2012-2013 Lecture Series

[00:00:00] SPEAKER 1:
So it’s great to see everyone, uh, here today for the Tanner Lectures. Uh, I think probably Mary Catherine and I are the ones who are most grateful to be here because we had the ult– the usual United Airlines experience, which is we were in DC this morning, arrived at the airport with no warning, just headed towards our gate, and then there was the magic word, “canceled,” right?

With no warning. And it turned out there was one other flight which we ran to, and they were just about to close the gate, and they let us on in the last two seats. So anyway, so, so I’m very extraordinarily pleased that we’re there therefore able to be here and to host the dinner tonight, among other things.

Otherwise, we would have sent you over to Top Dog. And if you don’t know what Top Dog is, then before you leave Berkeley, you should try it, because it’s the students’ gourmet treat. So, uh, it gives me great pleasure to, uh, welcome all of you to Berkeley campus this afternoon for the Tanner Lectures on Human Values, and it’s, uh, my job to give you a little bit of the history.

So this distinguished lecture series is presented annually at each of nine universities, including UC Berkeley, and the others are, uh, in England, Oxford, and Cambridge, uh, and then here in the United States, Harvard, Michigan, Princeton, Stanford, Utah, and Yale.

[00:01:20] BOB:
Uh, and one of the great side benefits, which Nick already knows about because he’s and, uh, Mark Matheson here will introduce you both in a minute, uh, is that besides having the lectures, then the heads of these institutions meet together once a year to talk about the lectures, but then to talk about issues that, uh, that connect Cambridge and Oxford and Harvard, et cetera, right? And so it turns out to be just an absolutely tremendous, uh, uh, uh, experience. The series was founded in 1978 by the American scholar, industrialist, and philanthropist Obert Clark Tanner, who was a member of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Utah, and he was also an honorary fellow of the British Academy.

I have particular affection for him because he’s possibly, or was the only person on the planet who feels that university presidents and chancellors are underappreciated, and that’s the reason why there’s this meeting every year at some very nice place, right? So-

[00:02:16] MARK MATHESON:
And overworked, Bob. Underappreciated and overworked.

[00:02:18] BOB:
Thank you. Thank you, Mark. You see, there’s one.

So there’s Mark Matheson. I’ll introduce him. Now, more than one.

Uh, Tanner’s goal in establishing the lectures through the Tanner Philanthropies was to remote to promote a search for a better understanding of human behavior and human values. He hoped that the lectures would advance scholarly and scientific learning in the area of human values and contribute to the intellectual and moral life of humankind. Human values are defined as broadly as possible, and the lecturers may be chosen from any discipline.

Uh, the lectureships are international and transcend national, religious, and ideological distinctions. Uh, the lectures from all nine universities are published in an annual volume. Uh, in addition, Oxford University- Oxford University Press publishes a series of books based on the Berkeley Tanner Lectures and, uh, I have those on my bookshelves.

Uh, eight volumes have been published, and three more are making their way towards publication. That’s the Berkeley series specifically. Uh, here at Berkeley, the Tanner Lecturer is appointed through a faculty committee of which nominally the Chancellor is chair, and Professor Martin Jay is vice chair.

In reality, Marty is the chair, and I’m a spectator. Uh, I wanna congratulate my colleagues, Professor R. Jay Wallace, Martin Jay, Hannah Ginsborg, uh, Chris Kutz, Kinch Hoekstra, Niko Kolodny, and Kevis Goodman for their terrific choice of this year’s lecturer, Frances Kamm. And I want to take a moment now to introduce two special guests, uh, uh, Professor Mark Matheson, who you just heard from, and, uh, Professor Nicholas Dirks, I believe.

And so Mark Matheson was appointed as executive director of the Tanner Lecture Program in spring two thousand– in two– spring two thousand and eleven. And in addition to his role as director, Professor Matheson is also a professor lecturer in the Department of English and Honors College at the University of Utah, teaching courses such as Shakespeare and British Studies. Uh, Nicholas B. Dirks is the Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and History at Columbia University, where since two thousand and four, he has been Executive Vice President for the Arts and Sciences and Dean of the Faculty.

Uh, and as all of you know, he’s the Chancellor-designate, uh, for the University of California, Berkeley, my savior, and I will send over the Tanner lecture reins to him on June first. So now let me call on my distinguished colleague, uh, and friend, Professor Chris Kutz, Professor of Law, Director of the Kadish Center for Morality, Law, and Public Affairs, and member of the Tanner Committee to introduce Professor Kamm and the commentators. And, uh, Chris will then also moderate the discussion that will follow.

Chris.

[00:05:13] CHRIS KUTZ:
Thank you.

(applause)

Many thanks, Chancellor Birgeneau, and welcome to Chancellor-Designate Dirks and Director Matheson. It is a great pleasure to have you here. Let me take this moment to offer you, I don’t know where this figured in your account, but one of the most recent treasures of the Berkeley Tanner Series.

This is the volume by Jeremy Waldron, Dignity, Dank and Ra- Dignity, Rank and Rights from 2009, um, which is, uh, hot off the presses with an introduction from our colleague, Meir Dan-Cohen. Another great Tanner event there. It is now my great pleasure to be able to introduce our 2013 Tanner lecturer, Frances Myrna Kamm, Littauer Professor of Philosophy and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government, and Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University.

