How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question

by Michael Schur

So while a duty to follow the maxim “We ought to spare the lives of as many innocent people as we can, whenever possible” might seem like just a fancy way of a utilitarian saying “Five is more than one!” that similarity dissolves when we add in the second formulation of the imperative: that we should not use people as a means to an end, but rather as ends in themselves. Shoving Don off the bridge certainly counts as using him as a means to an end—he would cease to be a person, and literally become a tool (in this case, a “human trolley stopper”) that allows us to achieve some other goal. In the Trolley Problem Classic, utilitarian accounting and deontological duty overlap—whichever one we use, we’re likely to arrive at the same result (pull the lever, save the five people). But utilitarian accounting isn’t as finely honed as Kantian reasoning. As the details of the problem shift and change, strict utilitarianism keeps telling us to “kill one and save five,”9 even when we start to feel queasy about the way in which we’re carrying out the “kill one” part.