Would You Kill the Fat Man? – The Trolley Problem and What Your Answer Tells Us about Right and Wrong - Hardcover

Edmonds, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691154023 ISBN 13: 9780691154022

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2013

Synopsis

A runaway train is racing toward five men who are tied to the track. Unless the train is stopped, it will inevitably kill all five men. You are standing on a footbridge looking down on the unfolding disaster. However, a fat man, a stranger, is standing next to you: if you push him off the bridge, he will topple onto the line and, although he will die, his chunky body will stop the train, saving five lives. Would you kill the fat man? The question may seem bizarre. But it's one variation of a puzzle that has baffled moral philosophers for almost half a century and that more recently has come to preoccupy neuroscientists, psychologists, and other thinkers as well. In this book, David Edmonds, coauthor of the best-selling Wittgenstein's Poker, tells the riveting story of why and how philosophers have struggled with this ethical dilemma, sometimes called the trolley problem. In the process, he provides an entertaining and informative tour through the history of moral philosophy. Most people feel it's wrong to kill the fat man. But why? After all, in taking one life you could save five. As Edmonds shows, answering the question is far more complex--and important--than it first appears. In fact, how we answer it tells us a great deal about right and wrong.

About this title

About the Author

David Edmonds is the author, with John Eidinow, of the best-selling Wittgenstein's Poker, as well as Rousseau's Dog and Bobby Fischer Goes to War. The cofounder of the popular Philosophy Bites podcast series, Edmonds is a senior research associate at the University of Oxford's Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and a multi-award-winning radio feature maker at the BBC. He holds a PhD in philosophy.

From the Back Cover

"Lucid, witty, and beautifully written, this book is a pleasure to read. While providing an introduction to moral philosophy, it also presents engaging portraits of some of the greatest moral philosophers from Thomas Aquinas to the present day, and it makes the case for the relevance to ethics of the new experimental moral psychology. It is a tour de force."--Kwame Anthony Appiah, author of The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen

"This is a splendid work. You shouldn't expect it to resolve all your trolley problems but you can look forward to a romping mix of fine humor, intriguing anecdote, and solid argument. It's a sheer joy to read."--Philip Pettit, Princeton University and Australian National University

"David Edmonds has a remarkable knack for weaving the threads of philosophical debates into an engaging story. Would You Kill the Fat Man? is a stimulating introduction to some key ethical issues and philosophers."--Peter Singer, author of The Life You Can Save: How to Do Your Part to End World Poverty

"David Edmonds's new book, Would You Kill the Fat Man?, is both highly informative and a delight to read. Written in a clear, engaging, and witty style, it succeeds admirably in making various fascinating and important debates in philosophy and psychology accessible to a broad readership."--Jeff McMahan, Rutgers University

"This is a highly engaging book. David Edmonds's reflections are full of insight and he provides fascinating biographical background about the main players in the history of the trolley problem, in a style reminiscent of his very successful Wittgenstein's Poker."--Roger Crisp, University of Oxford

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Would You Kill the Fat Man?

The Trolley Problem and What Your Answer Tells Us about Right and Wrong

By David Edmonds

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2014 David Edmonds
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-15402-2

Contents

List of Figures............................................................
xi
Prologue...................................................................
xiii
Acknowledgments............................................................
xv
PART 1 Philosophy and the Trolley..........................................
CHAPTER 1 Churchill's Dilemma..............................................
3
CHAPTER 2 Spur of the Moment...............................................
8
CHAPTER 3 The Founding Mothers.............................................
13
CHAPTER 4 The Seventh Son of Count Landulf.................................
26
CHAPTER 5 Fat Man, Loop, and Lazy Susan....................................
35
CHAPTER 6 Ticking Clocks and the Sage of Königsberg........................
44
CHAPTER 7 Paving the Road to Hell..........................................
57
CHAPTER 8 Morals by Numbers................................................
69
PART 2 Experiments and the Trolley.........................................
CHAPTER 9 Out of the Armchair..............................................
87
CHAPTER 10 It Just Feels Wrong.............................................
94
CHAPTER 11 Dudley's Choice and the Moral Instinct..........................
108
PART 3 Mind and Brain and the Trolley......................................
CHAPTER 12 The Irrational Animal...........................................
127
CHAPTER 13 Wrestling with Neurons..........................................
135
CHAPTER 14 Bionic Trolley..................................................
153
PART 4 The Trolley and Its Critics.........................................
CHAPTER 15 A Streetcar Named Backfire......................................
169
CHAPTER 16 The Terminal....................................................
175
Appendix Ten Trolleys: A Rerun.............................................
183
Notes......................................................................
193
Bibliography...............................................................
205
Index......................................................................
213

CHAPTER 1

Churchill's Dilemma

At 4:13 a.m. on June 13, 1944, there was an explosion in a lettucepatch twenty-five miles south-east of London.