The Berkeley Tanner Committee is honored that she has accepted our invitation to deliver these lectures. Professor Kamm is hailed in the field of practical and theoretical moral philosophy as one of, if not the, most incisive, ingenious, and dedicated explorers of that peculiarly important human institution that we call morality. In The Republic, Plato has Socrates tell Thrasymachus that the question of what is right conduct, of how we ought to live, is no ordinary question, but requires great thought and care.

This question is of course also at the heart of the vision of the Tanner Lectures. For both Plato and Professor Kamm, answering the question of how we must live means applying subtle and dialectical reason to the conduct of life. What makes Professor Kamm an electric presence in moral philosophy is her Socratic willingness to push these questions further than anyone might have thought possible.

She begins with some of the hardest and largest problems of life and death in both medicine and in more recently in war. Whether it is right to bear children or to abort them, whether we can help people die, how to allocate scarce life-saving resources we can… when we can only save a f- a few. What to think about the collaborations with evil that are an ine- inevitable part of life in an interconnected world.

What is wrong with torture and terrorism, and whether they might be any way justified. What makes it permissible, if it is, to kill soldiers who have personally done us no wrong. What is distinctive is Professor Kamm’s technique, which involves the careful construction of imaginary cases, on which she then rings an astonishing variety of changes designed to elicit underlying principles and justifications.

Professor Kamm has pursued her explorations of morality in many articles and in an important series of books, commencing with Creation and Abortion in 1992, followed closely by her magisterial two-volume work, Morality, Mortality, Volume 1: Death and Whom to Save from It, and Volume Two, Rights, Duties, and Status. 2007 brought us the beautifully named Intricate Ethics: Rights, Responsibilities, and Permissible Harm. In 2011, she gave us Ethics for Enemies: Terror, Torture, and War.

And just out is The Moral Target: Aiming at Right Conduct in War and Other Conflicts. Actually, I left one out.

Forthcoming is Bioethical Prescriptions to Create, End, Choose, and Improve Lives. I think coming out shortly in 2013. All of these are published by Oxford University Press.

Born and brought up in her beloved New York and educated at the High School of Music and Art, Professor Kamm went to college at Barnard, where she studied philosophy after discovering that her initial plan to be a doctor foundered on her incompetence in the laboratory. She pursued her doctoral studies at MIT, where she worked with our first panelist, Judith Jarvis Thomson, and had her thesis supervised by Barbara Herman, but also up the Charles at Harvard, where she worked extensively with the philosopher Robert Nozick. She began her teaching career at New York University, where she was eventually Professor of Philosophy, Professor of Medicine and Bioethics, and law school-affiliated faculty.

But in two thousand three, she took up her current position at Harvard as the Littauer Professor. She’s been awarded many scholarly honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and fellowships at Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics and the Professions, Princeton’s Center for Human Values, and Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. All of this and more you can read in your program.

Instead, I thought it might be useful for me to very quickly give some background and advice to those not already familiar with Professor Kamm’s work. The background is this. The general foil for Professor Kamm’s work is the philosophical version of the idea that if something, like saving a life, is a good thing, more of it is better, period.

In philosophical form, this is the moral theory called consequentialism, which says that when we decide how to act, we should take into account only the good and bad consequences of our acts and choose the one with the overall best consequences, even if this involves accepting or imposing some significant costs. In particular, consequentialism can recommend, without qualification, trading off fewer lives against more of them. Professor Kamm’s work takes on this simple but powerful moral theory by showing how it conflicts with deeply rooted and widely shared moral judgments that modern philosophers call deontological or non-consequentialist.

Non-consequentialists in ethics say that we are usually not required, and sometimes not even permitted, to do whatever it is that maximizes good consequences. Professor Kamm develops a non-consequentialist position by posing a series of challenges, test cases where it seems that we must settle for saving fewer lives because of the presence of other important values. One of the most famous vehicles for testing consequentialism is the eponymous trolley of these lectures, which are called The Trolley Problem Mysteries: May we harm some to save others?

The trolley in question is said to be hurtling down the tracks ready to claim some victims unless you can divert it. But when and whether you can save the many, as Professor Campbell shows us, seems to rest on a range of considerations about the nature of your action, considerations not dreamed of in the consequentialist’s philosophy. These considerations can seem almost green eggs and ham-like.

Can you turn the trolley with a bomb or save the many by pushing someone onto the tracks and so on? By teasing out the factors at play, Professor Kamm helps us to see the intricate values and principles that sustain and define our humanity under adverse choice. The underlying principles she discerns are aspects of what h- she has influentially termed our moral status of inviolability, the ways in which we must not be treated, whatever the good or good intentions at stake.

Now let me give you the advice. No one ever said that philosophy was a spectator sport. In order to appreciate the genius of Professor Kamm, you’ll need to play along at home, as it were.

She’s going to tell you a series of stories or scenarios, and you’re going to have to think your way into them as well. Let me read to you how Professor Kamm has described her own method in a recent interview with Alex Voorhoeve. I think it gives us all very good advice.

She says, I’m quoting, “I don’t really have a considered judgment about a case until I have a visual experience of it. I have to deeply imagine myself in a certain situation with an open mind. It’s almost as if you were looking at something with no preconceptions.

