Would You Kill the Fat Man?

The Trolley Problem and What Your Answer Tells Us about Right and Wrong

David Edmonds

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780691165639, 9780691154022
• eBook ISBN: 9781400848386
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

From the bestselling coauthor of Wittgenstein's Poker, a fascinating tour through the history of moral philosophy

A runaway train is racing toward five men who are tied to the track. Unless the train is stopped, it will inevitably kill all five men. You are standing on a footbridge looking down on the unfolding disaster. However, a fat man, a stranger, is standing next to you: if you push him off the bridge, he will topple onto the line and, although he will die, his chunky body will stop the train, saving five lives. Would you kill the fat man?

The question may seem bizarre. But it's one variation of a puzzle that has baffled moral philosophers for almost half a century and that more recently has come to preoccupy neuroscientists, psychologists, and other thinkers as well. In this book, David Edmonds, coauthor of the bestselling Wittgenstein's Poker, tells the riveting story of why and how philosophers have struggled with this ethical dilemma, sometimes called the trolley problem. In the process, he provides an entertaining and informative tour through the history of moral philosophy. Most people feel it's wrong to kill the fat man. But why? After all, in taking one life you could save five. As Edmonds shows, answering the question is far more complex—and important—than it first appears. In fact, how we answer it tells us a great deal about right and wrong.

PART 1

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Philosophy and the Trolley

CHAPTER 1

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Churchill’s Dilemma

AT 4:13 A.M. ON JUNE 13, 1944, there was an explosion in a lettuce patch twenty-five miles south-east of London.

Britain had been at war for five years, but this marked the beginning of a new torment for the inhabitants of the capital, one that would last several months and cost thousands of lives. The Germans called their flying bomb Vergeltungswaffe—retaliation weapon. The first V1 merely destroyed edible plants, but there were nine other missiles of vengeance that night, and they had more deadly effect.

Londoners prided themselves on—and had to some extent mythologized—their fortitude during the Blitz. Yet, by the summer of ’44, reservoirs of optimism and morale were running dry,—even though D-day had occurred on June 6 and the Nazis were already on the retreat on the Eastern front.

The V1s were a terrifying sight. The two tons of steel hurtled through the sky, with a flaming orange-red tail. But it was the sound that most deeply imprinted itself on witnesses. The rockets would buzz like a deranged bee and then go eerily quiet. Silence signaled that they had run out of fuel and were falling. On contact with the ground they would cause a deafening explosion that could flatten several buildings. Londoners tempered their fear by giving the bombs a name of childlike innocence: doodlebugs. (The Germans called them “hell hounds” or “fire dragons.”) Only an exceptional few citizens could be as phlegmatic as the poet Edith Sitwell, who was in the middle of a reading when a doodlebug was heard above. She “merely lifted her eyes to the ceiling for a moment and, giving her voice a little more volume to counter the racket in the sky, read on.”¹

Because the missiles were not piloted, they could be dispatched across the Channel day or night, rain or shine. That they were unmanned made them more, not less, menacing. “No enemy was risking his life up there,” wrote Evelyn Waugh, “it was as impersonal as a plague, as though the city was infested with enormous, venomous insects.”²

The doodlebugs were aimed at the heart of the capital, which was both densely populated and contained the institutions of government and power. Some doodlebugs reached the targeted zone. One smashed windows in Buckingham Palace and damaged George VI’s tennis court. More seriously, on June 18, 1944, a V1 landed on the Guards Chapel, near the Palace, in the midst of a morning service attended by both civilians and soldiers: 121 people were killed.

The skylight of nearby Number 5, Seaforth Place, would have been shaken by this explosion too. Number 5 was an attic flat overrun by mice and volumes of poetry: there were so many books that additional shelves had had to be installed in what had originally been a bread oven, set into the wall. There was a crack in the roof, through which could be heard the intermittent growl of planes, and there were cracks in the floor as well, through which could be heard the near constant roar of the underground. The flat was home to two young women, who shared shoes (they had three pairs between them) and a lover. Iris was working in the Treasury, and secretly feeding information back to the Communist Party; Philippa was researching how American money could revitalize European economies once the war was over. Both Iris Murdoch and Philippa Bonsanquet would go on to become outstanding philosophers, though Iris would always be better known as a novelist.

