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

  The success of the operation is contested by historians. The British intelligence agency, MI5, destroyed the false reports dispatched by Garbo and ZigZag, recognizing that, were they ever to come to light, the residents of south London might not take kindly to being used in this way. However, the Nazis never improved their aim. And a scientific adviser with a stiff upper lip, who promoted the operation even though his parents and his old school were in south London (“I knew that neither my parents nor the school would have had it otherwise”), estimated it may have saved as many as 10,000 lives.5

  By the end of August 1944, the danger from V1s had receded. The British got better at shooting down the doodlebugs from both air and ground. More important, the V1 launching pads in Northern France were overrun by the advancing Allied forces. On September 7, 1944, the British government announced that the war against the flying bomb was over.6 The V1s had killed around six thousand people. Areas of south London—Croydon, Penge, Beckenham, Dulwich, Streatham, and Lewisham—had been rocked and pounded: 57,000 houses had been damaged in Croydon alone.

  Nonetheless, it’s possible that without the double-agent subterfuge, many more buildings would have been destroyed—and many more lives lost. Churchill probably didn’t lose too much sleep over the decision. He faced excruciating moral dilemmas on an almost daily basis. But this one is significant for capturing 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 a runaway train hurtling toward him: clearly the brakes have failed. Ahead are five people, tied to the track. If the man does nothing, the five will be run over and killed. Luckily he is next to a signal switch: turning this switch will send the out-of-control train 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 being killed. What should he do?

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

  Figure 1. Spur. You’re standing by the side of a track when you see a runaway train hurtling toward you: clearly the brakes have failed. Ahead are five people, tied to the track. If you do nothing, the five will be run over and killed. Luckily you are next to a signal switch: turning this switch will send the out-of-control train down a side track, a spur, just ahead of you. Alas, there’s a snag: on the spur you spot one person tied to the track: changing direction will inevitably result in this person being killed. What should you do?

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

  A version of Spur appeared for the first time in the Oxford Review, in 1967. The example was later reprinted in a book of essays of which the dedication reads “To The Memory of Iris Murdoch.”1 It was the author of those essays who had shared a flat with Iris Murdoch during World War II and cowered in the bath at Seaforth Place as the British government was confronted with an analogous problem.2 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 a debate that continues to the present day.

  It’s a debate that draws on the most important moral thinkers in the philosophical canon—from Aquinas to Kant, from Hume to Bentham—and captures fundamental tensions in our moral outlook. To test our moral intuitions, philosophers have come up with ever more surreal scenarios involving runaway trains and often bizarre props: trap doors, giant revolving plates, tractors, and drawbridges. The train is usually racing toward five unfortunates and the reader is presented with various means 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 the five is also, in most scenarios, entirely innocent. There’s generally no link between the one and the five: they’re not friends or members of the same family: the only connection between them is that they happen to be caught up in the same disastrous situation.

  Soon we will meet the Fat Man. The central mystery about how we should treat him has baffled philosophers for nearly half a century. There have now been so many articles linked to the topic that a jokey neologism for it has stuck: “trolleyology.”3

  As an indication of how trolleyology has entered popular consciousness, a version of it was even put to a British prime minister. In front of a live TED audience in July 2009, an interviewer threw Gordon Brown the following curveball. “You’re on vacation on a nice beach. Word comes through that there’s been a massive earthquake and that a tsunami is advancing on the beach. At one end of the beach there is a house containing a family of five Nigerians. And at the other end of the beach there is a single Brit. You have time to alert just one house. What do you do?” Amidst audience tittering, Mr. Brown, ever the politician, deftly dodged the premise: “Modern communications. Alert both.”4

  But sometimes you can’t alert both. Sometimes you can’t save everyone. Politicians do have to make decisions that are a matter of life and death. So do health officials. Health resources are not limitless. Whenever a health body is faced with a choice between funding a drug that is estimated to save X lives, and funding another that would save Y, they are, in effect, confronted with a variation of the trolley problem, though these are dilemmas that don’t involve killing anybody.5

  As we’ll see, trolleyology has bred subtle and important distinctions: for example, between a choice to save one or to save five 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 New York State, where future officers come to train, all the cadets are exposed to trolleyology as part of a compulsory course in philosophy and “Just War” theory. It helps underline the difference, the tutors say, between how the United States wages war and the tactics of al-Qaeda: between targeting a military installation knowing that some civilians will inevitably be caught up in the attack and deliberately aiming at civilians.

