Would You Kill the Fat Man?: The Trolley Problem and What Your Answer Tells Us about Right and Wrong Read online

  Would You Kill the Fat Man?

  Would You Kill the Fat Man?

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

  David Edmonds

  Princeton University Press

  Princeton and Oxford

  Copyright © 2014 by David Edmonds

  Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press

  Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

  In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

  press.princeton.edu

  All Rights Reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Edmonds, David, 1964–

  Would you kill the fat man? : the trolley problem and what your answer tells us about right and wrong / David Edmonds.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-691-15402-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Ethics. 2. Thought experiments. 3. Churchill, Winston, 1874–1965—Miscellanea. I. Title.

  BJ1012.E34 2013

  150--dc23 2013012385

  British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

  This book has been composed in Electra and Syntax

  Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Liz, Isaac, and Saul

  (an undiscriminating fan of wheels, trains, and trolleys)

  “Clang, clang, clang” went the trolley

  “Ding, ding, ding” went the bell

  “Zing, zing, zing” went my heartstrings

  From the moment I saw him I fell.

  —Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane, “The Trolley Song,” 1944

  (sung by Judy Garland in Meet Me in St. Louis)

  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

  Figures

  FIGURE 1 Spur

  9

  FIGURE 2 Fat Man

  37

  FIGURE 3 Lazy Susan

  40

  FIGURE 4 Loop

  41

  FIGURE 5 Six Behind One

  55

  FIGURE 6 Extra Push

  64

  FIGURE 7 Two Loop

  65

  FIGURE 8 Tractor Man

  98

  FIGURE 9 The Tumble Case

  99

  FIGURE 10 The Trap Door

  140

  Prologue

  The levity of the examples is not meant to offend.

  —Philippa Foot

  THIS BOOK IS GOING TO LEAVE in its wake a litter of corpses and a trail of blood. Only one animal will suffer within its pages, but many humans will die. They will be mostly blameless victims caught up in bizarre circumstances. A heavyset man may or may not topple from a footbridge.

  Fortunately, almost all these fatalities are fictional. However, the thought experiments are designed to test our moral intuitions, to help us develop moral principles and thus to be of some practical use in a world in which real choices have to be made, and real people get hurt. The point of any thought experiment in ethics is to exclude irrelevant considerations that might cloud our judgment in real cases. But the experiment has to have some structural similarities with real cases to be of use. And so, in the forthcoming pages, you will also read about a few episodes involving genuine matters of life and death. Making cameo appearances, for example, will be Winston Churchill, the twenty-fourth president of the United States, a German kidnapper, and a nineteenth-century sailor accused of cannibalism.

  Thought experiments don’t exist until they have been thought up. Books covering philosophy tend, rightly, to focus on ideas, not people. But ideas do not emerge from a vacuum; they are the product of time and place, of upbringing and personality. Perhaps they have been conceived as a rebuttal to other ideas, or as a reflection of the concerns of the moment. Perhaps they reflect a thinker’s particular preoccupation. In any case, intellectual history is fascinating, and I wanted to weave in the stories of one or two of those responsible for the ideas on which this book is based.

  There is a reason why the crime at the heart of this book, the killing of the fat man, has never been fully solved, philosophically: it is complicated … really complicated. Questions that, at first glance, appear straightforward—such as “When you pushed the fat man, did you intend to kill him?”—turn out to be multi-dimensional. A book that attempted to address every aspect of all the fraught issues raised by the killing would be ten times the length of this one. In any case, although some of the intricacies can’t be avoided—indeed, they provide much of the scholarly excitement—my aim was to write a book that did not require readers to hold a philosophy PhD.

  When I first came across the trolley problem I was an undergraduate. When the fat man was introduced to philosophy I was a postgraduate. That was a long time ago. Since then, though, what has reignited my interest has been the perspective brought to bear on the problem from several other disciplines.

  My hope is that the text that follows will give some insight into why philosophers and non-philosophers alike have found the fat man’s imaginary death so fascinating.

