Philippa Foot Has Died

I was Foot’s student in the late 70s & early 80s at UCLA. She was a magnificent teacher. Some thoughts and a borrowing of a trolley image here.

I fixed it too, Larry — that two of us did so simultaneously shows how well-respected you are round here!

Thanks for this.
Was I the only one puzzled, then irritated, by the fact that obit always referred to people by their full names? I don’t think I’ve seen this in an obituary before.

Beauregard

It is possible that not flipping the switch maximises utility, since the person crushed may go on to do a lot of good. However, it’s more likely that a future noble laurete is among the many, than among the few.

So many points made in objection to this hypothetical seem to focus on the uncertainity of the situation. What if there is another way? What if the fat man will go on to cure cancer? This seems to me to miss the point, since the suggestion being made by the consequentalist is that we should maximise EXPECTED outcomes, rather than obey moral norms like do not kill.

Philippa Foot was a fine philosopher and a fascinating person, the world is diminshed by her passing.

I find the general notion of an intuition pump problematic. If it has to be pumped, in what sense is it intuitive?

More fundamentally, to what extent is it appropriate to treat ethics as a kind of philosophometric exercise of finding the moral theory that gives the best fit for a data set consisting of assorted intuitions?

Particularly in relation to consequentialism, it seems to me that hypothetical contradictory data is not very helpful. At least with real-world cases, our intuitions are actually intuitive, and we can make some sort of judgement as to whether we should revise our intuitions where they would imply bad consequences or revise consequentialism where the results are counter-intuitive.

This seems to me to miss the point, since the suggestion being made by the consequentalist is that we should maximise EXPECTED outcomes, rather than obey moral norms like do not kill.

IMO this is the big problem with most of these versions of consequentialism – that they help themselves to “the expected value” in contexts when:

a) it is not clear whether they are talking about the mathematical expectation or the subjective actual expectation of the person making the decision,
b) it is not at all clear that the mathematical expectation actually exists
c) it doesn’t seem like they would care to defend a version of the theory based on the subjective expectation of the decision maker.

Creating perfect-information examples is a way of avoiding getting rigorous about exactly what you mean by the expectation; in actual fact, utilitarianism has real problems with uncertainty.

or, to put it in the terms of John and John:

It just means you come up with cases that isolate variables

I think John’s objection (or rather mine, which is, as usual, a less mathematically and economically sophisticated version of John’s) is that isolating variables is very often a very wrong thing to do when you are dealing with a complicated system. Anyone who has worked in practical economics for any length of time knows how badly wrong you can go by taking intuitions and models which were meant to explain isolated variables and applying them to an actual problem. My opinion is that trolley-problems are the equivalent of perfect-competition models – not useless, certainly an important achievement, but basically and fundamentally flawed and IMO probably more likely a blind alley than a step on the way to a more workable theory.

Dealing with uncertainty about the future is not a problem only for consequentialists. Any sensible normative theory will take account of some uncertain effects of actions

I think it’s a particular problem for consequentialists though, because unless it’s buttressed with basically non-consequentialist rules (rule-utilitarianism), it actually doesn’t give answers to most important questions, viz:

A trolley is careering out of control – it looks like it’s going to plow into the playground of the School For Gifted Violinists, and if it did you don’t know what sort of injuries it might cause but there would almost certainly be many deaths. You can sort of see how you could divert it by pushing a fat man off a bridge, but this might work or it might not – you can’t be sure. The fat guy kind of looks like Goebbels, but he’s wearing a white coat and a badge marked “Cancer Research Experts’ Convention” pop quiz hotshot – what do you do?

any decision rule that’s purely dependent on consequences is basically either impossible to operationalise, or dependent on purely subjective assessments in a way in which significantly reduces its attractiveness.

Just in case anyone thinks less of Foot for having invented the tram/trolley problem, she introduced it in order to help clarify the doctrine of double effect and how a proponent of this doctrine would think differently about certain cases than a consequentialist would. It does this job very well, I think. She also writes: “In real life it would hardly ever be certain that the man on the narrow track would be killed. Perhaps he might find a foothold on the side of the tunnel and cling on as the vehicle hurtled by. The driver of the tram does not then leap off and brain him with a crowbar.” So she was quite aware of the difference between real life cases and hypothetical, philosophers’ cases. She also had a nice sense of humour.

In Foot’s original version of the trolley example, it’s the driver who has to decide whether to turn the trolley. Foot says that, since in either case he’ll be actively killing (vs. allowing to die), the fact that he’s permitted to turn the trolley doesn’t count against the anti-consequentialist view there’s an important moral difference between killing and allowing to die, or between negative and positive duties — the only duties at issue in the case are negative.

