“WOULD YOU KILL THE FAT MAN?

” - David Edmonds

PART 1 - PHILOSOPHY AND THE TROLLEY

CH. 1 - Churchill’s Dilemma

On June 13, 1944, there was an explosion in a lettuce patch in the south-east of London. Britain
had been at war for five years and germans were bombing over them. The first german flying bomb
merely destroyed edible plants, but there were nine other missiles of vengeance that night. The
bombs were aimed at the heart of the capital, which was both densely populated and contained the
institutions of government and power. Some missiles 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, was shaken by this explosion too. The flat was home to two young women: 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. What is more important is
that 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 was presented
in Whitehall: if the Germans could be deceived into believing that the missiles were hitting their
mark then they would not readjust the trajectory of the bombs and that could save lives. The details
of this deception were intricately plotted by the secret service and involved several double agents,
including two of the most colorful, ZigZag and Garbo. Both ZigZag and Garbo were on the Nazi
payroll but working for the Allies. 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 in which Churchill prevailed. 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. It’s possible
that without the double-agent subterfuge, many more buildings would have been destroyed and
many more lives lost.

CH.2 - Spur of the moment

Figure 1. SPUR: a man is standing by the side of a track when he sees a runaway train hurtling
toward him. Ahead are five people, tied to the track. If the man does nothing the five people will
die, but luckily he is next to a signal switch: turning the switch will send the out-of-control train
down a side track, a spur, just ahead of him, but on this spur there is one person tied to the track:
changing the direction will inevitably kill this person. What should he do?

Most people seem to believe that not only is it permissible to turn the train down the spur, but that it
is actually required and morally obligatory. A version of “Spur” appeared for the first time in the
Oxford Review in 1967. To test our moral intuitions philosophers have come up with ever more
surreal scenarios involving often bizarre props (trap doors, tractors..). The train is usually racing
toward five unfortunates and the reader is presented with various means to rescue them, although
the cost of another life. There is no link between the one and the five, and they are innocent
people. Politicians and health officials do have to make decisions that are a matter of life and
death. 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 do not involve killing anybody.
CH.3 - The Founding Mothers
Philippa Foot (Bonsanquet), the founder of trolleyology, believed that there were a right answer to
her train dilemma. Foot was born in 1920 and her ethical outlook was molded by the violence of
WW2. Some of her work was crucial in the re-emergence of normative ethics within analytic
philosophy, especially her critique of consequentialism and of subjectivism. When she began to
teach philosophy at Oxford University in 1947, subjectivism still had a pernicious hold on
academia, according to her. Subjectivism maintains that there are no objective moral truths and
this idea was further expanded by the “Vienna Circle”, a group of intellectuals which 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 (ex 2+2=4), or it must be in
principle verifiable through experimentation. All other statements were literally meaningless
(including explicit moral assertions). How then ought we interpret ethical statements? A.J. Ayer’s
answer: Ayer developed what is pejoratively called the boo-hooray theory: emotivism claims that
judgments, rather than being statements of facts, are only expressions of emotion, and are neither
true nor false. Moral judgments are attitudes rather than beliefs. In this way, to say something is
right is to have a favorable attitude toward it and amounts to saying “Hurrah!” To say something is
wrong is to have an unfavorable attitude toward it and is equivalent to saying “Boo!”. But Foot was
radically out of step with ethical emotivism. In addition to their common assault on hooray-boo
meta-ethics, Anscombe, Foot, and Murdoch were preoccupied with the “virtues”. In answer to the
question “How should I behave?” in any particular moral dilemma, (1) one approach emphasizes
moral obligations and duties. (2) An alternative response, utilitarianism, states that what matters
are the consequences of an action, whether for example the action saves the most lives, or
produces the most happiness. (3) Foot, Anscombe, and Murdoch were attracted by a third way of
thinking: inspired by the work of Aristotle and Aquinas and Wittgenstein, they stressed the
importance of character. An action was good insofar as it exhibited the behavior of a virtuous
person. Anscombe was the most deeply transformed by Wittgenstein. Like so many of those who
came in contact with Wittgenstein she began to adopt some of his traits, such as disquieting
silences as she paused for thought in seminars and tutorials, the vise-like holding of her head with
her hands, and the agonized expression during intense philosophical debate. Wittgenstein
persuaded many of his most talented students to abandon the discipline: fortunately for philosophy
Anscombe stuck to her vocation. Anscombe spread the Wittgensteinian gospel to Foot. Foot
published several collections of articles but only one work conceived as a book, Natural Goodness.
Wittgenstein believed that philosophical puzzles were natural, easy to make, and yet arose out of
conceptual confusion, and so dissolvable by an analysis of language. Wittgenstein was skeptical
that philosophy had anything to contribute to ethics. More important the focus on the minutiae of a
hypothetical puzzle, endlessly reexamined through a myriad of distinct scenarios, ran contrary to
his style.

