Would You Kill the Fat Man (3 page)

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

Some of the trolleyology literature is so fiendishly complex that, in the words of one exasperated philosopher, it “makes the Talmud look like
Cliffs Notes
” (referring to a set of student study guides).
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Indeed, to an outsider, the curious incidents of the trains on the track may seem like harmless fun—crossword puzzles for long-stay occupants of the Ivory Tower. But at heart, they’re about what’s right and wrong, and how we should behave. And what could be more important than that?

CHAPTER 3

The Founding Mothers

I realize the tragic significance of the atomic bomb.

—President Harry S. Truman, August 9, 1945, the day Fat Man is dropped on Nagasaki

PHILIPPA (PIP TO HER FRIENDS) Foot, the George Stephenson of trolleyology, believed there was a right answer (and so, logically, also a wrong one) to her train dilemma.

Foot was born in 1920 and, like so many of her contemporaries, her ethical outlook was molded by the violence of World War II. But when she began to teach philosophy at Oxford University in 1947, “subjectivism” still had a lingering and, to her mind, pernicious hold on academia.

Subjectivism maintains that there are no objective moral truths. Before World War II it had been given intellectual ballast by a group of mathematicians, logicians, and philosophers from the Austrian capital. They were known as the Vienna Circle. The Vienna Circle developed “logical positivism,” which claimed that for a proposition to have meaning it must fulfill one of two criteria. Either it must be true in virtue of the meaning of its terms (e.g., 2 + 2 = 4 or “All trains are vehicles”), or it must be in principle verifiable through experimentation (e.g., “the moon is made of cheese,” or “five men ahead
are roped to the track”). All other statements were literally meaningless.

These meaningless propositions would include bald moral assertions, such as “The Nazis were wrong to gas Jews,” or “The British were justified in using subterfuge to alter the trajectory of the doodlebugs.” On the face of it this is an odd claim: these propositions sound as if they make sense and at least the first seems self-evidently true. They’re not like the jumble of words, “Trajectory doodlebugs subterfuge British alter justified,” which is patently gibberish. How then ought we to interpret ethical statements? One answer was supplied by the English philosopher A. J. Ayer, who’d attended sessions of the Vienna Circle.
¹
Later he would say of logical positivism that “the most important of [its] defects was that nearly all of it was false,”
²
but for a time he was entirely under its spell. Ayer developed what is pejoratively called the boo-hooray theory.
³
If I say, “The Nazis were wrong to gas the Jews,” that’s best translated as, “The Nazis gassed the Jews: boo, hiss.” Likewise, “The British were justified in using subterfuge to alter the trajectory of the doodlebugs” is roughly translatable as “The British used subterfuge to alter the trajectory of the doodlebugs: hoorah, hoorah.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ménage à quatre

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

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

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

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

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

At least it led to a thaw between Foot and Murdoch, so much so that they connected almost every corner of the love quadrangle and had a brief affair themselves. Meanwhile, the relationship between Foot and Anscombe itself grew tense. Foot was an atheist, Anscombe a devout Roman Catholic. This chasm in their worldview would eventually become too vast to be bridged by any shared philosophical interests.

And they did share interests as well as an approach to philosophy. In addition to their common assault on hooray-boo meta-ethics, Anscombe, Foot, and Murdoch were preoccupied with the “virtues.” In answer to the question, “How should I behave?” in any particular moral dilemma, one approach emphasizes moral obligations and duties: for example, the duty never to lie. An alternative response, utilitarianism, states that what matters are the consequences of an action, whether for example the action saves the most lives, or produces the most happiness. (Anscombe is credited with introducing the word “consequentialism” into philosophy, for her a term of disdain.) But Foot, Anscombe, and Murdoch were attracted by a third way of thinking, which had been almost entirely abandoned, at least in Oxford. Inspired by the work of Aristotle and Aquinas, they stressed the importance of character.
¹⁸
An action was good insofar as it exhibited the behavior of a virtuous person. A truly virtuous person will exhibit many virtues. The virtues include pride, temperance, generosity, bravery, and kindness. Foot was said to prize “honesty” as supreme among the virtues.
¹⁹

Aristotle and Aquinas were not the only points of common reference. A more recent and divisive character was also a powerfully felt presence. Born in Vienna in 1889, Ludwig Wittgenstein died in Cambridge in 1951. His genius, beguiling prose, and mesmerizing charisma combined to make him the most influential philosopher in the Anglo-American world.