Trolley Problems

I’ve been thinking about creating a more emotionally charged series of thought experiments with the same basic structure, and comparing responses to these with responses to whimsical trolley problem style scenarios for a while now.

It would help to understand what the point of the trolley case is. It’s not at all about “utilitarianism and its discontents.”

Let’s say you start out persuaded that utilitarianism is false, because it would be wrong to e.g. frame and execute one innocent person in order to prevent a riot that will kill five. Then you ask *why* that would be wrong, and a natural answer is that you’d be killing the one as against letting the five die: it’s morally worse to actively cause harm than just to allow it to happen, and you’d be actively killing the one.

But the trolley case shows that that can’t be the right answer. Even non-utilitarians (or most of them) think it’s *not* wrong to turn the trolley, even though that too involves actively killing one to save five. So the reason it’s wrong to frame and execute the one in the riot case can’t be just that it’s always worse to kill than to allow to die — the trolley case shows that it isn’t.

Of course if you start out with an economist’s attachment to utilitarianism you won’t be interested in why utilitarianism is false. But, amazingly, not everyone is a utilitarian. And they may want to understand what general principles underlie their anti-utilitarian intuitions. The trolley case is then a *problem* for them, because it shows that a simple answer won’t do. The case actually counts in favour of utilitarianism, by showing that the alternative will have to be much more complex than at first appeared.

Do most people (e.g., most students in a seminar) vote for throwing the switch? That surprises me. I am probably on board with [what some would argue are] real-life equivalents of throwing the switch (like having wars, or allowing coal mining), but I don’t think I would vote in favor of throwing the switch.

I assume that, if you won’t throw the switch, then a fortiori you won’t push the fat man.

Geo: utilitarianism is a sub-type of consequentialism. Consequentialism says: bring about the best consequences; utilitarianism includes a view that when we compare states of the world (sets of consequences) we should score them in terms of the amount of utility (net welfare) they contain. A view that said that you should maximize the amount of aesthetic value in the world would be consequentialist, but it would not be utilitarian.

Thanks, Chris. But why isn’t aesthetic enjoyment a utility? Surely beauty enhances our welfare?

Simplest version of @1, despite policy of “do not feed the trolleys”,

I was walking with the Ethicist across the footbridge over the tracks leading to the switching yard when he stopped and [interpose canonical statement of problem]. So I threw his fat ass over the railing into the path of an oncoming train.

I’m curious about how far from actual physical contact we can get, and whether changing that parameter would elicit a different response. I.e.,

1. Push the fat man
2. As the trolley driver, you switch the car onto the track with 1 victim from the track with multiple victims.
3. As the trolley driver, you do nothing to switch the car, which is already directed towards the 1 victim.
4. You are the president of the trolley company, fortuitously riding on the death trolley. You direct the driver to switch to the 1 victim track.
5. You are the general counsel for the trolley company. You write and publish a policy directive stating that where there is a choice, death trolleys should be switched onto the track with the fewest victims.

In at least some sense, each of these is morally equivalent. Yet they will almost certainly not elicit a uniform response, yes?

Okay, okay, if I’m gonna comment as “Borderline Troll” I guess I should add something more productive; in all seriousness, the race of potential trolley victims has been shown to significantly influence ethical intuitions in surprising ways.

I am not an expert on Wikipedia, but I suspect the weasel words are the following:

… some non-utilitarians may also accept the view…. Opponents might assert that, since moral wrongs are already in place… Additionally, opponents may point to the incommensurability of human lives.

It might also be justifiable…

My inner Wikipedian is crying out, “Which non-utilitarians? Do they accept the view or don’t they? Are these opponents who might advocate non-participation purely imaginary, or are they real? Who are they? Do people actually point to the incommensurability of human lives, or is that a hypothetical strawman being used to attack hypothetical incommensurabilists? Anything might be justifiable; is there a school of thought that argues that the following ellipsis is justifiable?”

Unfortunately I don’t have enough of a background in ethical philosophy to answer these questions myself, or I’d fix the article and remove the “weasel words” tag. However, I assert that anyone who reads this article and has the relevant knowledge has a utilitarian obligation to edit the article so that the trolley runs over and kills the weasel words.

Wikipedia, not being written in the voice of any particular author, has little tolerance for descriptions of what hypothetical people might believe as logical consequences of premises they hypothetically hold, because that style of discourse has far too much scope for rhetorical abuse in the hands of effectively anonymous authors discussing contentious matters such as Scientology, the Armenian Genocide, or the Gaza Strip. There are an infinite number of plausible chains of reasoning by which one can plausibly derive odious moral consequences from the stated beliefs of one’s ideological opponents. Consequently this sort of thing is frowned upon, because it tends to lead to unproductive edit wars.

However, it would be entirely justifiable to say, “Thomson points out that a hypothetical utilitarian could reason that taking an action in the situation assumes responsibility for the consequences,” assuming she does, of course. The issue is the use of the “some say” device (in this case, worse: “some could conceivably say”) used by unethical journalists to inject their own opinions into ostensibly factual articles, cloaked in a thin veil of objectivity. I don’t think it’s being used that way here, but some clarification would help.

@20 Good point, but from what I understand of Wikipedia’s editing policies: If the article cited in the footnote says “some say,” the Wikipedia article should do the same. Otherwise, the editors are publishing their own original research, which is explicitly against the rules.

I’d strongly surmise that almost all of the ‘would throw the switch, wouldn’t push the fat man’ answers can be accounted for by not being able to accept the premise of the question, that pushing the fat man would stop the trolley. If you’re asking students for their intuitions, you’re asking them to make a general assessment of everything they know and feel about the situation, and expecting them to be able to discard their sense of the probable and accept both that the fat man’s body would stop a trolley that would be unimpeded enough by four (presumably leaner) bodies that it would still kill the fifth person, and that the student would be certain enough of this to act immediately on that basis. Even though that’s the stated premise of the question, it seems implausible enough to me that it’s going to throw off answers: I would (I think) flip the switch in a real-life situation; I would not (I know) push a fat man in a real life situation, because there is no remotely plausible real world situation because there is no chance I’d think it would work; and so I’m not sure what I’d do if I knew pushing the fat man would work, because I can’t really conceive of having that knowledge for real.

Has anyone tried coming up with a less whimsical and more plausible fat man analogue, and seeing if the plausibility brings people’s intuition in line with the switch problem?

geo @14:
Aesthetic value can be a utility. But a utilitarian, though he’d presumable prefer “more aesthetic value” to “less aesthetic value,” would, in at least some circumstances, be willing to sacrifice aesthetic value for other goods. Chris Bertram’s hypothetical aesthetic-value-maximizer would be willing to sacrifice a little aesthetic value for a lot of aesthetic value, but would never sacrifice even a little bit of aesthetic value for the sake of, say, someone’s health or personal fulfillment.
And consequentialism, at least as I understand it, doesn’t even have to be that close to utilitarianism: a consequentialist could be in favor, not of maximizing anything, but of maintaining some sort of balance between, e.g., happiness and misery in the world. Or in favor of maximizing something (happiness, aesthetic value, hair length, whatever) only for some subset of humanity, rather than for everyone.

In practice, though, are there any consequentialist meta-ethical theories other than utilitarianism that anyone argues for?

“In practice, though, are there any consequentialist meta-ethical theories other than utilitarianism that anyone argues for?”

Well, Richard Posner argued explicitly (and many economists, especially on the right of the spectrum, argue implicitly) for wealth maximization, rather than utility maximization. But some would say that this is a very minor wrinkle in basic utilitarianism. (And others, including many here, I fancy, would argue that Richard Posner, and economists on the right generally, aren’t anyone.)

Matt Austern – yes, if you have an argument for it, it’s consequentialism (albeit possibly indirect c’ism). This is my opinion and not a standard position though. Also – isn’t it just ‘ethical’ rather than ‘meta-ethical’?

(re me @26: 1. posted without reading whole thread, 2. don’t know why I referred to JH as ‘Holbo’ – maybe just like the sound of it… 3. not terribly cogent, just to preempt anyone else. Am I allowed to do that, without offering an improved version?)

