How To Beat "The Trolley Problem"

Why Conservatives Hate "Harm Reduction"

“A trolley is on a track, if it continues along this track it will crush 5 people who have been tied to the tracks (for reasons unknown). You are standing at a switch which allows you to change the trolley’s destination and save the five people. However, on this other track there is another person who’s been tied to it (for reasons unknown), and will be crushed by trolley if you flip the switch. In this situation, what is the most ethical decision you can make?”

The “Trolley Problem” should sound fairly familiar. It’s a common philosophical thought-problem, it was on an episode of The Good Place, and it’s been meme’d into oblivion. What is particularly interesting about it is not so much the question itself, as how one’s answer can change based on what can be applied to the question. Who is tied to the tracks? Why have they been tied there? If you change the destination will the trolley only kill one person, or will it hunger for more after acquiring a taste for human blood? It’s complicated.

Thought experiments like this aren’t meant to prepare us for our futures as train operators, but to help us understand our own ethical worldview as well as that of others. Years ago, mining into the depths of YouTube debate-lord content, I heard an anti-choice advocate bring this up. Their answer to the Trolley problem was this: I do nothing.

“If I make the conscious decision to change the course of the trolley, then I am killing someone. But if I refuse to make a decision, then those people are already dead.”

Essentially, they had “beaten” the trolley problem because to them, it’s a question about moral culpability as opposed to responsibility. To them, the nature of the problem is not “How do I prevent the most of suffering?” it is: “How do I avoid moral responsibility for the death of one or more persons?”

i.e. “How do I make this about me?”

This is actually a really enlightening moment, because it’s illustrative of a greater pattern in neoconservativism and its all-or-nothing approach to morality. Their explanation was basically Kantian ( whom I’m paraphrasing here): “The ends do not justify the means, because people are ends in-and-of-themselves. It is dehumanizing and unethical use people as means for your own ends, no matter what they may be.” Now, I’ve fallen for this one before (in fact, it was basically the whole point of a video essay I did on Dear Evan Hansen), but I think I’ve had a slight change of heart. Choosing to do nothing when you have the ability to do something - throwing the switch and saving 5 lives - is in itself a choice. The person who refuses to choose in that moment is not thinking about the 5 people on the tracks, but of their own moral standing: “If I were to save 5 lives but knowingly kill one in the process, that makes me murderer and nothing more”.

So first off: That’s bullshit, the one does not negate the other. In emergency situations when doctors must practice triage, they are not killing the people they are unable to save, they are saving who they can. Turning the question of how to reduce harm into how one can preserve their own integrity, dehumanizes people into means by which you get to make yourself feel morally just.

It gets even more interesting when you think about how placing one’s own moral standing as the primary focus of an ethical dilemma becomes a part of another philosophical question: Should we think of justice as punitive or reparative?

Left v. Right political philosophy has always fascinated me, and I think this was one of the more important insights on the differences between the two.

For Conservatives, the rejection of harm reduction strategies like safe injection sites, decriminalized sex-work, or safe-supply of drugs has never been about saving money (which they do) or saving lives (which they also do), it’s been about punishing individual behaviour. The never-ending abortion debate makes this clear as day when some anti-choice advocates come out against birth control. Some of them even just say it out loud: “We don’t want you to have pre-marital sex without consequences,” which then becomes: “We will not let you escape the consequences of your actions”.

You can think of this simply as: “We want you to suffer.”

Ironically, the reason that these moral stances are made is because not doing so would mean remaining neutral in the face of an ethical dilemma. Abortion wasn’t considered an issue for conservatives until right-wing think tanks in the 70s started telling Christians and Catholics that allowing these laws to pass would make them morally complicit in sin.  

Instilling a policy of harm reduction means accepting there will be some harm. Yes, drug addiction is a tragedy and while safe injection sites don’t “condone” addiction, they do - in a way - “enable” it (although reducing stigma is a better way to reach out to those who suffer from addiction). Admitting that you are willing to accept some responsibility for the consequences of your choice means that you are morally responsible for the negative consequences as well as the positive: addiction can ruin lives and destroy families, but safe supply and safe injection sites prevent people from dying.

When you change the destination of the trolley, you are responsible for the ones you save as well as the ones you don’t. It is the difference between “killing one person”, “saving 4 lives”, and “saving 5 lives at the cost of one”. 

Within this tiny, vacuum-sealed question (which I’ll admit is not as morally complex as the real world), the person who decides that choosing to do nothing in order to avoid moral culpability has decided that their own morals are worth the lives of 5 people, but this same thought applies even if the number is 5000 people.

For these people, it doesn’t matter how many lives can be improved through harm reduction strategies if it means they must compromise their morals. Innuendo Studios “Alt-Right Playbook” series, covers this topic in his “I Hate Mondays” episode so I’d recommend watching that (as well as the whole series) but this has been ringing true to me for some time. You hear it in arguments that say: “Well we can’t just give people housing,” or “We can’t just let these people use drugs”. Anti-choice advocates admit that abortions will continue even if they’re criminalized, their stated goal is to make abortion “unthinkable”. Of course, for something to be criminalized it would require enforcement; which means the results of criminalizing abortion aren’t necessarily “less abortions”, they are “punish those who provide abortions, and (though not all will admit it) punish those who seek abortions”. It’s the exact same results of marginalization from the war on drugs or sex-work: a group of people now become incapable of seeking recourse from law-enforcement because their actions were already criminal. Now you have a what is essentially a disposable population: a group of people you are free to commit crimes against, because what are they gonna do? Go to the cops?

In this case the cost of one’s moral integrity becomes the creation and preservation of a group that is less moral than one’s own, and must to suffer the consequences of their behaviour without reprieve. To prevent any or all of their suffering would implicate oneself in their behaviour, costing one their integrity, which is too high a price.

Since laws are not inherently moral or immoral, this brings us to what is known as Wilhoit’s Law:

“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” 

When we understand justice as meant to punish those who break the law instead of working to heal those who suffer (commonly referred to as “social justice”), this is the price you pay, and there are a lot of people are who willing to pay for it.

The thing is, it’s really fucking expensive.

The costs are mounting too. When we continue to fund police departments over schools, housing, and infrastructure; we create an environment where the police budget can only go up at the cost of everything else. Arguments against student loan forgiveness (or free education) in the US turned into: “Well, that would mean those who can already afford their debt would have theirs forgiven, meaning we would be helping those who don’t deserve it alongside the ones who do. This would be bad.” Arguments like this are made by people so terrified of helping someone deemed “undeserving” that they would rather see everyone suffer than be caught helping some jerk. “Why should I help you if you could be an asshole?” This lack of trust devolves into misanthropy and nihilism pretty easily: If we can’t truly trust others because we’ll never know what they’re thinking, why bother being nice to anyone?

Justice as punishment is not justice; it is pouring salt on the entire garden because we can’t allow the weeds to win.

Plus there’s a better way solve The Trolley Problem.

Have a good weekend!