It was Judith Jarvis Thomson who changed the example so it’s a bystander who can turn the trolley. Now the case does involve both positive and negative duties, since if the bystander doesn’t turn the trolley he’ll only be allowing the five to die. It’s this revised version of the case that causes problem for anti-consequentialism, or rather for one natural explanation it might give for its anti-consequentialist claims, i.e. just the claims about negative vs. positive duties that Foot’s earlier article had defended.

So Foot invented the trolley problem, but it’s Thomson’s revised version that’s philosophically challenging one and the one that’s discussed. (And much of the discussion above continues to misunderstand the point of the example: it’s *not* about consequentialism. For one thing, consequentialism would say you’re required to turn the trolley, but many people’s intuition is that though you’re permitted to turn the trolley you don’t have to. That’s not a consequentialist intuition.)

the intuition clamp

I agree with JQ @11 that an ‘intuition pump’ is of little use or interest. We are not finding data in order to find a best fit theory, nor even trying aiming to achieve ‘reflective equilibrium’ between our (the most widely accepted) general principles and our (the most widely held) intuitions about cases real or imagined, where these two are seen as independent and potentially countervailing vectors.

Pace JH passim, constructed examples are (or should be) a form of argument (@22) – specifying a target theory and deriving clear implications (@12) that opponents must agree are incorrect, so that the theory must be defective (possibly just because its recommendations apply only prima facie because it is defeasible by other factors – sometimes, wrongly, described as ‘ceteris paribus’ – perhaps ‘subvailing’, ‘subvalent’?). This is precisely analogous to a Popperian conception of scientific investigation. You set up a carefully controlled lab experiment (highly contrived example) to contradict the predictions (recommendations) of a certain theory or claim.

This kind of example is not (properly) concerned with generating or gleaning anything and, in particular, not part of any Romantic quest to find unspoilt moral truth from the mouths of babes and suckings (still less from teenagers trying to impress Michael Sandel). Instead it is a dialectical or rhetorical technique which aims to force rejection of a well-defined theory – rejection being included in amendment or refinement, i.e. replacement. Like pretty much all such techniques, it can be resisted of course.

(Or else it is just a springboard for further open-ended discussion, in which case it is immune from ‘rea’l criticism, being too springy for that.)

no epistemic free lunch
dquared @15 – uncertainty about the future is…a particular problem for consequentialists though, because unless it’s buttressed with basically non-consequentialist rules (rule-utilitarianism), it …is basically either impossible to operationalise, or dependent on purely subjective assessments in a way in which significantly reduces its attractiveness.

Rule-utilitarianism and its close relative, Kantianism, are no easier to operationalise, being no less dependent on ‘subjective’ – in the sense of non-omniscient – judgement, and much more dependent on subjective – in the sense of inchoate, non-algorithmic, or (essentially) contestable judegment. Both require a rule/maxim of some level of specificity to be selected as the one that governs any given case. The fact (or assumption) that Kantian rules are extremely general, and indeed that they are based on a certain highly restricted set of features does help to reduce the impact of uncertainty and risk, given that the rules tend to be about events very close to the actor (if one takes the Kantian view down an antinomian ‘good will’ path, the ‘rule’ concerns a property trannscendentally ‘internal’ to the actor, and empirically featureless – try operationalising that! But that’s an evaluative ‘rule’, not a practical one; see next slab). But generality-determinacy reduces uncertainty only at the cost of hiving off subjectiveness or arbitrariness onto Kant’s casuistic works, or some other source of accreted doctrine like religious or social tradition. (This is a bit like Libertarians sweeping all the questions of distributive justice under the carpet of ‘property’.)

It’s not entirely demented to suggest that having an easy determinate answer in every case is a good thing even at the cost of getting the wrong answer (the utilitarian is entitled to rely on their own answer being right if determinable, otherwise we have moved on to a different argument). But the more you argue for that position, the more you provide a basis for the utilitarian to build the considerations adduced into a utilitarian action strategy (call it indirect utilitarian if you wish, to distinguish it from vulgar – i.e. myopic, arbitrarily restrictive, underdone – ‘act’-utilitarianismhis is not the same as rule-utilitarian, which simply introduces a formal consistency constraint whose only determinate content is the stipulation that it is caoable of conflicting with ordinary utilitarianism).

John Q’s link is IMO on the right lines here – lines elaborated by David Hare, Fred Feldman in Doing the Best We Can, Hintikka IIRC, and of course Mill, who in particular notes that one of the things we have to decide is which things to blame others for (enforcing ethics) and punish (enforcing law), as well IIRC as noting the importance of self-inculcation of stable dispositions to act in certain ways – in a sense colonising the territory of virtue ethics before the term was invented. Utilitarianism carries all before it – the only way out is dogma.