You have to attend to it, and then things will pop out at you. First, you may get the intuitive judgment of what you really should do in the circumstances you are imagining. Then you wonder, “Why am I reaching this conclusion?\”

And your inner eye focuses on one factor as driving this judgment. I suppose it’s the same sort of thing when you look at a painting. Make sure you’re attending to it and aren’t having any stray thoughts.

I recommend that you take her advice as you listen to these lectures. Let the stories and scenarios work on you and match your thoughts against hers. Of course, you don’t have to do this.

You can just listen and admire the virtuosic performance you’re about to hear for its sheer technical prowess. But trying to play Watson to her Holmes in these trolley problem mysteries will be more rewarding yet. Let me now tell you about the order of events.

Today, Professor Kamm will speak to us on who turned the trolley, the first question of the detective story, and then after a short intermission, we will hear from one of our distinguished commentators, Professor Judith Thomson. Tomorrow, Professor Kamm will deliver her second lecture, How Was the Trolley Turned? And we will hear responses from Professors Thomas Hurka and Shelly Kagan.

Thursday will be a panel discussion of the four, with ample time for questions from you, and we may be able to fit in a few questions today and tomorrow as well. All of these events are held in this room at this time. And with that, I leave you to watch the mystery unfold.

Thank you.

(applause)

[00:13:59] F.M. KAMM:
See if the water stands up here. No, it doesn’t. We’ll put it over here.

I need it. Okay, uh, can you all hear me now? Yeah, I bear no resemblance to the person that was described, actually.

The genius is sitting to your extreme right and in front of the podium here. So, uh, the best I can do is, you know, try to follow up. Uh, I was really honored to, uh, obviously to be invited to give these lectures.

Uh, I, uh, wanna know how many people here ever have ever heard of the trolley problem? Oh, my God. How many people here regret ever having heard of it?

(laughter)

Yeah. Well, you see, not many, so that’s a good sign. Okay.

Uh, in, uh, 2010, I, I was asked to write an entry on the trolley problem for an Encyclopedia of Ethics, and I decided that I would try, though I hadn’t written on it for a while. And, uh, I looked at some more recent literature that come about and discovered, you know, new things, uh, that were really very surprising to me. I was only given a very short space in which to write, um, and so, what, two thousand words to give the history, uh, solution, uh, objections, et cetera.

So there was a lot left over, and I, I hope to explore these topics at greater length, and I’m taking this opportunity to do so, and I want to thank everybody for their indulgence, you know, in, in allowing me to do this. So, uh, some philosophers that have already been described by, um, Chris Kutz as, uh, well, I call them act consequentialists, uh, believe that insofar as the greater number of people surviving is the greater good, it is always right for anyone to do what brings about their survival. Non-consequentialists deny that it is always right to do whatever brings about the greater good, though they need not deny that consequences matter in some ways to the rightness of acts.

As support for, uh, their own view, the non-consequentialists have cited what’s known as the transplant case in Diagram 1. I’m not used to using diagrams. I usually ask people to just sort of imagine or I write.

But, um, advisors have suggested that I use this. So you’ve got diagrams in front of you. Um, number one.

If a doctor kills a single healthy person, she will be able to use his organs to produce what we assume is the greater good, saving five fatally ill patients. Yet non-consequentialists say it seems im-impermissible for the doctor to kill the one to save the five. And this is not my ingenious case, right?

Uh, this is way back in the literature, right? Uh, Philippa Foot mentions it in her article, and it’s been much discussed. Um, so, uh, as you see, you have very minimal descriptions here.

I’m in the Agnes Martin school of diagrams. She was a m– great minimalist, uh, uh, artist whom I admire, and I don’t use icons or anything, so you just have to imagine that there’s one person and five people here. However, uh, the philosopher Philippa Foot noted that even many non-consequentialists seem to think that it’s permissible to kill one to save five in the following case: A driver is in control of a trolley, that Foot called a tram, uh, when it becomes clear that it is headed toward killing five people on one track.

It can only be stopped from killing the five by the driver redirecting it away from them onto another track where it will kill one different person. Now, this is represented in diagram two, with the trolley being represented by the short little, uh, cross, uh, s- line. Uh, it’s headed towards the five, but it could be redirected towards the one.

Now, some non-consequentialists find it mysterious that it is permissible to kill in this case, but not in transplant, even though with both, it is a question of killing one to save five, and they think that explaining this mystery is the trolley problem. I must admit, that’s what I thought. However, this suggestion about what the trolley problem is should not be understood so narrowly that the problem only concerns these two cases.

I mean, you know, people say sometimes in objecting to so much time spent on this topic, “How often am I going to meet a trolley?” You know, or, “How often am I going to have to transplant organs?” Right?

The, that– the point is that this is a, uh, a more general issue, right? The problem concerns not only these two cases, but at the very least, all cases that are structurally similar. For example, one might face the choice of the question of whether it is permissible to redirect the trolley off a track and onto a slope headed towards someone far away from any track, even though one may not generally kill someone to stop a threat to others, as the transplant case is supposed to show.

Similarly, the question might arise of whether it is permissible to redirect a flood or unmanned missile headed to a large city with many people toward a country town with few people in it, even if one may not kill people in some other way to stop the threat to the large city. Apparently, Churchill faced an issue like this during World War II. We might also face an analogous problem when lives are not at stake, but only significant harms to either a larger or a smaller group of people.