CH.4 - Thomas Aquinas

Philosopher and theologian St. Thomas Aquinas was born circa 1225 near Naples. Combining the
theological principles of faith with the philosophical principles of reason, he ranked among the most
influential thinkers of medieval Scholasticism. To his family’s fury he determined to become a
Dominican friar rather that the Benedictine monk they had planned. In an attempt to thwart
Thomas’s plan, his elder brothers forcibly took him to a family castle. His siblings attempted to
break his vow of celibacy by dispatching to his quarters an attractive prostitute. He eventually
escaped his captivity and traveled to Germany. Until his death in 1274, he wrote prodigiously. Half
a century later he was canonized. His work in moral philosophy remains relevant to us today. In
particular he drew up the principles required for a war to be described as just. Intentional killing
could never be justified, thought Aquinas. But if a person was threatened, and the only option to
save their life was to kill the assailant, the killing could be morally permissible. Thus was born the
Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE). The DDE it’s usually seen as consisting of four components,
though this formulation is not universally accepted. The DDE comes into play when:
- the act considered independently of its harmful effects is not in itself wrong
- the agent intends the good and does not intend the harm either as means or end, though the
individual may foresee the harm
- there is no way to achieve the good without causing the harmful effects
- the harmful effects are not disproportionally large relative to the good being sought

In 1967, Philippa Foot —> “The Problem of Abortion and the doctrine of Double Effect”. In it Foot
rejected the use of the DDE as a weapon to criticize abortion. She explains the DDE as a “based
on a distinction between what a man foresees as a result of his voluntary action and what, in the
strict sense, he intends”. The distinction between intending and foreseeing is at the car of the DDE.
In Catholic theology, the DDE has been pivotal tot he church’s explanation of why in its view there
are only rare cases in which abortion is acceptable. Most cases involve the intentional killing of the
fetus. But if a pregnant woman has author in her uterus, and a hysterectomy is required to save
her life, the fact that there is also a fetus in the womb is incidental. The DDE is built into law, into
medical practice and into the rules of war. The law draws a distinction between “direct” or
“purposeful” intention on the one hand and “oblique” intention on the other.
The method of trolleyology involves conjuring up various trolleyesque scenarios and taking note of
the strong intuitions that they elicit. The DDE is one possible candidate for a principle that explains
our intuitions. In exploring the validity of the DDE in er article, Philippa Foot describes several
imaginary thought experiments. A fat man is stuck in a hole in a cave. His head is out of the cave
so he can breathe, but a party of potholers is behind him and unable to escape. According to Foot
the right thing to do is to sit down and wait until the fat man grows thin; but philosophers have
arranged that flood waters should be rising within the cave. You have a stick of dynamite. Can you
use it to blow up the fat man? Foot compares her scenario with a twin set of cases. Imagine we
could either save a patient with a massive dose of drug, or save five patients who only need a fifth
each of this drug: what should we do? Once again it would be permissible according to Foot to
save the five though one will die. Now take the transplant case. Suppose there are five seriously ill
patients, all in urgent need of organs transplant. Two requires kidneys, two need lungs, one needs
a heart. An innocent healthy young man walks in for his annual checkup: should the surgeon bump
him off so that his organs can be farmed out to the five at risk? We are expected to find this
proposal abominable.
Foot believed that we do not need to resort DDE to explain our intuitions in these scenarios. She
proffered an alternative explanation. We have both negative and positive duties. Negative duties
are the duties not to interfere in other people’s lives. Positive duties are the duties to help others.
In Spur, her dilemma is faced by the driver and since her driver presumably started the train, his
terrible choice is between killing one or five. In a subsequent article Foot went on to highlight what
o her was a crucial point. In Spur one is merely redirecting an already existing threat. But in the
hospital case we have introduced a whole new threat.

