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Thursday, June 14, 2007 - 01:02 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

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Trolleys And Votes

Time to knock off some of the stuff I've accumulated at the bottom of my todo.txt file.

Today's discussion stems from the Trolley Problem. No, not whether to return it to its originating supermarket after wheeling it to one's car, but something slightly more weighty. In its basic form, the trolley problem states: Imagine a trolley running down a track towards five people. It will kill those five people if it strikes them. You however stand at a switch that will redirect the trolley down another track before hitting those people, unfortunately that track has a single person on it. Should you flip the switch?

At its most basic, the question is whether we can, or should, trade multiple lives for one, if there are no other possibilities. However, slight variances in the question substantially affect the responses received, as mentioned in the Wikipedia article. Suppose instead that there is no switch, but a very fat, wheelchair-bound man is seated next to you, you know that only his mass is sufficient to stop the trolley, and that you can surely push him into the path of the trolley. Though it is still a one life for five exchange, most people disagreed with sacrificing the fat man while they approved of flipping the switch.


How Ah?

The main explanation then goes along the lines that deflecting the trolley with the switch kills the unfortunate one as a passive side-effect, while pushing the fat unfortunate one down is an active decision to do him harm; However, personally I find that this does not capture the gist of the objection. Comparing the situations, in the first case the single to-be-victim was also originally in no danger at all.

Now, utilizing the CS technique of transforming problems (I knew CS was good for something), let us now assert that in the second case, instead of having the fat unfortunate in a wheelchair, we have him as a passenger in another trolley on a track that crosses over the first track. So, instead of having to take the trouble to push him down onto the track, all we have to do is to flip a switch, and let his trolley cross the track at the right moment and take the lethal impact. With this change, the provision that the unfortunate has to be fat disappears (it was probably included to preclude self-sacrificial respondents from volunteering en masse to throw themselves on the tracks).

The dilemma is now closer to the original - do not flip the switch, and five die. Flip, and one who would otherwise have lived die in their stead. There is still a difference: In the original case, flipping the switch redirects the trolley to hit the unfortunate. In the adjusted case, flipping the switch redirects the unfortunate to hit the trolley. Is there a material difference between the two? I would say no, with support from Newton's Third Law.

Why the distaste for pushing Mr. Chubby onto the tracks, then, if the situation is fundamentally the same? My hypothesis is that doing the pushing physically, instead of the more detached switch-flipping procedure, is the key factor in the respondents' objections - It brings the choice too close, too personal for comfort. Yet, is this a good reason? Perhaps we all like to believe, when making such difficult decisions that impact others, that "Well, yeah, I made the choice, but I didn't really make it, you see.", and that is simpler by being further away, so we can pretend.

The beauty of the dilemma is that it can be cast on many varied circumstances. One such follow-up is the Transplant Problem, where a single person's organs just happen to be suitable for five others, who would surely die without them. If there were a 100% success rate of the transplant operations, would it be right to kill the one so the five may live? Of course, stating just this would likely conjure visions of five decrepit old fellows who wouldn't live much longer even with the organs, so let me offer a stricter version:

In an orphanage, there are six babies, five of whom lack one organ each, and a healthy sixth who happens to have organs suitable for transplanting into all five. If the sixth is killed for his organs, the other five who receive his organs are guaranteed to be as healthy as normal babies after their operations. Should the transplants take place?

Is this significantly different from the Trolley problem? This is a tough one. For one, the Trolley problem imparts to me a sense of split-second, lesser-of-two-evils feel in an extraordinary situation, while the Transplant problem seems more premeditated, more planned, more... cold. Likely, respondents to the Transplant problem have a dim awareness that supporting the pure utilitarian view here would imply that they were amenable to their own scheduled disassembly on an operating table for the greater good, which just feels creepier and wrong, while they may have slightly less complaints about having a rampaging trolley redirected onto them as a "side-effect" of there being more people on the other track. As the Aussies say, fair dinkum, mate!

This sense of "fair play" appears pretty strong in many humans - supposedly subjects are more likely to object to using another trolley to save five people, if the end result is that the colliding trolleys roll down a hill and kill a man sleeping in a hammock in his backyard, than in the standard Trolley problem. Why? Because he is not "involved". This suggests that people may attach some responsibility to a person being on the tracks in the first place, kind of like a person participating in contact sports taking on the risks of injury himself. Interestingly, the Wikipedia version states that the people involved are tied to the tracks, presumably not of their own free will - so they are not responsible, but still "involved"? Personally, I do not see any difference between this and the original Trolley problem.