For convenience, I’m going to use the transplant and trolley cases since they may help exemplify the general problem. Even more broadly, we could see the trolley problem understood as I have so far described it, right, as presenting a challenge to non-consequentialists who in some rough way think there is what is called a side constraint on harming non-threatening people to produce greater goods. Now, a side constraint is not merely a factor that weighs against producing the greater good, is it– it is supposedly a factor that has priority over producing the greater good.

That is, we may produce the greater good only if doing so is consistent with respecting that constraint. One view is that side constraints reflect fundamental aspects of our conception of persons and their status, which are backgrounds to any pursuit of the good of such beings. The challenge is to explain exactly what the side’s constraint on harming amounts to if it does not exclude turning the trolley and thus killing one person to save the five others.

Now, in taking up this challenge, all right, there, there are two general questions with, uh, which we shall deal in these lectures. First, whether there is a moral difference between killing others, such as the one person in this case, and only letting people die, right? Such that someone who would otherwise kill many people may permissibly kill fewer other people instead.

But someone who would otherwise only let many people die may not kill fewer other people instead. So I mean, you– just to take the missile case I gave to, to interlope here with the example, you know, Churchill didn’t send the missile towards the big city. It was, you know, the Nazi powers that did.

If he were to allow the missile to hit the big city, he would be letting those people die, all right? If he turned the trolley– the, the missile, he’d be killing. Um, if the Nazis decided to turn from the large city to the small city, for them, it’s a choice between killing versus killing.

Just to sort of get your, your mind around that in the bigger framework. Another question with which we shall deal shall is whether there is a constraint on harming people for the sake of producing a greater good only when we come to harm them in some ways, but not in others. In other words, is coming to harm them in some ways consistent with proper respect for persons that the constraints were supposed to perhaps, you know, exemplify, but harming them in other ways is not inconsistent.

Now, these questions are analogous to those detectives in mystery cases typically ask when someone has been killed, namely who done it and how was it done, right? And like prosecutors, we shall be concerned with whether the answers to these questions, who done it and how was it done, bear on whether foul play occurred or all is above board, to continue with that metaphor of Holmes. Now, the first lecture today will focus on the who question, and the second lecture, we all plan to– we plan to chain you here overnight to make sure you come back, right, is, uh, the how question, okay?

Um. So, uh, I’m going to, uh, first, uh, discuss various elements and propose solutions of the trolley problem, uh, today, as I’ve so far characterized it. I will then consider some alternative views of what the trolley problem is, which I was, you know, surprised to discover when I went to write this encyclopedia article.

Uh, the second part of this lecture will, will deal with some recent views of the philosopher, the great philosopher, Judith Thomson, who was here, f-for which we’re all tremendously grateful, uh, today, which she expressed in her 2008 paper, “Turning the Trolley,” about how a moral distinction between killing and letting die may eliminate what she thinks of as the trolley problem. So we can all go home, forget about it, And those of you who regretted ever having heard about it, you—great. The third part, however, will consider a different argument for the conclusion that Thomson favors, but ultimately what I try to do is resurrect the trolley problem so that we can keep on worrying about it.

Xanax is provided at the exit.

(laughter)

Okay, now, uh, understood as the contrast between transplant and trolley, the way I introduced this originally, and you have the diagram to remember what transplant and the trolley is. Mm. Many proposals have been offered to solve the trolley problem.

One relies on a view that is known as the doctrine of double effect. This doctrine implies that it is impermissible to kill in the transplant case because the doctor intends the death of the single person as a means to saving the five, or at least his severe violation in order to get those organs. The doctrine of double effect holds that it is wrong to intend an evil such as this person’s grave harm or death, even as a means to a greater good.

In Foot’s case, by contrast, okay, the Doctrine of Double Effect takes a different view. This is the trolley driver case, right? There’s two options, either let it, you know, let go to the five, right, or turn it.

The Doctrine double effects– Doctrine double effect holds that it is, even though it’s wrong to intend, right, this person’s– a person’s death as a means to a greater good. In Foot’s case, by contrast, the death of the one person is only a foreseen side effect of turning the trolley. And according to this doctrine of double effect, these foreseen harms can sometimes be outweighed if greater goods are produced by what we do that produces the harm.

Okay? So in this case, five lives saved is a greater good relative to one person’s being alive. Given that the death is foreseen, the doctrine of double effect says that’s why it’s permissible.

That’s the distinction it draws between these two cases. Responding to this proposal, Foot argued that intuitively, it’s often wrong to do what will merely foreseeably cause someone’s death without intending to produce the death even in order to maximize lives saved. So she’s arguing that the doctrine of double effect just permits too much.

Okay? For example, she said, “It seems impermissible” for a doctor to use a gas that will save his five patients,” in that first case, let’s suppose, “if it is foreseen that the gas will kill one immovable bystander,” right? “In a room nearby, uh, even though, uh, this death is not intended as a means to saving the five in any way, shape, or form.”

It’s a, it’s a side effect. They wish that they could avoid it, but they can’t. They can’t.

And she held it was impermissible for the doctor to use that gas in that case. Similarly, it seems to me impermissible, right, uh, for the driver to set off a bomb that will stop the trolley from hitting the five when a piece of that bomb will kill a bystander as a side effect, as is described or represented in your third diagram. This is a case where the driver sees that he can’t turn the trolley, but he could stop it from hitting the five by setting off this bomb that will stop the trolley, but the bomb itself is going to kill one person as a side effect.