Britain had been at war for five years, but this marked thebeginning of a new torment for the inhabitants of the capital,one that would last several months and cost thousands of lives.The Germans called their flying bomb Vergeltungswaffe—retaliationweapon. The first V1 merely destroyed edible plants,but there were nine other missiles of vengeance that night, andthey had more deadly effect.

Londoners prided themselves on—and had to some extentmythologized—their fortitude during the Blitz. Yet, by thesummer of '44, reservoirs of optimism and morale were runningdry,—even though D-day had occurred on June 6 and theNazis were already on the retreat on the Eastern front.

The V1s were a terrifying sight. The two tons of steel hurtledthrough the sky, with a flaming orange-red tail. But it was thesound that most deeply imprinted itself on witnesses. The rocketswould buzz like a deranged bee and then go eerily quiet.Silence signaled that they had run out of fuel and were falling.On contact with the ground they would cause a deafening explosionthat could flatten several buildings. Londoners temperedtheir fear by giving the bombs a name of childlike innocence:doodlebugs. (The Germans called them "hell hounds"or "fire dragons.") Only an exceptional few citizens could be asphlegmatic as the poet Edith Sitwell, who was in the middle ofa reading when a doodlebug was heard above. She "merelylifted her eyes to the ceiling for a moment and, giving her voicea little more volume to counter the racket in the sky, read on."

Because the missiles were not piloted, they could be dispatchedacross the Channel day or night, rain or shine. Thatthey were unmanned made them more, not less, menacing."No enemy was risking his life up there," wrote Evelyn Waugh,"it was as impersonal as a plague, as though the city was infestedwith enormous, venomous insects."

The doodlebugs were aimed at the heart of the capital,which was both densely populated and contained the institutionsof government and power. Some doodlebugs reached thetargeted zone. One smashed windows in Buckingham Palaceand damaged George VI's tennis court. More seriously, onJune 18, 1944, a V1 landed on the Guards Chapel, near thePalace, in the midst of a morning service attended by both civiliansand soldiers: 121 people were killed.

The skylight of nearby Number 5, Seaforth Place, wouldhave been shaken by this explosion too. Number 5 was an atticflat overrun by mice and volumes of poetry: there were so manybooks that additional shelves had had to be installed in whathad originally been a bread oven, set into the wall. There wasa crack in the roof, through which could be heard the intermittentgrowl of planes, and there were cracks in the floor as well,through which could be heard the near constant roar of theunderground. The flat was home to two young women, whoshared shoes (they had three pairs between them) and a lover.Iris was working in the Treasury, and secretly feeding informationback to the Communist Party; Philippa was researchinghow American money could revitalize European economiesonce the war was over. Both Iris Murdoch and Philippa Bonsanquetwould go on to become outstanding philosophers,though Iris would always be better known as a novelist.

Iris's biographer, Peter Conradi, says the women becameused to walking to work in the morning to discover variousbuildings had disappeared during the night. Back at the flat,during intense bombing raids, they would climb into the bathtubunder the stairs for comfort and protection.

They weren't aware of it at the time, but matters could havebeen worse. The Nazis faced two problems. First, despite thenear miss to Buckingham Palace, and the terrible toll at theGuards Chapel, most of the V1 bombs actually fell a few milessouth of the center. Second, this was a fact of which the Naziswere ignorant.

An ingenious plan presented itself in Whitehall. If the Germanscould be deceived into believing that the doodlebugswere hitting their mark—or, better still, missing their mark byfalling north—then they would not readjust the trajectory ofthe bombs, and perhaps even alter it so that they fell still farthersouth. That could save lives.

The details of this deception were intricately plotted by thesecret service and involved several double agents, includingtwo of the most colorful, ZigZag and Garbo. Both ZigZagand Garbo were on the Nazi payroll but working for the Allies.The Nazis requested eyewitness information about where thebombs were exploding—and for a month they swallowed upthe regular and misleading information that ZigZag and Garboprovided.

The military immediately recognized the benefits of thisruse and supported the operation. But for the politicians it hadbeen a tougher call. There was an impassioned debate betweenthe minister for Home Security, Herbert Morrison, and PrimeMinister Winston Churchill. It would be too crude to characterizeit as a class conflict, but Morrison, who was the son of apoliceman from south London and who represented a desperatelypoor constituency in east London, perhaps felt morekeenly than did Churchill the burden that the operation wouldimpose on the working-class areas south of the center. And hewas uneasy at the thought of "playing God," of politicians determiningwho was to live and who to die. Churchill, as usual,prevailed.