More complications - what if the single person is the President of the United States, while the five people are just average citizens? Hmmmmm, perhaps not a good example, Bush probably wouldn't stand a chance, I think some would ask for a second trolley just to make sure. Again, let me try to reformulate the question:

Suppose you are on a ship, and a renowned cancer scientist and an ordinary guy happen to fall off opposite ends of the ship simultaneously. Neither can swim, and the ship has only one lifesaving float, so one will surely drown while the other is saved. Whom should you throw the float to, assuming that you know neither personally?

Here, the question is whether one with very probably a far higher value to society should be given precedence (unless the overwhelmingly recognized societal value is egalitarianism). Or should we rightly flip a coin instead? Again, the urgentness of the above situation may make the "spur of the moment" excuse applicable, so suppose the same two people are stricken with a terminal disease that will kill them in half a year, and you hold the only dose of medication. How do we decide?

Let it be Einstein before his prime, and an average Joe. Made your choice? How about Einstein and two average Joes? Three? Five? A hundred? What if that average Joe is a convicted murderer? How about Einstein versus a hundred murderers? If we choose Einstein over an average Joe, how about a slightly less brilliant scientist? Let's say, just a Dean of the local university? What about a promising graduate student? Or if he got a few more distinctions in the A Levels? Where do we draw the line?

This gray area is the most interesting part of any deliberations, methinks.

But ultimately, someone has to make the decisions, no? For most of us, may we be blessed not to have to encounter them; Still, we do have to choose, even if the scales are smaller, the outcomes more obfuscated and the responsibility sometimes more diffuse, for not to choose is also a choice. What value a life? The easy way is to insist indignantly that all lives are priceless, and that we should not be so crass as to tag a number on such a divine gift; But, as an economics textbook would say, to refuse to put a value is to allocate it no value at all. How then would cost-benefit analyses for hospitals, for schools, for other quality-of-life institutions, be done? Yes, it is disconcerting to consider oneself in numbers, but I hope that some competent planner somewhere is doing just that.

Another question I've long wanted to get off my back is the sacrosanct democratic value of one man, one vote. That's what democracy is about, isn't it? Singapore flirted with the idea of "some men, two votes", which was obviously not taken well in some quarters; But quite other than the fact that many men don't get a vote at all anyway due to lack of credible opposition, even in other countries the people seem oblivious to the fact that some votes are worth less than others.

For instance, the US Senate admits two senators per state, regardless of population - Hypothetically, suppose the 24 states with the largest populations are in favour of some issue, while the other 26 are against it. Using the 2006 figures, the 24 most populous states contain 80.99% of the US population - yet in a straight vote in the Senate their interests would be defeated by the 19% minority. Makes one man, two votes seem tame, doesn't it? Granted, this is rather far-fetched, and the Senate is far from the only font of power in the US, but it remains clear that not all votes are created equal.

Consider now the United Nations. A quote in Norman Lowe's Mastering World History, my secondary school textbook and still one of my favourites, always ticked me: Supposedly, the Americans wanted the countries who gave the most money to have greater influence in how the funds were spent, but smaller countries criticized this as "undemocratic", with one delegate from Sri Lanka summing their thoughts up as "In our political processes at home, the wealthy do not have more votes than the poor. We should like this to be the practice in the UN as well."

A nice sentiment no doubt, but I always wondered after reading this line if the smaller countries would then accept having voting power proportional to their population. (Ah, for a cheeky Chinese delegate to rebut, "In our political processes at home, the few do not have more votes than the many. We should like this to be the practice in the UN as well.") As mentioned in the relevant article, the one state one vote system in the UN General Assembly theoretically allows states containing just 8% of the world population to pass resolutions requiring a two-thirds vote. The voting power of a Singaporean is about that of a hundred Americans, or three hundred Chinese. Impressive! Then again, one Marshall Islander's say is worth... 66 Singaporeans, so we shouldn't be too proud either.

Of course, this made totally no sense, so the bulk of the UN's power is vested in the Security Council where the big guys can veto any resolutions, which is a more accurate representation of the true power structure. But hey, one state, one vote, so democracy is served! We are happy siblinghood of nations!



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