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« Hello and goodbye and hello... | Main | Unknown Sneakers » Thursday, April 5, 20079/11 and the trolley problemA couple weeks back, Chris and I were discussing trolley problem thought experiments on Brainiac (all links provided in Chris's last post on the topic). One trolley problem, commonly known, I'm afraid, as Fat Man, is this: You are standing on a footbridge above a trolley track. You cannot divert the trolley. You consider jumping off the bridge, in front of the trolley, thus sacrificing yourself to save the people in danger, but you realize you are too light to stop the trolley. Standing next to you is a very large stranger. The only way you can prevent the trolley from killing five people is by pushing this stranger off the bridge into the path of the trolley. He will be killed, but you will save the other five. In surveys, most respondents say one should not push the man on to the tracks. It occurred to me yesterday that officials at the highest levels of the US government, particularly Dick Cheney, faced a terrifyingly real variation of this scenario for about two hours on the morning of September 11, 2001. (With Bush in that elementary school and then on Air Force One, Cheney was de facto in command.) If any other planes appeared to be on a suicide mission, do we try to shoot down that aircraft before it could reach its target? Do we intentionally sacrifice X people to save X+Y? The variation here is that the passengers, who are in some ways analagous to the large man, are presumed to be doomed no matter what. There is some evidence that at a disputed point that morning Cheney gave the order to shoot down commercial aircraft that were off course and non-responsive. This evidence is to be found in testimony given by former Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta before the 9/11 Commission (not discussed in its final report), and in statements from Robert Marr in a BBC documentary called "Clear the Skies": Colonel Robert Marr was Commander of the North East Defense Sector and remembers the words that came over the secure phone: "we will take lives in the air to preserve lives on the ground." Posted by Evan Hughes at 04:26 PM
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