The success of the operation is contested by historians. TheBritish intelligence agency, MI5, destroyed the false reportsdispatched by Garbo and ZigZag, recognizing that, were theyever to come to light, the residents of south London might nottake kindly to being used in this way. However, the Nazis neverimproved their aim. And a scientific adviser with a stiff upperlip, who promoted the operation even though his parents andhis old school were in south London ("I knew that neither myparents nor the school would have had it otherwise"), estimatedit may have saved as many as 10,000 lives.

By the end of August 1944, the danger from V1s had receded.The British got better at shooting down the doodlebugsfrom both air and ground. More important, the V1 launchingpads in Northern France were overrun by the advancing Alliedforces. On September 7, 1944, the British government announcedthat the war against the flying bomb was over. TheV1s had killed around six thousand people. Areas of south London—Croydon,Penge, Beckenham, Dulwich, Streatham, andLewisham—had been rocked and pounded: 57,000 houseshad been damaged in Croydon alone.

Nonetheless, it's possible that without the double-agent subterfuge,many more buildings would have been destroyed—andmany more lives lost. Churchill probably didn't lose toomuch sleep over the decision. He faced excruciating moral dilemmason an almost daily basis. But this one is significant forcapturing the structure of a famous philosophical puzzle.

That puzzle is the subject of this book.

CHAPTER 2

Spur of the Moment

how are they free from sin who ...have taken a human life?

—Saint Augustine

A man is standing by the side of a track when he sees arunaway train hurtling toward him: clearly the brakes havefailed. Ahead are five people, tied to the track. If the man doesnothing, the five will be run over and killed. Luckily he is nextto a signal switch: turning this switch will send the out-of-controltrain down a side track, a spur, just ahead of him. Alas,there's a snag: on the spur he spots one person tied to the track:changing direction will inevitably result in this person beingkilled. What should he do?

From now on this dilemma will be referred to as Spur. Spuris not identical to Winston Churchill's conundrum, of course,but there are similarities. The British government faced achoice. It could do nothing or it could try to change the trajectoryof the doodlebugs—through a campaign of misinformation—andso save lives. Different people and fewer peoplewould die as a result. Switching the direction of the train wouldlikewise save lives, though one different person would die as aresult.

Most people seem to believe that not only is it permissible toturn the train down the spur, it is actually required—morallyobligatory.

A version of Spur appeared for the first time in the OxfordReview, in 1967. The example was later reprinted in a book ofessays of which the dedication reads "To The Memory of IrisMurdoch." It was the author of those essays who had shared aflat with Iris Murdoch during World War II and cowered in thebath at Seaforth Place as the British government was confrontedwith an analogous problem. Philippa Bonsanquet(later Philippa Foot) could never have guessed that her puzzle,published in a fourteen-page article in an esoteric periodical,would spawn a mini-academic industry and signal the start of adebate that continues to the present day.

It's a debate that draws on the most important moral thinkersin the philosophical canon—from Aquinas to Kant, fromHume to Bentham—and captures fundamental tensions inour moral outlook. To test our moral intuitions, philosophershave come up with ever more surreal scenarios involving runawaytrains and often bizarre props: trap doors, giant revolvingplates, tractors, and drawbridges. The train is usually racingtoward five unfortunates and the reader is presented with variousmeans to rescue them, although at the cost of another life.

The five who are threatened with death are, in most scenarios,innocent: they don't deserve to be in their perilous circumstances.The one person who could be killed to save thefive is also, in most scenarios, entirely innocent. There's generallyno link between the one and the five: they're not friends ormembers of the same family: the only connection betweenthem is that they happen to be caught up in the same disastroussituation.

Soon we will meet the Fat Man. The central mystery abouthow we should treat him has baffled philosophers for nearlyhalf a century. There have now been so many articles linked tothe topic that a jokey neologism for it has stuck: "trolley ology."

As an indication of how trolleyology has entered popularconsciousness, a version of it was even put to a British primeminister. In front of a live TED audience in July 2009, an interviewerthrew Gordon Brown the following curveball. "You'reon vacation on a nice beach. Word comes through that there'sbeen a massive earthquake and that a tsunami is advancing onthe beach. At one end of the beach there is a house containinga family of five Nigerians. And at the other end of the beachthere is a single Brit. You have time to alert just one house.What do you do?" Amidst audience tittering, Mr. Brown, everthe politician, deftly dodged the premise: "Modern communications.Alert both."

But sometimes you can't alert both. Sometimes you can'tsave everyone. Politicians do have to make decisions that are amatter of life and death. So do health officials. Health resourcesare not limitless. Whenever a health body is faced with a choicebetween funding a drug that is estimated to save X lives, andfunding another that would save Y, they are, in effect, confrontedwith a variation of the trolley problem, though theseare dilemmas that don't involve killing anybody.