Now, uh, Foot is objecting to the idea that you can always therefore do things that will, uh, foreseeably harm others. You don’t intend the harm, but that’s not enough. All right?

And, uh, therefore, she doesn’t think the doctrine of double effect points to a distinction between these first two cases that can explain why the doctor can’t act in transplant, but the trolley driver can turn the trolley. Uh, now other people have argued against the doctrine of double effect, furthermore, that, uh, intending a harm in and of itself cannot make an act impermissible. Uh, that even that right part of the doctrine of double effect is not right.

So you could imagine that the driver, right, uh, who has to turn the trolley in, in the diagram two, right? Wouldn’t bother to turn it, right? He doesn’t really care about the five he would kill until he notices that the one person on the other track is his enemy.

Right? And he turns it in order to kill that one person. Now, that’s a bad intention to have.

However, it doesn’t seem to make turning the trolley away from the five impermissible. So, uh, there are various problems that people have pointed out with using the doctrine of double effect to explain these differences in cases. Foot’s own proposal was that the driver in, uh, trolley diagram two may redirect the trolley because he is choosing between killing five and killing one.

And he should co– kill fewer rather than a greater number. By contrast, the doctor in that first transplant case is choosing between letting five die, sick people, and killing one. And her view was that the negative duty not to kill takes precedence over the so-called positive duty to aid, to not let die, to come to assistance and saving the patients.

Hence, the distinction between killing and letting die here is held to explain and justify the non-consequentialist intuitive judgments in both Foot’s case and in the transplant case. If you just focus on what these agents would otherwise do, would they otherwise be letting die, or would they otherwise be killing? Now, one possible objection to, um, Foot’s proposal is that it could be unclear whether the trolley driver really is in the process of doing what will kill the five, or rather is only in a position to let what will happen to them, namely the out-of-control trolley mowing them down occur.

If the latter were true, he may become the killer of five in virtue of having first started the trolley, but at the time of deciding whether to turn it, perhaps he would be only letting the trolley continue and so only be letting the five die if he did not redirect. Now, Judith Thomson agrees with Philippa Foot that the driver would be killing the five if he does not redirect. In her 2008 article, she imagines a case where a car driver, quote, “Suddenly sees five people on the street ahead of him, but his brakes fail.

He cannot stop his car. He can only continue onto the street ahead or steer to the right, killing one person, or steer to the left, killing himself.” Maybe he goes into a tree.

If he doesn’t steer to one or the other side, if he simply takes his hands off the wheel, he runs the five down and kills them. He cannot at all plausibly insist that he merely lets them die. So similarly for the trolley driver.

Hence, Foot and Thompson see Foot’s case, the second trolley driver case, as, as similar to one in which a driver is at the very cross point, at the very beginning of the tracks, the bottom, and must decide whether to turn the trolley toward five or toward one. Now, I’m going to assume that this is, in fact, correct in Foot’s case, the correct description, though I may return to it below if we have time. But I’m just going to assume that he would be killing if he, you know, lets that trolley go on rather than killing the five.

Here’s another objection to Foot’s proposal. Remember, the proposal was that someone who would otherwise kill, but not merely let die, right, may kill fewer other people. The objection is that her proposal would permit too much.

To see this, suppose the driver could stop the trolley from hitting the five only by pressing a button that causes the device to topple a fat man standing on a bridge. And this is very non-PC, I apologize to everybody who’s overweight. Um, but this– as I say, this literature started before Me, the genius, whatever, right?

This is way, way back, okay? Uh, this, I believe, was Judith Thomson’s brilliant case, uh, toppling the driver. Uh, sorry, the driver t–

Oh, not the driver. No, this was not her case. She had a slightly different case, so I’ll come to that.

In any case, in this case, what we’re doing is the, the driver is toppling a fat man in diagram four, one person off a bridge in front of that trolley, right? And it so happens that his weight will just stop the trolley from hitting the people. It might, like, divert it a little bit or just stop it.

Now, intuitively, the driver toppling the fat man, pressing that button, seems to me as impermissible as killing, as the doctor killing in transplant. Even if toppling, like redirecting, would involve the driver killing one, killing one rather than killing five, all by purely mechanical means. Now, maybe as they say, you’ll get off the track at this point with me.

I think that it’s impermissible for that driver to, uh, you know, topple that fat man in front of that a trolley. Really. Now, um, Thompson introduced a case, a brilliant case, in which a bystander, not the driver, can only stop the trolley, because the driver can’t do anything.

S- nothing works in his machines. And that bystander can only stop the trolley by pushing the fat man off that bridge in front of the, uh, trolley. She concluded that his doing so was impermissible.

That was about the bystander. However, I’m here concerned with the driver and whether the driver may topple the fat man, and it seems to me that, um, he may not do it either, right? In addition, as I said when discussing, uh, diagram three, I don’t think that the, the driver may set that bomb to stop the trolley when a piece of the bomb is gonna go off and kill a bystander as a, uh, as a side effect.

This is a different bystander. This is, uh, you know, just someone who’s, uh, a single person who will be hurt by the bomb, not someone who can’t turn a trolley. Those who will otherwise impermissibly kill the five, I think may not do just anything to minimize the number that they kill, even when doing so would be the strict alternative at a specific time to killing the five.