The truth Tom H.’s claim that you are actively killing the one in the standard Trolley case depends on what it means to “actively kill.” Kamm has argued that while tossing the switch would kill the one–and I think she would concede that the switch-thrower does kill the one–this is a side-effect of saving the five. It is not something that is intended. Since intention is often thought to be relevant in these cases, if actively killing requires an intention to kill, then it’s not clear that the switch-thrower in the standard trolley actively kills.

In my view, any use of the two most standard trolley cases should be accompanied by the loop variant (did Thomson come up with this variant?). This variant is set up exactly as the original standard trolley case, but the track is looped, such that if the one person *were not* trapped on the other track, and the switch was thrown, the trolley would loop around and kill the five anyway. In this case, throwing the switch would save the five only if the one *were* on the other track and only if his body would be sufficient to stop the trolley before it loops back around to kill the five. Many non-consequentialists who are fine throwing the switch in the standard trolley case (because the one is killed as a side-effect of, and not as a means to, saving the five), but who are not OK with pushing the fat man (because the fat man *would* be used as a means), also believe that it is permissible to throw the switch in the loop case. But throwing the switch in the loop case saves the five by using the one as a means. This puts the non-consequentialist (and I am one of them) in quite the pickle, since using someone as a means turned out to be the reason that pushing the fat man was not permissible. I started to read Kamm’s explanation of why it’s permissible to throw the switch in the loop case, but I got confused and stopped.

just a quick thanks for making the cartoons available—i’ll be using them when i teach the trolley next time! on the switching cartoon, did you intend to make the first of the set of five look like hitler? (at the risk of using weasel words, that would seem to complicate the moral calculus….)

Kamm has argued that while tossing the switch would kill the one—and I think she would concede that the switch-thrower does kill the one—this is a side-effect of saving the five.

Any argument that makes this plausible ought also to make it plausible that throwing the fat man into the trolley’s path is a side effect of saving the five as well, or, at least, I can’t see how to distinguish the two.

However cheesily you make the point, it is a very real problem, the question of killing N to save P where P>N comes up all the time.

Its most depressing form is after the fact rationalization.

Ben W.,

I think the difference Kamm has in mind can be seen by noting that in the standard trolley case, you do not need the one person on the spur to be there in order to save the five. In other words, killing the one on the spur is not necessary, as a means, to save the five. In the case of the fat man, you *need* the fat man to drop onto the track in order to save the five. So in the standard trolley, Kamm says that killing the one is a foreseen side-effect, but not intended means. I think she’s right about this.

Are you still not convinced?

Any citations for that Dworkin/Posner exchange?

Mark Austern @ #32 said:

In practice, though, are there any consequentialist meta-ethical theories other than utilitarianism that anyone argues for?

There were, but they are not mentioned in polite company anymore. Nietzche, Hitler and the Social Darwinists were advocating a form of consequentialist ethics that was not utilitarian. Granted these are not the names that immediately leap to mind for the thoroughly modern ethicist. But they were influential and still haunt our collective imagination.

Survival of the fittest aims at maximizing the power of intelligent predators, whether they be raptors, robber barons or SS stormtroopers. So it is definitely a teleological consequentialist philosophy.

But its not utilitarian. Romantic nationalists contemptuously dismissed utilitarianism as a shopkeepers mentality unfit for higher breeds.The predators were not going to have a happy contented life, what with the ceaseless struggle to survive and dominate.

Its not always clear that we have said Goodbye to All That. The ethic driving the stockmarket – profit maximization – looks utilitarian given its basis in neo-classical economics. But this appearance is deceiving.

It always assumes that there is a person behind the profession. Once upon a time there was an individual there, now its institutional. The notion of a company having feelings is a bit of a stretch.

One day “the agent” could be purely instrumental ie a computer. You would have a hard time selling the greatest happiness of the greatest number of microchips as “utilitarian”.

The problem with complaining about thought experiments being “frivolous” without backing it up with some theory as to how this could be distorting what is found in a pernicious way is that it makes philosophy into a kind of Belles Lettres. Other than a preconception that it is somehow very wrong to go about it in such & such a way, I just don’t see what the problem is. Would examples that reflected the scope & grandeur of the questions somehow lead to better or clearer results? If you think so, fine, but that has to be argued for , and once you start to play that game you might soon fine you’ve started to play ours.

Just how distinct are the ticking time bomb and trolley dilemmas once you stipulate that torture is effective? If you need to vary the degrees of moral discomfort in the former instance, you have threats ranging from pain to impairment to disfigurement to death, and also the death of loved ones, a wider range of choices than the latter selection of an anonymous victim, a chosen victim, and a modest assortment of innocents.

When I look at the fat man on the overpass, I think (1) the fall will kill him, even if he misses the tracks, (2) if he hits, he might kill one or two on impact, (3) if he has sufficient mass to stop the train, he’s probably only saving the last two or three on the tracks, and (4) the trolley’s engineer and many of the passengers are at least likely to be injured in the impact.

Most recent arguments about torture actually concern torture; as far as I know, the U.S. hasn’t recently researched fat man deadfalls for trolley traffic control. Apart from practical applications, though, the scenarios appear precisely parallel.

Shorter me: For me and a lot of folks I know, the implicit cultural norm is that funny deaths are the ones happening to people not like us and/or far away from us. To the extent a postulated death feels goofy, it’s going to tap into reactions about those kinds of deaths rather than ones closer and more significant-seeming. This probably skews ensuing judgments.

@61: nice.

More broadly, this comes to mind: Conservatism – we shouldn’t intervene in the ancient tradition, wrapped around the efficiencies of the market, that runaway trolleybuses crash into crowds. Communism – sure, push the fat guy under the trolleybus. got any more? Socialism – why are these trolley buses running away down the hills? todo: new inspection standard for trolley brakes.

Tom Slee, Critics of consequentialism often point to two features of the view that seem counterintuitive: first, it seems to require us to violate intuitively compelling moral rules (e.g. rules against pushing people into trains); second, it seems to place unreasonable demands on our personal time, energy, attachments and, yes, sometimes lives.

One reason why the standard Trolley problems involve pushing and not jumping, I suspect, is that there is no moral stricture against sacrificing oneself to save others. So when you jump, the central issue it raises was whether you were, in fact, obligated to jump. That’s a real question worth addressing. But it leaves out at least one element of the debate that some people will want to focus on (namely the violation of commonly recognized moral strictures).

People aren’t reporting their ‘intuitions’. Period. Rather, they are telling you what they would say, once you’ve set the mood for a good, seminar-style go-round. The examples are supposed to take you out of the seminar room, imaginatively. But plausibly they do the opposite – are really designed to do the opposite. They export the socially and intellectually distinctive seminar room atmosphere to a whole, slightly off-kilter world.

Between this and your last paragraph, I’m still not convinced that trolley problems are a desirable frame for discussion, but I’m fully convinced that teaching and discussing them JH-style would be a marked improvement.

LizardBreath at 28:
If you’re asking students for their intuitions, you’re asking them to make a general assessment of everything they know and feel about the situation, and expecting them to be able to discard their sense of the probable and accept both that the fat man’s body would stop a trolley that would be unimpeded enough by four (presumably leaner) bodies that it would still kill the fifth person, and that the student would be certain enough of this to act immediately on that basis. Even though that’s the stated premise of the question, it seems implausible enough to me that it’s going to throw off answers.

To follow up on the bolded portion, another problem for me is that my assessment of the situation doesn’t stop with the moment of impact. What’s the difference for the trolley driver and passengers if the collision is caused by hitting one person rather than hitting five? Are they going to be injured at the same rate and in the same way? Do I think they will feel worse, going about their lives afterwards, knowing that part of the “accident” ws intentional, rather than purely mechanical or happenstance?

If someone [me] pushes the big man, is s/he going to spend the next five years of life with a massive liability lawsuit hanging over their heads, as the insurance companies battle it out?

Obviously part of the reason for setting up thought exercises is that you’re supposed to abstract all of these problems away. But when I’m asked for my “intuition” (really, more like my reasoned reaction) to a situation like the above, then my pragmatic sense of reality comes to the fore.

Yet another wrinkle is that hypotheticals like these require: 1) that the student believe the professor is presenting them in good faith, and 2) that discussing them can be done in a sealed seminar room, with no leaky consequences for the real world.

It’s not hard to imagine someone committing #1, and #2 immediately brings to mind “should killing a fetus in the act of homicide to the mother be a separate charge of murder” — a question which could be framed as a safe classroom hypothetical, but in fact is politically used as fodder for laws that stake out ground for a claim of fetal personhood, and consequently a climate of decreased reproductive rights for women.

