Would You Kill the Fat Man (4 page)

Anscombe was the most deeply transformed by the Austrian. During the war she had moved to Cambridge to take up a research fellowship. Wittgenstein spent the war working first as a hospital porter and later a laboratory technician in Newcastle, but he returned to Cambridge to lecture. Anscombe attended these lectures and spent hours in conversation with him: he referred to her, with affection, as “old man.” Far too idiosyncratic to be a disciple—Wittgenstein had no shortage of these—Anscombe’s work was nonetheless indelibly stamped by his style. When others expressed what they took to be a profound thought, she would ruthlessly expose their latent nonsense for patent nonsense. Arguing with Anscombe was likened to having your skin ripped off.

Like so many of those who came into contact with Wittgenstein, she began to adopt some of his traits, such as disquieting silences as she paused for thought in seminars and tutorials, the vise-like holding of her head with her hands, and the agonized expression during intense philosophical debate. She’s even said to have developed a hint of an Austrian accent. Some people detected an inauthenticity in her earnestness, but she certainly took philosophy very seriously. Wittgenstein persuaded many of his most talented students to abandon the discipline: fortunately for philosophy, Elizabeth Anscombe stuck to her vocation, though she told her friend, then plain Tony Kenny, “I don’t have a thought in my head that wasn’t put there by Wittgenstein”. “I sometimes think,” added Sir Anthony Kenny, “that I don’t have a single thought in my head that wasn’t put there by Elizabeth.”
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Anscombe spread the Wittgensteinian gospel to Foot. During her lifetime Foot published several collections of articles, but only one work conceived as a book,
Natural Goodness
. The
opening page begins with Wittgenstein and one of only two talks he delivered in Oxford. As Foot recalled:

Wittgenstein interrupted a speaker who had realized that he was about to say something that, although it seemed compelling, was clearly ridiculous, and was trying … to say something sensible instead. “No,” said Wittgenstein. “Say what you
want
to say. Be
crude
and then we shall get on.” The suggestion that in doing philosophy one should not try to banish or tidy up a ludicrously crude but troubling thought, but rather give it its day, its week, its month, in court, seems to me very helpful.
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Wittgenstein believed that philosophical puzzles were natural, easy to make, and yet arose out of conceptual confusion, and so dissolvable by an analysis of language. The aim of philosophy was “to show the fly the way out of the flybottle.”
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And Foot interpreted this as essentially an oral approach, involving two people in therapeutic talk, one trying to express some deep truth, the other pulling back the veil to expose its shallowness. Perhaps, in those daily postprandial debates at Oxford, she imagined herself acting out the role of trapped fly, with Anscombe helpfully pointing to the exit.

It’s not easy to conceive of any aspect of philosophy that would be more alien to Wittgenstein than trolleyology. For one thing, Wittgenstein was skeptical that philosophy had anything to contribute to ethics. More important, the focus on the minutiae of a hypothetical puzzle, endlessly reexamined through a myriad of subtly distinct scenarios, ran quite contrary to his style—which grappled with the most fundamental questions in logic and language. This gives us a clue as to what Foot herself must have thought about the bourgeoning subdiscipline she had inadvertently instigated.

The President’s Degree

Our philosophers had something else in common. For them moral philosophy was not merely an abstract exercise, to be confined within the manicured quads and courts of mediaeval universities. It mattered. They engaged with what was happening in the world, and believed they had a duty to do so. It wasn’t a special duty that accrued to moral philosophers: it was a general duty that derived from being human.

Foot was one of a small group of people who set up a committee for famine relief back in the 1940s. She had initially responded to a newspaper advertisement seeking volunteers to sort out donations to a charity shop on Broad Street in the center of Oxford. The shop took whatever people could give, and then resold it. In the early days there were gifts of false teeth and a live donkey.
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Now the organization has grown somewhat. Oxfam operates in around one hundred countries and has fifteen thousand shops.