For example, suppose the driver’s taking his hands off the steering mechanism would be his killing the five, as Thomson and Foot claim, and his keeping his hands on it will allow him to wiggle the trolley and so topple the fat man that way, and that top– that fat man will stop the trolley. Here, toppling the one to stop the trolley would be the alternative to one way of killing five people, but I think it’s impermissible. Now, if that’s so, then Foot’s failure to consider the limits on the driver, on what the driver can do, is one problem with her analysis.

Given the limits on the ways in which the driver may kill, some might think that the trolley problem just is to explain why it is permissible to kill some people in some ways, but not others. You di-re-redirect the trolley, but you can’t topple that fat man. As the alternative to killing a greater number of people, like the trolley driver will do if he goes down and mows down the five.

Even if it is not permissible to kill someone as the alternative to merely letting others die, even if that’s off the table. Okay? So that, that’s a slightly modified view of the Foot proposal.

But another challenge to the adequacy of Foot’s killing, letting die explanation of the dil– difference between transplant and trolley is that it would permit too little, it seems, ruling out some permissible acts. This was the point of Thomson’s brilliant bystander two-option case. So, uh, in order to minimize the number of diagrams, uh, you can just look back at the, uh, second trolley driver case and just imagine that it’s not the trolley driver who has to turn the trolley, but this bystander.

So it’s a bystander two-option case. All right. The driver is unable to do anything to stop the trolley, but a bystander, Mr. X, can press a switch and redirect the trolley.

This case, as I say, is represented in that diagram, if you just do a little imaginatively eliminating of the driver. The bystander is doing– the bystander’s doing this, right, would involve his killing one rather than letting five die. I mean, he’s just a bystander.

He didn’t have anything to do with directing the trolley towards the five. If it is permissible for him to redirect the trolley, killing one, though he would otherwise let five die, the distinction between killing and letting die will not explain why it is permissible for the driver to kill one in Foot’s trolley case, but not permissible for the doctor to kill one in the transplant case. Because the doctor in that case, like the bystander, would be otherwise letting five die if he kills the one, takes his organs.

Now, it might be the case that the driver has an obligation to kill the one to save the five because he would otherwise kill them. Uh, and that a mere bystander, while he’s permitted to turn the trolley to save the five, doesn’t have an obligation to do so. So that’s possible, okay?

We could also imagine a case in which I think a driver himself would be choosing between letting five die and merely killing one. Because we could suppose that the driver was, you know, thrown from the trolley at the time when the brakes stopped working, right? And now he’s outside the trolley near the same sort of switch that a bystander would have to use.

And he sees his trolley, you know, hurtling down to kill the five. And, uh, I call this the bystanding driver case, you know. Uh, I think that it’s permissible for the driver to redirect the trolley in this case when he’s in the role of the bystander.

Um, now, of course, he will be someone who will become a killer of the five if he doesn’t turn the trolley. But at that very time, it seems as though he would otherwise merely be letting them die. In many possible cases, it seems clear that sometimes an agent who starts a threat to someone and then separately refuses to save them from the threat will merely have let the five or the other people that he has threatened at, die at that time, that he does not save them, even though in virtue of this and his past act, he will have ki-will have killed people.

I’m not denying that. Indeed, Thompson once discussed a version of a transplant case much like this. She imagined that the five in transplants suffered from organ failures caused by the very doctor who contemplates taking organs from his healthy patient to save his own victims.

You know, one of these Doctor Strangelove types, right? Okay. She concluded that at that time when she wrote that, that at the very time when he would act, right, when he would, uh, have to decide whether to take the organs from that healthy patient to rescue his own victims, uh, this culpable doctor faced a choice between killing one and letting his five victims die, and that he had no more right than any other doctor to kill in the transplant case, even though he would then become the killer of the five if he did not save them.

Suppose that unlike the culpable doctor, the driver in the bystanding case, the bystanding driver case that I’m, uh, now imagining, is permitted to avoid becoming the killer of the five by redirecting that trolley to fewer people, even though he’s still not permitted to topple that fat man to stop the trolley any more than that culpable doctor could kill the one person to get his organs to save the five victims. Now, you know, at this point, it would seem then that, um, there is some difference, it seems to me, in the way in which killing is being permitted to occur, right? Uh, if you can redirect the trolley, but you can’t topple that bystander, and neither the driver who would become a killer, uh, or would kill, or the bystander may not topple that fat man, right?

Um, I think that we should be, you know, thinking about why are there these differences in how we come to, to kill people. Now, just as a summary of some of the things that I’ve been talking about right now, I want you to just look at the summary chart here where we, you know, for convenience, I’ve distinguished between redirecting and toppling to stop the trolley. And we have, you know, the choice between killing versus killing, killing versus merely letting die, and killing versus letting die when you will, as a result, in fact, have killed someone, you know, because you started this process that will cause their death and you’re not stopping it.

Now, in her 2008 article, Turning the Trolley, Thomson claims that the question of why a bystander may permissibly redirect the trolley but not topple the fat man over the bridge to the– stop the trolley, that that just is the trolley problem. That’s what it is. She refers to the question of why a driver who was on the trolley driving it and would kill the five, may instead redirect the trolley, but a doctor in transplant may not kill that one patient to save the five.

She refers to that as Mrs. Foot’s problem, which surprisingly she says is not the trolley problem. Now, you know, I was writing this article for the encyclopedia, and I, oh my God, I don’t even know what it is.

