Hello, Trolley
Well hello, Trolley
It’s so nice to have you back where you belong…

I think it’s fine to wish that no one has to die, ever. It’s expected to wish that no one ever gets murdered, or eaten by wild tigers, or starves to death in the midst of plenty.

You can let your trolley run over and kill six people, or you can divert to a siding and kill a single person. And that single person is also Hitler in 1932, and instead of six people it’s six million. Or, rather, 11 million total victims of the camps. Or around 80 million deaths in total.

If we could, for the purposes of the thought experiment, save 80 million lives by killing Hitler in 1932, would killing Hitler be a moral act? Is it mandatory, meaning that choosing not to kill Hitler, knowing for certain what was about to happen, would be an immoral act?

The surgeon problem is a fun inversion of the trolley. You have Hitler on the operating table, and the only way you can save his life is to harvest the organs from six otherwise healthy patients. You have to kill six random people so that 1932 Hitler can love and go about his business with WWII and the holocaust. Except instead of six people, it’s 80 million. You can see it’s the exact same dilemma as the trolley problem but made more - forgive me - visceral.

If we don’t high five the surgeon who chooses to let 1932 Hitler die rather than harvesting the organs from 80 million people, it’s only because the decision is so obvious that it doesn’t even seem to need congratulations. It’s not that we’re avoiding celebrating because we would have preferred a scenario where you are a vampire and could hypnotize Hitler to give up politics and return to art school, and then fly around the world hypnotizing the other world leaders to not punish the German people over the decisions made by their government. You could hypnotize US leadership to let Japan pursue economic development, and hypnotize Japanese leadership to be a liberal democracy rather than a militarized autocracy. But those scenarios don’t seem appropriately serious enough for the discussion.

The thing is that you can’t agree to disagree with a Hitler. James Baldwin wrote

We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.

We can disagree on tax policy and agree to debate and take it to the court of public opinion.

When people talk about the ethics of murdering Hitler, it’s not about tax policy.