Seems to me that curing cancer swamps out everything else in the story. Supposing that World War 2 was entirely down to Hitler, the casualties came to about 60-80 million. By comparison, back of the envelope calculations suggest that around 1.7 million people die from cancer each year* in the U.S., E.U., and Japan taken together. See the CDC numbers and the Destatis numbers (via Google’s public data explorer) for the numbers that I used to form a baseline for the 1.7 million figure.
That means that within a generation or two, the cancer guy would have saved as many lives (to speak with the vulgar) as the Hitler guy would have killed. Plus, the cancer guy would have improved quality of life for a lot more people than that. Maybe we have to go another couple of generations to balance life years if the Hitler casualties are all young and the cancer savings are all old. But under the assumption that a solution to cancer is very unlikely without the cancer guy, the right decision seems clearly to be to steer the trolley left.
* Things get more complicated if we suppose that the Hitler guy will bring about a new world war and attempted genocide, which might involve full-on nuclear war, rather than a sort of repeat of real-Hitler’s consequences. I am choosing to understand the Hitler guy as being responsible for 60 or 80 million deaths—or make the number a bit larger, like 100 million, if you like.
It’s also conceivable that with his compelling story of kidney failure with his life saved by transplantation, Hitler gets admitted to art school, creating beautiful landscape paintings for the rest of his life. At the same time, the person who cures cancer may also accidentally create a virus that destroys every single living cell on earth within one week after its accidental release into the environment. The only person surviving would be a brain emulation prototype which copies itself, rebuilding human society such that nobody dies or feels pain anymore.
Seems to me that curing cancer swamps out everything else in the story. Supposing that World War 2 was entirely down to Hitler, the casualties came to about 60-80 million. By comparison, back of the envelope calculations suggest that around 1.7 million people die from cancer each year* in the U.S., E.U., and Japan taken together. See the CDC numbers and the Destatis numbers (via Google’s public data explorer) for the numbers that I used to form a baseline for the 1.7 million figure.
That means that within a generation or two, the cancer guy would have saved as many lives (to speak with the vulgar) as the Hitler guy would have killed. Plus, the cancer guy would have improved quality of life for a lot more people than that. Maybe we have to go another couple of generations to balance life years if the Hitler casualties are all young and the cancer savings are all old. But under the assumption that a solution to cancer is very unlikely without the cancer guy, the right decision seems clearly to be to steer the trolley left.
* Things get more complicated if we suppose that the Hitler guy will bring about a new world war and attempted genocide, which might involve full-on nuclear war, rather than a sort of repeat of real-Hitler’s consequences. I am choosing to understand the Hitler guy as being responsible for 60 or 80 million deaths—or make the number a bit larger, like 100 million, if you like.
It’s also conceivable that with his compelling story of kidney failure with his life saved by transplantation, Hitler gets admitted to art school, creating beautiful landscape paintings for the rest of his life. At the same time, the person who cures cancer may also accidentally create a virus that destroys every single living cell on earth within one week after its accidental release into the environment. The only person surviving would be a brain emulation prototype which copies itself, rebuilding human society such that nobody dies or feels pain anymore.
Oh, the under-specification! ;)