CH.5 - Fat Man, Loop, Lazy Susan

Philippa Foot set trolleyology rolling but it was Judith Jarvis Thomson, a philosopher at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who expanded the discipline. She responded with two
influential articles on what she labeled “The Trolley Problem”. The first article included many
thought experiments of her own.
Figure 2. Fat Man: you’re on a footbridge overlooking the railway track. You see the trolley hurtling
along the track and, ahead of it, five people tied to the rails. There’s a very fat man leaning over the
railing watching the trolley. If you push him over the footbridge, he would smash on the track below
shuddering halt the trolley. But the fat man would die, saving the other five. Should you push the fat
man?
The reference to the man’s obesity is not gratuitous. If the train could be stopped by anybody of
any size you should sacrifice yourself. Even though the man’s size is a necessary component of
the thought experiment, and event though he is fictional drawing attention to his scale is
considered by some to be indecent. Thomson introduced us to the fat man in an article in 1985, the
obese were not seen as a self-identifying group subject to discrimination. Nowadays in many of the
articles about trolleyology the fat man has become a “large” man or a “heavy” man, or a man with a
heavy backpack. However described it looks as though the DDE might help explain that we can
turn the train in the Spur but not push the fat man. Like Philippa Foot, Thomson did not resort the
DDE to explain the difference. She wanted to appeal the notion of “rights”. Thomson appealed to
rights in Fat Man. Toppling the fat man is an infringement of his rights. But turning the trolley in
Spur is not an infringement of anybody’s rights. In Spur one is merely redirecting a preexisting
threat, whereas pushing the poor fat man introduces a completely new treat. The distinction feels
plausible: it feels as if it should carry some moral weight. But one trolleyologist (Frances Kamm)
insists it does not. She offers the example of Lazy Susan.
Figure 3. Lazy Susan: in Lazy Susan you can save the five by twisting the revolving plate 180
degrees - this will have the unfortunate consequence of placing on man directly in the oath of the
train. Should you rotate the Lazy Susan?
According to the author of the scenario it’s permissible to turn the lazy Susan even though this is
not about diverting an existing threat; for the individual who will die it introduces an entirely new
threat. Another example is that one of Loop.
Figure 4. Loop: the trolley is heading toward five men. If the trolley were to collide into them they
would die but you could instead turn the trolley onto a loop. One fat man is tied onto the loop. His
weight alone will stop the trolley preventing it from continuing around the loop and killing the five.
There’s a key difference with Spur. In spur, if the single man were to escape, that would be the
best of all possible worlds. In loop, if the man on the side track were to disappear, the five men
would be killed: you need his death to save the five.

CH.6 - Ticking clocks

An eleven year old boy has been kidnapped. He’s been missing for three days and he is now
considered to be in mortal danger. The police has arrested the chief suspect, he was captured after
picking up a ransom of one million euros. Now police men urgently need to locate the boy. The
interrogation of the suspect begins, the clock ticks and a search of 1.000 police, helicopters and
tracker dogs yells nothing. After seven hours of questioning the suspect has still not given up the
boy’s whereabouts. The police officer in charge writes down an instruction to the interrogators to
threaten to torture the suspect. So the suspect reveals where the boy is being held. This
kidnapping occurred in Germany in 2002, the kidnapper was Magnus Gafgen and the victim was
Jacob von Metzler (when the police men arrived they discovered the boy’s body already killed).
The case came famous after allegations surfaced of the torture threat. Frankfurt’s deputy police
chief, Wolfgang Daschner, who had written the torture note, said that he faced a stark choice.
There were expressions of outrage at Daschner’s behavior, but he also had vocal supporters, and
polls showed that the majority of Germans believed the threat was a reasonable means of
potentially saving a life.
There could be no trolleyology without deontology. Deontology states that there are certain things
that you just shouldn’t do. We can’t torture someone to death even if this would save five lives.
Some deontologists are absolutists: for them nothing could ever justify torture. But most accept
that in certain circumstances deontological constraints can be overridden. Central to the history of
deontology was an eighteen century professor, the guru of Koenigsberg, Immanuel Kant. In Kant’s
view, persons must never be treated merely as a means to some other end. The Categorical
Imperative is an absolute moral requirement for all times, all situations, all circumstances, and from
which all other duties and obligations follow. Kant believed the Categorical Imperative could be
derived through the exercise of our reason alone. We should always treat others never merely as a
means to an end, but always at the same time as an end. The modern human rights movement is
almost inconceivable without Kant. If there are certain moral absolutes then one of them surely
must be the prohibition on torture.
The tickling scenario is a favorite among ethicists debating the permissibility of torture. Post 9/11
the tickling bomb of ethical debate took on a practical and public reality. In response to the ticking
bomb case, deontologists (Alan Dershowitz) respond in one of the five ways:
1) there are those who deny that the ticking bomb reflects any possible empirical reality. In reality,
threats are not usually imminent: there is no specific deadline, nor is the threat inevitable.
2) some deontologists are prepared to swallow the logical conclusion of an absolutist position -
they continue to deny the permissibility of torture, regardless of how many lives would be saved
3) there are deontologists who argue that if the consequences of not torturing somebody are truly
calamitous then the constraint against torture can be overridden
4) a few deontologists maintain that a terrorist who has planted a ticking bomb is morally liable to
be tortured if that’s the only way to obtain vital informations
5) there are those who determinedly refuse to engage with the scenario, who believe the
justifiability of torture should not be up for idiscussionat all: merely to raise the possibility
reflects a sickness of the mind, and a contamination of the culture.