Shorter me: Doing trolley problems requires a lot of trust on the part of the students, in ways that the traditional framing of the problems often seems designed to elide.

LizardBreath wrote that, for some students, the way the trolley problem and other thought experiments is introduces seems to be “expecting them to be able to discard their sense of the probable” and to proceed on trust that the problem has to be couched in the way it is.

I think this is key. In some situations, a teacher absolutely wants students to question their own sense of the probable. Howard Gardner has used the example of students’ intuitive sense that the physical world follows Aristotelian physics, and how teachers of physics have to inculcate in them a new sense that Aristotelian physics is wrong, and have them replace it with Newtonian physics. Carol Gilligan’s theories can be used in support of the thesis that women are innately less Kantian than men (that’s a very rough account of something Seyla Benhabib has written). But, I think, the issues are not exactly the same. For one thing, I think students who are very good at abstract symbol manipulation in physics, math, logic, and computer science are often more likely to find objections to philosophy thought experiments that involve real-world probability. I think it’s probable John Holbo is right that an “ethos” has something to do with it.

There’s a missing transition in that comment, but I’m not sure what it should be. Sorry.

P.S. I know a lot of people who are into BDSM, which makes me a little skeptical about the implied morality of the experimental subject in either the Trolley Problem or Milgram’s experiments (go on, you’re a sadist: you know you’ld *enjoy* shoving the fat guy under the trolley/electrocuting the prisoner)

Not having the time to read all the comments, I can only submit my experience as a support for what John says in the original post; I decided to use Sandel’s book (in the place of Harry’s, fwiw) in my Christianity and Social Justice course this fall, and we started right out with the Trolley Car, supplemented with clips from Sandel’s lectures. The discussion went very, very well. I think I’m probably more suspicious of the intellectual and social ethic that is presumed by this kind of philosophical reasoning than John is, but the truth of the matter is that I’ve rarely had a introduction to utilitarianism lecture go quite so well before. The Trolley Car works.

I find LizardBreath @28 persuasive, coupled with the fact that someone of my upper body strength is likely to push without effect, leaving me rather embarrassed in front of a big and angry man.

Assuming that you do accept all the assumptions of the problem, my son has sat through this in class, and is frustrated that people don’t see SusanC @73’s point (“our heuristics only need to be right most of the time, in the situations we normally encounter. Failure under weird conditions isn’t a practical problem.”) As he puts it, “So your intuition is wrong. Get over it. End of discussion.” And the story of modern physics, of course, is the realization that one intuition after another from our slow-speed, moderately-sized every day experience does not apply in conditions other than those under for which it was developed and must be jettisoned.

[And Henri@63, Paul @64: agreed. Thanks for clarifying.]

Missing from the trolley problem is the nature of the individuals tied down.

If there are five Al Qaida or Aryan Brotherhood members in the path of the trolley, and one university professor or airline pilot tied to the alternate path – yes, I would throw the switch.

It gets a little murkier if there are five woman Al Qaida members who each have three very young children dependent on them against one childless airline pilot.

The utilitarian approach assumes an equal value for each individual in the problem, which just isn’t the case in real life.

I like to pose this one to folks who insists that ‘life begins at conception’, i.e., a fertilized egg = a human being:

You are in a fertility clinic, and it’s on fire!!!!! You can only grab one thing to save, which do you choose:

1) a petri dish containing 5 frozen fertilized eggs, or

2) one live 2-year-old child

I keep waiting for this question to be asked of some high-profile right-to-lifers, but somehow I haven’t heard it yet.

Hm… green eggs and ham.

Would you choose to pull the lever?
No I do not think I’d ever!
I would not choose to pull the lever.

Would you push the fat chick over?
I would not push the fat chick over,
I’d certainly refuse to shove her.
I would not choose to pull the lever,
No I do not think I’d ever.

Would you pull it for the orphans?
How about endangered dolphins?
No orphans. No dolphins. Etc.

Would you save the serial killers
Or the authors of bad thrillers?
No killers. No thrillers. Etc.

What if they’d have cured your cancer?
Would that, maybe, change your answer?
No cancer. Same answer. Etc.

What if they were Mao and Stalin
Or autistic infants bawling?
No Stalin. No bawlin’. Etc.

At this point I’m sort of running into the limits of my philosophical education so I’ll stop here.

@Ben W. (#75): you’re right: you don’t need the fat man to die. But you do need him to be there, and you do need to place his life at risk in order to save the five. This is a key difference from the Standard Trolley, as you simply do not need the one to be on the other spur in order to save the five. So the need to use the one as an intended means (which is really what most people find wrong about the Bridge Variant) is there in the Bridge Variant but not in Standard Trolley. In Standard Trolley, you do not use the one on the second spur as a means. You don’t *use* him at all. This is why it might be misleading to characterize his death as an “active killing,” as Tom H. did.

Geo @ 51:

I find your account there thoroughly confused. It’s a commonplace that moral acts involve a possibly painful self-discipline , such that the “right” (or “just”) acts come at the expense of personal happiness, whereas personal happiness often inclines one to “wrongful” (or ‘unjust” or “selfish”) acts. That is much of what moral controversy is about. I wouldn’t want to swallow the Kantian hog whole here, but that goes to why he stigmatizes embodied. empirical motives as “pathological”. Of course, Kant is under peculiar compulsions due to the way he sets up his whole problematic. Kant is a “phenomenal” determinist and thus must likewise be, in part, a moral skeptic. Hence the only sign of any actual “freedom”, (identified dubiously with “autonomy”, itself identified dubiously with the moral law), is the “Ehrfurcht”, (reverence or awe, combining literally honor and fear), for the moral law, and thus the painful pleasure that on experiences in conforming oneself to the moral law, (which one has voluntarily at once legislated and imposed on oneself). I wouldn’t want to identify myself with the purist/rigoristic/formalistic nature of the Kantian account, but it does capture something of the phenomenology involved. Likewise, though the internalism/intentionalism of Kant’s moral account, (its excess of Lutheran inwardness), is hard to countenance, (and yields an oddly abstracted, disembodied account of human agency, by implication), his notion that intentions rather than consequences are the locus of moral responsibility and culpability, does capture part of the “phenomenology” or the intuitions that most here might share. Hence too his claim that the “good will” is the only “thing” that is good in itself and, as the only “true” end-in-itself, underwrites moral “disinterestedness”. Most of us, I’d guess, would reject such “pure” intentionalism, since acts have conditions and consequences, as well as, intentional sources, and it would be difficult to specify intentions without resort to their conditions and consequences. But it doesn’t at all follow that “consequentialism” (= utilitarianism) would be the only alternative conception or adequate to our various intuitions on such matters.

But what I do want to defend from Kant, leaving aside much of the rest of the apparatus of his thinking, is his basic intuition or recognition of the de-ontic status of norms: i.e. that norms can not be “grounded” or “justified” either on the basis of some pre-given metaphysical-teleological order, nor on the on the basis of some set of naturalistic facts. (Since norms are counterfactuals, they are evidenced as much by their violations as their observances or enactments). That is a far more “radical” account of the problematic of “morality” than what you adduce from Mill, (with its dim echo of Aristotle, though, as many have pointed out “happiness” is very much an 18th century empiricist notion, which is not the same as “eudaimonia”, with “human flourishing” often suggested as the translation, though “well-being” would be a serviceable current word, if well-faring might be too old-fashioned and contaminated by modern meanings, though I’d prefer the literalistic “well-spiritedness” to capture the “original” intent). At least, I think that enters more “deeply” into problematic modernity, wherein a formal-rational systematic prescriptive ethics breaks down and becomes “no longer” possible, which is the burden of much of the crisis mentality of 20th century philosophy, for better or worse. Maintaining otherwise tends toward academic pettifoggery.