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

  Some of the trolleyology literature is so fiendishly complex that, in the words of one exasperated philosopher, it “makes the Talmud look like Cliffs Notes” (referring to a set of student study guides).6 Indeed, to an outsider, the curious incidents of the trains on the track may seem like harmless fun—crossword puzzles 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 signi
ficance 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 Stephenson of 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 World War II. But when she began to teach philosophy at Oxford University in 1947, “subjectivism” still had a lingering and, to her mind, pernicious hold on academia.

  Subjectivism maintains that there are no objective moral truths. Before World War II it had been given intellectual ballast by a group of mathematicians, logicians, and philosophers from the Austrian capital. They were known as the Vienna Circle. The Vienna Circle developed “logical positivism,” which claimed that for a proposition to have meaning it must fulfill one of two criteria. Either it must be true in virtue of the meaning 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 ahead are roped to the track”). All other statements were literally meaningless.

  These meaningless propositions would include bald moral assertions, such as “The Nazis were wrong to gas Jews,” or “The British were justified in using subterfuge to alter the trajectory of the doodlebugs.” On the face of it this is an odd claim: these propositions sound as if they make sense and at least the first seems 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 interpret ethical statements? One answer was supplied by the English philosopher A. J. Ayer, who’d attended sessions of the Vienna Circle.1 Later he would say of logical positivism that “the most important of [its] defects was that nearly all of it was false,”2 but for a time he was entirely under its spell. Ayer developed what is pejoratively called the boo-hooray theory.3 If I say, “The Nazis were wrong to gas the Jews,” that’s best translated as, “The Nazis gassed the Jews: boo, hiss.” Likewise, “The British were justified in using subterfuge to alter the trajectory of the doodlebugs” is roughly translatable as “The British used subterfuge to alter the trajectory of the doodlebugs: hoorah, hoorah.”

  At the onset of Philippa Foot’s career, the full horrors perpetrated in the concentration camps of World War II were still being exposed and would haunt her. The notion that ethical claims could be reduced to opinion and to personal preferences, to “I approve,” or “I disapprove,” to “hooray-boo,” was to her anathema.

  But not only was Foot radically out of step with ethical emotivism, she also had little time for an alternative approach to philosophy which for a period in the 1950s and 1960s dominated the discipline in Oxford and beyond—”ordinary language” philosophy. The ordinary language movement believed that, before philosophical problems could be resolved, one had to attend to the subtleties of how language is deployed in everyday speech. Philosophers would spend their time deconstructing fine distinctions between our uses of, for example, “by mistake” and “by accident.”4 A student who spoke up in a lecture or tutorial would invariably hear the question boomerang back: “what exactly do you mean when you say XYZ?” Pupils of Foot recall her dutifully teaching this approach, but half-heartedly, and only so that they could pass exams.

  Foot was not a natural teacher. She was solicitous, encouraging, but intimidating. She had a long, patrician face and a plummy voice, sounding according to one student “like a Grande Dame.”5 The first impression, that she came from an aristocratic English family, would have captured a half-truth. Her parents were married in Westminster Abbey in one of the social events of the year. Her father, Captain William Sydney Bence Bosanquet, a World War I war hero, was from what Foot herself described as the hunting, fishing, and shooting set. Foot was brought up in an imposing country house and given almost no formal schooling, though she was surrounded by governesses. It was not a culture in which it was deemed advisable or worthwhile to educate girls (Foot’s spelling was always atrocious). When to everyone’s surprise Pip was offered a place at Oxford to read Politics, Philosophy, and Economics, a friend of the family consoled the parents with the thought that “at least she doesn’t look clever.”6

  Foot never objected to intellectual snobbery, but university liberated her from the social snootiness at home. She neither flaunted nor hid her privileged background. Her studies began a month after Britain had declared war on Germany: during the war, while most of the female undergraduates stitched their own skirts out of blackout material, Philippa’s clothes were fashionable and always “conspicuously not home-made.”7 She became the focus of particular attention from her economics tutor, Tommy (later Lord) Balogh, a brainy, bullying, and philandering Jewish-Hungarian émigré, who became an adviser to Harold Wilson—an enthralling character though an “emotional fascist.”8 Balogh had many affairs: according to Foot’s tutorial partner, Pip endured a sustained courtship campaign, refusing his proposals—made in a thick accent—of marriage.9

  But only half of Philippa Foot’s pedigree was posh-English: her mother could claim more illustrious lineage still. Esther was born in 1893, in the White House. She was the daughter of the twenty-second president and the twenty-fourth president of the United States. This sounds like a logic teaser, since no woman has ever held that office. But the descriptions, “22nd President” and “24th President,” have, as philosophers might put it, the same reference. The Democrat, Grover Cleveland, Foot’s grandfather, was the only president ever to serve in two nonconsecutive terms.