In the search for a formulation of the principles that should govern how we can and can't treat
people, Kamm offers some principles (of alternate reason, of contextual interaction, of ethical
integrity, of instrumental rationality, of irrelevant goods, of irrelevant rights, of irrelevant need) and
doctrines —> the Doctrine of Triple Effect. It has a third distinction in addition to the two that are
familiar from the DDE, namely effects that are intended and effects that are foreseen. She explains
it through what she calls the Party Case.We intend to throw a party in order to have fun. We
foresee though that this will result in a big mess, and we will not have a party if we will be left to
clean up that mess by ourselves.  However, we foresee that if we throw the party, our friends will
feel indebted to us and this will cause them to help clean up.  Hence, we have the party because
we believe that our friends will feel indebted and because we will not have a mess to clean up. 
However, we do not give the party in order to make our friends feel indebted or to clean up for us.
There’s distinction between doing something because it will cause the hitting of a bystander, and
doing it intending to cause the hitting of a bystander. This distinction can assist in various trolley
scenarios.
Figure 5. Six Behind One: you are standing on the side of the track. A runaway trolley is hurtling
toward you. Ahead are five people tied to the track. If you do nothing the five people will be run
over and killed. You are next to a signal switch, turning this switch will send the out-of-control
trolley down a spur. On the spur you see one person tied to the track and changing direction will
inevitably result in this person being killed. Behind the one person are six people also tied to the
track. The one person if hit will stop the trolley. What should you do?

CH.7 - Paving the road to hell

In mid 1894 in Chicago, the president had a very public trolley problem: an industrial relations crisis
threatened the economic and social stability of the nation. It had been a boom period for the
railroads: George Pullman, the founder of the Pullman Palace Car Company, was an architect of
our modern rail system. Working for Pullman was less of a privilege. In order to house his
thousands of employees, Pullman came up with the notion of building a model city south of
Chicago, with all the necessary: parks, shops, a kindergarten, a library. But behind the facade the
truth was nastier. Some of the houses were overcrowded, poverty was spread, there were rents
and fees for all services. When in 1883 the US national economy went into a dramatic downturn,
the Pullman Company was itself inevitably affected. Many workers were laid off and those that held
their jobs had their wages cut drastically.When union members began to boycott Pullman trains,
rail networks were paralyzed. In a highly contentious move President Cleveland declared the strike
a federal crime and sent in thousand of federal troops. The intervention of federal troops served
only to enrage the strikers, who almost immediately began to attack the troops. President
Cleveland issued a proclamation in which he explained that those who continued to resist authority
would be regarded as public enemies and troops had the authority “to act with all the moderation
and forbearance consistent with the accomplishment of the desired end”. By the time the strike
was over at least a dozen lives had been lost in the Chicago area and forty more in clashes with
troops in other states. Intention is everywhere in the law. That troops killed rioters in the Pullman
strike is beyond doubt, what’s more difficult to ascertain is their intention. Did they intend to kill? An
intention is not the same as a cause. If someone asks “why did you jump in front of the trolley?” a
response might be “I didn’t jump, I was pushed”. If an action is intentional it makes sense not just
to ask “why?” but to expect any answer to explain the action’s significance for the person who
undertook it. Anscombe was the first to point out that an action can be intentional under one
description yet not under another. The action of the person who sends the fat man hurtling off
the bridge can be intentional under the description “pushing the fat man” but not under the
description “stretching his triceps”. So did soldiers mean to kill the Pullman rioters? No soldier was
ever held responsible for doing so. Those hauled in to give testimony to the commission describe
the troops as meaning to “protect property” or to “preserve the law”. There is a deep problem here,
what Philippa Foot calls the problem of “closeness” and refers to the cave case. Recall that in
the cave the waters are rising, the fat man is blocking your escape, and you have a stick of
dynamite that would clear a route for you and others but obviously end the fat man’s life. Suppose
you used this dynamite and afterward declared in court that you’s had no intention of killing the fat
man, merely of blowing him into a thousand of small pieces. That would be ridiculous: blowing a
man into a thousand pieces and killing him are the same. But then we require an account of
“closeness” to ensure that such excuses are indeed laughed out of court: if talented surgeons were
to arrive on the scene and declare that they could somehow stitch the fat man back together, it
must be true in that strange sense that you really don’t want the fat man to die. This is similar to
the situation in Loop, It could be said that in turning the train we do not intend to kill the man on the
loop. Our intention is merely that he be it and the train stop. However, as Philippa Foot points out,
being hit by a train is a death sentence.
Putting aside the problem of closeness, intentionality can draw a distinction between Spur and
Loop. What if the man on the Loop were to run away, for example? The “what if” question helps us
think about intentionality, take the Extra Push case.
Figure 6. Extra Push: the trolley is heading toward five men who will die if you do nothing. You
can turn the trolley onto a loop away from the five men. On the loop there is a single man. But the
trolley is traveling at such a pace that it would jump over this man on the side track unless given an
extra push. if it jumped over this man, it would loop back and kill the five. The only way to
guarantee that it crashes into the man is to give it an extra push.
Similarly there is the Two Loop case.
Figure 7. Two Loop: the trolley is heading toward five men who will die if you do nothing. You can
redirect the trolley onto a empty loop. If you took no further action the trolley would rattle around
this loop and kill the five. However you could redirect the trolley a second time down a second loop
that does have one person on it. This would kill the person on the track but save the five lives.
Were you to redirect the trolley not once but twice, to guarantee its collision with the single man, it
would be unreasonable to claim that you didn’t intent to hit him.