As to utilitarianism, (which again is not the some as “consequentialism”, whatever that might means, since consequences, foreseen or not, can’t simply be ruled out of the subject-matter), it is subject to a number of obvious objections. It tends to reduce ethical issues to a form of pseudo-economic reasoning, in which all goods, needs, desires, ends, are assumed to involve a single homogeneous criterion, “utility”, which itself involves a simplistic, binary account of pleasure and pain, carrots and sticks, as the root of motives and ends, desires, ultimate or proximate, and thus emphasizes the efficiency, optimization and accumulation of means over any validation of ends, hence confusing deliberation with calculation, etc. But the most basic objection is that it fails to provide any adequate criterion of recognizing the separateness of persons. If ethics concerns acts and material or symbolic exchanges with respect to relations with others qua other, i.e. irreducibly separate selves/agents, the the whole terrain of conflicts between agents and between potentially incommensurable “values” and ends. and their potential resolution, which motivates ethical inquiry, in the first place, is evaded or elided. “Happiness” just amounts to a name for assuming the consequent, avoiding awareness of the “tragic” potential involved and the need to differentiate the sort of “higher” desires involved in the pursuit of “right” or “justice”. And it also misses the fundamental ambivalence of human desire, whereby goods and bads are not simple binary opposites, but often all too proximate, such that good and bad can exchange places in processes of normative transformation in recognizing “the good”.

As to the actual, general topic here, alas, once again, the “trolley problem”, I belong to the statistical majority in intuiting the “switch” case permissible and the “fat man” case not. But I think the basis of the intuition can be articulated: “fat man” involves not an active deliberate act, which “switch” does not, but rather a direct, immediate relation (to both the act and the other), whereas “switch” is at once more distantiated and mediated by an apparatus. (In fact, I thought fMRI atudies had been done on the problem, indicating, unsurprisingly, that differently located brain areas were involved in the two case, for all that I dislike facile extrapolations from mere brain images). But if Analytic sharpies insist on providing examples as “intuition pumps”, shouldn’t they maybe be engaged in multiplying different examples, (since examples in philosophical reasoning are always tendentious, whether consciously or not, as both Wittgenstein and Adorno, in their different ways, took pains to point out). Umm… that might at least move the discussion forward, rather than merely illustrating received wisdom.

I always thought the point of the trolley problem is that there are no right answers. Because there is no right answer, you can always ramp up the absurdity until strict utilitarian answers are met with disgust (killing someone to harvest their organs and save five people) and the saps who won’t throw the switch are at a loss to explain why 5 people dying is better than one.

The trolley problem proves that the social context, i.e. how you will be perceived by others afterwords, is more important than actual outcomes or motives and that objective ethical systems are illusions. Hence, we have 86 hair-splitting comments and no satisfying answers.

BTW John, I love the cartoons. They illustrate the absurdity of the problem brilliantly.

If the point is that, in the real world we can never be sure that the dillema is unavoidable, sure, that’s true- we can never be SURE the dillema is unavoidable. However, that is not necessairly morally relevant. If I were Superman or MacGuyver I might be able to to save everyone somehow, however I’m not, so I’m just going to have to kill the fat man and live with the consquences, or do otherwise and live with the consequences..

Real world analogies of this come up all the time, and sometimes the agents in question have no escape. Generals commanding solidiers to hold the rearguard. Beauracrats juggling various medical budgets. I think I’ve even heard of a real world, honest to God railway problem just like this somewhere. The fact that a paticular moral dillema isn’t specified finely enough to make it clear that there is no way out misses the point.

Ultimately, when we approach a moral choice we have to frame it against a background of assumptions. We are not certain of these assumptions, but if we’re hoping to avoid all 5 v 1 dillemas, or equally awful Sophie’s choice style problems, simply stating that there might, in principle, be another way won’t save us.

John seems to be worrying about the friviolity of the examples in and of themselves. I don’t see the intution. Should we frame them in gravity & grandeur to match the awesome life and death nature of the questions? What would that acheive? Is it just about the taxpayer’s dollars? If so, is this really just a kind of propoganda exercise? I think there are grounds for believing that my work, in the long run, is worth the money that funds it, but it’s not my job to convince the taxpayer about that.

John- I totally agree that it’s worthwhile trying out thicker cases which capture the nitty gritties of day to day reality to see if different results come about. Most of my word is in experimental philosophy at the moment, so I find the idea of using emotionally and socially richer examples quite exciting really.

My concern about turning philosophy into Belles letters was more about other commentors like Storrochi than with what you were saying. There is a sentiment that I get from my friends elsewhere in the art department that philosophy just isn’t literary enough.

There’s a utilitarian objection to pushing the fat man, which is that principles have utilitarian value. If fat men know that they’re subject to summary execution for the common good when walking over bridges, they’ll be less likely to walk over bridges; every time a fat man chooses to avoid a bridge, he loses something of value to him. This consequence seems silly—how many people would consider this possibility when deciding whether or not to use a bridge?—but that’s a consequence of the silliness of the scenario and a reason not to use silly scenarios: the principle “fat man should not be subject to summary execution when crossing bridges” is a specific application of a far broader principle of justice, and if society is willing to sacrifice people in this case, it implies that society would be willing to sacrifice people in other cases. I’d rather not live in a world where I have to arrange my life so that my death won’t be convenient to others.

Salient, to address your objection they invented another story: fat man blocking the exit from a cave (number 4 here). And you’re right, 74% feel like blowing the fat guy into pieces.

97-98: might become real soon, in Chile.

The trolley problem baffles me as I have the apparently non-standard response that you should kill the one to save the many in both situations. I really don’t see the difference between the two, and you are definitely actively killing the one in both cases. Now I have seen broadly analagous experiments constructed where my intuition flips to the norm, but to me all that really does is highlight the problems with thought experiments Kenny elucidates – an unrealistically high degree of certainty about the consequences of extremely unusual actions. In any real world equivalent I’d be much less inclined to push the fat man because I’d have much less certainty that it would save the five. And I suspect, with Kenny, that this is what really underlies the “normal” response to the trolley problem.

Personally I have always seen the “fat man” example as inane – it is like a maths teacher asking everyone what does 1+1 equal, and then tells them “now assuming 1+1=3, what does 2+2 equal” and then wondering over how they get different results from different people.

Ok, off the cuff I’ll try to apply this to a real world example:

3.8-5 million people died in the second Congo between 1998-2003 and nobody cared – so the international community basically walked away from the train tracks singing que sera sera. The switch would be equivalent to exerting international pressure to minimize the number of victims that would undoubtedly be and indeed have been killed. The fat man would be equivalent to military intervention, which would require us to actively kill people in order to save others.

The problem I have with utilitarianism is that, with hindsight (another problem of course), it could be used to justify us killing, say, 3 million people in a military intervention, because that would have been a better outcome, than the 3.8-5 million that actually got killed.

novakant @ 107: The problem I have with utilitarianism is that, with hindsight (another problem of course), it could be used to justify us killing, say, 3 million people in a military intervention, because that would have been a better outcome, than the 3.8-5 million that actually got killed.

At least 800k-2 million people would want to know why you have a problem with that.

Um… no he didn’t. Or if he did I can’t find it anywhere.

@108
I wonder whether you would get different results if you primed subjects with the Milgram experiment, or with a discussion of how a “switch” connected to a computer-driven system works, or with a discussion of how a railway switch works, or with the fact that Hitler used trains.

The international community is by the way doing an intervention in Congo. One that is heavily criticized for not intervening enough.

That being said, the international community did not intervene in Rwanda – and there are little people that would doubt that people were still very much killed.

The Trolley Problem can only be enhanced by the presence of a spritely Sam-I-Am figure supplicating you to pull the lever. “You will not pull it. So you say. Try it! Try it! And you may. Try it and you may, I say!”

Novokant @107: I am lamentably ignorant about conditions in the Congo in the period cited — do you have in mind some specific form of pressure that the “international community” could have exerted that would not have involved at least the threat of violent force? If there was such a lever, how would it have operated, other than by inducing the object of the pressure to send men with lethal weapons to the scene of the violence with authority to use them?

geo — Shakespeare’s personal views on any topic are notoriously inaccessible, since he was he had to make a wide variety of viewpoints dramatically plausible. But he could not have taken Williams’ side openly without the risk of putting his employers out of business. Thersites is in Shakespeare to BTW, in Troilus and Cressida:

I am a bastard too; I love bastards: I am a bastard
begot, bastard instructed, bastard in mind, bastard
in valour, in every thing illegitimate. One bear will
not bite another, and wherefore should one bastard?

