A634.1.5.RB - The Train Dilemma: When no Choice is a Good One!

 Embarrassingly enough I am rather familiar with the train dilemma, in short a train is approaching and you have the option to either direct the train to hit one group of people versus another group. As you go through the situation and you become more more physically involved in choosing to kill off this individual. At the end of the situation it’s your child that you can choose to kill to save the other five children.

 Because I’ve gone through this exercise I had my answers handy but the school around I was able to really think through my ethical viewpoints that are affecting my decisions through this train dilemma. For example, I know that in the first situation being responsible for the switch I would go ahead and choose to switch the train on the tracks to hit the one child rather than five children on the alternative track. In this scenario where I’m standing next an elderly man and I have the option to push him to stop the train to save all of the children, I know that I would not push. In this situation I feel that it is not my responsibility nor my right to decide that an elderly man will sacrifice his life to save five others. In my own ethical view this differs from the first situation because it was my responsibility as the switch conductor, and with the goal of safety I would feel unable to make the decision to save five lives over that one.

Now with that said, in the third and final situation I would not choose to throw the switch to hit my child over the five children on the other track. This hits on my ethical emphasis on loyalty, potentially to a fault.  I’m a firm believer that we have the greatest loyalty to our loved ones and because of that I could never choose to sacrifice my loved ones even if it means saving five other lives. I know that this may not be the most ethical choice, I know that the right decision would be to save the five lives over the life of my loved one. Although even with this understanding I’m confident in knowing that I would not make the true ethical decision in this scenario, but that my decision to save my own loved one would be the only one that I could live with.

During this module we learned of ethical decision making and the implications of educating on ethical decisions making. I emphasized early on that I learned much of my ethical decision-making from my own upbringing and my family. This leads me to the conclusion that because of relationship with ethics and my family it only makes sense that I arrived at putting loyalty to my family above making the morally right decisions in the third scenario of the train dilemma. I wouldn’t ever want to change my thinking on this but it does make me wonder if I would think differently about this dilemma and my decision if I had learned the foundation of ethics from different source like an educator, that obviously would not emphasize the value of family loyalty as far as to a fault.