Soul_Venom — 5 years ago(February 02, 2021 08:04 PM)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_monster
A runaway train trolley is rushing down the tracks. There is no one onboard. Further down the tracks are five rail-yard workers, who are oblivious to the approaching danger—say they are drilling and are wearing earplugs. They will surely be crushed underneath the trolley. You are standing some distance away in the train yard, too far away to warn them. Beside you is a lever. If you pull it, the trolley will switch to a second set of tracks that branch off the main track. The catch is, there is a single worker on the second track. If you switch, this person will surely die. What will you do?
I have is a decision procedure or a framework, rather than a full-fledged theory of rights. For the purpose of solving the trolley problems, I’ll limit the rights to a core set of four: the right not to be deprived of life or existence; the right not to be deprived of liberty; the right not to have one’s body and products of that body—which could be labor, speech, ideas, property, etc.—appropriated without consent; and finally, the Kantian right not to be used as a means to an end.
Some definitions first. In this treatment, rights and duties are two sides of the same coin. Rights imply duties and duties imply rights. The four rights I mentioned are negative rights, which means they prohibit an agent from performing certain actions on the holder of the right. Each of the rights is associated with a corresponding hard duty. Your negative right to life implies others have a hard moral duty not to kill you. Your negative right to liberty means others have a hard moral duty not to imprison you or restrict you in any way unless you yourself are in violation of rights. Apart from the core rights, there are secondary rights. These rights are associated with soft duties. Your right to be aided is one such, and correspondingly, others have a soft duty to help you. In the decision procedure, secondary rights are not binding, but core rights are.
A word about the framework itself. As I mentioned, it is a decision procedure. It consists of two levels. The first level is a rights argument. The level-one procedure assesses the moral permissibility of the choices in front of the moral agent. Specifically, it examines each choice or course of action for rights violations and helps the agent decide whether they should take that course of action or not. If the first level is undecided, then we seek the help of the second level. The level-two procedure is a value judgment. It is always subservient to the level-one procedure. It means if the first level prohibits an action, then you cannot use the level-two procedure to justify otherwise. The level-two value judgment can be made with or without a particular ethical theory.
The level-one decision procedure is neutral between switching and not switching. As far as rights are concerned, the bystander problem is neither moral nor immoral. It is an amoral situation, and therefore the level-one procedure has nothing to say on which course of action is preferable.
The point of a two-level decision procedure where individual rights trump utility calculations is to prevent the emergence of utility monsters. The only way to defeat utility monsters is to treat individuals as containers of value and rights—rights that cannot be overruled by calculations justifying the greater good.
If you are an innocent bystander, then you are not in violation of the rights of the five about to be crushed by the trolley. However, you would be violating the rights of the single worker if you switched tracks. The choice is between violating rights versus not violating rights. You have a hard duty not to sacrifice the one and a soft duty to help the five. The hard duty takes precedence; not violating rights takes precedence. The level-one decision procedure is clear that you are not to switch the track. There is no question of invoking a level-two value judgment.
Individual rights take precedence over utilitarian calculations. You are not allowed to save a million people or people dear to you or even yourself by switching the tracks You can’t have your cake and eat it too. If you do not wish to see the rights theory degenerate into some version of utilitarianism, you have to bite the bullet and accept the consequences. The cost of preventing utility monsters is the cost of not switching the tracks.
Trump is still your President. Charlie Kirk still Wins!