Trolley Problem/Consistency in Ethics

[I_am_not_mafia]

Problem with the transplant dilemma is that it is normal to go to the doctors and get healed. It is not normal to go into the doctors and have your organs harvested. Society would not function if that were so and ethics is primarily a means for us to get along with each other. It is normal to come down with ill health that can kill us. So with the transplant dilemma what is being suggested is an abnormal decision to solve 5 normal situations.

I don't know about America but in the UK at least it is not normal to find yourself tied to a railway track.

[Catholic_Lady]

The 2 scenarios are ethically different.

In the first scenario you are diverting a train so that the least amount of people are killed. The one person dying is an unintended consequence of you rescuing 5 people. In Catholic moral theology we call this the principle of double effect. A moral loophole, if you will, in extreme moral dilemmas.

In the second scenario, you are actively and directly killing an innocent person by your own choice, which is never moral.

[SteveII]

The thought experiments are not equivalent. In the trolley scenario , you have control and responsibility over the thing that is causing the death(s). In the organ scenario, you don't have control and responsibility over the thing that is causing the deaths. What you have is control over one solution to the problem that may or may not be better than the problem. Nowhere in the organ scenario is there any responsibility to decide. 

To whomever chooses "consistent", that is disturbing, but in line with the morality one can glean from a totally naturalistic/deterministic worldview--which is to say an entirely subjective morality.

[Catholic_Lady]

The thought experiments are not equivalent. In the trolley scenario , you have control/responsibility over the thing that is causing the death(s). In the organ scenario, you don't have control/responsibility over the thing that is causing the deaths. What you have is control over one solution to the problem that may or may not be better than the problem. Nowhere in the organ scenario is there any responsibility to decide. 

To whomever chooses "consistent", that is disturbing, but in line with the morality one can glean from a totally naturalistic/deterministic worldview--which is to say an entirely subjective morality.

Exactly.

[vorlon13]

I'm not even sure New York state's depraved indifference law would require anyone to pull the switch or do the surgery.

What if the 5 people on the track were instead starving to death and person #6 could be sacrificed to feed them ?

[vulcanlogician]

The thought experiments are not equivalent. In the trolley scenario , you have control and responsibility over the thing that is causing the death(s). In the organ scenario, you don't have control and responsibility over the thing that is causing the deaths. What you have is control over one solution to the problem that may or may not be better than the problem. Nowhere in the organ scenario is there any responsibility to decide. 

To whomever chooses "consistent", that is disturbing, but in line with the morality one can glean from a totally naturalistic/deterministic worldview--which is to say an entirely subjective morality.

Exactly.

I personally would pull the lever to save the lives, but I would NOT conduct the organ transplants.

I agree that the thought experiments are not equivalent, but I disagree as to why. In both scenarios, there is a force which threatens the lives of five people. In both scenarios you can either NOT ACT which will result in the death of five people-- or you can ACT which will save five people but BECAUSE YOU ACTED one person will die. Why do you think you have "control and responsibility" in one situation and not the other? I would say in BOTH situations you have responsibility and (limited) control.

If you are going to argue that you don't have responsibility in the organ scenario, what is it essentially that makes it different from the runaway trolley?

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I guess there is a third solution...

[brewer]

Plaeese, one individual being a donor match for 5 different individuals. Poppy cock!

Do the right thing and start a PCA morphine drip on the five. Give them a choice in their own fate. Give the potential donor some Tums and kick him/her out the door.

[Catholic_Lady]

Vulcan, I agree with Steve that the 2 scenarios are not morally equivalent, though not sure I would use the "responsibility/no responsibility" way of explaining why. Ill leave that up to steve since it was his analysis.

For my own part, I'd use the principle of double effect like I explained in my first post.

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The doctrine (or principle) of double effect is often invoked to explain the permissibility of an action that causes a serious harm, such as the death of a human being, as a side effect of promoting some good end. According to the principle of double effect, sometimes it is permissible to cause a harm as a side effect (or “double effect”) of bringing about a good result even though it would not be permissible to cause such a harm as a means to bringing about the same good end.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/double-effect/

[Homeless Nutter]

Everybody died in both my experiments. I don't know what I did wrong...

[The Grand Nudger]

I agree with Steve, somewhat, until he starts rambling about "totally naturalistic this or thats" as a symptom of his compulsions.  

An organ harvesting doctor who becomes the cause of death directly for one to save many has not stumbled upon anything.  Further, he has a consequentialist duty to -be- a doctor, rather than play angel of death.  Imagine the state of medicine and the world when going to a hospital with stomach pain gets you eyed as a bodyfarm for other sick people rather than medical attention.  There are always his own organs to consider.  Death..in his example, is a slow moving trolley and he has a decidedly more ethical option from among a field of exclusively suboptimal solutions.  He could choose to kill one to save five...or he could heal the patient and then forfeit his own life to kill one and save six.  Tell me, from a consequentialist standpoint which is a better trade for 1 life, 5 or 6?  

In the trolley example..the switch thrower does not have the option of forfeiting his own life to save others.  He does still have a normative consequentialist duty, as the doctor does, to try and save people.  In this, the choice to save five over one is to seek the best possible outcome in his field of exclusively sub-optimal solutions.  If we propose that this were the same person in two different situations in their life it;s easy to see that in saving five in the trolley example a person is being consistent with their consequentialist ethics.,..but having had their moral agency compromised by mortality has chosen a course of action in body farming quantitatively less optimal in killing 1 to save 5 rather than killing 1 and saving 6.  

In the one, the subject could do no better.  In the other, he has failed by degree and made himself a murderer in the process.