Iris’s biographer, Peter Conradi, says the women became used to walking to work in the morning to discover various buildings had disappeared during the night. Back at the flat, during intense bombing raids, they would climb into the bathtub under the stairs for comfort and protection.

They weren’t aware of it at the time, but matters could have been worse. The Nazis faced two problems. First, despite the near miss to Buckingham Palace, and the terrible toll at the Guards Chapel, most of the V1 bombs actually fell a few miles south of the center. Second, this was a fact of which the Nazis were ignorant.

An ingenious plan presented itself in Whitehall. If the Germans could be deceived into believing that the doodlebugs were hitting their mark—or, better still, missing their mark by falling north—then they would not readjust the trajectory of the bombs, and perhaps even alter it so that they fell still farther south. That could save lives.

The details of this deception were intricately plotted by the secret service and involved several double agents, including two of the most colorful, ZigZag³ and Garbo.⁴ Both ZigZag and Garbo were on the Nazi payroll but working for the Allies. The Nazis requested eyewitness information about where the bombs were exploding—and for a month they swallowed up the regular and misleading information that ZigZag and Garbo provided.

The military immediately recognized the benefits of this ruse and supported the operation. But for the politicians it had been a tougher call. There was an impassioned debate between the minister for Home Security, Herbert Morrison, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill. It would be too crude to characterize it as a class conflict, but Morrison, who was the son of a policeman from south London and who represented a desperately poor constituency in east London, perhaps felt more keenly than did Churchill the burden that the operation would impose on the working-class areas south of the center. And he was uneasy at the thought of “playing God,” of politicians determining who was to live and who to die. Churchill, as usual, prevailed.

The success of the operation is contested by historians. The British intelligence agency, MI5, destroyed the false reports dispatched by Garbo and ZigZag, recognizing that, were they ever to come to light, the residents of south London might not take kindly to being used in this way. However, the Nazis never improved their aim. And a scientific adviser with a stiff upper lip, who promoted the operation even though his parents and his old school were in south London (“I knew that neither my parents nor the school would have had it otherwise”), estimated it may have saved as many as 10,000 lives.⁵

By the end of August 1944, the danger from V1s had receded. The British got better at shooting down the doodlebugs from both air and ground. More important, the V1 launching pads in Northern France were overrun by the advancing Allied forces. On September 7, 1944, the British government announced that the war against the flying bomb was over.⁶ The V1s had killed around six thousand people. Areas of south London—Croydon, Penge, Beckenham, Dulwich, Streatham, and Lewisham—had been rocked and pounded: 57,000 houses had been damaged in Croydon alone.

Nonetheless, it’s possible that without the double-agent subterfuge, many more buildings would have been destroyed—and many more lives lost. Churchill probably didn’t lose too much sleep over the decision. He faced excruciating moral dilemmas on an almost daily basis. But this one is significant for capturing the structure of a famous philosophical puzzle.

That puzzle is the subject of this book.

CHAPTER 2

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Spur of the Moment

How are they free from sin who …

have taken a human life?

—Saint Augustine

A MAN IS STANDING BY THE SIDE OF A TRACK when he sees a runaway train hurtling toward him: clearly the brakes have failed. Ahead are five people, tied to the track. If the man does nothing, the five will be run over and killed. Luckily he is next to a signal switch: turning this switch will send the out-of-control train down a side track, a spur, just ahead of him. Alas, there’s a snag: on the spur he spots one person tied to the track: changing direction will inevitably result in this person being killed. What should he do?

From now on this dilemma will be referred to as Spur. Spur is not identical to Winston Churchill’s conundrum, of course, but there are similarities. The British government faced a choice. It could do nothing or it could try to change the trajectory of the doodlebugs—through a campaign of misinformation—and so save lives. Different people and fewer people would die as a result. Switching the direction of the train would likewise save lives, though one different person would die as a result.

Figure 1. Spur. You’re standing by the side of a track when you see a runaway train hurtling toward you: clearly the brakes have failed. Ahead are five people, tied to the track. If you do nothing, the five will be run over and killed. Luckily you are next to a signal switch: turning this switch will send the out-of-control train down a side track, a spur, just ahead of you. Alas, there’s a snag: on the spur you spot one person tied to the track: changing direction will inevitably result in this person being killed. What should you do?