  Foot was fascinated by her grandfather’s life (and knew her grandmother reasonably well), but it wasn’t the “done” thing to boast about such a connection. In public she was far more likely to refer to a link with a relative on her father’s side: Bernard Bosanquet—the cricketer credited with inventing the game’s most devious delivery, the googly.

  Ménage à quatre

  After the war, Philippa Foot persuaded her college, Somerville, then an all-women college, to take on a second philosopher, Elizabeth Anscombe, who has an indirect but vital role in trolleyology. Like Foot, Anscombe never took a PhD: in those days a doctorate was a stigma, a sign that you weren’t considered worthy of an immediate academic post. Anscombe had studied Classics [Greats] and received a First Class degree despite, it is said, answering “no” in her viva to the question, “is there any fact about the period you are supposed to have studied which you would like to tell us?”10 She cut her hair short, smoked cigars, drank tea from the saucer, and wore a monocle and trousers—one pair was leopard skin. She had a mellifluous voice, like a clarinet, which she occasionally deployed to be eye-wateringly rude.

  For many years Foot and Anscombe were confidantes as well as colleagues, united in a visceral aversion to subjectivism. Former students recall the two Somerville tutors retreating to the common room after lunch, sitting on either side of the fireplace and engaging in protracted philosophical discussions.11 Foot always said she owed a great deal to Anscombe and thought she was one of the best philosophers of her generation. Respect was mutual: when a young Tony Kenny arrived in town as a graduate, Anscombe told him that Foot was the only Oxford moral philosopher worth heeding.

  In the late 1940s it was still rare for women to enter academic philosophy, and Oxford was a bastion of male chauvinism. That one generation could produce not only Anscombe and Foot, but Iris Murdoch too—who with Foot’s encouragement had applied for and been offered a job at nearby St. Anne’s College—was remarkable. The gifted have a tendency to cluster, so it was less than remarkable that their academic and personal lives were so closely intertwined. There would be falling-outs and falling-ins, demonstrations of loyalty and acts of betrayal, philosophical consensus on some matters and bitter divisions on others. When Pip and Iris were flatmates in London, one of Murdoch’s numerous lovers was M.R.D. Foot. M.R.D. Foot became a dist
inguished historian of the Special Operations Executive, the clandestine organization that operated behind enemy lines in World War II. But in the war, he himself was a daring agent, parachuting into alien territory. He regarded parachuting as “a tremendous, sensual thrill—nothing but love-making with the right companion can touch it.”12

  The thrill was bound up with the danger. Foot was captured and almost killed in 1944, by which stage Murdoch had ditched him, rather callously, in exchange for Tommy Balogh. Murdoch later grew to hate Balogh, calling him Satan and a “horribly clever Jew.”13 But the episode had left M.R.D. Foot feeling ravaged.14 Looking back, Murdoch wrote that Philippa “most successfully salvaged what was left after my behavior”15 by marrying M.R.D. Foot herself, in 1945. The complications from this partner-swapping strained relations between the two women for many years. “Losing you & losing you in that way was one of the worst things that ever happened to me,”16 Murdoch wrote to Foot.

  After the war, the Foots settled down to domestic life in north Oxford. It seems to have been a relatively happy arrangement to begin with at least, though M.R.D. Foot was devastated when he wasn’t awarded a First Class degree in PPE (Politics, Philosophy, and Economics). Pip broke the news to him, and he spent the rest of his life adding to a list he kept of distinguished people who had suffered a similar calamity. Then in the late fifties, quite unexpectedly to Philippa, and with devastating emotional impact, her marriage broke up. In his memoirs, M.R.D. Foot explains it in two lines. “I remained passionately interested in having children; she turned out not to be able to have any. Feeling a fearsome cad, I walked out on her.”17