Solving the Trolley Problem

One might despair of ever arriving at a principle adequate to capturing and accommodating our intuitions about the full range of cases that have come to be known as “trolley problems” (roughly speaking, cases where one must choose whether to kill some to save others). But suppose there were such a principle, as indeed I imagine there probably is. For the moment, just call it Q. Is there such a principle? As I say, I find it plausible to think there is. After all, something generates our intuitive reactions to cases. So the odds are there is some statement of a rule or law (or a set of rules or laws) that accurately predicts our intuitions. Properly reformulated, this rule could provide the proposed Q. (Here’s the idea behind this talk of “reformulating” the rule: start with a rule that accurately predicts the precise circumstances in which we will have the intuition that a given act is permissible; restate it as a moral principle, one which correspondingly asserts that acts are permissible in precisely those circumstances. This principle will, by hypothesis, match our intuitions about cases; so that should be the desired Q.) Admittedly, we might not always judge in conformity to Q: perhaps in some situations, or when thinking about certain cases, various psychological factors interfere with our ability to judge in perfect conformity with Q. Even if so, it might still be the case that Q is the best match for our various intuitions. But for simplicity, let us put this complicating possibility aside and suppose we can OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, Fri Aug 28 2015, NEWGEN