The things we care about the most are morally and ethically complex. That’s an idea that I’m pretty committed to. And while it seems like a fairly anodyne statement, it turns out to have far-reaching implications. For one thing, if we believe contentious issues are complex, that means that if we think the answers are simple or obvious (and that anyone who disagrees is a horrible person), we’re probably missing something.
The topic of moral complexity has dominated my Social Problems class for the past few sessions. Most recently, the students read through the classic trolley problem. While there are several variations of it, as many people already know, the most basic version presents you with a choice. There’s a train barreling in your direction. If you do nothing, it’ll run over and kill five people working on the track. However, if you pull a lever, it’ll change tracks and run over one person standing on a separate track.
As we talked through students’ various responses, I started to see a parallel that I hadn’t expected. There was a link between differing reactions to the trolley problem and the way certainty feeds political polarization. And while the connection might at first sound tenuous, it’s actually surprisingly straightforward.
As most philosophers will tell you, one of the reasons the trolley problem can be useful is that it offers a clean illustration between different ways of determining right and wrong. Specifically, it lays out the case for both deontology and consequentialism. In the most oversimplified terms, consequentialism suggests we determine what’s right by looking at the possible consequences of an action. In this sense, whichever choice brings about more benefit than harm is good and the one that causes more harm than benefit isn’t. Deontology, again to oversimplify, says that what’s good is determined based on rules that govern morality, not on outcomes.
Consequentialism tells you to pull the lever and divert the train. One person dying should be less harm than five people dying. Yet, deontology could lead to the opposite conclusion. The rule might be, don’t take any direct action that results in killing a person. That sounds a lot like you shouldn’t pull the lever.
Now imagine two people arguing about which decision they think is right—a consequentialist says pull the lever and the deontologist says don’t. And let’s assume the argument gets heated. Each calls the other a murderer who doesn’t care about human life. But neither one bothers explaining how they came to their conclusion—after all, to each the thinking seems so obvious that stating it out loud seems ludicrous.
One way to view this disagreement is to throw our hands up in the air and say, “See, morals vary across people, and we just can’t decide what’s right and what’s wrong.” And sometimes this is what people think I’m saying when I write and talk about the problem of certainty. But this isn’t the case at all. Understanding the problem of certainty doesn’t require any declaration about whether we can or can’t declare one right or wrong.
It means seeing how certainty keeps us from being clear in the first place. Go back to the people arguing about the trolley problem. Imagine that, rather than calling one other names, they explained the thinking that got them to their position (valuing the most lives saved versus valuing a principle saying you shouldn’t actively take part in ending a life). The two still might disagree, and even do so stridently, but now they’re disagreeing about their values and principles, and not about the moral character of the other person.
How does this relate to political polarization? Similar to how certainty kept the two trolley problem arguers from being explicit about their thinking, certainty keeps us from being clear about our thinking when it comes to real life contentious problems. Consider: What does an argument over the “right” or “best” immigration policy mean until or unless we’ve made clear who an immigration policy is supposed to benefit in the first place? Is it supposed to benefit the people fleeing worse conditions in other countries? Is it supposed to benefit the economic conditions of those already in the host country?
If you don’t like the immigration example, consider affirmative action instead. Both sides on that debate invoke the concept of fairness. People opposed to affirmative action say it’s not fair to allocate resources based on traits like race and ethnicity. People who support affirmative action argue that it’s only fair to try to correct for the injustice that led to such racial inequality in the first place. Certainty about what’s right, and therefore obvious, keeps us from talking about these foundational differences.
The upshot is this: There’s absolutely a world where we can declare one solution right and the other wrong—on any particular issue. But this is only the case provided we understand that declaration will always depend on things like what our values are and how we think about tradeoffs. I’ll note here that the power of clarifying our thinking applies to even the most odious opinions. In fact, the more odious and hateful, the easier it is to clarify the thinking behind the objection. Why do I think genocide is bad? Because I think all lives have equal moral value. Why do I think slavery is bad? Ditto on the genocide point. And I might add that I don’t believe any human being should be enslaved. So, now try it for gender-affirming care, policing in minority communities, COVID-19 policies, etc.…
You get the idea.