Another problem with deontology

This one is original to me

Let’s start assuming one holds the following view

Deontological Bridge Principle: This views states that you shouldn’t push one person off a bridge to stop a trolley from killing five people.

This is obviously not morally different from

Deontological Switch Principle: You shouldn’t push a person off a bridge to cause them to fall on a button which would lift the five people to safety, but they would not be able to stop the trolley.

In both cases you’re pushing a person off a bridge to save five. Whether their body stop the train or pushes a button to save other people is not morally relevant.

Suppose additionally that one is in the Switch scenario. They’re deciding whether to make the decision and a genie appears to them and gives them the following choice. He’ll push the person off the bridge onto the button, but then freeze the passage of time in the external world so that the decision maker can have ten minutes to think about it. At the end of the ten minutes, they can either lift the one person who was originally on the bridge back up or they can let the five people be lifted up.

It seems reasonable to accept the Genie’s option. If, at the end of ten minutes, they decide that they shouldn’t push the person, then they can just lift the person back up such that nothing actually changes in the external world. However, if they decide not to then they’ve just killed one to save five. This action is functionally identical to pushing the person in switch. Thus, accepting the genie’s offer is functionally identical to just giving them more time to deliberate.

It’s thus reasonable to suppose that they ought to accept the genie’s offer. However, at the end of the ten minutes they have two options. They can either lift up one person who they pushed before to prevent that person from being run over, or they can lift up the five people. It seems obvious that they should lift up the five people. But this is analogous to the switch case, which is analogous to bridge.

We can consider a parallel case with the trolley problem. Suppose one is in the trolley problem and a genie offers them the option for them to flip the switch and then have ten minutes to deliberate on whether or not to flip it back. It seems obvious they should take the genie’s offer.

Well at the end of ten minutes they’re in a situation where they can flip the switch back, in which case the train will kill five people instead of one person, given that it’s already primed to hit one person. It seems obvious in this case that they shouldn’t flip the switch back. Thus, deontology has to hold that taking an action and then reversing that action such that nothing in the external world is different from if they hadn’t taken and then reversed the action, is seriously morally wrong.

If flipping the switch is wrong then it seems that flipping the switch to delay the decision ten minutes, but then not reversing the decision, is wrong. However, flipping the switch to delay the decision ten minutes and then not reversing the decision is not wrong. Therefore, flipping the switch is not wrong.

Maybe you hold that there’s some normative significance to flipping the decision and then flipping it back, making it so that you should refuse the genie’s offer. This runs into issues of its own. If it’s seriously morally wrong to flip the switch and then to flip it back, then flipping it an arbitrarily large number of times would be arbitrarily wrong. Thus, an indecisive person who froze time and then flipped the switch back and forth 10000000000000000^1000000000000000000000000000000000000000^10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000^100000000000000000000000000000000 times, would have committed the single worst act in history by quite a wide margin. This seems deeply implausible.

Either way, deontology seems to run afoul of the deeply intuitive principle that taking an action and then undoing it can be very bad. This is quite unintuitive. If you undo an action, such that the action had no effect on anything because it was cancelled out, that can’t be very morally wrong. Much like writing can’t be bad if one hits the undo button and replaces it with good writing, it seems like actions that are annulled can’t be morally bad.

It also runs afoul of another super intuitive principle, according to which if an act is bad, it’s good to undo that act. On deontological accounts, it can be bad to flip the switch, but also bad to unflip the switch. This is extremely counterintuitive.

I thought of this argument when I was thinking over how deontologists would respond to the question of “if you accidentally hit the switch in the trolley problem, should you switch it back?”