Perhaps you have heard about The Runaway Trolley problem. It’s one of the popular thought experiments in philosophy where one is made to question their morality. Here is a simplified version of it.
Suppose there is a trolley car hurtling down the track at a high speed. Up ahead you see five workers standing on the track, tools in hand. The driver tries to stop, but he can’t. The brakes don’t work. You feel desperate, because you know that if it crashes into these five workers, they will all die.
Suddenly, you notice a side track, off to the left. There is a worker on that track, too, but only one. You realise that you can divert the trolley car (with a switch) onto the side track, killing the one worker, but sparing the five.
What should you do? Most people would say, “Divert! Tragic though it is to kill one innocent person, it’s even worse to kill five.” Sacrificing one life in order to save five does seem the right thing to do.
However, it becomes complicated when you consider more scenarios. For instance, what would you do if that one person is related to you? Or what if that one person is young and the other five old? Or one person is noble and the other five corrupt?
These scenarios in the runaway trolley problem pose a kind of moral dilemma which is not easy to resolve, unless you have clarity about your own values. You may think all these are hypothetical scenarios that we are not going to face in our lives. But, as Michael Sandel shows in his book Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do, this has real life consequences. Consider the case of the Afghan goatherds as Sandel discusses in the book.
The Afghan Goatherds
In June 2005, a special forces team made up of Petty Officer Marcus Luttrell and three other US Navy SEALs set out on a reconnaissance mission in Afghanistan, near the Pakistan border, in search of a Taliban leader, a close associate of Osama bin Laden. According to intelligence reports, their target commanded 140 to 150 heavily armed fighters and was staying in a village in the forbidding mountainous region.
Shortly after the special forces team took up a position on a mountain ridge overlooking the village, two Afghan farmers with about a hundred bleating goats happened upon them. With them was a boy about fourteen years old. The Afghans were unarmed. The American soldiers trained rifles on them, motioned for them to sit on the ground, and then debated what to do about them. On the one hand, the goatherds appeared to be unarmed civilians. On the other hand, letting them go would run the risk that they would inform the Taliban of the presence of the US soldiers.
As the four soldiers contemplated their options, they realised that they didn’t have any rope, so tying up the Afghans to allow time to find a new hideout was not feasible. The only choice was to kill them or let them go free.
After much contemplation and discussion, they let the goatherds go. Guess, what happened next?
About an hour and a half after they released the goatherds, the four soldiers found themselves surrounded by eighty to a hundred Taliban fighters armed with AK-47s and rocket propelled grenades. In the fierce firefight that followed, all three of Luttrell’s comrades were killed. The Taliban fighters also shot down a US helicopter that sought to rescue the SEAL unit, killing all sixteen soldiers on board.
Luttrell, severely injured, managed to survive by falling down the mountainside and crawling seven miles to a Pashtun village, whose residents protected him from the Taliban unit until he was rescued. In retrospect, Luttrell condemned his own vote not to kill the goatherds. “The deciding vote was mine, and it will haunt me till they rest me in an East Texas grave,” he said.
Moral Dilemmas
Few of us face choices as fateful as those that confronted the soldiers on the mountain or in the runaway trolley problem. But wrestling with their dilemmas sheds light on the way moral argument can proceed, in our personal lives and in the public square.
In Plato’s Republic, Socrates compares ordinary citizens to a group of prisoners confined in a cave. All they ever see is the play of shadows on the wall, a reflection of objects they can never apprehend. Only the philosopher, in this account, is able to ascend from the cave to the bright light of day, where he sees things as they really are. Socrates suggests that, having glimpsed the sun, only the philosopher is fit to rule the cave dwellers, if he can somehow be coaxed back into the darkness where they live.
The point is that in order to grasp the meaning of justice and the nature of the good life, we must rise above the prejudices and routines of everyday life.
But, at the same time, moral reflection needs some engagement with the common people, with the arguments and incidents that roil the public mind. Debates over bailouts and price gouging, income inequality and affirmative action, military service and same-sex marriage, are the stuff of political philosophy. They prompt us to articulate and justify our moral and political convictions, not only among family and friends but also in the demanding company of our fellow citizens.
At some point we have to recognise that there are no exact right or wrong answers, but only solutions which can work in a particular time and place. For that, we need to work collectively to understand each other’s values and decide our actions keeping the moral fabric of society in mind.
Reference books:
Kalampedia 