Would You Kill the Fat Man (11 page)

Thus, it may be that to save five lives a judge needs to frame an innocent man, but society would operate more smoothly if individual judges were not tempted to pervert justice in this way. “Do not convict the innocent” would seem a sensible rule for judges to follow if we want to maximize well-being or happiness overall. If we believed that judges were willing to disregard the little matter of innocence or guilt for what they believed to be a higher value, our faith in the entire legal structure would be fatally undermined. And to feel secure we require the institutions of state to operate consistently, without making exceptions on grounds of expediency. We do not want judges even to consider the option of framing an innocent man, for mere reflection about such an option would contribute to an erosion of confidence in the system of justice.

Other utilitarian philosophers have developed this thought further. What should we do in the notorious ticking-bomb scenario discussed earlier? Imagine that we can extract information to defuse a bomb that threatens thousands of lives only by torturing a person who has this information. Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900) described what he called “esoteric morality”
²¹
and which the British twentieth-century philosopher Bernard Williams derided as “Government House utilitarianism.”
²²
Ostensibly, we want to uphold a rule like “do not torture” since to
permit any exceptions could lead to terrible abuses. But in practice, it might be right, in very unusual circumstances, to torture someone, especially if the violation of the torture rule could be kept secret. It might also be the case—and this sounds terribly Machiavellian—that only an elite can be trusted to act in every decision on utilitarian principles, while the broad “vulgar” mass should be indoctrinated with general maxims, since they can’t be expected to handle “the inevitable indefiniteness and complexity” of utilitarian calculations.
²³

Thus, on Utilitarian principles, it may be right to do and privately recommend, under certain circumstances, what it would not be right to advocate openly; it may be right to teach openly to one set of persons what it would be wrong to teach to others; it may be conceivably right to do, if it can be done with comparative secrecy, what it would be wrong to do in the face of the world.
²⁴

In the twentieth century, Philippa Foot’s contemporary, Richard Hare, was another promoter of two-tiered utilitarianism.
²⁵
Life is complicated and time is short, so we would do well to operate with a series of rough-and-ready rules that on balance will produce the best overall result. One can see how it’s sensible to have a rule about not killing bystanders, be they fat men on footpaths or healthy visitors to medical centers. Even if it were the case that doctors could murder a man with a rare blood type to save the lives of five dying patients, this would be more than offset, in utilitarian terms, by the panic and anxiety such a practice would provoke. It would be unsettling to have to worry that any time you visited a sick relative in hospital, it might be you who ended up under the scalpel with surgeons cutting out your organs. So, we should adhere to the rough-and-ready rules. Every now and again our rules will
come into conflict: we may be able to follow one rule, but only at the cost of violating another. “Tell the truth” and “do not harm a person’s feelings” might conflict if someone asks you whether you like their haircut. When rules conflict, says Hare, you should appeal to your internal utilitarian referee—and judge, by a utilitarian standard, which rule you should ditch on this occasion.

A Place for Qualms

A utilitarian trolleyologist is an oxymoron. The raison d’être of this philosophical sub-genre, trolleyology, is to identify differences between cases in which either one or five people die. But the utilitarian rejects the notion that there are intrinsic differences in these cases: the utilitarian doesn’t take seriously the difference between intending and foreseeing, acting or omitting, doing or allowing, between negative and positive duties. True, the utilitarian has an elegant explanation as to why the idea of killing the fat man, or the healthy hospital visitor, makes people feel queasy, and indeed why this queasiness is to be encouraged, as conducive in the long run to the general good. But thought experiments being thought experiments, utilitarians must ultimately embrace the logic of their position: scenarios can be reworked so that the utilitarian can no longer appeal to rules.
²⁶

Thus, imagine that a utilitarian professor of philosophy were standing next to the fat man and knew that the fat man’s death could be passed off as an accidental fall. No one would ever find out the truth. There would be no threat to social cohesion. Imagine too that the professor, being a committed and clear-eyed utilitarian, could correctly predict that he or she
would feel no subsequent qualms about killing the fat man. In those circumstances, the professor would have to reach the conclusion that killing the fat man was the right thing to do.

Those who would still balk in such circumstances at the killing of the fat man are likely to agree with Bernard Williams, the British philosopher, that utilitarianism is fundamentally flawed. Back in the 1970s, Williams offered two thought experiments of his own designed to show that utilitarianism failed to capture various essential dimensions of our moral life.

The first case involved George and the second, Jim. George is a qualified chemist but finding it difficult to get work, and has a wife and small children to support. He is told by a colleague about a decently paid post in a laboratory that’s researching chemical and biological warfare. George opposes such research and so says he couldn’t accept a job in such a place. His colleague points out that if George doesn’t take the job, it will go to a contemporary of George’s who would pursue the research with far greater zeal. What should George do?

Now take Jim’s predicament. Jim arrives in a central square in a small South American town. Tied up against the wall are a row of twenty terrified Indians in front of several armed men. The captain of the armed men arrives and begins to chat with Jim. He explains that he’s selected these twenty people at random after some acts of protest against the government: he’s going to kill them as a deterrent to future protest. However, since Jim is an honored visitor from another land, he will offer him the privilege of killing one of the Indians himself. If Jim accepts, the other Indians will be freed. If he doesn’t, all twenty will be killed. What should Jim do?
²⁷

In the George scenario, Williams was making the point that utilitarianism can’t account for integrity. From a utilitarian perspective, everything points toward George taking the job.
It’ll bring in a much-needed income and actually hold back, rather than accelerate, research into biological and chemical warfare. But it would be “absurd,” says Williams, to expect of George that simply because of the utilitarian calculus he should put aside his most deeply held convictions.

