Would You Kill the Fat Man (15 page)

The Italian Job

Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto (1848–1923), economist, political theorist, and one of the founders of modern sociology, had his own connection with railways. After graduating top of his class from Turin, he took a job in the Rome Railway Company. Pareto had trained as an engineer and was fascinated by mechanisms and laws: he had, according to one writer, a “thirst for laws.”
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From the railway, Pareto went on to a role in an iron and steel company, before settling down in the lush hills of Tuscany
to pen polemical articles lambasting the incompetence of the government in the recently united Italy. In 1893, aged forty-five, Pareto was offered, and accepted, the chair of political economy in the Swiss city of Lausanne. And although many of his ideas had already been formulated, it was from this moment that he began to generate the body of work that makes him relevant for our story and for which he is now remembered.

Pareto’s hero was the man who had discovered the laws of motion, Sir Isaac Newton. Pareto, not unlike Karl Marx before him, aimed to do for the social world what Newton had done for the physical: Pareto’s instincts were those of a scientist and he imagined that the social world, though in a constant state of flux, was moving between different equilibrium points.

It is easier for acolytes to choose their heroes than for heroes to choose their acolytes. This unfortunate law of the social world has sullied Pareto’s posthumous reputation. While Pareto admired Newton, Benito Mussolini admired Pareto. He is thought to have attended some of Pareto’s lectures in Lausanne in 1904. Subsequently the sociologist was wooed by the fascist party, though he died in 1923, less than a year after Mussolini had taken power. The twentieth-century Anglo-Austrian philosopher, Karl Popper, excoriated Pareto as the theoretician of totalitarianism, though it was hardly Pareto’s fault that the fascists found succor in his Pareto Principle—that 80 percent of effects come from 20 percent of causes. Pareto had observed that four-fifths of Italian land was owned by one-fifth of the Italian people; later research indicated that this 80/20 distribution pattern was true not just of Italy, and, moreover, that it was repeated in a number of areas in addition to property and wealth. The fascists drew what to them was a comforting implication—that this was some kind of iron law.

But Pareto is credited with another eponymous principle. In economics, a state of affairs is said to be Pareto efficient or Pareto optimal when there could be no reallocation of goods that would make one or more individuals better off without making anyone else worse off. For example, suppose an economic system results in person A getting two philosophy books and person B getting three oranges. If we could somehow alter production and distribution so that person A received an orange in addition to his two philosophy books, while person B continued to receive three oranges, the prior state would have been shown to be Pareto inefficient.

What does all this have to do with trolleyology? Well, take the unusual case of Captain Tom Dudley.

Cannibalism on the High Seas

On July 25, 1884, Captain Dudley, a short man with red hair, stabbed, killed, and later began to eat his cabin boy. Some months later, this devout Anglican would be charged with and then found guilty of willful murder. He was sentenced to be “hanged by the neck until you be dead.” But the then Home Secretary, Sir William Harcourt, knew the public would never tolerate such a punishment—and along with his fellow defendant, Edwin Stephens, Tom Dudley had his sentence commuted to six months in jail.

It was an unusual case, and one still cited in the courts. Dudley had openly admitted to the killing, and was stunned as well as indignant that it should be considered a crime. He had just survived an horrific experience, and was now having to relive it. He must have felt a sense of vindication when the cabin boy’s brother approached him in court and, far from haranguing him, made a very public show of courteously shaking his hand.

Standing in the dock, and speaking in a pronounced Essex accent, Tom Dudley recounted his story. Twenty days before the murder, he, Richard Parker (the cabin boy), and two other men, Stephens and Edmund Brooks, had been in the middle of the Atlantic en route from England to Australia. Their mission was to deliver a yacht,
The Mignonette
, to its new owners.