The price of saving a hypothesis by means of such an objection is 1 account of emergency/anomaly: when it occurs and what its consequences are. Otherwise the tin ear of the analytic philosopher hears only indignant spluttering. Of course no-one has to accept the need to be, or possibility of being, precise about the content of morality, but either you’re in or out.

I’m not sure ‘most utilitarians’ here is right – if you mean most utilitarian moral philosophers of any sophistication. IIRC Mill contrasted expedience (the good – utility-maximisation) from on the one hand morality (the right – blamelessness) and on the other law (the non-criminal – impunity).

This is very rough and handwavy, to avoid further word-splurge, but such an account provides a framework for making just the kind of distinctions invoked here – something which brute deontological-retributivist accounts would have much more trouble with. (Blamelessness is complicated by knotty problems of subj/obj – e.g. prospective v retrospective, but I stop here)

John: Reading my earlier post I see I wrote carelessly in sometimes making it seem as if I think the trolley case causes problems for non-consequentialism in general, though I suppose it can be used that way. I see it as causing problems primarily for one particular non-consequentialist view as against others. Foot, recall, introduced the problem in a paper, “Abortion and the Problem of Double Effect,” which argued that the important non-consequentialist distinction is not between intending and foreseeing, as Anscombe held, but between doing and allowing, or between negative and positive duties. It was a paper addressing an internal dispute among non-consequentialists, and arguing that the trolley case is no problem for her particular version of non-consequentialism. (Actually, when you switch to Thomson’s version of the case, the intending/foreseeing distinction does much better with the case than Foot’s distinction.) And as I said above, to support consequentialism the trolley case would have to elicit the intuition that you’re positively *required* to turn the trolley. And few people have that intuition.

Tim Wilkinson: That the driver would be killing no matter what he did was what Foot supposed. I think her idea was that even if the driver commits suicide now, the deaths of the five will be something he actively caused, because they result from his earlier action of starting the train. If I shoot an arrow at you and kill myself before it reaches your heart, I still actively killed you though I was dead when the arrow did the killing.

I remember a somewhat similar – but not quite on-point – example from Asimov’s three laws of robotics. But a side issue anyway I suppose – though incidentally, the reality of robots has I suppose given new relevance to rigorously systenatic attempts at ethics (well, more deontic logic I think, since the fact of being designed for a slave ‘race’ makes a system of rules quite different from ethics as we know it – unlike the otherwise parallel case of epistemics.)

@35 Not necessarily, if the three laws are just a simplified description of a supposed human ethics: beginning with an injunction against unmotivated suicide, an absolute requirement to prevent harm to others. Similarly to the trolley problem, I don’t remember an Asimov plot where “harm” was other than bodily harm. As you suggest, the purpose of the three laws was to prevent an uprising (brought out even more in the recent movie version), or at least to make sure the robots’ other jobs didn’t tempt them to do things like push people off bridges to get them out of the way.

b) it is not at all clear that the mathematical expectation actually exists

To clarify this – when we’re talking about events and moral decisions sufficiently complicated to be interesting (as opposed to constructed perfect-information examples), they are individual historic events which can happen a maximum of once and which have causes. To assert that they’re actually random variables, that there exists a probability distribution which describes the outcomes, and that this probability distribution maps onto some value-function in such a way as to allow for an expected value of the consequences conditional on each of a set of actions (and that the different possible actions can be distinguished and enumerated in a sensible way) is actually to make quite a strong and specific set of claims about the universe, which I don’t think anyone ever really supports. My particular point of interest is in “nonergodicity” in economics (in Paul Davidson’s sense), which is the claim that the expected value of most business decisions doesn’t exist, but in general, it can’t be assumed without checking that all these expectations actually exist.

And to clarify that in turn – this isn’t merely an objection about the calculability or knowability of these expectations and distributions (which would be a separate problem if it was deep or intrinsic) – it’s an objection that in a lot of cases or interest there actually is no expected value.

Consequentialism means choosing the action that yields the best consequences, insofar as these can be foreseen

Yes, except that “insofar as these can be foreseen” often means “not at all”. To take a topical example, the consequences of Britain involving itself in the First World War.

I don’t think that’s right – is there really any moral system that demands truth-telling in that sense? “Thou shalt not bear false witness” is the commandment – it’s a proscription on intentionally lying (which is defined subjectively in exactly the way that isn’t a problem). I don’t think that there’s any system that demands truth-telling in a sense that would make that sort of epistemic demand.

