Free Would You Kill the Fat Man by David Edmonds Page B

we take Kamm’s word for it? Does a professor of philosophy, who has been wandering for decades downthe highways and byways of trolleyology, have especially sensitive moral antennae? Well, perhaps. After all, we expect a wine connoisseur to be superior to ordinary topers in identifying and grading qualities in a wine. We expect something similar of an art buff who can look at a painting and be in a better position than the rest of us to assess its merits. 3
    Nonetheless, many of Kamm’s tortuous cases even divide trolleyologists—so an appeal to expertise gets us only so far. That’s not true of Spur and Fat Man, of course, where intuitions are more robust among both philosophers and lay people alike. But the indictment against trolleyology is that all its puzzles are improbable and, therefore, all of them are useless. According to Mary Midgely, even her old friend Philippa Foot would have been dismayed by the burgeoning sub-genre that she spawned: “this trolley-problem industry is just one more depressing example of academic philosophers’ obsession with concentrating on selected, artificial examples so as to dodge the stress of looking at real issues.” 4
    In the real world, we don’t have T-junction ethics. In the real world we are not constrained by having just two options, X and Y: we have a multitude of options, and our choices are entangled in complex duties and obligations and motives. In the real world, crucially, there would be no certainty. If I pushed the fat man I could be tried for murder. Perhaps I would be concerned about a CCTV camera capturing my every move. I couldn’t be sure that I’d be physically strong enough to shove the fat man over the bridge (if I tried to push him would there not be a danger that he’d retaliate and throw me over instead?). I couldn’t be sure that the fat man’s bulk would stop the trolley. I couldn’t be sure that without my intervention the trolley would trundle onward and flatten the five.They might manage to cut their ropes and escape. The driver might regain control of the trolley. And could I not find another bulky object that would be just as effective as the fat man’s body in stopping the trolley?
    Trolleys in the Real World
     
    Confronted with the charge of artificiality, the best strategy for trolleyology is to embrace it. The thought experiments are deliberately contrived, yet most of them are not so wildly out of the world as to be entirely unrecognizable from actual cases.
    There’s a joke that lampoons moral philosophy. Question. How many moral philosophers does it take to change a light-bulb? Answer. Eight. One to change it and seven to hold everything else equal. But it’s precisely because the trolley scenarios are so carefully engineered that they are of use. Real life is full of white noise, ethical hiss. The complexity of real life makes it difficult to identify pertinent features of moral reasoning. Trolley cases are designed to extract principles and detect relevant distinctions. They can only do so by blotting out the distracting and distorting sound. A crude analogy can be drawn with the scientific method. In the laboratory, if you want to test for the effect of, say, light, you vary the light while maintaining all other factors constant. Similarly, if you want to determine whether a particular feature is relevant morally, you imagine two cases that are otherwise identical while playing around with this one variable.
    But neither are the basic trolley cases so fantastical that they’re entirely detached from reality. Earlier I played a little trick on you, dear reader: Professor R U Joaching, referred to atthe beginning of this chapter, is imaginary. But his trolley case is not. This accident took place in Chicago. The appellate court that heard the case ruled in the woman’s favor. The young man who died, Hiroyuki Johu, was held responsible for her injuries: according to the court he should have foreseen that if hit by a train his