(What Homer thought is doubly inaccessible as there is no agreement as to who he or she was or how many of him or them there were. The Singer of Tales, by Albert B. Lord, puts forward a fascinating theory that I find convincing as well.)

ajay, geo: it’s an interesting appeal to double effect, because it’s undoubtedly the case that the slaughter of his own soldiers was in no way part of the king’s preferred plan – and indeed it was presumably not even foreseen – not with certainty, anyway.

Responsibility should thus be (even) less plausibly ascribed than in standard double-effect cases such as the DE defence of the fat man case. In those, whether the supposed ‘side-effect’ (death of fat man) can plausibly be claimed not to be part of the plan depends in part on how the concrete events should properly be described: stopping the train, putting a fat man in front of the train, dropping our corpulent friend 30 feet onto a track so that a 20-ton locomotive will be brought to a halt by his squished flesh, sacrificing his life to save others, etc. And ex hypothesi his death is expected with certainty.

But in the Shakespearean case, though the case for the king’s exculpation should if anything be stronger than it would be in standard double effect situations, I don’t think many people – even those sympathetic to DE – would really suggest that the king can use that kind of argument to avoid responsibility for the deaths of men he orders into battle.

Of course there is the novus actus interveniens side of things; there is more than one agent involved. The men could (a point Williams seems to finesse) mutiny or ‘dishonourably’ refuse to join up.

But responsibility is not zero-sum, so you may blame the men to some extent while still blaming their leader too, just as you might blame someone for ‘procuring’ an offence committed by someone else, or you might say it is someone’s own fault that they got attacked (they should have known better than to walk down there shouting that slogan, etc) without suggesting for a moment that their attacker is thus absolved from blame for attacking them.

(Earnest O’Nest: “there are little people that would doubt…”? Would one of those be Sam-I-Am by any chance?)

Yeah I thought it was (very, very) mildly amusing in an utterly lighthearted way at the time but after posting it I felt ashamed too. Unfortunately shame is not zero sum either, so we must both suffer these pangs.

roac: he had to make a wide variety of viewpoints dramatically plausible

Yes, but did he ever make the democratic/republican/dissenting/anticlerical viewpoint dramatically plausible? And of course he wouldn’t dream of displeasing his royal/noble employers and patrons — he never seems to have strayed, or been tempted to stray, a millimeter from the Elizabethan conventional wisdom.

Tim: I’m afraid I’m not at all inclined to exculpate kings. If they didn’t want to see their soldiers slaughtered, it’s only because they wanted to make use of them for their own frivolous and bloody purposes on another occasion. For the men’s actual welfare, kings typically didn’t care a pin. This is what (Homer’s) Thersites and Shakespeare’s Williams dimly grasped, and why we should sympathize with them against vain Hal and brutal Ulysses.

No, I’m not that way inclined either.

Well-spoken, Aulus; herein hast thou seized
The very pith and marrow of the question!

Only philosophers can turn courage and grace under mortal peril into a moral dilemma for faculty debating clubs.

Only?

Suppose that instead of a fat man you had the Mona Lisa? Or, for a more suitable weight, the Venus de Milo, attached to a handy ramp The work of art would be completely destroyed.

geo and others: I’d read that passage slightly differently. Williams isn’t saying “if we die in this battle, it’s the king’s fault, because we didn’t have a choice”. He’s saying “if we die badly in this battle, it’s the king’s fault”. Badly, in this case, means with unfinished business – either with responsibilities undischarged (widows and children) or with sins unforgiven. And, Williams adds, there are few die well that die in battle, because a battle doesn’t exactly give you much chance to sort matters out.

And Hal replies, essentially, “well, if you haven’t sorted your lives out before coming on campaign, it’s your problem, not mine”. That’s why the two examples are the son drowning “sinfully” and the merchant’s servant being killed by robbers “in many irreconcil’d iniquities” – and both, implicitly, being damned as a result of dying unshriven.

Sticking with the same play, incidentally, Shakespeare makes it very clear that Hal doesn’t have a choice in fighting Agincourt. He’s retreating from Harfleur to the British town of Calais and the French are in the way, deliberately forcing him to battle. The whole “anyone who doesn’t want to be here can leave now” bit in the “band of brothers” speech is irony – just as it would be if delivered by a more recent commander at Arnhem or the Chosin Reservoir.

TW @ 122:
By focusing on how things should be described, though, aren’t you shifting the focus to linguistic and social, historically conditioned concerns–thus doing something other than philosophy? The point of the exercise seems to be to identify relevant aspects of the problem for doing philosophy. This seems to explain why nobody in the Harvard video that I recall, or in any scholarly discussion of the problem I’ve seen mentioned, says something like that it is wrong to commit murder, or even that it is wrong to be violent.

I suppose it’s possible that people who might otherwise say “murder is wrong” usually feel one of the other alternatives is close enough to what they mean.

ajay @138: Yes, I think your reading is right. It’s not the soldiers’ mere lives but their estates and their salvation that the king is arguably endangering if “the cause be not good.” This doesn’t make me think any better of Hal (or Shakespeare), though. On the contrary: the right of the king to send soldiers to their death in a frivolous cause is, on this interpretation, now not even contested, as long as they’ve confessed their sins and left their families provided for. So now it seems that Shakespeare couldn’t even conceive of a popular challenge to divine right, even to swat it casually away.

race, class, and trolley cars …

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/morality10/morality.pizarro.html

@140:

Midnight melancholia. It was a comment about the gap between a toy model and insoluble reality. (And it’s not a book about genocide; it’s about the Congo Wars, which novakant had mentioned above, an unfathomable, horrifying mess, in which all parties are derelict). Since the topic is moral judgment, which is about the (attribution and acceptance) of responsibility (and blame), and our evasive incapacity to bear them, eh?

Yes, it’s a tonally mixed thread, not unusually so, dependent on the contingent motives and pre-occupations of contributors. So, while we’re at it, I find geo’s pre-occupation with the (ir)responsibility of kings, which is not just anachronistic, but fictive, as well, rather silly.

@147, but don’t you think there is clear, striking difference between the trolley-switch scenario and the scenario with the second track being free, empty – nobody dies when you flip the switch. Coward, really?

Um… because not everyone is a utilitarian? I’m not sure I understand what you’re asking. Am I to refrain from doing what I think is right because other people disagree with me? As for the word “coward,” I was responding in kind to the equally overblown language of “playing God,” but since you’re taking issue with it, do you think fear of appearing presumptuous is not a cowardly reason to allow millions to die unnecessarily?

A concrete hypothetical:
• You are Truman’s chief defence counsel at his 1946 impeachment hearings charged with not using the atomic bomb as soon as possible to force the Japanese power elite to accept terms of surrender.

• Truman could have chosen to abjure from using the 2 bombs at his disposal and let the fire bombings burn down most Japanese cities and towns using the new air bases for B26s from Okinawa, let 100,000 Chinese be slaughtered on average every month at the hands of the occupying Japanese army, and invade in December and call forth a slaughter of a million or two more on both sides.

• The second bombing discredited the important faction within the Japanese ruling oligarchy that argued that the USA had only one bomb to use. (I think a third bomb may not have been available all that soon so good thing that this Japanese bluff was not repeated or many tens or hundreds of thousands more would have died in occupied China).

Would talking about the pros and cons the trolley problem helped Truman avoid a unanimous vote for conviction in the Senate?

Oh please.

Substance McGravitas,

What were Truman’s other options? A demonstration explosion would have signaled to the Japanese oligarchy that the new president Truman is weak and reluctant to spill blood.

The willingness of the Japanese oligarchy to waste the blood of their own people and spill the blood of others without limit was central to their strategy of avoiding occupation and the dismantling of the old order.

Japan was governed largely by a consensus among an oligarchy of ruling factions. No major decisions of national policy could be reached until such a consensus had been obtained. This process inevitably took time and involved complicated pressures and struggles of will among those of differing opinions. Assassinations and the threat of the same often greased the wheels.

The Japanese oligarchy felt in the spring of 1944 that Japan was facing certain defeat or at least that the time had come for positive steps to end the war.

While Japan no longer had a realistic prospect of winning the war, Japan’s leaders believed they could make the cost of conquering Japan too high for the Allies to accept, leading to some sort of armistice rather than total defeat.

