foot’s own neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalist perspective, I don’t think she would accept executing an innocent person.
Her account of the practical rationality of the Sudetenland farm boy who chose death over joining the Nazis seems to indicate her preference for avoiding participation in others’ evil acts.
Just as well, it seems to conflict with virtues such as courage (giving into fear of a riot), wisdom (abandoning the rule of law to placate a mob), justice (murdering an innocent person), and so on.

Execute everyone.
- Yepp, usually that's the option I choose in Total War too.
- Massacre tous!

Just accuse the riot's leader of the crime. Riot is settled and a person is punished for orchestrating violence. Get 2 birds stoned at once

These sort of thought experiments are helpful to drive home the point that in creating public policy, sometimes you do need a way to quantify the value of human life, which gets to the ugly truth that we do value lives differently everyday in society. ER triage will save the sickest person first, all else being equal. But when things get swamped children often get prioritized up. We value young life more. The trolley problem forces the concept of assigning value to life and taking action based on that.
This second problem doesn't do so as cleanly. In my opinion, the right answer is to let them riot, but also alert the police and seek to mitigate the harm they cause. This problem feels less about the quantification of human life than about moral culpability of actions. The trolley is acting as it must die to physics. It isn't good or evil and has no agency. On the second problem, the rioters have agency, are choosing to do evil, and should be fought against.
Just my quick take though.

The answer is dependent on context I think.
In a universe where the whole future of the world is laid out before you and you can choose 1 death or many deaths, then sure, pick the greater good.
The weakness of simplistic “greater good” automatic arguments is that in a real universe it opens you up to manipulation.
In the end, there’s no avoiding thinking through the incentives from all perspectives. And that indeed suggests not giving in to the rioters, to protect the integrity of the entire legal system and reduce the risk that every trial becomes a show trial dictated by whoever has the biggest mob.

i pick one of the rioters
- This is the shortest comment here, and perhaps the most elegant answer I've seen. Instead of shooting all of the rioters to prevent them from causing harm, you trick them into turning on each other, devouring just one of their number, and then after their internal melee you round up the survivors and throw them in a paddy wagon.

Commit suicide

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