Sam Harris has often referred us to a specific hypothetical moral dilema which forms what appears to be a cornerstone in his philosophy concerning the practice of religion, and in all likelihood one of the key foundations in what appears to be his tacit, if not explicit, endorsement of certain aggressive aspects of US foreign policy. The dilema proposes a scenario in which a runaway train cart is on course to wipe out a group of workers plying their trade on the track. According to the rules of the dilema only one of 2 possible courses of action may be taken. One is to do nothing whilst the other is to kill an otherwise uninvolved individual, the result of which will be that the cart does not go on to kill the group of rail workers. Sam comes down in favour of killing the innocent bystander on the basis of the lower resultant body count. This Sam does without equivocation, as though it were an obvious a conclusion to reach, just as choosing not to open fire on a crowd of shoppers simply because you have a gun. Sam does not explore the ethics of the other option in our raiload dilema, and that is to take no action, though he gently urges us to except his conclusion on the basis that truths may in fact be less than obvious to us, citing the Double Jeapardy 3 door dilema as another such case. In fairness to Sam he does explore the alternative in a different scenario, in which we consider the possibility of sacrificing a hospital patient suffering say only a minor injury in order to save the lives of several other patients who are in need of critical organs which our patient happens to have. In this scenario Sam comes down on the side of not sacrificing the individual for the sake of the body count. Is Sam suffering from a case of what Orwell called double think? I.e the ability of the human mind to simultaneously accept two mutually incompatible statements or beliefs. In fairness to Sam I should say that I don't know what Sam's reasoning is though he does seem to expect us to find it obvious, and it maybe the case that Sam pictures different conditions to that which he appears to me to present. That said, I would like to go back to the railway scenario and examine the option of taking no action.
The principle view point in the philosophy of ethics, to me at least, is of the actors or catalysts in a given scenario. That is to say that what the rest world is doing is irrelevant, what matters is the action or inaction of the actor. This, on the face of it, might appear to lend favour to Sam's argument in the case of the runaway train cart. However if we start to adjust some of the criteria of the scenario we may unveil a broader picture that is not obvious from simply taking the train cart scenario in isolation. For example let's suppose that the innocent bystander is Sam's own child, assuming Sam has a child for the sake of the argument. Sam doesn't know any of the track workers in peril, but according to Sam's moral reasoning we should assume that he would be at least in favour of killing his child to save the track workers, whomever they may be. I think it would be hard for anyone to believe that Sam would actually support the notion of killing his child and thus hold any respect for statements by Sam to the effect that he would kill his child if presented with the scenario for real. Could you support the notion of killing your own child in this scenario? Your answer to that question is what we would call a moral value. So what has changed? We have substituted his child for an anonymous individual, but the moral dilemma itself has not changed. Now, I don't want to be seen to be putting words into Sam's mouth so I shall just remind you that Sam, as far as I know has not made his position in our altered scenario known, and for all I know he may not have even thought about it. We do however appear to have a conflict of morality here to resolve, as I suspect most people fall strongly in favour of not killing their children, which I believe to be a good thing, and that is also a moral value. So, what is at the heart of the conflict? Well, it would seem to me to be down to the question of action or inaction, physically at least.
On the matter of action versus inaction I believe it to be valuable to explore the ethics of inaction as the complexity of real life may reveal more about the reality of outcomes versus hypothetical scenarios in which other considerations are excluded for the purpose of building an ethical argument. First off, in our railway crisis, we are urged to ignore external actors, be they natural or intelligent. So we are encouraged not to consider that we do not know that everything will turn out as we are led to believe. For example, let's suppose our group of rail workers are in fact Nazi sympathisers trying to dislodge a rail so as to kill the Jewish occupants of a later train. This fact we add to the scenario, but we do not allow the principle actor and would be saviour to know this information. If we sacrifice our innocent bystander, the Nazi plot remains uncovered by virtue of them having been saved from a grisly meeting with a fast moving and very heavy machine. The Nazi conspirators are then free to go on and successfully derail and kill a train load of people. OK, it's a fairly unlikely real world scenario today if we are thinking of the context of Nazis, however it may not be such an unlikely scenario if we change the actors and props to a more contemporary context.
Let's now consider another alternative to the railway scenario. Supposing instead that the rail points between the train and the unaware workers are set to divert the train cart down a different line thus averting disaster. Again our saviour is unaware of this fact or worse still is of the belief that the points are set such that the workers will meet their destiny when in fact they are set such that the workers would be saved. In the latter case, our would-be saviour would be compelled to switch the points based on his belief, but in doing so would seal the fate of our rail workers. In the former case he may have in fact killed his son or an innocent bystander when in fact the workers are in no danger. Now we start to see that with every moral dilemma, in the real world at least, we can't know all of the factors that are critical to the outcomes. It is also reality that all too often intervention i.e. action, in fact turns out to be a moral travesty. The would-be saviour is not in control of everything in the scenario nor are they aware of everything and thus they cannot be held responsible for a situation not of their making, in my opinion. A passive observer has no impact upon a system thus the system remains the product of the histories of the actors in the system and thus if any responsibility maybe apportioned it must be to them. Does this make a case for not acting to intervene ever? I don't believe so. What I have done here is to show that complex situations that for which we cannot be fully aware of we should not simply jump aboard the action wagon but watch peacefully and passively and learn. In war and conflict actors following the action course are almost always the ones doing the killing or at least supporting it. These scenarios are vastly more complex than in our railroad scenarios yet the moral actors are always those with guns that choose not to use them, inaction. It is the same principle in peaceful non-cooperative protest. Protesters pursue their peaceful course of action and in doing so expose the immorality of their opponents who choose the course of physical intervention. Another example is the role of international obervers in conflict zones.
Many people try to persuade us that inaction is a form of complicity. I reject this notion on the grounds that I think it is willful ignorance of the factors of a situation that is tantamount to complicty and in order not to engage in such ignorance we must observe and learn.
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