Choices

I was reading a review of the new Netflix science-fiction movie, Stowaway. The review was unusual in how little time it spent on Stowaway itself. Instead it's mostly a second-hand takedown of The Cold Equations, a clear influence on the plot of Stowaway. What little time the reviewer spent on Stowaway was mainly to point out the parallels.

Unsurprisingly, there was a mention of the Trolley Problem, and as I read through the review, I realized that a lot of what was going on was shaped by the author's opinion of the problem. While the Trolley Problem is said to highlight the difference between deontological and consequentialist ethical systems, it also highlights the difference between people who accept, and those who reject, hard choices. One of the critiques of The Cold Equations, the Trolley Problem and Stowaway is that they are contrived to force a choice that technically should never arise in the first place. For the two science-fiction stories, the contention is that the spacecraft involved should, and therefore could, have been designed in such a way that the unexpected presence of another person on board should have been solvable by the crews in each case. Likewise, a common line of attack on the Trolley Problem is that no-one would ever be in a situation in which the only viable choices concern who dies, in reality, saving all of the supposedly at-risk lives would be simple.

I was reminded of this story that I'd read a year ago, in The Atlantic: My Husband Would Not Survive a Triage Decision. Oregon State Philosophy Professor Kathleen Dean Moore, faced with the realization that the brand of utilitarian ethics that she taught her students would mean that in a shortage medical care, her husband would not be selected for treatment, laid out a simple conclusion:

Deciding who lives or dies is a false dichotomy. There’s a third path: a proper health-care system that doesn’t require these terrible choices.

And you often see this in people's reactions to the Trolley Problem. There are those people who embark on the task of attempting to come to a rational conclusion as to which life or lives to safe, and these are those people who refuse to concede that there is any terrible choice to be made. And perhaps, they see the whole exercise as nothing more than a means to push people into denying that all lives are worth saving, and thus can be saved.

I tend to draw a distinction between the intrinsic value that we place on human life, and its instrumental value in practice. Every individual may be infinitely precious, but when push comes to shove, a life is worth precisely what someone will pay to preserve it, and no more. And part of the pushback against the Trolley Problem, made explicit in the critiques of The Cold Equations and Stowaway is that we have the resources to preserve lives, and that is only forced contrivance that constrains people from simply doing what needs to be done to keep people alive; whether that's interfering editors or governments that a certain professor of philosophy believes are too stingy to avoid unnecessary triage decisions.

I was watching a playthrough of the video game The Banner Saga, and there was a character in it, Rugga by name, who struck me as a stand-in for that person who makes the case that decisions in favor of the greater good are all simply covers for depriving others of what is rightfully theirs. Resistance to the Trolley Problem (and its many and varied incarnations) seems to be in the same vein. Why, one might ask, should people learn how to make life-or-death decisions, when the actual question is how does our society structure itself such that those decisions need not be made.

For my part, I'm dubious that the instrumental realities of life can ever be made to line up with our desires for the intrinsic value of all people. But maybe that simply means that I'm part of the problem.