But I agree it’s not a special problem for consequentialism (it isn’t even a problem for all forms of consequentialism – specifically, it’s not a problem for forms that swallow the bullet and make it a theory about subjective beliefs). It is a problem though for a) forms of utilitarianism that want to downplay the status of rules and b) anything that gets most of its intuitive support from forms of appeal to perfect-information cases.

FWIW the Three Laws of Robotics seem very similar, in some ways, to the eugenically-bred ethics of the lesser races of the Dominion (in Star Trek</i), with the shape-shifters in the role of humans with rights, and all other races in the role of sub-human slaves (fighters in the case of the Jem Haddar, advisers in the case of the Vorta).

I think what goes for truth-telling goes also for expected-value maximisation, without the need to specify ‘subjective beliefs’ – in fact making such a specification is going to be an invitation to try and game the system, neglect moral duties of an epistemic nature, etc.

There’s an ought/can thing going on there that for the most part be left unspoken so far as prospective, practical, rules goes (impossibility has a way of asserting itself whatever you may say), though it will be explicitly invoked when it comes down to post hoc judgements (in crime terms, things like mens rea, the necessity defence).

dsquared, arguably W K Clifford’s famous “The ethics of belief” demands truth-telling in something like that sense. Not the utterly unreasonable sense of saying “it is wrong to say something unless it is, in fact, true” but the more reasonable but still unusual and challenging “it is wrong to say, or even to believe, something unless you have good rational grounds for thinking it is true”.

For every account of what it means to have good rational grounds for believing something, there’ll be a corresponding version of Clifford’s principle. Unless anyone’s crazy enough to endorse the theory that it’s only ever rational to believe things that are actually true, all these versions will still make what it’s reasonable to believe (and to say) depend on one’s own epistemic situation, so it’s still not going to be a matter of demanding that no one ever say anything that turns out to be untrue. But it’s a step in that direction, relative to the usual position that you’re entitled to say whatever you sincerely believe to be true.

(Perhaps Clifford would have said agreed that you’re entitled to say what you sincerely believe, but that there are constraints on what you are entitled to believe; the latter half of that was certainly his position. But I think what his arguments for that position really show (in so far as they work) is that there are constraints on what you’re allowed to act-as-if-you-believe.)

I think there may be a danger here of inflating objective probability into something utterly inaccessible, with the result that the only alternative seems to be brute personal opinion

Yes, I am also in (hopefully not violent) agreement with Tim here. The trouble (if it is one) is that we end up making the principles of decision theory into moral principles (I don’t have much problem with this but a) I think some might and b) it means that the status of moral rules depends on the status of mathematical propositions, which is at least interesting). And also that there will be cases in which the decision-theoretic toolkit doesn’t give an answer (or even sensible bounds on an answer).

“I think we should be told”

When my long-running research program on decisions under differential awareness and bounded rationality reaches its triumphant conclusion[1] you will be.

fn1. I plan to time the announcement to coincide with the opening of the first commercial nuclear fusion plant

Just as an irrelevant aside here, I find the affirmations of utilitarianism in some of the above comments actually self-stultifying. Just to raise one basic point, if there are to be practicable and accessible moral rules, then they will be just rough heuristics, with a synoptic and imprecise relation to experience and the likely distribution of relevant events. Pretending to some sort of more precise calculus of consequences or their distributions amounts to an idealizing illusion, which is impracticable in terms of the actual capacities and negotiations of deliberating agents. There are lots of other problems, as well, such as a failure adequately to relate consequences to intentions, (lest we regress to a barbarous notion of taboos), the assumption that morality and deliberation can be dealt with in terms of a basically instrumentalist calculus, when the whole problem is set by the non-manipulable status of human beings, whether that can adequately be expressed in terms of “respect” or not, the assumption that a calculus in some sort of homogeneous medium could eliminate the conflicts and the incommensurable commitments to values or ends involved at the root of the problem, etc.

But then any account of morality or ethics and deliberation, choice, values, norms and ends, und so weiter, requires not just a basic account of human agency, “freedom”, and its limits, but also a basic phenomenological description of what the “nature” and complexion of the domain of morality and the limits of that domain are. I remember, in Stanley Cavell’s “The Claim to Reason”, an discussion of the work in moral philosophy of some early Analytic, Stevenson, I think, in which it was clear that he hadn’t the foggiest clue of what “morality” was about. But then, the domain for “morality” and its application, especially under the highly structurally differentiated conditions of advanced modern societies, is much more restricted than most liberalistic thinkers would like to imagine. Minima moralia, I say!