Would You Kill the Fat Man (12 page)

But in 1963 an American philosopher, Edmund L. Gettier III, then at Wayne State University in Detroit, imagined some problematic cases. Gettier had not published before and was under intense pressure from the university bureaucrats to produce some scholarly work. He reluctantly wrote a three-page paper,
Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?
He himself was lukewarm
about it. “Up to the last moment of decision, I would never have dreamed of submitting a philosophy paper that consisted of nothing but a counterexample.” And he has not published a word since, because “I have nothing more to say.”
⁵
But his short paper has become among the most influential in contemporary philosophy.

Here is a Gettier-type scenario. Suppose, in the example above, what I see on the track is actually a fallen tree trunk, which bears a close resemblance to a man and from a distance I mistake it for such. And suppose that, by pure coincidence, nestling just behind the tree trunk a man lies prostrate, tied to the track. I have fulfilled all three conditions. I believe there’s a man tied to the track, it is true that there’s a man tied to the track, and I have good reason for believing that there’s a man tied to the track (since I see a human-like object on the line). But can I be said to
know
that there’s a man tied to the track or, as Gettier claimed, that I merely
believe
it?

Philosophers in the West have assumed that Gettier was right about such cases. I can only be said to
believe
that there’s a man on the track, but it would be wrong to say I
know
it. Recently the x-phi crew has rolled up, armed with their pencils and clipboards. Instead of taking Gettier’s intuition for granted, they posed the question to ordinary people, both in the East and the West—with unexpected results. It turns out that, while respondents in the West concurred with Gettier (that I only
believed
there was a man on the track), the majority of East Asian participants said that I
knew
there was a man on the track.
⁶

Equally fascinating results were uncovered when people were questioned about other perennial philosophical problems, such as free will. Assuming the universe to be entirely deterministic, entirely governed by causal laws (a contentious premise), can a person be said to have free will, and is free will
compatible with moral responsibility? Should I be praised or blamed if my actions were somehow the inevitable product of a causal chain?

Here it turns out that the more nitty-gritty details subjects were given about a situation, the more likely they were to be “compatibilists,” to hold that even though a man or woman was caused to act, he or she could still be held to act freely and to be morally responsible. By contrast, the more abstract the example, the less likely subjects were to use concepts like “praise” and “blame.” Thus, offered a richly textured story about a deterministic universe in which there was an embittered forty-five-year-old woman named Mary, who worked as a bank teller and was desperate for promotion, but who had a rival for the job, a genial, somewhat overweight thirty-five-year-old man named Mike, who had asthma and happened to pause for breath while on a walk, and was leaning over a railway footbridge when Mary chanced upon him, giving him a sharp shove in the back … etc., subjects would be far more likely to hold Mary morally responsible for the killing than if the scenario were presented shorn of all its evocative details, and all that was revealed was that in this deterministic universe a person was pushed to his death.
⁷

Almost every philosophical question of interest rests ultimately on intuitions of one kind or another. For a further example there’s the notorious problem of reference. When we use the term, “Philippa Foot,” to what, or to whom, do we refer? One answer is that we refer to the person who fits a certain description, such as “the woman who devised the trolley problem.” The American philosopher and logician Saul Kripke thought that this account was wrong; he proposed a variation of the following thought experiment to show why. Suppose another philosopher, call her Penelope Hand, conceived the trolley
problem, and just before she died mentioned it to Philippa Foot, who then passed it off as her own. Surely, if we then used the name Philippa Foot, we wouldn’t be referring to Penelope Hand, who fits the description of Philippa Foot better than Foot herself? And indeed, in surveys using a similar question, American philosophers concurred with Kripke’s intuition: use of the term Philippa Foot would not, in their view, refer to Penelope Hand. But when this experiment was conducted in Hong Kong, the majority disagreed: for them, anybody who used the name Philippa Foot would actually be referring to Penelope Hand.

You Tell Me

Trolleyology has been embraced by the x-phi movement: there have been numerous studies to examine whether the intuitions of the philosopher are shared by the man on the Clapham omnibus. And there have been various experiments designed to test the influences on, and the stability of, our trolley intuitions.

Some of these experiments have been small in size. But the Internet has provided a flawed, though cheap and convenient way to collate opinion on a grand scale. One data-gathering tool has been managed by Harvard University. Since it was set up in 2004, more than 200,000 people have tested their moral intuitions in numerous scenarios at their Moral Sense Test: several tens of thousands of participants have been non-American. That’s a decent sample by any statistical standards, though caution still has to be applied in interpreting the numbers, since those who take such a test may in some ways be unrepresentative of the general population—they have an eccentric interest in moral philosophy, for starters.

Another large survey has been conducted by BBC online: it included 65,000 participants. The findings on these various sites do not markedly differ. The BBC found that roughly four out of five agreed that the trolley should be diverted down the spur. Meanwhile, only one in four thought that the fat man should be heaved over the footbridge. Other studies have suggested that closer to 90 percent would divert in Spur, and up to 90 percent would not push the fat man.

Some gender differences have been found. In general, women emerge as harm-averse (less likely to push the fat man, or flip the switch in Spur), men as more utilitarian (more likely to push the fat man or flip the switch). And there is some other demographic variability. Hospital workers are more harm-averse than military workers (with many other professions falling in between). Religious people (those surveyed are mostly Christian) are more harm-averse than the non-religious. Conservatives are more harm-adverse than liberals. However, these differences are not dramatic. And on the whole there is no significant distinction between the rich and poor, the educated and uneducated, and those from the developed and the less developed worlds.