The Japanese army fought to the death with 99% plus casualty rates as the Americans moved from island to island to show that any attempt to invade Japan would be too high a price to pay. This was the Japanese ruling elite’s ace in the hole. The War Department staff in Washington estimated there would be 250,000 to 500,000 American casualties in an invasion of Japan.

Nearly 500,000 Purple Heart medals were manufactured in anticipation of the casualties resulting from the invasion of Japan. To the present date, all the American military casualties of the sixty years have not exceeded that number. In 2003, there were still 120,000 of these Purple Heart medals in stock!

After the bombings, a public admission of defeat by the responsible Japanese leaders was secured prior to an invasion and while Japan was still possessed of some 2,000,000 troops and over 9,000 planes in the home islands. There was no need for the Allies to either invade Japan or deal with the million Japanese troops in China who could have held out as a government-in-exile.

A demonstration explosion would have signaled to the Japanese oligarchy that the new president Truman is weak and reluctant to spill blood.

This is entirely speculative and sounds very dubious to me. The US had already inflicted horrendous damage on Japanese civilians through urban fire-bombing. The American blockade was constantly tightening; Japan was starved of essential supplies and its eventual defeat was obvious. The Emperor was solidly for ending the war, and the oligarchy was divided. An American demonstration, plus dropping the pointless demand for unconditional surrender, might very well have led to the defeat of the die-hards. This is certainly what Dower, Alperovitz, and other leading historians think. And it would have set a tremendous example of humaneness and rationality — it was a unique opportunity lost.

And of course, even more squalidly, there is certainly evidence that the US wanted to use the Bomb to influence the postwar settlement with the USSR.

Thanks for the interesting link.

Your arguments are contradictory. Saying that fire bombings were just as ruthless as an atomic bomb, and then saying an atomic bomb was a higher stage of horror. Make up your mind.

You refer, for example, to Chester Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet, two months after the bombings:

“The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace before the atomic age was announced to the world with the destruction of Hiroshima and before the Russian entry into the war. . . .The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military standpoint, in the defeat of Japan”

What were the Japanese feelers?

Accept the Potsdam Declaration with the following conditions:

(1) That the Allied forces would not occupy the homeland;
(2) That the Japanese military and naval forces abroad would be withdrawn, disarmed and demobilized by Japan itself; and
(3) That all war crimes should be prosecuted by the Japanese Government.

Remember that one-half the imperial war council wanted to fight on after the two bombings.

There were coup attempts to stop the surrender with generals commanding Tokyo based troops holding back to see who ended-up on the winning side.

The willingness to sue for peace among the oligarchy was tactical and based on an armistice type deal to end to the war to live to fight another day.

Substance McGravitas,

name three Japanese peace feelers. what terms were sought?

The use of atomic bombs brought an end to a bloody war that would have become far bloodier if the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands had proven necessary.

The civilian peace party within the Japanese oligarchy had great difficulty prevailing over the hardliners even after both bombs had dropped and the Soviet Union had entered the war. remember the famous 3:3 vote. It was hardly a peace feeler.

The actual interrogation records of Japanese officials reveal that every Japanese official questioned but one (and he was contradictory) expected the war would have continued absent the shocks of the atomic bombs and Soviet entry.

Japanese leaders believed that if they could defeat or inflict terrible casualties on the initial American invasion, they could secure a negotiated end to the war to their satisfaction. Thanks to code-breaking, American leaders knew this.

The Japanese military was working around the clock to turn the site of the first planned invasion into massive killing grounds. Intelligence intercepts show this, and Japanese geography makes it very obvious were any invasion would have start.

No American president could have accepted the terms the Japanese oligarchy wanted such as no occupation and self-disarmament because this would have meant abandoning the Allies’ most basic war aims.

BTW, given the moral insights offered by the Trolley problem, what minimal terms of surrender would you regarded as acceptable from Hitler. The Japanese were keeping a good pace with Hitler on the slaughter of civilians in China and elsewhere in S.E. Asia . About 100,000 a month since 1937 in China; the massacre of Manila was 100,000 alone in one month in 1945 done by 10,000 Japanese marines in a rear-guard action.

Henri, I’m sorry, I’m even more in the dark now about your question than I was before. Why do you think utilitarians are committed to the claim that “killing one million people to save one million and one is exactly the same deal as saving one without killing anybody”?

I suspect you’re taking aim at versions of utilitarianism which claim actions are right just when they maximize average utility, but even if we restrict the discussion to those versions of the theory, utilitarians still have ample resources to explain why we ought to treat such cases differently in real-world situations, if not in the frictionless world of theory. I have difficulty trying to imagine a real-life person who believes that feathers fall as fast as coins, but if such people don’t really exist we need not conclude that an object’s gravitational acceleration must depend on its density.

But while physicists agree that gravitational acceleration is independent of density, not all moral philosophers agree–not even all utilitarians agree–that two scenarios with equal average utility are morally equivalent. The most dramatic differences appear when people claim that some kinds of action are intrinsically (that is, even in the frictionless world of theory) worse than others, e.g., killing versus letting die.

In your original question, you asked me why I thought that the rightness of saving one without killing anyone is uncontroversial, while the rightness of killing one to save five is controversial, and my perhaps overly glib response was that some people aren’t utilitarians. A better response, I think, would just be to say that the latter case is controversial because some people believe that killing is worse than letting die, and it is worse enough that it might be better to let more people die than to engage in killing, even in the frictionless world of theory.

I concede that there is disagreement about this point, but I fail to see why that disagreement is relevant to my response to novakant, both because I don’t see why the mere existence of disagreement about some moral dilemma counts for or against any particular solution, and because I don’t see how anyone could think that the act of killing is so wrong that it should prevent us from engaging in a military intervention which would certainly kill many, many people, but, it was stipulated, would ultimately result in 800k-2 million fewer casualties.

I think Jim is entirely right. The trolley problem is irrelevant not because it is so uncommon but because some trade-off is always inherent in what we do. The choice not to go to war is as much a choice as the choice to go to war. The non-consequentialist part of utilitarianism is what we’re choosing as a good (to be maximized) outcome. Take treating Alzheimer – if maximizing quality of life is taken as to be maximized we’ll come to other conclusions (including euthanasia) than if we want to maximize life full stop. There is no utilitarian’solution without some non-utilititarian assumptions.

Guido Nius, thanks

Another daily example is ambulance drivers.

In a court near me, an ambulance driver was charged with causing death by negligent driving. The offence carried a maximum of three months in the big house.

A little old lady stepped out in front of his ambulance while he was rushing to an emergency.

The ambulance driver was driving at the maximum speed of 90 km that he was permitted to travel while on emergencies on urban streets with the sirens are on. The little old lady who died after stepped out in front of his ambulance was deaf.

The jury took one look at the ambulance driver in the dock in his ambulance uniform and said to themselves their but for the grace of god goes the man who will rescue me or my family in an emergency and found him not guilty.

The ambulance driver had the full support of his employer, was not under suspension, and wore his uniform in the dock with the permission of his employer, but was desk bound for the duration of the legal proceedings.

The trolley problem did not tie up any of the random members of the public that make up juries in their jury deliberations or cause even one of them to say guilty.

The trolley problem arises every time an ambulance or fire truck speeds to an emergency. The truck speeds up but within a balancing of the very real risks to life of both delay and speed.

name three Japanese peace feelers. what terms were sought?

Oh, now you’re looking for three. That’s a tough trolley to keep in service! Well then, go look. Again, Truman had options, and if his own military staff figured the war had been won, I’ll go with them over Jim Rose.

Returning to the initial point John was making:

This type of thought experiment within Anglo-American analytical philosophy could be described as a form of literary genre (just as dialogues, treatises, lives of the philosophers, philosophic novels, the philosophic letter, mirrors of princes, etc are other philosophic literary genres). The resulting question is what does this genre do within philosophy? How does this genre operate compared to other genres?

At it’s heart, this is a discussion of what philosophy is. The genre utilized is a reflection of how the writer (or readers, for that matter) understand how knowledge operates. Plato and Xenophon both write Socratic dialogues, but their dialogues (in my analysis) are quite different because Plato and Xenophon have a disagreement on what knowledge is and how best to gain it.

The resulting question from the above is: how does this genre (analytic thought experiments) encode what understanding of knowledge?