Politics was conducted, of course, from within the framework of the Cold War, and Foot was active in supporting dissidents and émigrés from eastern Europe, especially from Hun-gary after the 1956 uprising. In 1975, she and Tony Kenny were invited to lecture in Yugoslavia. They’d heard a rumor that a local philosopher, Mihailo Marcović, had been arrested before their arrival, and drew up a trenchant protest document for distribution, hiding it in their luggage. As they smuggled this contraband through customs, both Brits were anxious about being caught. On this occasion their efforts proved unnecessary—Dr. Marcović was in the welcoming party to greet them.

Anscombe, too, was stirred into action by politics and current affairs. Two examples are relevant here. In 1956 there was
a proposal to give Harry S. Truman, the thirty-third president of the United States (1945–1953), an honorary degree at Oxford University. Western Europe had much to be grateful to Truman for. After succeeding Franklin Roosevelt in 1945, he had overseen the final months of World War II. In the years following the end of the war, the Berlin Airlift broke the Soviet blockade on the Western part of this city, while the Marshall Plan pumped vast sums of money into the region to rebuild its shattered economies and NATO was established, providing West European countries with a security umbrella.

The voting on any offer for an honorary doctorate would normally have been a routine affair. However, for Truman, the beautiful seventeenth-century Sheldonian Theatre—where such matters are aired in Oxford—was packed to its cupola. Anscombe wrote that the academics had caught wind of her rebellion and they were “whipped up to vote for the honour.” The dons at St. John’s were simply told, “The women are up to something in Convocation; we have to go and vote them down.”
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A witness recalled events.
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Miss Anscombe rose and (after duly seeking the VC’s permission to speak English) delivered an impassioned speech against the award of an Oxford degree to the “man who pressed the button” of the Bomb.

At the time the
Oxford Mail
reported that Anscombe had caused “a sensation.”
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National newspapers also covered her intervention. Getting carried away with her own rhetoric, Anscombe had asked, “If you do give this honour, what Nero, what Genghis Khan, what Hitler, or what Stalin will not be honoured in the future.”

The Americans named the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945 Little Boy. The bomb detonated on Nagasaki
three days later, on August 9, was Fat Man. Together they immediately took between 150,000 and 245,000 lives, and the radiation claimed tens of thousands more in subsequent years. Truman said he had ordered the dropping of the bombs—the only time in history that nuclear weapons have been used—to force Japanese surrender and accelerate the end of the war. Within a week, Emperor Hirohito had announced his country’s capitulation.

But, as Anscombe stated, for men to choose to kill the innocent as a means to their ends was always murder. She was puzzled by the common cant about Truman’s decision being “courageous.” “It may be said that Mr. Truman showed great courage in making the decision,” she told the assembled academics, “but I should like to know what he had to lose. I should like to think that he had one thing to lose, and that was the chance of an honorary degree at Oxford.”

There are various inaccurate accounts printed about what occurred in the vote. The Oxford University archives make it clear that there was no formal count, but that the proposal to honor Truman was approved by a calling out of
placet
[literally, it pleases] and
non placet
[it does not please]. In fact, at least two other people backed Anscombe
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—Philippa and her then husband M.R.D. Foot. Philippa shared Anscombe’s horror of the bomb: her husband, by contrast, believed that dropping the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs had shortened the war, saved countless lives, and was fully justified: he only supported Anscombe out of a sense of personal loyalty.
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A pamphlet Anscombe later wrote about “Mr. Truman’s Degree” is dedicated to those who said “Non placet.”

The full reason for Anscombe’s fury at Truman’s pressing the atomic button revolves around the concept of “intention,” discussed in the following chapters. Did Truman intend to kill
innocent civilians? And her dissection of intention was key to her views on other moral issues. Although Anscombe had, as it were, bipedal support (two Foots) on her Truman stance, Foot and Anscombe held diametrically opposed views on sexual matters—in particular, contraception and abortion—which would cause a permanent rupture between them: “[Anscombe] was … more rigorously Catholic than the Pope,” said Foot.
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Right through the swinging sixties, the decade of feminist awakening and sexual liberation, Anscombe was vehemently defending the Roman Catholic Church’s prohibition of contraception and advocating the rhythm method for sex between married couples. She remonstrated with Foot when Oxfam introduced a policy on birth control in the developing world, tearing up her Oxfam subscription. She bandied about the term “murderer” quite liberally, applying it not just to President Truman but to almost any woman who chose to have an abortion.