What is the philosophical value of appealing to such polls and surveys? None: it’s a worthless exercise, say some, including the eminent Cambridge philosopher Hugh Mellor. “If this is philosophy then questionnaires asking people whether they think circles can be squares, is maths—which it isn’t.”
⁸

But the gathering of survey information, the building of intuition data banks, has been used to cast doubt on whether our intuitions can ever be relied upon—and has raised the related question of whether the intuitions of experts are any more reliable than those of normal folk.

CHAPTER 10

It Just
Feels
Wrong

The only really valuable thing is intuition.

—Albert Einstein

HERE’S A TROLLEY PROBLEM FROM FAMOUS Professor Robert Unger Joaching. It’s pouring rain. A man is crossing the railway track, protecting himself with an umbrella. Given where he is, it would be prudent of him to pay more attention, but he’s in a hurry and so doesn’t spot a train racing toward him. It crashes into him at such speed and with such force that he is killed instantly and bits of his body go hurtling through the air. One large chunk hits a woman waiting on the platform, causing her severe injury. The question for the philosophy and law student is whether the woman should be able to make a financial claim against the dead man’s estate.

But let’s park this surreal trolley question for just a short while.

The Comfort Zone

Reading through the trolley literature is a little like watching a Rambo movie: you know it won’t be long until the next slaying.
There are threats from every angle: from tractors and trains and collapsing bridges, from bombs and noxious gases. The cases have exotic names: there is the Loop Case of course, but also the Two Loop Case, the Extra Push Case, the Roller Skates Case, The Three Islands Case, the Tractor Case, and the Lazy Susan Case. But while trolleyology is a godsend to philosophy professors keen to entertain and enthuse students, does it have any relevance to the real world? How seriously should we take our intuitions about these outlandish fictions?

Exactly a century after John Stuart Mill finished making his amendments to
Utilitarianism
, another book was published that has received almost as much scholarly attention and that addressed the issue of how much weight we should give to our intuitions.
A Theory of Justice
, published in 1971, aimed to set out the rules by which a just society should be governed. It was written by a quiet, bookish Harvard professor, John Rawls, and although it has probably been read by only a tiny number of people outside academia, it has proved both radical and influential.

The book’s most radical claim was that inequality was permissible only if it was to the benefit of the least advantaged. Its most important influence was felt not in university departments—although it rejuvenated political theory—but in the offices of state, among politicians and bureaucrats. It helped nudge decision makers away from a neutral utilitarian weighing up of policies by costs and benefits and toward a particular focus on the most deprived in society. Education, health, and transport policies were, of course, to be judged by whether they led to an overall improvement in standards, but also, and now especially, on what impact they had on the poorest and most marginal individuals and communities.

In
A Theory of Justice
, Rawls used a phrase relevant to the
fate of the fat man: “Reflective Equilibrium.” Theories about morality are not testable in the same way as theories about molecules. To test a theory about molecules we can use a microscope. To test a theory about morality we have to appeal to internal resources of the mind.

Crudely put, we are in reflective equilibrium when our general principles and our individual judgments about particular cases are in harmony. For example, we may start with a theory that we should never lie. But suppose lots of lives would be at risk on a particular occasion if we told the truth? Perhaps, then, we should amend our theory—water it down: “do not lie unless truth-telling would result in serious harm,” or something like that.

On the other hand, we may wish to stick to the theory and ignore any conflicting intuitions. Mill had a principle of liberty: we ought to be free to do anything that causes no harm to others. What about private acts such as consensual, “safe,” and nonpsychologically damaging sex between siblings? Firm believers in Mill’s principle will probably have to overcome their instinctive opposition to such sibling sex. They may believe that their initial intuition about the repugnance of sibling sex should be disregarded, and that it shouldn’t, on reflection, cause us to amend or weaken Mill’s principle.

We are in a position of reflective equilibrium, said Rawls, when our set of beliefs about principles and our beliefs about individual cases have achieved a sort of coherence.

Reflective equilibrium is not the only model for how to handle intuitions, but it is the dominant one.
¹
However, in recent times, the reliability of our intuitions has come under sustained assault from two directions. One prong of the attack is specific to trolley-like scenarios. Since they’re so stylized, goes the
charge, we cannot peel them off from the pages of a philosophy publication and transplant them onto a real case. The other prong is more general: that recent research in the social sciences has unearthed just how unstable and irrational our intuitions are across a whole spectrum of domains.

Tractors and Tumbles

To the specific allegation first. It is true that while the ingenuity of some of the trolley creations is admirable, they do lend themselves to satire. Take one of the splendid constructions from a doyenne of trolleyology, Frances Kamm, author of
Intricate Ethics
—the title considerably downplays the convolutions within.

As usual, a runaway trolley is heading toward five innocents. This is really not their day. Not only are they tied to the track, not only are they about to be flattened by the trolley, but there is another independent threat—rampaging in their direction is an out-of-control tractor. To redirect the trolley would be pointless if the five will in any case be hit by the tractor. But ….!!

There’s a glimmer of hope for our ill-fated five. If you turn the trolley away from them, “it will gently hit and push (without hurting) one person into the path of the tractor. His being hit by the tractor stops the vehicle but also kills him.”
²

Now, this
is
clever. It has elements of Spur and elements of Fat Man. Turning the trolley away from the five looks permissible, even though one man would die—this parallels Spur. However, there would be no point turning the trolley if this man’s corpse did not double as a buffer to halt the tractor—for otherwise the five would still be doomed. This mirrors Fat Man.