Should You Kill the Fat Man?

Are you familiar with the famous "trolley problem" in ethics? If you're not (and even if you are), start with this introductory exercise. This thought experiment is a great way of spending a few minutes to probe some of your fundamental moral intuitions. Don't worry, there aren't any right or wrong answers here.

Assuming you are now familiar with the "trolley problem", read this discussion on it by Terrance Tomkow and his take on why most people consider it OK to pull the lever that kills one (rather than letting five people die) but do not consider it OK to push the fat man onto the tracks to achieve the same goal. Read Tomkow's progressively complex scenarios and see if you find his explanation plausible.

Finally, in Philosophy Now, read Phil Badger's engaging piece on the topic, and his own attempt at finding "a plausible account of morality which takes into consideration both the sense that we have to weigh the consequences of our actions and also the sense that, nonetheless, there are moments when consequences are secondary to higher principles".

Comments

[Usha]

Extremely interesting and provocative discussion. What's noticeably missing, though, is the variation in how these scenarios might be answered by people from very different cultures. I'll wager that most of this discussion hinges on the "moral intuitions" of middle-class members of Western societies. I wonder how the answers to these questions—and hence, the discussion—would change if the same moral conundrums were presented in culturally meaningful terms to people from non-Western, non-industrialized, and non-market societies.

My reaction to much of this discussion is that there's a mistaken assumption at the start, in trying to discover moral solutions to these problems, solutions that one can argue are the "truer moral" response, which would let us all go home and sleep soundly in the certainty that our moral reasoning is consistent. I think it's just quite possible that there are some situations that have no moral solution: that is, no matter what you do, or don't do, you aren't acting (or being passive) in an absolutely or consistently morally correct way. I think life can present us with genuinely "lose-lose" moral situations, and the conundrums presented here are probably just that.

That's not to say that I don't think it's meaningful or useful to discuss morality, even the morality of lose-lose situations. In the end, we need to figure out how we're all going to live together on this planet, and being engaged in examining even the outer bounds of morality is a necessary and useful exercise that might help make some higher degree of coexistence possible.