Would You Kill the Fat Man (21 page)

More recently, in the second half of the twentieth century, Robert Nozick asked whether we would plug into an Experience Machine.
³
So ingenious was this hypothetical gadget that we would instantly forget that we were connected to it, and we would be guaranteed pleasurable “experiences” (for example, that we’d won a Nobel Prize or scored the winning goal with a spectacular overhead kick in the World Cup final). None of these experiences would be real, but we would believe they were. Derek Parfit borrowed from science fiction to moot disquieting questions about personal identity: would we be the same person if a tele-transporter made a copy of all the molecules
in our bodies and reconstituted them on another planet?
⁴
And John Searle imagined a Chinese Room. In this room a person is passed notes in Chinese under a door. Although he doesn’t speak Chinese, he follows a complex set of instructions from a manual, copies out the response prescribed by this manual, and passes a response back under the door. From outside the room we might assume he understands Chinese, when in fact he can’t understand a word. It’s a thought experiment designed to suggest that computers will never really think or understand.
⁵

So thought experiments have littered philosophical texts through the ages. It seems implausible that they, collectively, are the main target for the trolleyphobes. It’s possible that the trolleyphobes have a more specific objection to their use in the moral realm. But even that seems farfetched: notable moral philosophers from all traditions—utilitarian, Aristotelian, Kantian—have deployed thought experiments in argument or illustration.

True, there are doubts about the reliability of our intuitions in the trolley cases (see
chapter 10
). Our intuitions can be easily manipulated and are influenced by morally irrelevant factors. Some of the trolley problems are so outlandish that it’s not clear how we should react to them. Moreover, even those scenarios that do elicit near-universal responses are unusual or artificial, so a case needs to be made for their applicability beyond the seminar room. Cases that are odd may not necessarily be reliable guides to cases that are ordinary.

But the strongest critics of trolleyology want to attack it at a deeper level still. Trolleyology is essentially about what people should do. Should they turn the trolley? Should they push the fat man? But there’s a tradition going back to Aristotle which stresses another question. What matters is less about what people
do, more about what kind of character they have. Are they brave, cowardly, generous, mean, truthful, dishonest? What virtues and vices do they possess?
⁶

The idea that a virtuous person could also be someone who would weigh the costs and benefits of pushing a man to his death is, at least according to Bernard Williams, an incoherent one. In his words, practical thought cannot be “transcendental to experience.”
⁷
In other words, a generous person just is someone who is motivated to act generously, and then does so. It is a sort of nonsense to describe a person as being, say, honest, if that person is prepared to act dishonestly whenever utilitarianism so dictates.

Philippa Foot, the unwitting founder of trolleyology, would not disagree. She and her friends, Elizabeth Anscombe and Iris Murdoch, helped resurrect the tradition of virtue ethics. Murdoch gives an imaginary example, much quoted. A mother-in-law, apparently driven by jealousy and snobbery, has a very low opinion of her daughter-in-law. She regards her daughter-in-law as rude, juvenile, lacking in dignity and refinement. But then, after careful reflection, she comes to see these characteristics differently: the daughter-in-law is no longer undignified but spontaneous.

Naturally, as a result of this change of perspective, the mother-in-law acts differently toward her daughter-in-law. But the action is, as it were, secondary to the seeing: and it’s in the seeing correctly that the hard moral work is done. In his book
Nicomachean Ethics
, Aristotle distinguishes between types of wisdom. There is theoretical wisdom, but there is also
phronēsis
, which is usually translated as “practical wisdom.” According to neo-Aristotelians, a person with
phronēsis
is able to sense what is the right thing to do.

Very Particular(ist)

The instincts of the trolleyologist are not dissimilar to those of the scientist, in the following regard at least. The trolleyologist wants to determine what moral distinctions are relevant, and to prod and poke, weigh, compare, and contrast our intuitions. The trolleyologist wants to make use of “clean” cases to aid our moral navigation in a messy world. But this is not how the Aristotelian conceptualizes the moral realm. The person with
phronēsis
is not in possession of any kind of moral algorithm, and has not mastered morality through any abstract investigation of it. This person has, instead, in a nice phrase used by one philosopher, “situational appreciation.”
⁸

The extreme end of this line of thinking is the moral particularist.
⁹
According to the particularist there are no correct moral maxims or principles, be they consequentialist (e.g., “always maximize happiness”), or deontologist (e.g., “never lie”). Each case is unique. There will be relevant moral considerations of course: whether an action involves lying, perhaps, or whether it causes suffering. Sometimes the moral particularist might want to cite the Doctrine of Double Effect. But there are no hard-and-fast rules: at best there are rules of thumb. Ethical thinking cannot be systematized in the way the trolleyologist would like it to be. The trolleyologist’s project is thus, inevitably, doomed from the start.

These are the big objections to trolleyology. One suspects, too, the existence of a more trivial and unjust one. There’s a sense that the trolley problem is, damn it, just too much fun, and fun is a quality incompatible with intellectual weightiness. It feels a bit like a brain teaser that might be published by a newspaper on its puzzle page next to the sudoku. Peter Singer
is one philosopher wary of reducing “philosophy … to the level of solving the chess puzzle.”
¹⁰
Though he used to love chess puzzles, “there are things that are more important.”
¹¹

This would seem a particularly harsh indictment if it were leveled at a philosopher like Kamm, whose entire philosophical life has been devoted to trolley-like conundrums. Whatever it is that motivates Professor Kamm, it’s not a sense of fun. “I am always surprised when people say, ‘Oh, that was a nice discussion. That was fun.’ I think, ‘Fun?’
Fun
? This is a serious matter…. If we had worked on a NASA rocket and it launched well, we wouldn’t say, ‘Well, that was fun!’ … It was aweinspiring—that would be the right way of putting it!”
¹²