  Acknowledgments

  THIS IS A DULL BIT FOR THE READER, but a welcome opportunity for the author—the acknowledgment of debts. And I have a trolley load of people to thank.

  First, to numerous philosophers: I’ve conducted many interviews or had many meetings with academic philosophers about the book, and have also drawn on relevant material gathered through my work with the BBC, Prospect, and especially Philosophy Bites (www.philosophybites.com). These philosophers include Anthony Appiah, Fiery Cushman, Jonathan Haidt, Rom Harré, Anthony Kenny, Joshua Knobe, Sabina Lovibond, Mary Midgley, Adrian Moore, Mike O
tsuka, Nick Phillipson, Janet Radcliffe Richards, Philip Schofield, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Quentin Skinner.

  Second, thanks to another set of philosophers who have read part or all of the manuscript. No doubt there are still errors in the book, but that there aren’t more of them is down to Steve Clarke, John Campbell, Josh Greene, Guy Kahane, Neil Levy, John Mikhail, Regina Rini, Simon Rippon, Alex Voorhoeve, and David Wiggins (and Nick Shea, for helping me decipher Professor Wiggins’s handwriting).

  Third, thanks to those who assisted with material for the biographical section—Lesley Brown, M.R.D. Foot (who, sadly, has passed away), Sir Anthony Kenny, and Daphne Stroud, a former tutorial partner of Philippa Foot’s.

  Fourth, I appreciate assistance I received from journalists at the BBC and Prospect. Colleagues at the BBC were crucial during this book’s germination stage. Jeremy Skeet helped to commission a two-part BBC World Service series on the subject, which was presented by the estimable Steve Evans, an economist with an insatiable curiosity, who would have made an excellent philosopher. For the past few years I’ve been contributing philosophy articles to Prospect, in which some of this material was given a first airing. James Crabtree (now of the Financial Times) and the former editor, David Goodhart, commissioned articles on subjects that other periodicals would shy away from. If it’s possible to plagiarize one’s own work, then I’m guilty in one or two places of doing so. The chapter on experiments in philosophy relies on some of the research done for an interview, co-written with Nigel Warburton, on the X-Phi movement. And I’ve also written for Prospect on enhancement as well as on the trolley problem itself.

  Fifth, to the team at Princeton University Press: Hannah Paul and Al Bertrand were patient and encouraging throughout the writing process—people always express similar sentiments about their editors in the acknowledgment section, but this time it’s really true. Copyeditor Karen Verde, illustrator Dimitri Karetnikov, and press officer Caroline Priday made up an excellent team. Hannah Edmonds, as usual, played the role of proofreading long-stop, brilliantly catching grammatical and spelling infelicities that had slipped through others.

  Sixth, thanks to my agents at David Higham, particularly Laura West and Veronique Baxter.

  Seventh, my referees’ input was much appreciated. Princeton approached two academics to read the manuscript. I was fortunate in that both of them are moral philosophers of international standing and both chose to waive their anonymity. Roger Crisp, a professor at Oxford, made numerous useful suggestions, as did Jeff McMahan, of Rutgers and Princeton and one of the world’s leading specialists in this area.

  Eighth, gratitude to Julian Savulescu, Miriam Wood, Deborah Sheehan, Rachel Gaminiratne, and others at Oxford’s Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, for providing me over the past several years with such an hospitable academic base. Likewise, to Barry Smith and Shahrar Ali from the Institute of Philosophy.

  Ninth, thanks to Britain’s finest Indian restaurant, the Curry Paradise, for fueling the brain.

  Finally, several friends merit a special mention. For the past six years, Nigel Warburton has been my partner-in-crime on the Philosophy Bites podcast. As of May 2012, our interviews have had 18 million downloads: more important, the series has been tremendous fun and has given me a wonderfully broad philosophical education. I also want to acknowledge two non-philosophers. John Eidinow (with whom I’ve written three books) and David Franklin, a law scholar, are very clever chaps indeed. Both read the entire manuscript and made countless invaluable comments.