They were well over a thousand miles from land when a terrible storm erupted and their yacht rapidly began to sink. They clambered into a lifeboat. In the chaos, all they managed to salvage from
The Mignonette
were two tins of turnips. Three weeks on, they were close to starvation. At seventeen, Parker was the youngest as well as the weakest. There had been little rainfall, and they had all been drinking their own urine, which Parker had supplemented with seawater. He had now begun to drift in and out of consciousness. The others were in a terrible state too. Scorched in daylight, cold at night, their feet had swollen, their bodies had sores.

This is where some details of the story become hazy, but according to Tom Dudley, he proposed a radical solution: they should draw lots and then one of them should be sacrificed for food. Brooks objected. He thought it was better they all die together. Dudley said, “So let it be, but it is hard for four to die, when perhaps one might save the rest.”
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A few hours later, Dudley spoke to Stephens, a conversation that Brooks would claim not to have heard. Dudley asked, ‘‘What is to be done?” and he gave his answer, “I believe the boy is dying. You have a wife and five children, and I have a wife and three children. Human flesh has been eaten before.”
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That night Dudley and Stephens stabbed Parker in the jugular with a penknife. For four days Dudley and Stephens fed
off Parker’s carcass (and drank his blood). Brooks, despite his denunciation of the crime, joined in: indeed, he ate heartily, more than Stephens, who was desperately feeble. The author of a book on the episode, Brian Simpson, writes that “The grim thought must have occurred to Stephens that he, as the weakest, was likely to be next on the menu.”
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Miraculously, still drifting hundreds of miles from land, they were spotted by a German boat returning from South America to Hamburg. The compassionate captain and his crew watered and fed them, and slowly they regained a little of their strength. When they eventually sailed into the Cornish port of Falmouth, they provided a full written explanation of what had happened—common practice when a ship was lost. Not imagining that any legal process would ensue, Dudley spared few details. The decision to prosecute them was not taken lightly. But the Home Secretary had a reasonable worry: “If these men are not tried for murder, we are giving carte blanche to every ship’s captain, whenever he runs low on provisions, to eat his cabin boy.”
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The Anonymous Ferry Killer

With Stephens, Dudley had murdered an innocent boy. In most normal circumstances murder is unconscionable. But although Dudley was tried and found guilty of the crime, this case tends to evoke mixed feelings. While some will think murder unacceptable whatever the circumstances, others will have considerable sympathy for Dudley’s predicament. If asked why, they’ll say something like “well, the cabin boy was going to die anyway, so what harm was done?”

Or, to put it in more formal if rather heartless terms, many,
probably most, people seem to recognize a rationale, a moral rationale to moving from a Pareto inefficient to a Pareto efficient state of affairs. This seems to be part of our moral grammar. Before Dudley orchestrated the killing of the cabin boy, all four men were dying. The cabin boy would have died anyway: his death allowed others to survive.

Their lot was improved and no one was made worse off. So Dudley’s actions seem at least excusable.

There are other equally dramatic examples with a parallel moral structure. Take, for example, the killing that occurred just off the coast of Belgium on the evening of March 6, 1987. The killer has not been publicly named: he later confessed to the act, but was never charged. The authorities must have judged that, in the circumstances, this was a justified killing, and not only should there be no trial, but the identity of the killer should remain secret.

However, we have some details of the deed. It was the night that the
Herald of Free Enterprise
, a car and passenger ferry, capsized. Almost two hundred people, passengers and crew, lost their lives. The ship had been in the Belgian port of Zeebrugge and was due to make the short crossing to Dover on Britain’s southern coast. The cause of the accident was a catastrophic human error: a crew member on duty had fallen asleep and the bow doors hadn’t been closed. Within ninety seconds of leaving the harbor, the ship began to list. Within another minute the ship was plunged into darkness. Most of those who died were trapped inside and suffered hypothermia.