There is one final complication with the concept of intention, unearthed by a new philosophical
movement, called “experimental philosophy”. Joshua Knobe —> Knobe Effect. He is well-known
for his experimental work looking at how we interpret a person's actions depending on linguistic
context.  The idea underpinning his approach is that we can better understand philosophical
concepts if we look at how people use and respond to them in practice.  Many of these
experiments focus on intentionality : i.e., in what contexts do we say that a person acted
intentionally, and in what contexts unintentionally?  Based on these findings, Josh wants to claim
that he has discovered something 'deep' about the nature of theory of mind, intentional action, and
moral judgment.
CASE 1: a vice president of a company goes to the chairman of a board and says ”we’ve got a
new project. It’s going to make oodles of money for our company, but it’s also going to harm the
environment”.The chairman says “I realize the project’s going to harm the environment. I don’t care
at all about that. All I care is making as much money as possible. So start the project”. The project
starts and the environment suffers.
CASE 2: a vice president of a company goes to the chairman of a board and says ”we’ve got a
new project. It’s going to make oodles of money for our company, and it’s also going to have a
beneficial impact on the environment”.The chairman says “I realize the project’s going to benefit
the environment. I don’t care at all about that. All I care is making as much money as possible. So
start the project”. The project starts and there is a beneficial impact on the environment.
When asked about the first scenario most people say “yes the harm was intentional”. But did the
chairman in the second scenario intentionally help the environment? Most people thought not; this
is odd since the two cases are almost identical. The only difference is that in the first scenario the
chairman has done something bad, while in the second he has done something good. Kobe
believes this shows that the concept of intention is inextricably bound up with moral judgments.

CH.8 Morals by numbers

Jeremy Bentham had a close friend James Mill, and acted as a guardian figure for Mill’s son, who
himself would become an acclaimed philosopher, John Stuart Mill. Bentham maintained that what
mattered about an action was how much pleasure it produced and how much pain was avoided,
acting to maximize pleasure and to minimize pain. In his most influential book, An Introduction to
the Principles of Morals and Legislation, he even devised an algorithm for how this could be
calculated. The greatest happiness for the greatest number was the meaning of all things.
Bentham viewed utilitarianism as a type of science, undermining irrational traditions and the
superstitions of the past. Since what mattered was feeling, pleasure and pain, we should care
about animal as well as human suffering. If sex brought pleasure then it didn’t matter whether it
was between a man and a woman, a man and a man, or a man and a beast, and laws should be
liberalized to reflect this. In many ways utilitarianism was a uniquely British creed, at least in its
origins. Britain was rapidly becoming more middle class, more materialistic, less hidebound to
tradition. Bentham accelerated these developments. Numbers mattered to Bentham. Other
things being equal, it was always better to save more than fewer lives. It was the reason he was
such a staunch opponent of war. Bentham recognized that commonsense morality held there to be
a distinction between “intending” and “foreseeing”, between “direct intention” and “oblique
intention”. But he rejected any intrinsic moral difference between these two.
His outlook is regarded as embarrassingly crude.
Mill remained indebted to Bentham all his life, and like Bentham was a consequentialist - believing
that what mattered about an action were its consequences. But he was far from being an uncritical
follower of Bentham’s theory. For Mill, some form of happiness were of a higher quality than
others. He now put more emphasis on imagination and emotion. Mill proposed another adjustment
to Bethamism, more pertinent with the problem of the fat man. It may be that to save five lives a
judge needs to frame an innocent man, but society would operate more smoothy if individual
judges were not tempted to pervert justice in this way. If we believed that judges were willing to
disregard the little matter of innocence or guilt for what they believed to be a higher value, our faith
in the entire legal structure would be fatally undermined.

