I finally did it. Curiosity got the better of me, and I sprung the 99 cents for a Kindle collection of Don Sakers short stories that included "The Cold Solution." It's the legendary solution to "The Cold Equations," Tom Godwin's classic 1954 SciFi short that for all intents and purposes is "The Trolley Problem" in space.
For anybody who never took freshman Philosophy, the Trolley Problem is the classic justification for Utilitarian "Ethics." You're standing at a switch that can send a trolley down the tracks to run over one person or multiple people. The "obvious" answer is that you save the largest number of lives.
"The Cold Equations" frames the problem thusly: A pilot has been dispatched to carry a load of serum to a colony that is going through an epidemic. En route, he discovers that a young woman has stowed away to see her brother. The problem is, the ship only has enough fuel for a safe landing of the mass calculated by the flight crew. If the young woman stays on board, the ship will crash, killing not only the woman and the pilot, but also all those who will die from not receiving the serum.
The colony does not have any ships to meet the relief ship in orbit to transfer more fuel or to take over transport. There's no space suit, apparently. The pilot can't jettison himself, because the woman doesn't know how to fly the craft. Everything in the ship is welded down or essential to flight.
Now, at this point, anyone with two brain cells will demand to know what the [redacted] kind of [redacted] dumb-[redacted] [redacted] [redacted] morons set up a flight mission with no safety margin? Numerous writers and critics have pointed out that it would be utterly negligent.
Furthermore, Cory Doctorow observed that the characters in a story do not truly labor under the constraints of physical reality, but truly the constraints placed by the author, which is of course, the same complaint that can be made about the Trolley Problem, namely, "It's ludicrous." In what sort of world are you going to come across multiple people tied up on railroad tracks? For that matter, in what world is the switch open to public access?
Of course, my biggest problem with the Trolley Problem is that I figure me and mine are usually the minority getting sacrificed for the majority. And even if not usually, then almost certainly often.
But, back to the story, after trying to figure out any way to save the woman, the pilot admits defeat. The woman talks to her brother, then willingly walks into the airlock.
For 40 years, people have rephrased the problem, trying to come up with a way out within the constraints of the story. In 1992, Don Sakers tackled the problem, this time with a young woman as the pilot, and a 9yo boy as the stowaway. Spoilers in...
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In Saker's take, the pilot stands at the airlock door looking at the boy as he is about to walk into the airlock to be jettisoned, and thinks, "I'd give my right arm to save him." At which point, she realizes that she has to throw out 25kg of body, but it doesn't have to be intact. So she amputates the kids limbs and her own legs with her laser sidearm and jettisons them, then crawls into the pilot's seat and lands the craft.
I really liked the solution because not only was it elegant, yet brutally ugly, it came at personal cost to the pilot. The story ends with her going to see the boy getting his limbs regrown, but as an adult, it's hit or miss whether the limb regeneration treatments will work, and she may have to use prosthetics the rest of her life.
I think that's what's missing from Utilitarian "Ethics": the human factor that can think outside the box and discover solutions, even at personal cost. The maxim of Utilitarianism is "The greatest good for the greatest number," but who defines what the greatest good is? The current pandemic is a great example of this. Many elderly people would rather risk an early death in the interest of continued contact with their families. Others would rather trade a year or so now for the potential of 5 more years later. Who's right? Frankly, that's a stupid question. The better question is, "Who has the right to tell either of them they're wrong?" "The Cold Solutions" pilot decides to value her conscience over her own legs.
And how do those making such judgments even know the outcome is going to be good? The history of the last hundred-odd years is replete with Utilitarian decisions resulting in piss-poor outcomes. Once upon a time, they thought it was "good" to purge the newly-founded national parks of wolves, because the wolves killed the ungulates. But then the ungulate population exploded, overgrazed, and suffered more from illness than when wolves were picking them off. To go back to the previous example, there's plenty of research to suggest that isolation is more deadly to the elderly than respiratory illness. Worse yet, the combination.
Utilitarianism requires actions to be judged by their outcomes, rather than their intent. And for retroactive study, I'm all for that. Let's absolutely judge the extermination of the Asian sparrow by the tens of millions of people who died in the famines it actually caused rather than by the tons of theoretical grain it was intended to save.
But let us also remember those gravestones when today's policy makers wish to justify their actions by their projected outcomes.
