Education’s trolley problem

What if we were to assign action and inaction the same moral value?

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Writing in UnHerd in December, science editor, Tom Chivers made an interesting argument about the ‘abundance of caution’ principle we have seen in the roll-out of Covid vaccines. He noted that on one day in April 2021, 70,000 new coronavirus cases were confirmed in the United States and 1000 people sadly died. On that same day, the US Centres for Disease Control paused the administration of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine because among the 6.8 million people it had been administered to, six had suffered a rare blood clot.

On the face of it, this does not seem reasonable. The lives saved by proceeding with the vaccine programme would have vastly outweighed any potential health problems it caused. Nevertheless, it was paused.

And this was not an isolated incident. Fear of blood clots bogged-down the rollout of the AstraZeneca vaccine.

It seems as if we price the harms caused by action more highly than those caused by inaction. If people die because we pause a vaccine programme, that somehow makes us feel less culpable than if we proceed and the vaccine directly causes a much smaller number of people to suffer adverse effects.

There is a famous philosophical thought-experiment, the trolley problem, that cuts to the heart of this issue. There are various versions but the basic idea is that a runaway trolley, like a tram or a rail cart, is barreling down a track and if nothing is done, it will hit and kill, say, five people. However, if an operator pulls a lever, they can divert the trolley onto a different track where it will kill one person. Should the operator pull the lever?

In terms of the raw number of lives saved, the operator should pull the lever and this is what people tend to say they would do. However, it would be evil and wrong to conduct such an experiment in real-life and so we don’t know what they would actually do. I suspect that as with vaccine programmes, in real-life, people would hesitate to pull that lever because they implicitly view the harm caused by action as worse than that caused by inaction.

Is there a trolley problem in education that is similar to the one found in the rollout of Covid vaccines?