——————————————————————————————————————————

PART 2 - EXPERIMENTS AND THE TROLLEY

CH.9 - Out of the armchair

Experimental philosophy —> philosophy with an empirical edge. The icon of the x-phi movement is
a burning armchair. Critics complain that the experiments carried out under the x-phi banner lack
scientific rigor and should not be categorized as philosophy. Nonetheless, insofar as a
philosophical movement can be fashionable, x-phi is currently very much all at rage. At lest since
the work in the late 19th century and early 20th century of the german logician Gottlob Frege the
portrayal of the armchair philosopher has had some basis in reality. Frege regarded philosophy as
a discipline requiring just the tools of logic and conceptual analysis. But philosophy was not always
like this. Philosophy has become a separate discipline only relatively recently, and philosophers
have historically made use of findings from the empirical sciences. There are many areas of
philosophy where the cross-cultural sociology of intuitions is injecting new energy into age-old
questions, and not merely in ethics. Take the relationship between knowledge and belief: when can
I be said to know something, when merely believe it.
Trolleyology has been embraced by the x-phi movement: there have been numerous studies to
examine whether the intuitions of the philosopher are shared by men and there have been various
experiments designed to test the influences on our trolley intuitions.

CH.10 - It just feels wrong

Exactly a century after John Stuart Mill finished making his amendments to Utilitarianism, another
book was published that has received almost as much scholarly attention. A Theory of Justice by
John Rawls published in 1971, aimed to set out the rules by which a just society should be
governed. The book’s most radical claim was that inequality was permissible only if it was to the
benefit of the least advantaged. Education, health and transport policies were to be judged by
whether they led to an overall improvement in standards and on what impact they had on the
poorest and most marginal individuals and communities. In A Theory of Justice Rawls used a
phrase relevant to the fate of the fat man: “Reflective Equilibrium”. We are in a reflective
equilibrium when our general principles and our individual judgements about particular cases are in
harmony. We are in a position of reflective equilibrium when our set of beliefs about principles and
our beliefs about individual cases have achieved a sort of coherence.

Francese Kamm —> “Intricate Ethics”

Figure 8. Tractor Man: the runaway trolley is heading toward five innocents. The trolley is not the
only thing they’re threatened by. Rampaging in their direction is an out-of-control tractor. To redirect
the trolley would be pointless if the five were in any case to be hit by the tractor. But if you turn the
trolley away from them, it will gently hit and push another person into the path of the tractor. His
being hit by the tractor would stop the vehicle but also kill him.
Figure 9. The Tumble Case: the runaway trolley is heading toward five people. You cannot
redirect the trolley but you can move the five. Bit if you did that the five would tumble down a
mountain and their body weight would kill an innocent person below.
The answer of Kamm is that you should not in both cases.

CH.11 - Dudley’s choice and the moral instinct

From culture to culture practices vary widely. Etiquettes and manners encompass innumerable
aspects of life: table manners, body language, dress code, ways to address friends and strangers..
It’s tricky to demarcate a firm boundary between etiquette and morality. Different cultures have
different practices. But what practice counts as etiquette and what morality? Morality is taken more
seriously than manners and is usually thought to imply a universal quality. Noam Chomsky
asserted that the language instinct was innate. In the 1990’s one of Chomsky’s graduate students
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, John Mikhail, wondered whether the linguistic model
could be transposed to morality and set about testing parallels with examples from trolleyology. If
there was a strong parallel, then children might expected to have the same intuitions about the
trolley cases as adults. And this is exactly what Mikhail found. The moral handwriting, so the thesis
goes, operates at a very abstract level, just as language does. Our rules do not have specific
content and there will be some local variations on morality just as there are among languages. A
universal law in language might be that a grammatical sentence contains a subject, verb, and
object but the order in which these appears differ from language to language. Nonetheless, the
claim is that the deep abstract rules are universal. Working with Mikhail, Marc Hauser found in
another parallel with language that moral intuitions were almost instantaneous and predictable over
any number of unique cases.

