Another Paradox of Deontology
Another Paradox of Deontology
What if you accidentally flip the switch in the trolley problem?
Imagine one thinks that it’s wrong to flip the switch in the trolley problem. While we’ll first apply this scenario to the trolley problem, it generalizes to wider deontological commitments. The question is, suppose one accidentally flips the switch. Should they flip it back?
It seems that the answer is obviously not. After all, now there’s a trolley barreling toward one person. If you flip the switch it will kill five people. In this case, you should obviously not flip the switch.
However, there’s a very plausible principle that says that if an action is wrong to do, then if you do it by accident, you should undo it. Deontologists thus have to reject this principle. They have to think that actions are wrong, but you shouldn’t undo them.
This problem can also apply to the footbridge case. Suppose you accidentally push the guy. Should you pull him back up? No — if you come across a person who is going to stop a train from killing five, you obviously shouldn’t preemptively save him by lifting him up, costing five lives.
This also applies to the organ harvesting case. Suppose you harvest the guys organs and put it in five other people. However, you can take the five organs out of the people, killing them, and put it back in the original person, saving him. Should you do that? Of course not!
The switch case seems stronger than the others, here. In the pushing case, I could see many deontologists claiming that you DO in fact have an obligation to rescue the one from the tracks (leaving the five to die) if you were responsible for his being in harm's way in the first place (assuming you weren't similar responsible for the position of the five). Likewise in transplant, if you've taken out the organs but haven't yet delivered them, but could put them back in and magically restore the one to full health, deontologists will surely say that you should: the one has a stronger claim to those organs than anyone else does. But you may not reclaim them after implanting the organs in the five, as removal at that stage would then violate *their* bodily integrity (and you obviously shouldn't "undo" an act in a way that involves committing *further* rights violations!). Much depends on the precise details, for deontologists, so it can be difficult to formulate universal principles that they'll agree with. The best you can do is general principles, with "all else being equal" clauses. But bear in mind that deontologists will often deny that all else is equal.
> you can take the five organs out of the people, killing them, and put it back in the original person, saving him
Deontologists will not be impressed by this last paragraph: it is unintuitive that you could take out five of a man's critical organs without killing him, and then put them back in again later. And a devoted deontologist, I wager, is not the sort of person who thinks through the logical implications of an incredibly far-fetched scenario and then says "oh I guess my moral system is wrong, then" and becomes thenceforce utilitarian.
Better to stick with the clumsy-oaf trolley problem. We've all been there!