Public Policy and the 'Trolley Problem'

Well – for starters - What the hell is the Trolley Problem?

The Trolley Problem is a post-medieval ‘Angels on a Pinhead’ conundrum posed by modern philosophers and public policy analysts. Introduced some decades ago by Philippa Foot, it exemplifies ‘experimental philosophy’.

As Professor Simon Blackburn of the Department of Moral Science at the University of Cambridge explains: ‘Here a railway trolley is careering down a track, certain to kill five workers, unless you pull a lever deflecting onto a sidetrack – on which, unfortunately there is one worker who will then be killed. Is it permissible, or obligatory, to pull the lever? Would you say the same about pushing an innocent but fat bystander off a bridge into the path of the trolley, stopping it – but only by killing him?’

Experimental philosophers poll people on issues like this to probe the influence of responsibility, intention, proximity and outcomes, under various scenarios.

Peter Singer’s book set me thinking about this again.

He describes how his grandmother Amalie survived Theresienstadt and possible transportation to Auschwitz by making herself indispensable to the German authorities. Among her task was the compilation of lists for the transports - in response to demands from the Germans to the Camp Elders to organize quotas of Jews who were to be transported. As time passed, she was all too well aware that the transport dockets were death tickets and not passports to a new settlement.

Peter singer quotes Norbert Teller who was faced with similar dilemmas: ‘Self-doubts arise in all of us about our ethics, our humanity, fairness, justice, and decency’... and in ‘life threatening circumstances we relinquish hesitantly, slowly, unhappily all the rules, laws and principles of decency’... ‘Who can say today whether all of this was excusable? Whoever has not lived for a few weeks, months or even years in such a situation can hardly comprehend the indescribably immense power of self-preservation’.

Better I think that philosophers and public policy advisors consult biographies and family histories on ethics and morality, than that they postulate abstract problems that allow them and their guinea pig subjects to pretend to play God.

One possible test of good public policy formulation could be that both the process and its outcomes exhibit and extend the best of common humanity - in the circumstances.