This essay argues that Engineer Bill has a moral duty to refrain from switching the tracks and thereby causing Sarah’s death, because deontological principles establish stronger protections against actively inflicting harm on an innocent person than utilitarian calculations of overall consequences permit. The discussion first outlines the core differences between utilitarianism and deontology, then examines the distinction between causing and allowing harm, considers the roles of constraints and thresholds within each theory, and finally tests the consistency of these positions against the related cases of Joe the Janitor and the Evil Hobo.
Defining the Two Ethical Theories
Utilitarianism judges actions solely by their outcomes, requiring the agent to produce the greatest net good for the greatest number of people. In contrast, deontology holds that certain actions are intrinsically wrong regardless of the beneficial results they might generate. In Bill’s situation, a utilitarian analysis would count the one hundred passengers against Sarah and conclude that switching the tracks maximises overall welfare. A deontological view, however, treats the deliberate redirection of the train onto Sarah as an act of killing that cannot be justified simply because more lives would be preserved.
Causing versus Allowing Harm
The moral weight attached to the difference between causing and allowing harm is central to the dilemma. Switching the tracks constitutes an active intervention that directly brings about Sarah’s death. Leaving the lever untouched allows the existing arrangement, set in motion by Sarah herself, to result in the deaths of the passengers. Deontological ethics typically assigns greater culpability to the former because it involves using an innocent person as a means to an end. Utilitarianism tends to regard the distinction as morally irrelevant once total consequences are tallied. Yet the ordinary moral intuition that actively killing someone feels more wrongful than failing to prevent deaths suggests that the causing–allowing distinction retains significance even when consequences are considered.
Constraints and Thresholds
Deontologists defend constraints that prohibit certain actions even when those actions would prevent greater overall harm. Bill is therefore constrained from using Sarah’s body to save the passengers. Some theorists introduce thresholds in an attempt to accommodate extreme cases: a deontologist might permit overriding the constraint if vastly more lives were at stake, while a utilitarian might accept a threshold that prevents the deliberate sacrifice of an innocent when the numbers involved are only moderately unequal. Both manoeuvres, however, risk undermining the original theories. Once a threshold is admitted, deontology begins to resemble consequentialism, and utilitarianism concedes that some harms must not be inflicted irrespective of net gains. In Bill’s case the numbers are lopsided but not astronomically so; the threshold device therefore offers little guidance without arbitrarily specifying how many additional lives are required to justify deliberate killing.
Application to the Joe the Janitor Case
The Joe the Janitor scenario sharpens the same tension. A utilitarian doctor would kill Joe to harvest organs for the hundred patients, since the net saving of life is overwhelming. A deontologist would refuse, because the doctor would be actively causing Joe’s death rather than merely allowing the patients to die from their injuries. If the original thesis is correct—that deontology better respects the prohibition on using an innocent person—then consistency requires the same refusal in the future hospital. The case also reveals the instability of thresholds: even though one hundred deaths exceed one, the deontological constraint against murder does not dissolve simply because the arithmetic becomes more dramatic.
Application to the Evil Hobo Case
The Evil Hobo variant isolates the causal contribution of the agent. Here the hobo has already switched the points, placing Sarah in danger. Bill must still decide whether to throw the lever. Because he did not create the initial threat, the action of switching now appears more clearly as an act of killing rather than an act of rescue. The deontological constraint therefore bites even harder. Utilitarianism again registers no difference between the two lever positions, yet the intuition that Bill would be wrong to use Sarah as a shield remains intact. The case thus reinforces the claim that the causing–allowing distinction and the associated constraint carry independent moral weight.
Evaluating the Overall Argument
The thesis that deontology supplies the sounder guidance rests on three connected premises: first, that deliberately causing the death of an innocent person is intrinsically objectionable; second, that the distinction between causing and allowing harm is morally relevant; and third, that thresholds fail to resolve the dilemma without eroding the distinctive character of each theory. While utilitarianism offers a clear decision procedure, it systematically overrides the constraint against using persons merely as means. Deontology preserves that constraint at the acknowledged cost of permitting a larger number of deaths. In ordinary moral reasoning the prohibition on active killing is rarely abandoned merely because the numbers differ; the Engineer Bill dilemma, together with its two variants, illustrates why that reluctance is not easily dismissed.
In conclusion, the analysis supports the view that Bill should not switch the tracks. Maintaining the deontological constraint against actively causing Sarah’s death provides a more stable and intuitively defensible basis for moral responsibility than utilitarian aggregation permits, even when the same logic is applied consistently to the Joe the Janitor and Evil Hobo cases.
