Questions: The Trolley Problem and Doing/Allowing

Question 1

In the footbridge case, is the large man's death best described as a 'foreseen side effect' of stopping the trolley?

• A. Yes — you foresee his death just as you foresee the death of the one person in the switch case
• B. No — his body is the mechanism that stops the trolley, making his death a means, not a side effect
• C. Yes — intention never matters morally, only the foreseen consequences
• D. No — because physically pushing someone is always intrinsically impermissible

Answer: (B)

This is the key distinction the doctrine of double effect (DDE) draws between the cases. In the switch case, the one person's death is a foreseen but genuinely incidental effect — the trolley would have endangered that track regardless. In the footbridge case, the man's body is the causal mechanism that stops the trolley: without his mass, nothing is achieved. He is used as a means, not merely harmed as a side effect. The DDE permits the side effect but forbids using a person as a means, which is why the cases receive different verdicts despite identical arithmetic.

Question 2

What is the primary philosophical purpose of the trolley problem?

• A. To demonstrate that consequentialism is the correct moral theory, since saving five outweighs saving one
• B. To show that deontological ethics always requires inaction in crisis situations
• C. To use diverging intuitions about structurally similar cases to reveal and examine implicit moral distinctions
• D. To establish that the number of lives saved is always the decisive moral factor

Answer: (C)

The trolley problem is not designed to answer 'what should you do?' — it is designed to test moral theories against intuitions and expose the morally relevant distinctions embedded in those intuitions. The fact that most people judge switching permissible but pushing impermissible, despite identical outcomes, reveals that people implicitly hold distinctions like doing/allowing and means/side effect. The cases are a testing machine for those distinctions, not a policy recommendation.

Question 3

A deontologist applying the doctrine of double effect can consistently permit diverting the trolley in the switch case, because the death of the one person is a foreseen but unintended side effect.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: True

The DDE has four conditions: the action is not intrinsically wrong, the agent intends only the good effect, the bad effect is a foreseen but unintended side effect, and there is proportionate reason. In the switch case, all four are plausibly satisfied: redirecting a trolley is not intrinsically wrong, the agent intends to save five, the one death is incidental (the track was already there), and saving five provides proportionate reason. This is precisely why the switch case is widely judged permissible even by deontologists.

Question 4

Because the switch and footbridge cases both involve saving five lives at the cost of one, any moral theory that gives different verdicts for the two cases is internally inconsistent.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

The consequentialist arithmetic is identical, but the cases differ morally in ways that non-consequentialist theories treat as significant: doing vs. allowing, initiating a new causal chain vs. redirecting an existing one, using a person as a means vs. allowing a side effect. A theory that draws on these distinctions can consistently permit the switch case and forbid the footbridge case. The whole point of studying the trolley variants is to discover which distinctions, if any, can bear the weight of explaining our divergent intuitions.

Question 5

Explain why pushing the man in the footbridge case feels like murder in a way that pulling the switch does not.

Model answer: In the switch case, you redirect an existing threat — the causal chain originated with the runaway trolley, and you merely alter its course. In the footbridge case, you initiate a new causal chain using another person's body as the instrument. The man's death is not a byproduct of stopping the trolley; it is how you stop it. Deontologists argue that treating a person as a tool for others' benefit — using them as a means — violates their status as an end in themselves, which is what makes pushing feel like murder rather than a tragic redirection.

This connects the doing/allowing distinction to the means/side effect distinction. Switching diverts; pushing uses. The asymmetry explains why identical outcomes can have different moral statuses: what matters is not just what results from your action but the nature of the causal role the harmed person plays in your plan. This is the insight that motivates deontological side-constraints and that pure consequentialism — by attending only to outcomes — cannot capture.