Vilfredo Federico Damasco Pareto —> Pareto Principle: 80% of effects come from 20% of
causes.
Pareto is credited with another 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.
Case of Captain Tom Dudley: on July 25, 1884 Captain Dudley stabbed, killed and ate his cabin
boy, and his sentence was established for 6 months of jail. It was an unusual case and one still
cited in courts. Dudley had openly admitted to the killing, and was stunned as well as indignant that
it should be considered a crime; in fact 20 days before the murder he and three other men had
been in the middle of the Atlantic en route from England to Australia. They were over a thousand
miles from land when a terrible storm erupted and their watch rapidly began to sink. They
clambered into a lifeboat. Dudley and Stephens decided to sacrifice the young cabin boy who was
dying and had no children nor wife. For four days they ate Parker’s carcass. Brooks, despite his
denunciation of the crime, joined in.
With Stephens, Dudley had murdered an innocent boy and in normal circumstances murder is
unconscionable. But although Dudley was tried and found guilty on the crime, this case tend to
evoke mixed feelings. While some will think murder unacceptable whatever the circumstances,
others will have considerable sympathy for Dudley’s predicament, recognizing a rationale, a moral
rationale to moving from a Pareto inefficient to a Pareto efficient state of affairs. The lot was
improved and no one was made worse off.
The Nazi Thought Experiment: 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. Roughly 50% 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.

———————————————————————————————————————————

PART 3 - MIND AND BRAIN AND THE TROLLEY

CH.12 - The irrational animal

When it comes to the fat man, the philosopher wants to know the answer to a moral question:
should we push? The philosopher is interested in normative (value) questions, such as, how
should we lead our lives?.
Can the scientist help? The scientist is broadly defined to include the psychologist and the
neuroscientist. The scientist is interested in different, non normative questions.
- The experiments conduced by the psychologist Stanley Milgram in the 1960s demonstrated that
many people are willing to put their consciences to one side when told by an authority figure to
perform a bad action.
- The prison experiments conduced by the psychologist Philip Zimbardo also showed how badly
people can behave when given a pseudo legitimate power. In a role play, some subjects were
assigned to the role of a guard, others that of prisoners, and they were put in a mock dungeon.
Many of the “guards” quickly began to exhibit sadistic tendencies towards the “prisoners”.
- In another oft-recited experiment, students at the Princeton Theological Seminary were informed
that they had to give a presentation on the parable of the Good Samaritan. As they were
dispatched off across the quad to deliver it, some of them were told that they were a few minutes
late. Before they reached their next destination they encountered a man slumped in an alleyway,
clearly in distress. The vast majority of those who thought they were in a hurry ignored the man.
The result was surprising; one might have expected those reflecting on the Good Samaritan to
recognize that helping a stranger was more important than being punctual for a seminar.

There has been a plethora of studies showing that our ethical behavior appears to be linked to
countless irrational factors. Although we like to fool ourselves into believing that we freely make
decisions in the light of informed and reasoned reflection, the growing evidence from
experimentation is that reason often takes a back seat to unconscious influences.
Although there are an infinite number of factors that might potentially influence our behavior and
moral judgements, a consensus is emerging that there are two broad processes, and the balance
of power between them is contested territory. David Hume —> “Reason is and ought only to be
slave of the passions” VS Immanuel Kant —> morality must be governed by reason.

CH.13 - Wrestling with Neurons

In the past decade there has been an explosion of research into all aspects of the brain, driven by
improvements in scanning technology. MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scans have yielded
intriguing results. The scanners work by detecting minute variations in blood flow: when a particular
part of the brain is engaged in more activity that is the so-called resting state it is shown “lighting
up”. What happens in the brain when we make moral decisions is under investigation. The
preeminent figure in this area is Harvard psychologist and neuroscientist Joshua Greene.
The Crowbar Case: Phineas Gage was a twenty-five-year-old construction foreman victim of the
railways. His job was to coordinate a group of workers who were building a railway track across
Vermont, when a fuse was lite prematurely the iron dos used to cram down the explosive powder
shot into Gage’s cheek, went through the front of his brain and exited via the top of his head. That
Gage was not killed was miraculous. But it’s what happened next that became a case study.
Although he was physically able to operate as before, it became apparent that his character had
been transformed. Where he had once been responsible and self-controlled, now he was impulsive
and capricious.