Here’s just some random thoughts about this:

That this genre is an entirely abstract thought-experiment encodes an understanding that non-philosophers (undergraduate students) can easily (with little introduction) and universally engage in very high-level abstract thought. This may be true, but we note that most of the other philosophic genres encode a contrary understanding – the Socratic dialogue, for example, asserts the contrary. Socrates (usually) encounters a named person in the agora, usually not one eager to philosophize, and only gradually moves to abstraction, often starting from a very concrete problem of the interlocutor’s (Alcibiades wants glory, Callias wants to gain the love of Autolycus, etc). Within the dialogue, Socrates will develop his arguments differently depending on the interlocutor’s intellectual ability, experience with philosophy, knowledge bases, character and so on. Socrates explicitly does not have a universal method to start philosophizing – the early writers of dialogues (Plato, Xenophon, Aeschines of Sphettus) all seem to agree that each individual interlocutor has his own affinity for philosophizing and these affinities can be radically different. Most of the interlocutors do not believe philosophizing will aid them in their aims and quite a few are extremely hostile to it.

This genre also has a specific literary style that attracts certain people and repulses others. This style especially rewards participants who like and excel at certain forms of argumentation. The genre asserts that philosophy is like this (analytic thought experiments) and those who do this easily are the most promising potential philosophers. Again, while this may be true, many other philosophic genres disagree. It’s notable that analytic Anglo-American philosophy uses extremely few literary genres compared to other philosophic schools – the early Socratics used dialogues, treatises, philosophic letters, autobiography (Xenophon’s Anabasis), novels (Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus) and other genres, for example. Rousseau deploys many genres – autobiography, treatise, dialogue and reverie among others.

I think it’s essential to also look at the Transplant Problem – we don’t kill people to harvest their organs and I don’t know anybody arguing we should do so, even though it would make sense from a utilitarian point of view.

Also, I would wager that a decent proportion of the students have seen similar discussions elsewhere, and associate the “strongest utilitarian” version with Communism, to which they are vehemently opposed. So they are probably going to favor the deontological theory (and, I’d guess, will assume it does include traditional morality like “don’t murder, no matter what” without modification).

“But how should such a discussion proceed?”

I can’t say I know. My own take is above – the literary genre of a philosophical piece is itself a crucial part of the philosophic content of the piece. Analytical Anglo-Americans tend to use an extremely limited range of philosophic genres (compared to the history of philosophy, which has included a wild variety of genres) and the thought experiment is one within that extremely limited range. That might mean that comparative examination of genre might be illuminating – I attempt an initial stab above.

John’s mention of the contextuality of genre is also interesting. Something that could be very useful when students have reached the seminar room stage might however completely backfire when students are in earlier stages.

What I don’t think is that particularly useful is playing around inside the thought experiment itself – the internal content of the thought experiment was peripheral to John’s initial post.

177: some people do kill people to harvest organs and there is no utilitarian defense of it, unless you want to make utilitarianism about personal profit – also, we do harvest organs and there are such good reasons for it that many people believe we ought to do it by default whenever there is a corpse that has potential in that regard.

I mean, you really insist on simplifying things to the point that you can blame the others and not run any risk to be blamed yourself.

You have access to information I haven’t. In any case, if so: on ‘allegedly’ utilitarian grounds is probably more accurate.

By the way: I am pro-euthanasia and I am also pro-default organ donorship so as long as there’s due process avoiding the organs being a reason for the euthanasia, I think it is common sense to make sure that the organs of somebody that has freely chosen to die are used for those that are freely choosing to live.

Yes, the transplant problem is an excellent way to generate or uncover deontological intuitions; when I introduce the kinds of problems ethical theory attempts to address in my classes, I often juxtapose the transplant case with other cases intended to draw out utilitarian intuitions (I don’t generally use the trolley problem, though it would work just as well). How are we to square the apparently obvious need to make sacrifices for the greater good with the equally apparently obvious need to refrain from certain kinds of paradigmatically wrong actions, like killing? To the extent that you do not roll your eyes at the attempt to achieve theoretical consistency on these matters, or simply shrug and say “I’d rather do economics,” or some other field, you’ve begun to do ethical theory.

Utilitarian responses to the transplant problem usually resort to the notion of rules or heuristics to avoid the conclusion that we should be killing people to harvest their organs–in general, they will argue, a policy of allowing such transplants will have negative effects on overall or average utility for empirical reasons, even though there may be rare cases in which violating that policy will in fact maximize utility. To be sure, utilitarians need to bite the bullet: sometimes uncomfortable sacrifices will need to be made, and so much the worse for our deontological intuitions. The problem is that deontologists have their own bullets to bite–which, as in the trolley case, will usually involve allowing whole gaggles of people to die for the sake of keeping one’s hands clean–so it’s not as if the counterintuitive aspects of utilitarianism necessarily render it inferior to its competitors.

I see that you are unwilling to discuss here and directly what terms these peace feelers sought. I assunme it is because the terms sought were never a starter.

Fair enough, your arguments rest on assumptions so one more won’t hurt.

if the cabinet tried to surrender, what would have prevented a successful military coup? plenty of generals sat on the fence during the attempted coup of 12-15 August 1945.

An unsuccessful military coup is evidence for a successful one. Gotcha. In any case, What Jim Rose Assumes The Japanese Would Have Done has no bearing on whether or not Truman had other options, which he did, nor does it speak to what Truman thought the Japanese were up to.

many of the responses argued that the trolley have additional tracks to divert too rather than argue what is to be done if the commitment of the Japanese to operation ketsugo was real and credible.

Oh, so are you just using the actual events as inspiration for a stipulative fictitious example then? Some of your remarks didn’t make that entirely clear. But please do go ahead and lay out the precise formulation of the exhaustive set of alternatives with their complete consequences.

Tim Wilkinson ,

The historian Chalmers Johnson has written that:

“It may be pointless to try to establish which World War Two Axis aggressor, Germany or Japan, was the more brutal. The Germans killed six million Jews and 20 million Russians [i.e. Soviet citizens]; the Japanese slaughtered as many as 30 million Filipinos, Malays, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Indonesians and Burmese, at least 23 million of them ethnic Chinese. Both nations looted the countries they conquered on a monumental scale, though Japan plundered more, over a longer period, than the Nazis. Both conquerors enslaved millions and exploited them as forced labourers …”

The trolley problem with either Hitler or the Japanese military is many more civilians would die if the war was not ended as qucikly as possible with atomic weapons.

Would the japanese ruling elite have surrendered in August 1945 but for the atomic bombings?

Substance McGravitas,

good point, but the person driving the trolley is human.

As Tullock argues, to reduce the personal distress of making difficult decisions, people often allocate and distribute resources in a different way so as to better conceal from themselves the unhappy choices they had to make even if this means more lives are lost than if more open and honest choices were made up about there only being so much that can be done.

a major driver of the opposition to the use of cost-benefit analysis and the valuation of statistical lives is its adoption makes people confront the tragic consequence of any of the choices available to them.

by saying how dare you value a statistical life does not change the fact that choices made without this knowledge will still have tragic consequnces and more lives may be lost because people want to conceal from themselves the difficult choices that they are making about others as voters and as policy-makers.

As soon as the trolley is real and the tracks take you to either deaths in Japan or even more deaths in the Japanese occupied countries, people grab at every possible straw for evidence that there is a third track.

novakant,

would you have opposed the use of violence to depose Hitler? Were his would be assassins immoral?

Do facts count here? Livers can regenerate, and live liver donations are possible, originally only with pediatric cases, but nowadays in adult cases. Not that there are no risks and controversies, but it’s empirically not an either/or instance.

Incidentally, novakant, you did seem to say or imply something interesting in the Congo Wars case: IFAICT you offered a consequentialist reason for a de-ontic standard.

Tim Wilkinson, thanks for the comments

I always thought references to the russian invasion as the decider was really desparate. Losing Tokyo in one atomic bombing is less important than losing Manchuria?!

after world war 1, the germans invented all sorts of fantasies about what really happened to excuse the fact that they sued for peace because they were routed.

How many more Chinese would have had to die as the Russians advanced through Manchuria in late 1945 so that the handwringers past and present could sleep better at night and avoid having to face up to some difficult choices?

Your link shows that the bombing shortened the war by several months at the minimum.

This results holds even using after paul nitze’s selective quotation of one Japanese high-level source in the strategic bombing survey that the war might have been over by Christmas.

