What is the humanist response when two courses of action are available, and both involve a negative outcome? How is the humanist to choose?
Kirk and Spock are in New York City 1930, seeking an out-of-control Dr. McCoy, who has inadvertently altered human history. His actions have set in motion a chain of events that will result in Hitler’s Nazi regime capturing the world, ending humanity’s chances of ever reaching the stars. To set things right, however, requires the predestined death of social worker Edith Keeler, an angel of mercy, with whom Kirk has fallen in love. Kirk’s dilemma: to save the lives of uncounted hypothetical billions of people, he must stand by and let Edith die a traumatic anonymous death, when he knows she can easily be saved.
The Dominion’s war against the Federation is not going well. Every week, Capt. Benjamin Sisko posts fresh casualty reports on Deep Space Nine, as tens of thousands more are killed in Dominion attacks. He realizes that if the neutral Romulans can be brought into the war in support of the Federation, the tide will turn and Federation loss of life will subside, at least to some degree. To achieve this alliance, he conspires with the illicit Cardassian agent Garak, who arranges false evidence that the Dominion is planning an invasion of Romulus as a next step. To make it convincing, Garak arranges the death of a Romulan senator and his entourage. Sisko’s moral transgressions now include not only fraud and manipulation that will result in thousands of Romulan military casualties, but overt murder. Pondering what he has done, he decides he can live with it.
How are such dilemmas resolved? Such resolutions can never be fully satisfactory, but the humanist process makes the moral calculus of resolution more manageable, if nothing else; and the emphasis on personal agency may be an impetus to personally invest more in the most positive (or least harmful) outcome, when push comes to shove.
The gentle reader is likely familiar with the famous Trolley Problem, one of the most useful thought experiments for pondering such choices.
You are standing near a trolley track, and notice that a runaway trolley car is careening down the track. Not far ahead, there are five children playing on the track. You can see that they are going to be run down and killed in seconds.
You also see that the track diverges to a separate track, and there is a single child playing on that track.
You are standing next to a lever that will switch the tracks. If you pull the lever, the runaway trolley car will strike and kill the one child, rather than the five.
What do you do?
When presented with this problem, about 90% of participants surveyed choose to minimize the damage by pulling the lever – taking an active role, rather than standing by and doing nothing, to minimize the damage. We can call that moral agency.
Now let’s look at a wrinkle in the problem:
In the rerun of the Trolley Problem, you are no longer standing nearby but are above the track on a bridge. The runaway car is going to kill the five children, as before. But this time, there is no diverging track and no lever. Instead, you are standing next to a very hefty person. If you push that person off the bridge, they will fall on the track and be struck by the trolley car. They will die, but the five children will be saved.
Mathematically, the outcome is the same; five lives saved, one life lost. This time, however, the action taken is more visceral, less remote; you are taking a human life with your two hands. In the survey data, the number of participants who answer the question in the affirmative – yes, they would push the hefty person off the bridge to save the five – drops to less than half.
Again, the math is the same in both cases. Five lives are saved, one is lost. But the willingness to make that moral choice drops significantly. Performing a remote, mechanical act to influence an outcome of great consequence is within reach, for most people; taking another human life directly to reduce the final damage done is farther than most people will go.
The interesting question here is this: what would the practicing humanist do?
The shift in the answers of the thought experiment participants is accounted for by the nature of the action called for. The remote act of pulling the lever that throws the track switch, diverting the train, may be an act of immediacy, but is not in itself the direct cause of anyone’s death: the participant is indirectly contributing to a death.
But the act of pushing someone off a bridge in front of a hurtling trolley car – that's a very direct act. In that scenario, the participant is killing another person with their own hands. And the thought of taking such action is so morally repugnant to some participants that the moral calculus that prevailed in the earlier version of the experiment is overwhelmed. Five children will die so that the participant does not have to face that burden.
The humanist moral paradigm grants liberty to the individual as moral agent. The humanist understands that they must decide for themselves the best course of moral action, and accept responsibility for that action. So there is no one correct, 'humanist' way to respond to the two variations of the Trolley Experiment.
But it is fair to wonder if the humanist might be one of those who would take action in the second scenario – overtly taking a life to save a life. Despite the moral revulsion of the act, the requirements of humanist morality are, in the end, satisfied; the choice is for the course of action that will lead to the least amount of human suffering. And the humanist participant has chosen to take moral action, even at unimaginable personal cost.
We can hear echoes of these choices in the actions of Kirk and Sisko above.
Kirk has unassailable foreknowledge of events to come, and the consequences of Edith Keeler’s two potential destinies. If Edith lives, Hitler wins the Second World War and humanity is plunged into darkness, at a cost of tens of millions of lives; if she dies, history proceeds along the path that brings about the Federation, the most benevolent of human social outcomes.
Kirk’s moral action is to prevent McCoy from saving Edith’s life. He himself does not push her in front of the truck that kills her, he simply stops Bones from pulling her from the truck’s path. Put another way, Kirk pulls the lever that throws the switch.
Sisko, on the other hand, partners with Garak – an agent of deception and a killer – to illicitly force a military alliance between the Federations and the Romulan Empire. In the process, Romulans are murdered – at Garak’s hand, not Sisko’s, but Garak is acting solely at Sisko’s behest.
Sisko pushes the Romulan senator and his people off the bridge.
We see Sisko’s manipulation as a dark moral compromise, one he resolves to “live with.” It is beyond question, however, that the alliance he achieves will reduce Federation casualities in the Dominion conflict – tens of thousands of lives will be saved because he acted.
The humanist moral calculus prevails, despite the ambiguity, as it does in the second Trolley scenario. But both situations underscore the complexity and the burden of carefully-considered moral action – to which the humanist commits.
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