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ABSTRACT
This article describes a teaching plan for a discussion-driven introduction to moral reasoning and explains its philosophical and pedagogical rationale. The teaching plan consists of a sequence of thought experiments that build on one another, and ends with participants addressing some morally complex, real-life issues. The plan rests on extensive experience teaching moral reasoning in several different professional learning environments. The main contribution of this article is practical. The goal is to equip educators with a pedagogical approach and ready-to-use teaching materials. To this end, the article offers the methodological background, identifies learning objectives as well as pitfalls of teaching the trolley problem, and describes the pedagogy of the session.
Notes
1. Another one is Peter Singer’s analogy between aiding distant others in an emergency and saving a child drowning in a pond nearby (Singer, Citation1972).
2. Foot (Citation1967) discuses a triage case: “We are about to give a patient who needs it to save his life a massive dose of a certain drug in short supply. There arrive, however, five other patients each of whom could be saved by one-fifth of that dose.”
3. A similar approach with a different sequence of cases is presented by Baltzly (Citation2021).
4. Because the progression starts with the driver case and not with the bystander case, our approach stands in the tradition of what Thomson (Citation2016) calls the “driver baptism” in contrast to “bystander baptism” version of the trolley problem.
5. One reviewer asked us to clarify the academic contribution of this article, given that this article neither tests a theory nor develops one.
6. In response to a similar case, 89% of 2,646 participants in an online experiment said that it is permissible for the trolley driver to kill one workman in order to save five (Hauser et al., Citation2007). However, the choice in the vignette used in this experiment was between “killing the one” and “letting the five die”—and hence not between two killings.
7. Similar cases, of using the body of one patient to save one or more others, are discussed also by Foot (Citation1967) and Thomson and Sugden (Citation1976).
8. Assume that the decision is up to the surgeon, that whatever they decide will not set any precedent, that there will no repercussions or legal consequences of any form, and that the operation will restore the five patients to the same level of perfect health that the healthy person is in.
9. The domain of dilemmas is restricted to cases that present a choice to “kill some innocent, nonthreatening person so as to either not kill or save other innocent, nonthreatening people from a threat already facing them.” (Kamm, Citation2020, p. 82).
10. This misunderstanding of the trolley problem was brought to great prominence not only in The Good Place, but also in a recent series of articles published in Nature and Science, in which scientists reported results from a large global survey on behavior in moral dilemmas (Awad et al., Citation2020, Citation2018; Bonnefon et al., Citation2016).
11. Bonnefon et al. (Citation2020, p. 112) write: “Just like the Trolley Problem and most experimental stimuli in the behavioral sciences, this autonomous car dilemma is a model, not a reflection of reality”. The clarity of stating that they take the trolley problem to be a model is immediately clouded by their denial that this model does what all models are taken to be doing: reflect or represent reality in some way (Frigg & Hartmann, Citation2020, sec. 1).
12. More precisely, because morally relevant differences between trolley cases are not self-evident, the reasoning view lends itself to ethical rationalism. The model view, by contrast, is typically used in a way that suggests a grounding in ethical intuitionism – with the Moral Machine being one example (Awad et al., Citation2018; Bonnefon et al., Citation2016, Citation2020). For the different uses of trolley cases and their limitations see Himmelreich (Citation2018).
13. Ethical rationalism and intuitionism are philosophical outlooks that explain what moral knowledge is and how it can be obtained. The two positions hence do not rival psychological theories about how people actually behave or make decisions.
14. Such sentiments are frequently encountered in teaching moral philosophy (Shafer-Landau, Citation2015, Chapter 1).
15. Formally, each topic concerns a set of propositions of normative theory—such as necessary conditions for permissibility of an action—that form the premises of the practical reasoning.
16. Although the parallels to real cases can easily be taken too far, such that distinctions, such as between doing and allowing, miss what is actually at stake (Burri, Citation2020).
17. These considerations on having to admit fault usually transfer over to the real-life examples given in Appendix B (such as the choice CARE faced in Rwanda).
18. Thomson (Citation2008) suggests that Foot (Citation1967) was right all along and that fundamentally a difference between positive and negative rights grounds the impermissibility of diverting the trolley.
19. This case was developed by Joshua Cohen and Abby Jaques in a follow-on to the course that was jointly taught by the co-authors of this paper.
20. For a further policy that has been put forward see White et al. (Citation2020).
21. Although this is not the first instance of dilemmas involving the steering or directing of trolleys between groups of different sizes (Engisch, Citation1930, p. 288; Welzel, Citation1951, p. 51).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Johannes Himmelreich
Johannes Himmelreich is an Assistant Professor in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, a core faculty member of Syracuse University’s Autonomous Systems Policy Institute (ASPI), and a Senior Research Associate in the Campbell Public Affairs Institute. His work is on applied ethics, political philosophy, and public policy with a research concentration on data science and the ethics of autonomous systems.
Joshua Cohen
Joshua Cohen is a political philosopher. He has written on issues of democratic theory, freedom of expression, religious freedom, political equality, democracy and digital technology, good jobs, and global justice. His books include On Democracy; Democracy and Associations; Philosophy, Politics, Democracy; Rousseau: A Free Community of Equals; and The Arc of the Moral Universe and Other Essays. He is co-editor of the Norton Introduction to Philosophy. Cohen taught at MIT (1977-2005), Stanford (2005-2014), is currently on the faculty at Apple University, and is Distinguished Senior Fellow in Law, Philosophy, and Political Science at Berkeley. Cohen held the Romanell-Phi Beta Kappa Professorship in 2002-3; was Tanner Lecturer at UC Berkeley in 2007; and gave the Comte Lectures at LSE in 2012. Since 1991, he has been editor of Boston Review.