December is not August.

The strategic bombing survey is a bit light the risks of a successful coup, and it mentions but does not explore in proper detail the capacity of the navy or army minister to resign and bring down a government at any time in august 1945 as did happen to the Tojo government after it has served its purpose to the ruling elite.

a word search of the the link you supplied does not find the word coup. The failed coup was after much reflection and temporising by the military high command and joining the plot or organising their own coup see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_Incident

In any case, the actual interrogation records of Japanese officials reveal their statements that the war would be over by christmas or november were literally the reverse of Nitze’s assertions.

the atomic genie was out of the bottle by 1945. The only way to put the genie back in, as Tom Schelling observed in 1961, is universal brain surgery to eliminate all knowledge of both atomic weapons and the principles of how to make them again.

novakant,

The trolley problem is about have a set of choices where all have tragic consequences. There is no third track that allows the driver to escape without blood on his hands.

History is full of examples of well-meaning attempts to regulate wars by prohibiting classes of weapons. The 1920s is an example of the dangers of such self-delusion about there is a third track or a slower trolley out there in international relations.

The Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 was designed to stop the naval arms race that helped to precipitate World War I. It limited naval tonnage among the five principal powers of the day. Germany was constrained by the Treaty of Versailles. The London Naval Treaties of 1930 and 1936 followed.

Japan, Italy and Germany ignored their treaty obligations, and the democracies limiting only themselves – reducing their ability to defend themselves. Germany was constrained by Versailles from building an air force – a fact of no comfort to the civilian victims of the Luftwaffe in World War II.

The 1928 Kellogg–Briand Pact (formal name: General Treaty for the Renunciation of War) was signed by the USA, France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Japan and a great many other states. The pact renounced aggressive war, prohibiting the use of war as an instrument of national policy except in matters of self-defence.

Obviously, the Kellogg–Briand Pact did not live up to its aim of ending war. This Pact did serve as the legal basis for charges of crimes against peace charges.

War criminals such as Bill Clinton and most heads of government in the EU in the late 1990s should be subject to those citizen’s arrests that so called peace activists try so as to make a spectacle of them-selves because the aforementioned war criminals supported the bombing of Serbia without a UN authorisation.

Go back to psychological crutchs, what does the trolley problem have to say about NATO’s unlawful intervention in the Kosovo war? Civilians died due to the NATO bombings.

Is the effect of a well-meaning but ill-considered effort to make humanitarian intervention obligatory as a matter of international law yesterday Kosovo, today Iraq, and tomorrow Darfur?

Yeah, Kevorkian is a true utilitarian. Apparently his other idee fixe was experimenting on, and harvesting organs from death-row convicts. It’s actually kind of funny, in a grim sort of way:

Professional journals and popular magazines rejected Kevorkian’s article outlining his proposal [to experiment on death-row prisoners]. Kevorkian later admitted his essay “reeked with sophomoric idealism and was highly impractical.” But he was able to present it at the December 1958 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington. D.C.– only because the group’s chairman figured the outlandish scheme would turn more people against capital punishment. Kevorkian’s speech caused a minor stir in the press, but drew no official support save for a stirring endorsement from an animals rights group, which pointed out that cutting up humans would save the lives of rats and guinea pigs.

Substance McGravitas @ #173 said:

Truman had options, and if his own military staff figured the war had been won, I’ll go with them over Jim Rose.

Speculating on the the figurings of American strategists or the imminence of Nipponese surrender and $2.50 will get you a cup of coffee. No one doubts that “Truman had options”, but the best one was to end the war sooner rather than later. That is the option he chose for thos reasons and it was the right one, on utilitarian grounds alone.

We know what the Nipponese authorities thought. We have it from the horses mouth (the Emperor) that the dropping of the A-Bomb caused them war to end with unconditional surrender. No one has given a plausible explanation of why we should not take his words at face value. Its not as if he just made it up as he went along.

What the American military staff may have privately thought, or even publicly recollected in tranquility, is something for psychoanalysts and biographers to quibble over. What they actually did is a matter of historical fact: plan and prepare for a six-to-twelve month conventional military campaign, with expected military and civilian casualties well north of one million.

Thats several times more civilians that were killed in Hiroshima/Nagasaki. So from an act-utilitarian perspective the dropping of the atomic bombs is a no-brainer: bombs away! Although its not the kind of military act that I would want to see made into a rule of thumb.

The idea that the JIA was on the verge of surrender in August 1945, prior to acquitting itself in an Armageddon battle against either the Red Army or US Army, is risible. Bushido honour code demanded that oceans of blood be spilt. Okinawa was just an overture. The only question remaining was the eternal one: Whose by Whom?

On the strategic question many critics of the A-bomb have pointed to the successful Red Army attack on the Japanese Imperial Army in Manchuko and the imminent Soviet invasion of the outerlying Japanese islands as an argument against the A-bombing. Supposedly the Red Army would have cleaned up the Nipponese remnants without the need for “that awful thing”.

To me the Red Army advance was an obvious argument in favour of dropping the A-bomb. Having the Reds divide up Japan, as they divided up Germany and Korea, would have been a recipe for unending geo-political pain (and another possible nuclear flashpoint). As it is the successful use of the A-bomb stopped the Red Army in its tracks in North Korea. That surely made the South Koreans happy.

More generally, or perhaps particularly, I have to wonder about the rarefied discussions of morality by people who were not, and never will be, on the firing line. (Although lest we forget, the A-bomb was Einstein’s idea and he was a pacifist.) How many CT readers and writers are willing to martyr themselves (or loved ones) in an agonizing death on behalf of a contentious philosophical idea. Yeah, me neither.

Its significant that combat veterans of some philosophical sophistication have come to the same conclusion. Thank God for the Atom Bomb,” as Paul Fussell (Normandy veteran) once wrote. Or, as my former teacher Dr Knopfelmacher (Normandy veteran) remarked, “it knocked the b*llsh*t out of them”. And of course everyone forgets that Truman, unlike most of his second guessers, was a combat veteran himself. Experience makes a real difference.

There ought to be a law against war. But by the time war gets serious it gets tribal which means that high-minded moral reasoning is a subordinate consideration. The best we can hope for is to end it sooner rather than later. By that standard Truman’s dropping of the A-bomb passed the Machiavellian test.

Hey, I don’t want to believe in the caricature, that’s what I’ve been saying all along. Utilitarianism is certainly a part of everybody’s decision making, to one degree or another.

Jack Strocchi @208 speak good.

But I think Mill’s (or a Millian) account of indirect utilitarianism/conseq’ism is a bit more complex and subtle. There is the matter of stable dispositions, and of social insitutions of priase and blame as an informal alnague (or indeed extension) of official political institutions. Deep facts about humanity: we are not entirely good at, e.g., lying (some even blush – we may trust them more; some are very good, high-functioning psychopaths who unfortunately have an advantage in getting t othe top of politics..) we are not able to perform hard calculations (this also probably means we cannot be Bayesians, thus we get ‘paradoxes’ about knowledge like the Harman/Kripke intransigence problem), we need some predictability in other’s behaviour, etc. All these things are higher-order conseu’ist arguments for why there should be adherence to rules (pssst! for the most part). Which is not to say aetiology follows axiology here.

Also, going by the description, JQ’s position on the ticking time bomb stuff is very similar to (‘similar to’ being symmetric) me own position. The distinction between laws and individual ethics is deliberately elided by those who want to have state torturers sitting around twiddling their own thumbs while they wait for those of others to be delivered to the sterile dungeon when the stakes are high enough (which will occur somewhere short of the apolcalyptic scenario, one suspects.)

Speculating on the the figurings of American strategists or the imminence of Nipponese surrender and $2.50 will get you a cup of coffee. No one doubts that “Truman had options”, but the best one was to end the war sooner rather than later. That is the option he chose for thos reasons and it was the right one, on utilitarian grounds alone.

It’s a weak utilitarian claim though: what is measured is potential losses, and the invasion plan mentioned was a plan among other options, not least was a moderation of the Potsdam language, which Truman indicated was possible. If the sticking point is, say, the preservation of the Emperor’s station then on utilitarian terms the dropping of the bomb is a horror.

geo @216
It’s from a Chalmers review in the LRB: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n22/chalmers-johnson/the-looting-of-asia