Kant's Trolley Problem Analysis

A runaway trolley will kill five people if it stays on its current path. I have the option to pull a lever and divert the trolley to an alternate track. In this case, it will only kill one person. What should I do? This is the trolley problem, a classic thought experiment whose outcome has numerous applications. For example, I may ask whether it is morally permissible to kill one person and harvest his organs to save five other people. Using the teachings of John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant, from their books, Utilitarianism and Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, respectively, I can hypothesize their solutions to the trolley problem. Given no other information, it is likely that Mill would tell me to pull the lever because he is a proponent of utilitarianism, the moral philosophy that advocates acting to maximize the happiness for the greatest …show more content…
While Mill was a consequentialist in that he only cared about the outcome of his actions, Kant was a deontologist who cares only about the motives of an action. In The Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, his second formulation of the categorical imperative, a rule that all must follow, states “man and generally any rational being exists as an end in himself, not merely as a means to be arbitrarily used by this or that will, but in all his actions, whether they concern himself or other rational beings, must be always regarded at the same time as an end” (35). Therefore, I can never use a person to obtain anything else. Kant’s view is practical, unlike Mill’s, in that it does not require the agent to weigh net happiness and instead lets him make split-second decisions quickly, and without lasting guilt, as the agent knows that his action was merely following the rules (even though avoiding guilt is not Kant’s purpose). In the trolley example, we cannot pull the pulley because we are purposely killing one man to save five