Jim’s quandary has a closer parallel to the Fat Man case. Williams thought that Jim should, on balance, kill the Indian. But the problem with utilitarianism was how it assessed this situation, how it weighed and balanced reasons for action. For the utilitarian it is obvious that this is what Jim should do: it’s one life against twenty. But that misses the fact, said Williams, that if Jim picks up the gun, it will be Jim who does the killing. The utilitarian, in the philosopher’s jargon, takes no account of “agency.” All the utilitarian cares about is
what
produces the best result, not
who
produces this result or how this result is brought about. Whether it is caused by Jim acting, or failing to act, is irrelevant. We are as responsible for what we fail to do, as for what we actually do. But that’s not how we ordinarily view matters: if Jim can’t bring himself to shoot the Indian we’d hold the Captain, not Jim, responsible for the deaths of the twenty. Utilitarians make the mistake, in Williams’s view, of believing they can judge actions from the “point of view of the universe.”
²⁸

But assessing outcomes from this bird’s-eye perspective is precisely what hard-headed utilitarians advocate that we do. Peter Singer is the best known of a number of contemporary utilitarian thinkers. He thinks the right thing to do is to push the fat man and that there is no relevant distinction between doing so, and turning the trolley in Spur.

To most philosophers, that conclusion is a
reductio ad absurdum
of the utilitarian approach. It seems to them wildly counterintuitive: which raises two issues. Why should we take our
instinctive feelings and reactions seriously on these matters? And do philosophers have any special authority over—any unique insight into—what’s right and what’s wrong?

To answer these questions, the walls between philosophy and other disciplines have had to be cut and planed if not exactly torn down.

PART 2

Experiments and the Trolley

CHAPTER 9

Out of the Armchair

Man will become better when
you show him what he is like.

—Anton Chekhov

A philosophical problem is not an empirical problem.

—Judith Jarvis Thompson

THE TRADITIONAL CARICATURE of the fusty philosopher seats him in a very specific item of furniture. His profound thoughts emerge from a sedentary position, but he is not on a stool, bench, rocking chair, sofa, chaise-lounge or—God forbid—bean-bag or deck chair (although, as it happens, Wittgenstein inflicted deck chairs on his students who came to his spartan Cambridge room). No, the philosopher sits in an armchair: it’s no doubt comfortably deep, and a little frayed at the edges, and there’s room on the armrest to balance a book and a smudgy glass of sherry.

It’s this image that explains the icon of a new movement. This movement has a label that could have been dreamed up by a public relations firm—x-phi—standing for “experimental philosophy,” philosophy with an empirical edge. In recent years, blogs, periodicals, and books have been devoted to x-phi,
and research grants have been lavishly bestowed on its exponents. The icon of the x-phi movement is a burning armchair.

Critics complain that the experiments carried out under the x-phi banner lack scientific rigor and should not be categorized as philosophy. “The worry about experimental philosophy is that it’s like Christian Science—it isn’t either,” is how one detractor puts it.
¹
We’ll return to such worries later. Nonetheless, insofar as a philosophical movement can be fashionable, x-phi is currently very much all the rage.

At least since the work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of the German logician, Gottlob Frege, the portrayal of the armchair philosopher has had some basis in reality. Frege regarded philosophy as a discipline requiring just the tools of logic and conceptual analysis. In that sense, it could be practiced without rising from the upholstery and it was unlike chemistry, which had Bunsen burners, history, which fed on archives, or sociology, which drew on surveys.

Philosophy was not always like this. Philosophy has become a separate discipline only relatively recently, and philosophers have historically made use of findings from the empirical sciences. Some philosophers even performed their own experiments—Aristotle, a pioneer in taxonomy, dissected all manner of creatures, from crustaceans to cuttlefish.
²
The x-phi movement claims to be a return to an earlier time, when philosophy had a broader self-conception, and was not separated from other disciplines. As one of the leaders of the x-phi movement expresses it, experimental philosophy is “more a retro movement, an attempt to go back to what philosophy was traditionally about.”
³

While x-phi has drawn extensively on the work of social psychology, until recently much of it has involved a different methodology—a deconstruction of everyday intuitions through
surveys. Faced with a real or imaginary set of circumstances, philosophers are not shy to proclaim that their reaction must be the universal reaction of all right-minded people everywhere. “We can all agree that …,” they might say. A typical example is given by Judith Jarvis Thomson. Imagine five people are at risk in a hospital, not from their ailments but from the ceiling of their room, which is about to fall on them. We can prevent this potential calamity by pumping on a ceiling-support mechanism, but doing so will inevitably release lethal fumes into the room of a sixth person. Here, she writes, “
it is plain
we may not proceed.”
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But x-phi has begun to undermine that sort of assured presumption. Is it really the case that the intuitions in the Oxford colleges of Somerville and St. Anne’s are shared by the inhabitants of Nashville and Saint Petersburg?

There are many areas of philosophy where the cross-cultural sociology of intuitions is injecting new energy into age-old questions, and not merely in ethics. Take the relationship between knowledge and belief: when can I be said to
know
something, when to merely
believe
it. Once, the standard answer was that I know it when I have justified true belief, and I have a justified true belief when the following three conditions are satisfied: (a) I believe it, (b) it is true, and (c) I have good reason for believing it to be true. Here’s an example. Do I know that there’s a man tied to the track ahead of me? Well, if there
is
a man tied to the track, and I look and see a man tied to the track, then surely I can be said to
know
there’s a man tied to the track.