The moral status of a fetus aroused fervid disagreement among philosophers, and Foot and Anscombe both wrote philosophical essays on the matter. Of course, to some extent it remains a contentious issue, but in most of the developed world the legal right to have an abortion is now settled. This was not the case when Foot first applied her forensic philosophical skills to the issue. The United States would have to wait until the landmark case of
Roe v. Wade
in 1973 to confirm a woman’s right to have an abortion. But in Britain the law liberalizing abortion was passed in parliament in October 1967. This was the same year that Philippa Foot published her article—”The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect”—in the
Oxford Review
, which introduced trolleyology to the world.

CHAPTER 4

The Seventh Son of Count Landulf

[The Trolley Problem] a lovely, nasty difficulty.

—J. J. Thomson

THE SEVENTH SON OF COUNT LANDULF was born near Naples in the early part of the year 1225. The boy, Thomas, displayed exceptional intellectual gifts. He also showed considerable moral integrity. In his view, two of the highest virtues were fortitude and temperance, qualities he possessed in abundance. To his family’s fury he determined to become a Dominican friar rather than the Benedictine monk they had planned. Benedictine monks have little interaction with the world. The Dominicans believed not in living behind secluded cloisters, but in traveling and preaching and spreading the word, surviving on charity. At one stage, in an attempt to thwart Thomas’s plan, his elder brothers seized him while he was drinking at a spring, and forcibly took him to a family castle. For two years he was unable to leave. His siblings attempted to break his vow of celibacy by dispatching to his quarters an attractive prostitute. When he saw her, Thomas jumped up, grabbed a poker from the fire, and forced her to retreat from the room.
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He eventually escaped his captivity and traveled to Germany to pursue his studies under a gifted Dominican friar, who
nurtured Thomas’s love and respect for Aristotle. Thomas later taught in many places—in Paris, in Rome, in Naples. Everywhere he went, he of course wore the distinctive white tunic and black cloak of the Dominican Order. Until his death in 1274, he wrote prodigiously: exegeses on Aristotle as well as many original works of extraordinary range and depth.

Half a century later this scion of Landulf would be canonized. To become a saint, a person must perform miracles after his death (to demonstrate that he is present in heaven and capable of coming to the aid of the living). But an indication of God’s favorable opinion is to have performed miracles too during life. Thomas wasn’t a particularly industrious miracle maker, preferring to write and read. But there were several witnesses to corroborate the following story: in Italy, in the last days of his life, when he’d been refusing food, he suddenly announced that he had a craving for herring. That was unfortunate because herring was nowhere to be found around the Italian coast. But then the fishmonger arrived with his usual batch of sardines and upon opening one of the baskets he found, to everyone’s astonishment, that it was full of fresh herrings.

It’s a story that has been swallowed by devotees who, to this day, pray at the saint’s grave in Toulouse for a cure to their ailments. But even non-Catholics venerate Saint Thomas Aquinas. He is regarded by many Catholics as their faith’s preeminent theologian, while secular philosophers acknowledge his seminal contributions in areas ranging from the philosophy of mind to metaphysics and the theory of natural law. His work in moral philosophy remains relevant to us today. In particular, he drew up the principles required for a war to be described as just. And he was the first thinker clearly to adumbrate a powerful doctrine. Intentional killing could never be justified, thought Aquinas. But if a person was threatened, and
the only option to save their life was to kill the assailant, well, this killing could be morally permissible, provided the intention was self-preservation, and not the taking of a life. Thus was born the Doctrine of Double Effect—henceforth the DDE.
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