All right. So the thing is, this was one shock, all right. However, I mean, it seems to me that the trolley problem should not be conceived as only the question of why a mere bystander may redirect the trolley but not topple the fat man to stop that trolley.

This is because it seems to me the same problem of redirecting being permissible but toppling not being permissible arises for the trolley driver. At least so it seems to me. And this is so whether he would otherwise kill the five at the time or would be letting them die, as in the bystanding driver case.

However, the most striking claim offered by Thomson in her two thousand and eight article is that she now believes that it is not permissible for the mere bystander to redirect the trolley. Indeed, Thomson, in that article, reverses herself because she introduced this brilliant case of the bystander claiming that it showed that, you know, people who weren’t going to otherwise kill, but only let die, could be permitted to kill others sometimes. But she now reverses herself, claiming that it is not any more permissible for the bystander to redirect the trolley toward the one than to topple the fat man to stop the trolley.

And therefore she, a founding mother of the trolley problem, as I think of her, right? She’s much more than that, but she’s at least that. Uh, believes that there is no trolley problem, given the way she understands the problem, right?

On these grounds, she further claims that her original bystander case cannot be used as an objection to Foot’s proposal for distinguishing Foot’s own trolley case from transplant. Namely, that killing one is the permissible alternative to killing five, but it’s not a permissible alternative to letting five die, and the driver may redirect, the bystander may not redirect, and the doctor may not kill and transplant. Okay.

Indeed, she endorses Foot’s proposal for distinguishing, as I say, transplant and her trolley case. Now, in the remainder of this lecture, I mean, I, you know, I took a deep breath and, uh, you know, I thought, “What am I gonna think about the trolley problem now?” So in the remainder of this lecture, I wanna consider whether Thomson’s reversal on the permissibility of a mere bystander redirecting that trolley is right.

But I first wanna emphasize that even if w- were only the driver, the regular driver on the trolley, who was permitted to kill by redirecting, if he’s not permitted to kill by toppling that fat man or setting the bomb, even to save himself from killing the five, then at least one component of the trolley problem as I originally thought of it will remain. Namely, there seem to be moral differences in how we come to kill someone. Sometimes those differences allow us to, uh, kill, and other times they don’t.

But now let me just consider Thomson’s recent discussion of her mere bystander case. And really, you know, um, I’ve, I’ve been tr-trying to figure out what, you know, pack it in with the trolley problem or resurrect it. So, you know, this is what I’m discussing.

One of her argument ag- ag- arguments against the, uh, permissibility of a mere bystander, uh, redirecting is based on what she calls the bystander three-option case, which is number six on your do-handout. By contrast to the ordinary two-option bystander case, in which the ops– in which the bystander has a choice between letting five die, the trolley sh-go on and hit them, or redirecting the trolley to a track where one, a different person will be killed by it. In the bystander’s three-option case, quote, “The switch available to this bystander can be thrown in two ways.

If he throws it to the right, then the trolley will turn onto the spur of track to the right, thereby killing one workman. If he throws it to the left, then the trolley will turn onto the spur of track to the left. The bystander himself, Mr. X, stands on the left-hand spur of track and will himself be killed if the trolley turns onto it.

Or, of course, he can do nothing, letting five workmen die.” ” End quote. Now this is where the road hit, or the rubber hits the road, which way you want to have it.

You know, and Chris says, “Put yourself– suppose you’re in that position.” Okay? High and mighty you talking about, “Well, I’m saving five.

Surely I can redirect to kill one.” And Thompson says, “Oh yeah? Would you redirect to yourself?”

Okay? That’s, that’s the short summary of the view, right. Concerning the bystander’s three-option case, Thompson first argues that the bystander may not redirect toward the right, where that one other person is, when he could redirect towards himself.

As, quote, “There is no way in which he, he can decently regard himself as entitled to make someone else pay,” end quote, a cost to others that he wouldn’t pay himself, given that the other person, like the bystander, does not want to die to save the five. However, she then also argues that the bystander is not morally required to sacrifice his life to save the five. Doing so would be altruism, and this is consistent with the non-consequentialist perspective that Chris spoke about.

They not only believe in constraints on doing certain things to bring about the greater good, but what they call personal prerogatives not to bring about the greater good. We do not have this duty to bring about the greater good. Don’t shake your head, Shelley.

I know you disagree with that.

(laughter)

We’ve got a real live consequentialist in the audience. Okay. So the idea is that we do have this prerogative, right?

Uh, it would be altruism to give up your life. It’s not a duty to save those five, even if it were the greater good. So given that he has permission only to harm himself to save the five, this person who is the bystander in control of things, that’s the only permission he has, as she says it.

She can’t make– he can’t make others pay what he could pay. He can only harm himself. But given that he doesn’t want to, and he needn’t morally do so, he needn’t morally do so.

He should just let the five die. When in the bystander’s two-option case, thinking about that case, you know, number two, where it wasn’t the driver, but the bystander who had to choose, he only had two options: let it go to the five or turn it on that one stranger, right? There is actually no option in that case of turning the trolley on himself.

The third option is gone. But Thomson says there is still, in the two-option case, quote, “No way in which he can decently regard himself as entitled to make someone else pay,” end quote, a cost that he wouldn’t– he would not pay if he could. Let us consider this first argument.

There’s another one, but I just wanna consider this first one. Uh, I don’t know what time is like, maybe we’ll never get to the second, but or you’ll be here all night. But those of you who are willing to sacrifice yourself for the greater good, let me know.