A coroner’s inquest took place in October 1987. Numerous witnesses were called to give evidence, but the most unexpected testimony came from an army corporal. He claimed that with dozens of other people he was at the bottom of a rope ladder, all of them in the icy water. However, the ladder, their
route to safety, was blocked by a young man. He was paralyzed either with fear, or cold (or perhaps with both), and appeared unable to move up or down the ladder. With time running out, the corporal shouted for him to be pushed off. He was, and was never seen or heard from again. The way was open for others to clamber up the ladder and to safety.

Again, callous though it sounds, the man on the rope ladder was not made worse off by being pushed to his death: he was soon going to die in any case and by blocking the escape route he would cause the deaths of fellow passengers. The decision to prosecute neither the corporal nor the person who actually carried out the deed must have been underpinned by Pareto considerations. In accepting (if we do) that the corporal had not acted immorally, we are conceding that there are some occasions when killing someone intentionally is not wrong.

Maltese Dilemma

There have been parallel mountaineering cases where two men are connected by a rope, and to survive one needs to cut loose the other (essentially condemning this second person to their death).
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And there are fictional cases, too. In the book, and movie,
Sophie’s Choice
, Sophie was forced by a Nazi officer to choose life for one of her children and death for the other. If she refused to pick, both would be sent to the gas chamber. She chose her son—the daughter was led away, screaming.

Sometimes the state, in the form of the courts, has mandated a killing in a Pareto-esque scenario. In 2000, a Catholic woman, Rina Attard, from the Maltese island of Gozo, gave birth in Britain to conjoined twins—the courts called them
Mary and Jodie. Doctors said the twins would both die unless they underwent surgery; but even if this operation went ahead only one of the babies, Jodie, would survive. The parents, both committed Roman Catholics, refused to allow this operation. Their written evidence included this:

We cannot begin to accept or to contemplate that one of our children should die to enable the other one to survive. That is not God’s will. Everyone has the right to life, so why should we kill one of our daughters to enable the other one to survive?
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The doctors challenged their decision. The argument went all the way to the high court where, in reaching their decision, the judges referred to works of philosophy, drew trolley-type analogies, quoted Hobbes, and cited
Regina v. Dudley and Stephens
and the Zeebrugge disaster, to determine, for example, whether carrying out the operation would be an example of an intentional killing.

In the end the court ruled that the operation should go ahead. It took place on November 7, 2000. Mary died, as the doctors had foreseen. Jodie survived, as predicted.

The Nazi Thought Experiment

Most people will be influenced by Pareto-type reasoning, just one feature of what some people call our moral grammar. The data bank of global moral instincts collated at Harvard’s Moral Sense Test is revealing an intricate lattice-like moral edifice. At Harvard, I watched a researcher question a subject on a harrowing dilemma with a parallel structure to the cases described. The subject was asked to imagine that she was among a group
of people hiding from the Nazis: her child was whimpering. Unless she smothered the child, the entire group would be discovered and murdered. The MST has presented this and similar scenarios on the Internet: for example, one case imagines a lifeboat that will sink and all its occupants die unless one person is jettisoned, so lightening the load.

One unusual feature of these cases is that they have revealed a big gender gap. Roughly 50 percent believe that it is acceptable to throw someone overboard in the lifeboat case, or for the mother to kill her child, but many fewer women than men think this. Nonetheless, Marc Hauser states, “When it comes to our evolved moral faculty—our moral competence—it looks like we speak in one voice: the voice of our species.”
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The moral taxonomer, John Mikhail, has deconstructed actions in terms of their means (throwing the switch in Spur), ends (preventing the five men from being killed), and side effects (killing the man on the main track). Battery—unwanted bodily contact when this entails harm—is usually impermissible. In Fat Man, the side effects include killing
with
battery, which is why the fat man’s killing is so obviously (to most people at least) ruled out.

A successful capturing of the principles that govern our ethical responses to the world holds out the prospect that, in theory, computers could be programmed to react like humans. In other words, if we could reduce moral considerations to algorithms, robots could be built to behave as we would like humans to behave.