Here’s a new-sounding version of the trolley problem due to Carolina Sartorio posted on Philosophy from the (617).

Fatman*: There are five people tied up to a track. One of them is a fat man, and somehow I can shove him into the path of the train (although I can’t save him!) to stop the train before it kills the other four.

There’s two puzzles here. The first, in which Carolina is interested, is whether the action is permissible in this case. The second, which seems more fun to me, is whether we can tell anything like a plausible story in which the facts are as Carolina stipulates. I’m moderately dubious that this can be done, but I should never underestimate the powers of storytellers.

I wonder if the intuitions about the cases will differ depending on just how the details are set out. Just for fun, here’s a variant that I think is like the basic switch-tracks-killing-one-to-save-five-case.

Evil Demon: An evil demon has set up a run away steam engine to travel through five tunnels, killing the people tied to the tracks in each tunnel. You can’t stop the train (it’s got a really powerful engine) but you can change the order in which the train goes through various tunnels. You notice that the man tied to the tracks in tunnel #5 (i.e. the tunnel the train is scheduled to go through fifth) is really fat. It looks probable the train will derail when it hits him. (It’s a pretty resilient train, so it can run over the supermodels in the other four tunnels without being derailed, but it can’t handle the fat man. Probably.) So you reroute the train to go through his tunnel first, it hits him, kills him and is derailed, saving the four.

Is this action permissible? Is it mandatory? Is it a sign of completely awful character that one even thinks about these puzzles? Of worse character to write about them? Of even worse character to write about them on two blogs?

(By the way, I think Philosophy from the (617) needs a name change. By my count currently 3 of the 14 listed philosophers are actually in the 617 area code. There’s a sense in which they are all connected to it, but then there’s a sense in which anyone with a phone line is connected to the 617 area code too.)