  The book is dedicated to Liz, for her loving kindness and her gentle toleration; to Saul, who has trumped my trolley preoccupations with his toy-train obsession; and to Isaac, the most delightful of way stations, born some time between chapters 7 and 8.

  PART 1

  * * *

  Philosophy and the Trolley

  CHAPTER 1

  * * *

  Churchill’s Dilemma

  AT 4:13 A.M. ON JUNE 13, 1944, there was an explosion in a lettuce patch twenty-five miles south-east of London.

  Britain had been at war for five years, but this marked the beginning 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—retaliation weapon. The first V1 merely destroyed edible plants, but there were nine other missiles of vengeance that night, and they had more deadly effect.

  Londoners prided themselves on—and had to some extent mythologized—their fortitude during the Blitz. Yet, by the summer of ’44, reservoirs of optimism and morale were running dry,—even though D-day had occurred on June 6 and the Nazis were already on the retreat on the Eastern front.

  The V1s were a terrifying sight. The two tons of steel hurtled through the sky, with a flaming orange-red tail. But it was the sound that most deeply imprinted itself on witnesses. The rockets would 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 explosion that could flatten several buildings. Londoners tempered their 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 as phlegmatic as the poet Edith Sitwell, who was in the middle of a reading when a doodlebug was heard above. She “merely lifted her eyes to the ceiling for a moment and, giving her voice a little more volume to counter the racket in the sky, read on.”1

  Because the missiles were not piloted, they could be dispatched across the Channel day or night, rain or shine. That they 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 infested with enormous, venomous insects.”2

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

  The skylight of nearby Number 5, Seaforth Place, would have been shaken by this explosion too. Number 5 was an attic flat overrun by mice and volumes of poetry: there were so many books that additional shelves had had to be installed in what had originally been a bread oven, set into the wall. There was a crack in the roof, through which could be heard the intermittent growl of planes, and there were cracks in the floor as well, through which could be heard the near constant roar of the underground. The flat was home to two young women, who shared shoes (they had three pairs between them) and a lover. Iris was working in the Treasury, and secretly feeding information back to the Communist Party; Philippa was researching how American money could revitalize European economies once the war was over. Both Iris Murdoch and Philippa Bonsanquet would go on to become outstanding philosophers, though Iris would always be better known as a novelist.

  Iris’s biographer, Peter Conradi, says the women became used to walking to work in the morning to discover various buildings had disappeared during the night. Back at the flat, during intense bombing raids, they would climb into the bathtub under the stairs for comfort and protection.

  They weren’t aware of it at the time, but matters could have been worse. The Nazis faced two problems. First, despite the near miss to Buckingham Palace, and the terrible toll at the Guards Chapel, most of the V1 bombs actually fell a few miles south of the center. Second, this was a fact of which the Nazis were ignorant.

  An ingenious plan presented itself in Whitehall. If the Germans could be deceived into believing that the doodlebugs were hitting their mark—or, better still, missing their mark by falling north—then they would not readjust the trajectory of the bombs, and perhaps even alter it so that they fell still farther south. That could sa
ve lives.

  The details of this deception were intricately plotted by the secret service and involved several double agents, including two of the most colorful, ZigZag3 and Garbo.4 Both ZigZag and Garbo were on the Nazi payroll but working for the Allies. The Nazis requested eyewitness information about where the bombs were exploding—and for a month they swallowed up the regular and misleading information that ZigZag and Garbo provided.

  The military immediately recognized the benefits of this ruse and supported the operation. But for the politicians it had been a tougher call. There was an impassioned debate between the minister for Home Security, Herbert Morrison, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill. It would be too crude to characterize it as a class conflict, but Morrison, who was the son of a policeman from south London and who represented a desperately poor constituency in east London, perhaps felt more keenly than did Churchill the burden that the operation would impose on the working-class areas south of the center. And he was uneasy at the thought of “playing God,” of politicians determining who was to live and who to die. Churchill, as usual, prevailed.