Yesterday I discovered an online, not for credit, philosophy course from Yale University. It is an attempt to correlate both the philosophy and the science of human nature. Naturally, that pairing turned my head. In the introduction the professor used the classic “Trolley” problem. You remember: a runaway trolley is out of control. Ahead on the tracks there are five unsuspecting people. Between the trolley and the people there is a switch that can reroute the carriage onto a siding. But on the siding there is one person. You can not control the trolley but you can throw the switch to the siding. Whatever you choose to do, someone will be killed. But if you throw the switch, only one person will die. If you choose not to throw the switch, five will perish. What do you do?
After a decision has been discussed and agreed upon, the problem is rebooted with a new wrinkle thrown in. This time, no switch, no siding, only a bridge over the tracks with one very large person on the bridge. The question is, if you chose to throw the switch in the first case, would it be alright in the second case to push the person off the bridge in front of the trolly, slowing the carriage to a stop? This is followed by a third option: if you chose not to throw the guy off the bridge, imagine that the five are hit by the trolly but not killed instantly. At the hospital they all need a critical body part to survive. There is a patient in the emergency room who will survive his/her emergency. If you remove one vital organ from the ER patient for each trolley patient, all of the trolley patients survive but the ER patient dies. You must choose.
It is a moral dilemma any way you turn. But the problem is not the choice you make, but how you weighed the morality of each step? Philosophy is one thing, human nature is another. We are by nature, moral beings. We care a great deal about what is right, as in righteous, and what is wrong, as in immoral. It is in our nature to want to be right but even more so, not to be wrong.
Then the professor identified two types of people. First was the person who is able to plan reflectively and follow through with reason & commitment to the plan. The other type may reflect and make the same plans but is vulnerable to procrastination/switching, to a temporary but more appealing plan: saving money to pay the rent but changing in favor of betting on the horses. The procrastinating substitution isn’t bad necessarily but tends to create more problems than it solves. But it’s not the result we will address here, it is the process. Human nature pushes our buttons and how successfully (how righteously) we navigate that experience depends on how well we reason/commit or procrastinate/switch at the time.
The class is geared to explore how we arrive at right and wrong, and then the likelihood of channeling our inherent nature to a happy conclusion. I am going back for the second lesson. We will no doubt revisit Socrates and Plato, Epictetus, David Hume and others but it is Yale after all and it is after all, a philosophy course.
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