Anti-protagonism

The famous trolley problems build up through a series of "x dies or y dies" type questions to the ultimate gotcha: if you would switch a train to hit one person instead of five, would you instead push a fat man in front of a train to stop it? The two situations are, in terms of pure utility, equivalent. Yet people are far happier to pull the switch than push the fat man. There are lots of theories as to why, but here's mine: it's about protagonism.

Video games often talk about player and non-player characters (NPCs), similar films have main characters vs extras and so on. It's a common trope, in part because I believe this is how we see the world. We look at the world and see an inert background layer, over which are a quite small number of foreground objects, usually chosen by how much they move and/or are likely to harm us. Our object recognition is so powerful it informs the entire way we see the world; even people are categorised as foreground or background.

So what about trolley problems? Well, the whole point of background characters is that they don't have agency, and thus no moral responsibility. When you're the poor schmuck stuck in the signal box, having to choose how to make the best of a bad situation, your part is played by Jonah Hill. When you step up to shove the man off the bridge, you're Matt Damon. And in its most extreme form, the doctor who secretly kills a healthy man to save the lives of five sick ones, you get to be a deeply troubled Leonardo DiCaprio. The more your actions reflect those of a protagonist, the more the situation is dictated by your actions than by external circumstance, the more harshly you are judged.

The problem with this is, well, it doesn't really make much sense. We clearly judge protagonists more because they are easier to judge, easier to think about, and tend to catch our attention. But the world isn't really divided into foreground and background characters, and trolley problems are, in some sense, the least useful moral dilemmas to consider. What about all the millions of lives not saved because people have other things to do? More people have been killed by indifference than the actions of all the world's murderers. But because inaction is background stuff, we don't get upset about it.

Worse still, the net effect of all this is a kind of anti-protagonism. There is far more moral risk for actors than non-actors, which leads to a strong motivation not to act. It means worse outcomes for moral actors, but also better outcomes for amoral actors, who don't care about the moral risk and also benefit from having fewer moral actors to oppose them. Worst of all, in bystander situations, or really any situation where inaction is pathological, we all suffer due to anti-protagonism.

All of which isn't to say that we shouldn't moralise about protagonists; they take actions, actions have moral consequences. But if we do so in the absence of moralising about inaction, we build a system where only one kind of person has to worry about moral consequences, and why would you want that to be you if you could avoid it?