The Fat Man Problem

I’ve been thinking a lot about this issue lately. The question is if you would push one fat man off a bridge to stop a train that was going to kill five people otherwise. Originally I said yes, because even though every life has value, the numbers do matter. But then I changed my mind when I heard about the wandering drifter problem. This is if you are a doctor trying to save five people from dying. You need healthy organs in order to perform surgery on them. Some drifter walks up and you have the opportunity to kill him and use his organs. The situations seem different at first, but what it comes down to is the fact that you are murdering that person rather than letting the other five die.

                The only question I still ask myself though is if it is murder to let someone die if you could stop it from happening. The best way to go about figuring this out is to rearrange the situation. If you saw someone being held at gunpoint and you had a button that would cause the attacker to pass out, would it be considered murder to not press the button? Some say yes, but in reality, the man with the gun is still committing the murder. Obviously, you feel morally obligated to press the button to save that man, but you should never be alright with saving someone at the expense of any number of people.

                There is also the question of what you should do and what you would do. These things are far from being the same. For instance, if it was my relatives in place of the five people on the tracks, then I would push the fat man off of the bridge. I would do it, but I would feel horrible about it, because I know that it is not what I should have done. Some people feel the opposite way. They feel that if there were five random people on the tracks then they would feel obligated to push the fat man. However, actually being in the moment is different, and they would most likely end up not doing it.

                One more situation you can use is the trolley situation. This is where you have two sets of tracks, one containing five random people, and the other containing one person. The tracks are set for the train to hit the five people. You can pull a lever that switches which track the trolley will take. When it comes down to it, all you would be doing is manipulating the objects around you, and it wouldn’t seem like you are actually murdering someone. But, when you think about it, the Fat Man problem is the same exact concept, only you have to deal with the fact that you are murdering the person up close. This is why I think that I would not push the fat man onto the tracks. Even though I feel that five lives are more valuable than one, I still think that you should not murder even though it would save others.