Most people seem to believe that not only is it permissible to turn the train down the spur, it is actually required—morally obligatory.

A version of Spur appeared for the first time in the Oxford Review, in 1967. The example was later reprinted in a book of essays of which the dedication reads “To The Memory of Iris Murdoch.”¹ It was the author of those essays who had shared a flat with Iris Murdoch during World War II and cowered in the bath at Seaforth Place as the British government was confronted with an analogous problem.² Philippa Bonsanquet (later Philippa Foot) could never have guessed that her puzzle, published in a fourteen-page article in an esoteric periodical, would spawn a mini-academic industry and signal the start of a debate that continues to the present day.

It’s a debate that draws on the most important moral thinkers in the philosophical canon—from Aquinas to Kant, from Hume to Bentham—and captures fundamental tensions in our moral outlook. To test our moral intuitions, philosophers have come up with ever more surreal scenarios involving runaway trains and often bizarre props: trap doors, giant revolving plates, tractors, and drawbridges. The train is usually racing toward five unfortunates and the reader is presented with various means to rescue them, although at the cost of another life.

The five who are threatened with death are, in most scenarios, innocent: they don’t deserve to be in their perilous circumstances. The one person who could be killed to save the five is also, in most scenarios, entirely innocent. There’s generally no link between the one and the five: they’re not friends or members of the same family: the only connection between them is that they happen to be caught up in the same disastrous situation.

Soon we will meet the Fat Man. The central mystery about how we should treat him has baffled philosophers for nearly half a century. There have now been so many articles linked to the topic that a jokey neologism for it has stuck: “trolleyology.”³

As an indication of how trolleyology has entered popular consciousness, a version of it was even put to a British prime minister. In front of a live TED audience in July 2009, an interviewer threw Gordon Brown the following curveball. “You’re on vacation on a nice beach. Word comes through that there’s been a massive earthquake and that a tsunami is advancing on the beach. At one end of the beach there is a house containing a family of five Nigerians. And at the other end of the beach there is a single Brit. You have time to alert just one house. What do you do?” Amidst audience tittering, Mr. Brown, ever the politician, deftly dodged the premise: “Modern communications. Alert both.”⁴

But sometimes you can’t alert both. Sometimes you can’t save everyone. Politicians do have to make decisions that are a matter of life and death. So do health officials. Health resources are not limitless. Whenever a health body is faced with a choice between funding a drug that is estimated to save X lives, and funding another that would save Y, they are, in effect, confronted with a variation of the trolley problem, though these are dilemmas that don’t involve killing anybody.⁵

As we’ll see, trolleyology has bred subtle and important distinctions: for example, between a choice to save one or to save five on the one hand, and to kill one to save five on the other. At the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, in upper New York State, where future officers come to train, all the cadets are exposed to trolleyology as part of a compulsory course in philosophy and “Just War” theory. It helps underline the difference, the tutors say, between how the United States wages war and the tactics of al-Qaeda: between targeting a military installation knowing that some civilians will inevitably be caught up in the attack and deliberately aiming at civilians.

Philosophers dispute whether or not the trolley scenarios do indeed encapsulate such a distinction. But trolleyology, which w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Prologue
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1: Philosophy and the Trolley
• Chapter 1: Churchill’s Dilemma
• Chapter 2: Spur of the Moment
• Chapter 3: The Founding Mothers
• Chapter 4: The Seventh Son of Count Landulf
• Chapter 5: Fat Man, Loop, and Lazy Susan
• Chapter 6: Ticking Clocks and the Sage of Königsberg
• Chapter 7: Paving the Road to Hell
• Chapter 8: Morals by Numbers
• Part 2: Experiments and the Trolley
• Chapter 9: Out of the Armchair
• Chapter 10: It Just Feels Wrong
• Chapter 11: Dudley’s Choice and the Moral Instinct
• Part 3: Mind and Brain and the Trolley
• Chapter 12: The Irrational Animal
• Chapter 13: Wrestling with Neurons
• Chapter 14: Bionic Trolley
• Part 4: The Trolley and Its Critics
• Chapter 15: A Streetcar Named Backfire
• Chapter 16: The Terminal
• Appendix: Ten Trolleys: A Rerun
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index