Intellectual Dilemma
Imagine you are standing beside some tram tracks, and you notice that at a distance, a runaway trolley is moving down the tracks where five workers are busy doing their jobs.
(Source of picture: Wikipedia)
Unfortunately, workers are so absorbed in the position that they cannot hear the trolley coming. So, you get concerned about saving the lives of five people and try to find a way to save them. However, you suddenly notice a lever, and if you pull it, the trolly will be diverted to a side track where only one person is working. Now, you have two options.
- Do nothing, in which case the trolley kills the five workers.
- Pull a lever that diverts the trolley onto a side track on which one worker is killed.
What will you do?
This popular case study or thought experiment is commonly used to explain ethical dilemmas, defined as the decision-making problem between two possible moral imperatives that are neither unambiguously acceptable nor preferable. Ethical dilemmas are situations in which there is a conflict between two or more moral values or principles where you have to choose one of the ethical principles and give up the other. Ethical situations involve actions and decisions based on a moral agent’s choice and volition that significantly affect other individuals.
In an ethical dilemma, there are no right answers, as whatever you do (or don’t do), you are doing something wrong. In this case, the ideal situation would have been to save the lives of all six people. For example, if you can warn the five workers on the track by shouting, they can leave the track, and the lives of all six people could be saved. In real-life situations, this option is mostly available to us, and even the trolly would have a powerful horn by which it can warn the workers and get the track cleared. However, what would you do if you were faced with such a situation? In other words, what will be the right action for you?
Intellectual Dilemma
Intellectual dilemmas arise when there is a conflict between two or more types of truth and where you have to choose one of the truths and give up the other. Intellectual dilemmas are thus the decision-making problem between two types of truth, neither unambiguously acceptable nor preferable. Let us discuss the trolly problem to see how we often face intellectual dilemmas in life and how we resolve them.
In this case, the four types of truth are
- Objective Truth: Save Life of more people
- Subjective Truth: Maximise your happiness and minimize your pain
- Normative Truth: Maximise the happiness and minimize the pain of society
- Complex Truth: Act according to the law for the best interest of self and society
Situation 1: All six people are strangers
If you don’t know any workers, you have no emotional attachment to anyone. Hence, you have an equal sentimental attachment to each person. In this case, you may like to pull the lever to save the lives of five workers, though, in the process, one worker on the side track gets killed. In this case, your subjective truth (what maximises my happiness or minimises my pain) and the normative truth (what maximises society’s happiness or minimises its pain) are in harmony.
However, you can take such a decision in the interest of society if you have legal protection, for instance, if you are a public servant whose job is to ensure the safety of the people on the railway track. However, if you are a common person, no such legal protection is available to you. Hence, you may be charged with murder of the single person who was working on the side track, where the trolly was not expected to go. His family members would blame you for his death, and the law may punish you for murder. Will you still pull the lever if no legal protection is available?
Most likely, you will not pull the lever because now there is a conflict between your subjective and normative truths. The society expects you to save more lives, but you care more about your own happiness. There is no way you can ensure your happiness with that of society. Hence, you choose not to pull the level to minimise your pain.
Situation 2: One of the six people in your loved one
Let us assume that one of the five workers is your brother or friend. If you do nothing, he will be killed along with four others, which will give you tremendous emotional pain. Hence, in such a situation, you face a dilemma because your subjective truth is to protect the lives of your loved ones. Society expects the same from you. However, you are still guilty in the eyes of the law, because when the matter goes to court, you may be adjudged guilty of killing one innocent person to protect the life of your loved one. However, you are still likely to pull the lever because your subjective truth (It is my duty to save my brother) is still aligned with the normative truth (society expects us to save more lives). Even the complex truth is likely to be the same since you have saved five lives at the cost of one.
However, imagine that the person on the sidetrack is your brother, while the five people on the main track are strangers. If you are a common person, it is not your duty to do anything in such a situation. Hence, you will have no reason to pull the lever, which will kill your brother and make you guilty of his murder. However, this action will be in contravention of the normative truth because society expects you to save more lives. If you choose to sacrifice your brother’s life for the sake of five strangers, you will be lauded by society. Hence, some people may choose this option also if they have deeper empathy for all human beings or value fame and recognition in society.
Why People Have Divergent views on the same issues
Man is said to be a rational animal since he can think and reason. Thinking is so critical for human beings that the French philosopher René Descartes’ observed, “I think, therefore I am”, which means that all living beings think. In 1641, Descartes published his ‘Meditations on First Philosophy’, where he sought a specific kind of knowledge that some academics called ‘perfect knowledge’. He says, “[As] soon as we think that we correctly perceive something, we are spontaneously convinced that it is true. Now, if this conviction is so firm that it is impossible for us ever to have any reason to doubt what we are convinced of, then there are no further questions for us to ask: We have everything that we could reasonably want.”
It means that only when we develop absolute belief in something we stop thinking about it. However, so far as there is any shred of doubt in our beliefs, we can’t stop thinking about the issue at hand. Hence, in case of any doubt, we analyse different types of knowledge and try to find out which is the most correct.
We have absolute trust that the addition of 2+2 will be 4, or about the truth of the Pythagoras thereon, as any person can verify this at any time. Hence, we don’t think about the accuracy of the mathematical calculation. Likewise, once we learn the principle of gravity, we don’t question it because we are convinced that the laws of gravitation are easily verifiable and have always been found to be correct whenever measured.
However, even scientists have no absolute knowledge of science, and every scientific law is fallible. Hence, if you are a physicist working on gravitation, you may doubt the law of gravity, and find its limitations and try to discover a new law that better represents reality. If you wish to challenge the law of gravity, your work is twofold now.
- You have to establish through experiments that the law of gravity is incorrect,
- You must present a better law than Newton’s law of gravity with evidence.
If you are unwilling to spend so much time and don’t have the intellectual capability, knowledge, and skill, it would be futile to question the law of gravity and waste your time and energy. It will be better to believe a law or a principle that is widely accepted by society as true rather than doubt everything till you establish the truth yourself. Accordingly, belief is an important part of human life not only because it provides stability and peace but also because we can focus our attention on a few doubtful things by developing belief in most of the things in life.
Conclusion
Bertrand Russell ridiculed Aristotle’s idea that man is a rational animal in his statement, “It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.” The mistake Russell seems to be making while calling all human beings (except himself) irrational is because he believes that rationality is objective and that, in the given situation, all reasonable men must come to the same conclusion.
It is evident from the above discussion that what may appear rational for one person may not appear to be rational for another person since there is no uniform formula to resolve an intellectual dilemma we face every day. However, every person acts rationally based on his own knowledge and experience. Accordingly, the better critical thinkers are, the more skills we develop to understand reality and the more rational decisions we can make without ever becoming perfectly rational people who are devoid of emotions since emotions are essential for bonding with people and enjoying happiness.
