Trolleys

My acquaintance with modern philosophy is very limited, with what little I have gleaned from the likes of the TLS not encouraging me to do more - and it is just as well for the modern philosophers that I don't sit on their funding committees.

However, on this occasion the NYRB (of April 24th) has come up with something more than usually interesting, to wit trollology, an ology which it seems was invented in Oxford after the dreadful experiences of the second world war by a clutch of lady philosophers, one of whom was Iris Murdoch, better known for dense novels.

I won't rehearse two of the core problems of trollology as they are nicely summarised in the illustration (click for legibility). But the answer of the philosophers seems to be that it is OK to pull the lever but that it is not OK to push the fat man and much of the meat on trollology is trying to explain why this is so. I learn that, once again, the Catholics were there first with their doctrine of double effect, which very roughly speaking says that it is sometimes OK to do things which have bad effects provided that those bad effects were not the purpose of the action, a doctrine which clearly bears on the trolleys.

The article then goes on to say that while we might want to put a lot of weight on our intuitions in such matters, rather than on learned debate, intuition is very unreliable in that what it tells us to do is apt to vary in an alarming way as the starting conditions, the context if you will, are varied in a minor way.

It also says that we need to have simple moral rules, rules which with training, perhaps in a school or in a church, might become embodied in intuition, because we do not always have time or inclination to think about a problem. We just have to get on and do whatever seems best at the time. The point being that simple rules are not going to cope with everything because the world is not simple. However cleverly we draw up the simple rules we will always be able to come up with a reasonably realistic scenario which breaks them. So what is to be done?

Another aspect of the problem is that pushing fat men off bridges is bad for our moral health. It is not healthy to be contemplating doing such things, let alone doing them. We could so easily become hardened to what we were doing, to become blind to the pain of the other, an other whom we have, in effect, cast out into the outer darkness, along with all the pigs which we kill for our pies. Which is all very well, but in a time of war, for example, the case for pushing the fat man might become compelling. Losing five battle groups (the things which include huge aircraft carriers) is a hugely bigger disaster than losing one, a disaster which is apt to be fatal. Can we afford to be moral in such circumstances? I think that the case for not pushing might be compelling but it is not of universal application. I am reminded of the grim business of battlefield triage.

I also think that my answer more generally is the same as that for the sometimes unsavoury activities of the securocrats. We have to allow the activities, but we must insist on some kind of trusted and independent oversight of same, which can all too easily get out of hand.