Trained in both philosophy and psychology, Greene was the first person to throw neuroscience into
the trolley mix. He began to scan subjects while they were presented with trolley problems: the
scanners picked up where blips in the resulting brain activity took place. Greene described the
trolley cases as triggering a furious bout of neural wrestling between the calculating and emotional
bits of the brain. The emotional recoiling that typically occurs when people contemplate killing the
fat man is made up pf two components. The first is an up-close-and-personal effect: there is
something about the physicality of pushing, the direct impacting on another person with one’s
muscles, that makes us flinch. The evidence suggests that this is even the case if the pushing
does not directly require contact with hands. The effect can be tested in the Trap Door case.
Figure 10. The Trap Door: the runaway trolley is heading toward five people. You are standing by
the side of the track. The only way to stop the trolley killing the five is to pull a lever which opens a
trap door on which a fat man happens to be standing. The fat man would plummet to the ground
and die, but his body would stop the trolley.
Subjects asked about the trolley cases are more willing to send the fat man to his death when it
involves the killing with a switch rather than killing with a push. Still, whether it requires a switch or
a push, most people still believe that killing the fat man is worse than changing the train’s direction
in Spur. Greene has a compelling evolutionary explanation for the moral distinction people
subconsciously draw between engaging muscles and turning switches. We have a particular
revulsion to harms that could have been inflicted in the environment of our evolutionary adaption.
We evolved in environments in which we intercede directly with other human beings. Using
muscles to show another person is a cue that there’s violence and for obvious reasons violence is
generally best avoided. Some of our moral instincts are inappropriate for our age, an era in which
people live in large anonymous groups in an interconnected world.
The typical ethical outlook of the typical human being relies on a balance of neural systems.
Joshua Greene initially saw the opposition as one between emotion and calculation, Haidt between
emotion and reason, Daniel Kahneman between fast and slow systems.

CH.14 - Bionic Trolley

Scientists are learning more and more about how memory works. The hippocampus is the area of
the brain that is thought to cement memory, arranging and ordering beliefs and images. Evolution
is to be congratulated for coming up with a throughly pragmatic arrangement. We forget most
things that have happened to us. But if we’re attacked by a stranger in the street, we need to
ensure that we remember this menacing episode. sometimes such an episode causes an
overreaction: the emotional impact of what we experience is so intense that it blows a memory fuse
(this seems to be what occurs with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). Some time ago researchers
found out that if within a few hours a disturbing episode, subjects took propranolol, a beta-blocker,
they were less likely to develop PTSD. So in theory, even if we were squeamish about pushing the
fat man, drugs might soon be available to allow us to emasculate the memory of doing so. But
there may be a more direct way to influence our approach to the trolley problem - a pill not to dull
the trauma, but to modify our values.
The Ultimatum Game: the Ultimatum Game has had a career trajectory similar to the Fat Man’s. It
first appeared in 1982, shortly before the fat man. It began in one discipline, economics, and was
analyzed as an idealized form of negotiation initially purely in an a priori way. The standard
Ultimatum Game involves two players (Thomas and Adam). Thomas is given a sum of money of
100$. He can choose to give any amount of that 100$ to Adam, who has the option of accepting it
or rejecting it: if he rejects it, neither player receives anything. Since it would make sense for Adam
to accept any amount, however small, it would also seem to make sense for Thomas to offer the
smallest possible amount. That is the result that a mathematical model might predict: it’s how some
economists claim Rational Economic Man ought to respond. But,as it turn out, it’s not how flesh
and blood men and women react. When it was initially put to subjects in the USA there were to
surprises: first, those in the role of Thomas typically offered around 40% of the total pot. Second,
those playing in the role of Adam, on the receiving, typically rejected any offer that was below
about 25%. The ultimatum game is relatively new but it taps into an argument with a long and
impressive pedigree about whether humans are born good or evil. Thomas Hobbes believed that
man was an essentially self-interested creature, and without a community or state police force,
people would club one another to death. While today’s caricature of the Scottish economist and
philosopher Adam Smith has him endorsing this grim Hobbesian diagnosis of the human psyche, in
fact the opposite was the case. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the
baker, that we can expect our dinner but from their regard to their own interest”, but “how selfish
man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the
fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derive nothing from it,
except the pleasure of seeing it”.

———————————————————————————————————————————

PART 4 - THE TROLLEY AND ITS CRITICS

CH.15 - A streetcar named backfire

Some moral philosophers devote their lives to the trolley-type dilemmas. Any more cite trolleyology
in lectures and seminars and instruct their students to read at least part of the trolley literature. But
trolleyology turns the grey matter of other philosophers red. 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 matter is less about what
people do, more about what kind of character they have. The instinct of the trolleyologists are not
dissimilar to those of the scientist. The trolleyologist wants to determine what moral distinctions are
relevant, and to prod and poke, weigh, compare and contrast our intuitions. The aim of trolleyology
is to provide a principle that makes sense of our powerful reactions and that can reveal something
to us about the nature of morality.