As we'll see, trolleyology has bred subtle and important distinctions:for example, between a choice to save one or to savefive on the one hand, and to kill one to save five on the other.At the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, in upper NewYork State, where future officers come to train, all the cadetsare exposed to trolleyology as part of a compulsory course inphilosophy and "Just War" theory. It helps underline the difference,the tutors say, between how the United States wages warand the tactics of al-Qaeda: between targeting a military installationknowing that some civilians will inevitably be caught upin the attack and deliberately aiming at civilians.

Philosophers dispute whether or not the trolley scenarios doindeed encapsulate such a distinction. But trolleyology, whichwas devised by armchair philosophers, is no longer exclusivelytheir preserve. A noticeable trend in philosophy in the past decadeis how permeable it has become to the influence and insightsfrom other fields. Nothing illustrates this better than trolleyology.In the past decade this sub-branch of ethics hasembraced many disciplines—including psychology, law, linguistics,anthropology, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology.And the most fashionable branch of philosophy, experimentalphilosophy, has also jumped on the tramwagon.Trolley-related studies have been carried out from Israel toIndia to Iran.

Some of the trolleyology literature is so fiendishly complexthat, in the words of one exasperated philosopher, it "makesthe Talmud look like Cliffs Notes" (referring to a set of studentstudy guides). Indeed, to an outsider, the curious incidents ofthe trains on the track may seem like harmless fun—crosswordpuzzles for long-stay occupants of the Ivory Tower. But at heart,they're about what's right and wrong, and how we should behave.And what could be more important than that?

CHAPTER 3

The Founding Mothers

I realize the tragic significance of the atomic bomb.

—President Harry S. Truman, August 9, 1945,the day Fat Man is dropped on Nagasaki

Philippa (Pip to her friends) Foot, the George Stephensonof trolleyology, believed there was a right answer (and so, logically,also a wrong one) to her train dilemma.

Foot was born in 1920 and, like so many of her contemporaries,her ethical outlook was molded by the violence of WorldWar II. But when she began to teach philosophy at OxfordUniversity in 1947, "subjectivism" still had a lingering and, toher mind, pernicious hold on academia.

Subjectivism maintains that there are no objective moraltruths. Before World War II it had been given intellectual ballastby a group of mathematicians, logicians, and philosophersfrom the Austrian capital. They were known as the ViennaCircle. The Vienna Circle developed "logical positivism,"which claimed that for a proposition to have meaning it mustfulfill one of two criteria. Either it must be true in virtue of themeaning of its terms (e.g., 2 + 2 = 4 or "All trains are vehicles"),or it must be in principle verifiable through experimentation(e.g., "the moon is made of cheese," or "five men aheadare roped to the track"). All other statements were literallymeaningless.

These meaningless propositions would include bald moralassertions, such as "The Nazis were wrong to gas Jews," or "TheBritish were justified in using subterfuge to alter the trajectoryof the doodlebugs." On the face of it this is an odd claim: thesepropositions sound as if they make sense and at least the firstseems self-evidently true. They're not like the jumble of words,"Trajectory doodlebugs subterfuge British alter justified,"which is patently gibberish. How then ought we to interpretethical statements? One answer was supplied by the Englishphilosopher A. J. Ayer, who'd attended sessions of the ViennaCircle. Later he would say of logical positivism that "the mostimportant of [its] defects was that nearly all of it was false," butfor a time he was entirely under its spell. Ayer developed whatis pejoratively called the boo-hooray theory. If I say, "TheNazis were wrong to gas the Jews," that's best translated as,"The Nazis gassed the Jews: boo, hiss." Likewise, "The Britishwere justified in using subterfuge to alter the trajectory ofthe doodlebugs" is roughly translatable as "The British usedsubterfuge to alter the trajectory of the doodlebugs: hoorah,hoorah."

At the onset of Philippa Foot's career, the full horrors perpetratedin the concentration camps of World War II were stillbeing exposed and would haunt her. The notion that ethicalclaims could be reduced to opinion and to personal preferences,to "I approve," or "I disapprove," to "hooray-boo," was toher anathema.

But not only was Foot radically out of step with ethical emotivism,she also had little time for an alternative approach tophilosophy which for a period in the 1950s and 1960s dominatedthe discipline in Oxford and beyond—"ordinary language"philosophy. The ordinary language movement believedthat, before philosophical problems could be resolved, one hadto attend to the subtleties of how language is deployed in everydayspeech. Philosophers would spend their time deconstructingfine distinctions between our uses of, for example, "bymistake" and "by accident." A student who spoke up in a lectureor tutorial would invariably hear the question boomerangback: "what exactly do you mean when you say XYZ?" Pupilsof Foot recall her dutifully teaching this approach, but halfheartedly,and only so that they could pass exams.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691154023
• ISBN 13: 9780691154022
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240