Imagine that you are standing on a bridge. Beneath you is a railway track where a wagon is approaching at high speed. You see that there are five men bound to the wagon. You also realise that there is a huge boulder on the track that will impact the wagon in the next ten seconds, and leave all five men instantaneously dead.

Just as you feel overwhelming despair, you realise that you have the power to prevent the five deaths. Standing beside you on the bridge is a fat guy who can be pushed down to the track below to slow down the wagon sufficiently to make its impact with the boulder quite harmless. The guy, who is staring at the sky, blissfully unaware that his destiny is being played with, will certainly lose his life in that case. What do you do?

(Many thanks to the person who described this scenario for me and listened to my responses with interest.)

Before anything else, let me clarify that you can assume certain things. You are strong enough to push the guy down, which is likely given the surprise element. Also, for the sake of simplicity, there are no grey areas – death is certain and instantaneous, be it the fat guy or the five men.

For those who are coming across this scenario for the first time, like I was very recently, several things might strike you. Practical details aside, the simple question “what do you do” translates into a million other questions that span the spectrum of ethics and values. Do I let one guy die and save five others?

But what if the five are criminals being taken to the executioner, and would have died on the electric chair in another couple of hours anyway? Then it makes no sense to let one more person die needlessly. What if the fat guy was the one who had tied up the five men? Even then, what if he had done this without knowing that there would be a boulder on the track? Or had merely done his duty as a police constable? And all these are just a subset of the possible plethora of questions. If you start thinking of options such as yourself jumping down (and hopefully not breaking too many bones) and derailing the wagon in some manner, or pushing away the boulder, you open a veritable Pandora’s box.

In any case, who am I to decide, you ask yourself.

What a muddle! Let me tell you what I finally decided. Given that I have neither information nor the time to gather information, I decide to do nothing. Oh, so I let the five men die by my inaction? But if I were to take the stance that saving five lives is better than one, I am immediately placing a value on each life and comparing one against five, which I simply cannot do. Yes, it seems instinctive to let the larger good win, but what is the larger good? Life does not go by numbers alone.

So, here’s my clincher. Research has shown that the negative impact, on your conscience and well-being, of action is far more than that of inaction. Meaning that if I were to remain a passive spectator and convince myself that I really had no choice, I would at least retain my peace of mind. Instead, if I were to act and save five people by killing one guy (mind you, not letting one guy die but acting to kill him), the guilt itself could make living impossible for me. So, ultimately, for rather selfish reasons, I do nothing. I would have preferred to jump down and save the five men myself. But then, how often does life give you a chance at successful heroism of the kind where you emerge alive?!

Well, what would you do?