In the end, trolleyologists and trolleyphobes have to agree to differ. Dismissing this entire approach to ethics as worthless means jettisoning scores of books and hundreds of articles by dozens of serious thinkers. Derek Parfit’s book
Reasons and Persons
is hailed as one of the seminal works in moral philosophy of the past few decades—but, though the work doesn’t itself discuss trolley problems, it exemplifies the trolley method of philosophy. It’s rich in imaginative thought experiments and it derives principles from testing intuitions in myriad fantasy scenarios. This is just one of numerous books in this “genre.” If trolleyology is misguided, then so are many publications based on trolleyesque argumentation. A rejection of the entire methodology would imply that many philosophers have been wasting their time. (“It wouldn’t be the first time,” said one eminent former Oxford professor, sotto voce.) Should that not give us pause?

CHAPTER 16

The Terminal

Truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.

—Winston Churchill

AFTER HURRICANE KATRINA flattened parts of New Orleans in 2005, one member of the National Guard was quoted as saying: “ I would be looking at a family of two on one roof and maybe a family of six on another roof, and I would have to make a decision who to rescue.”
¹

Residents of Bangkok would later have some special empathy with this predicament. In 2011, the Chao Phraya, a river that meanders through the Thai capital, Bangkok, became dangerously swollen, reaching more than three meters above its normal level. Floods that summer had already cost hundreds of lives. In an attempt to save the city center, where many people lived, where the tourists came to spend their money, and where major businesses were based, the authorities had built a ring of dikes and sandbags, fifteen kilometers long. But, while this left the center reasonably dry, it caused a buildup of water outside the protected zone. Enraged and desperate residents in the north, west, and east of the city demanded that holes be cut in the ring to allow the rising and stagnating water
to flow through. Police positioned hundreds of officers around the protected zone to prevent the floodwalls being sabotaged.

Such real-life dilemmas would appear familiar to trolleyologists. The trolley industry is currently in robust health. It has been boosted by developments in psychology and neuroethics and by the nascent but burgeoning field of experimental ethics. Trolley-type problems pop up in real life, while trolley thought experiments continue to crop up in academic philosophy papers.

But, like most industries, it will inevitably peak at some stage and then decline. Not before time, some philosophers might add. Certainly it’s difficult to imagine how new variations on the trolley theme could provide much additional illumination. The complexity of existing scenarios has already been stretched to the limits of our credulity and imagination—limits beyond which intuitions become fuzzy and faint.

The aim of trolleyology is to provide a principle or principles that make sense of our powerful reactions and that can reveal something to us about the nature of morality. It’s been a protracted philosophical detective story: different scenarios have provided different pieces of evidence to support different conclusions.

But it remains possible that the founders of trolleyology, Foot and Thomson, inadvertently pushed their trolleys down the wrong path.

In Agatha Christie’s mystery novel,
Death on the Nile
, the reader is led to believe that the murderer can’t be the obvious candidate (for she, apparently, has a cast-iron alibi). Later, Hercule Poirot, the little Belgian detective with the curly mustache, realizes that he has been bamboozled: the obvious candidate (with the support of an accomplice) was guilty all along.

Foot and Thomson both rejected an appeal to the Doctrine
of Double Effect. Yet this doctrine, first identified almost a millennium ago by Thomas Aquinas, has powerful intuitive resonance. At its heart is the difference between intending and merely foreseeing—in Spur we foresee but do not intend a death, in Fat Man we do. This is not a distinction that carries any weight with utilitarians—for in both Spur and Fat Man, the consequences of saving the five are the same: one man will die. But most non-utilitarians regard it as obvious that the nature of an intention is relevant in the judgment of an action.

If the distinction between intention and foreseeing holds the solution to our moral conundrum—as it seems to me that it does—then Thomson’s Loop dilemma was a giant red herring. How could a few extra meters of track make any moral difference, she asked? Her answer was that it couldn’t. And that set philosophers fishing for an alternative principle. But those few extra meters might make a moral difference—after all, in Loop it looks as if we intend to kill the one man on the track. As we’ve seen from the experimental work, if Loop is shown before exposure to Spur, rather than after, subjects are much more likely to judge that turning the trolley is impermissible. Thompson’s intuition ceases to command undivided support.

The Doctrine of Double Effect offers an explanation for the moral difference between Spur and Fat Man. It is an explanation with many virtues: it is simple and economic, it doesn’t seem arbitrary, and it has intuitive appeal across a broad range of cases. It is the reason why the fat man would be safe from me at least.

End of the Line

What happened to the characters featured in this book? What was their fate?

Grover Cleveland’s chief trolley problem, George Pullman, lived only three more years after the strike of 1894. A national commission set up to examine the strike’s causes concluded that Pullman’s company town was un-American. Such was the loathing for Pullman that even he couldn’t delude himself about it—and he made arrangements to ensure his body was not desecrated after his death. He was buried in a lead-lined coffin within a steel-and-concrete vault. The Pullman company went into rapid decline. President Cleveland never fully recovered from the strike either, failing to win the renomination at the 1896 Democratic National Convention.

• • •

Cleveland’s daughter, Esther, met her future husband on a trip to London. Their daughter Pip gave up her Oxford post shortly after her trolley article was published. She took various visiting professorships in the United States, until she became a full professor of philosophy at UCLA. But she continued to spend a lot of time in Oxford and eventually retired there. She died in 2010 on her ninetieth birthday. All the newspaper obituaries about her mention the trolley problem.