Okay. So, uh, here’s the first argument. Thompson moves from a three-option case to a conclusion about a two-option case, right?

She said if you’re not willing to turn it on yourself when you have that option, you just can’t turn it on someone else, right? When– even when you don’t have the option of turning on yourself.

In particular, the move is from, as I say, a three-option case in which the alternative that is eliminated in the two-option case, namely the bystander killing himself, is not chosen, wouldn’t be chosen in the three-option case. Now, it might be said that one problem with her argument is that one cannot in general move from a conclusion in a three-option case to one in a two-option case. For example, if we have three choices between letting a murder occur or stopping the murder by killing someone who’s doing it, right, or by shooting that person in the leg, three options, I think it’s impermissible to kill him.

You could shoot him in the leg, okay? Now, this does not mean that it im– it is impermissible to kill him if it’s the only alternative to letting the murder occur, okay? However, in this case, the murder case, case, the third option, shooting the murderer in the leg that is not present in the two-option case, would be taken in the three-option case.

That’s what you do there, right? In Thomson’s argument, the third option of the bystander sacrificing himself, which is missing in that two-option case, is not taken. That bystander’s not gonna kill himself in–

And we’re assuming at this point. So it might be thought that if an option would permissibly not be taken were it present, its absence in the two-option case could not affect what may be done. And so if it were impermissible to redirect to the bystander in the three-option case, it would be impermissible to do so in the two-option case.

But I don’t actually think this is so. It’s possible that there might be some sort of interaction effect caused by the mere presence of a third option, even if it’s not taken. And this interaction effect makes the second option impermissible, but only in the three-option case, without its being impermissible when the third option is not present.

In particular, it might be, some might think, I don’t actually, but some might think that making a choice between oneself and another, let’s say, in the presence of the other, might necessitate treating the other as one treats oneself, even if one may not treat him as one would treat oneself when there is no such choice to be made, especially, you know, up close and personal. So someone might agree with Thomson that in the three-option case, the bystander may only choose to fac– sacrifice himself and not another, or more weakly, that he must at least give himself and another an equal chance of being sacrificed. And hold that he may not turn the trolley on the one person.

Oh, and hold that he may. Someone may say, “Okay, three-option, I give it to you, interaction, you know, maybe I can’t treat him like, differently than I treat myself.” But when he’s not present, when, you know, when there isn’t this third option and there isn’t that choice between me and him, uh, then I may turn the trolley on that one person in the ordinary two-option case.

Someone might say that. In fact, I think that in the three-option case, there isn’t any special interaction effect between the second and third option. And the bystander need not refrain, even in that three-option case, from imposing costs on an-another person that he could but will not impose on himself.

Now, in connection with this point, and to help make myself clearer about why I think this, note that in considering her three-option bystander case, Thomson first argues for the indecency of the bystanders turning the trolley to the one person when he could turn it to himself instead. Only afterwards does she argue that it is permissible for the bystander to not give up his own life to save the five. But suppose the bystander’s turning toward the one person rather than toward himself would be indecent.

I don’t exactly know what that means, but okay, let’s suppose. This alone may not show that it is impermissible to turn it in that way. For consider an analogous case in which only a very small cost would be necessary to save the five, but the bystander is not willing to pay it.

Really lousy person, right? Okay. From what Thomson says, it seems to follow that it would be indecent for him to make another person pay the very small cost in order to save the five.

But even if it were indecent, it does not seem to me to be impermissible because refusing to pay the small cost is presumably impermissible for each person, given that five people will otherwise die. And Thomson’s objection does not seem to be to imposing a cost on someone against his will if he would clearly have a moral duty to pay the cost himself. Maybe some people object to that, but I don’t read her as saying that.

While I agree that the bystander’s not giving up his life to save the five is not in itself impermissible, unlike refusing to give a few pennies, my point here is that one needs to first show that it is permissible for the bystander or the other person not to make a certain sacrifice to save the five before one argues for the impermissibility of the bystander imposing the cost on another if he will not pay it himself. For if the cost is required of each, a person’s failing to make the sacrifice may not show that it is impermissible for him to impose it on another. Indeed, a very strong general claim might be suggested.

I call it strong claim one. It’s on the back of your handout or on the bottom of the third page. Where is it?

Bottom of the third page. If it is otherwise permissible to impose a great– uh, c- to impose a cost on someone for some end, it need not become impermissible to do so merely because one does not impose the cost on someone else when one should, including oneself. Now, my second major concern about Thomson’s argument can be made clearer by noting the following.

Some philosophers have been concerned with whether it is morally appropriate to require that someone else do something when one is oneself refusing or has refused to do it, other things being equal between me and the other person. This type of concern might imply that it is indeed indecent or impermissible for the bystander to condemn someone for refusing to volunteer his life, that one person, right? Or to require him to volunteer his life to save the five when the bystander is refusing or has refused or would refuse to volunteer his own life, other things being equal between them.

By contrast, notice that Thomson wishes to condemn as indecent the bystander’s taking someone’s life when the bystander wouldn’t volunteer his own. But taking someone’s life involves imposing a cost on another, a grave cost, and this is not the– quite the same as demanding that the other person impose the cost on himself altruistically when the bystander would refuse to act altruistically. Right, in that third option.

I think that sometimes it may be morally permissible, it’s at least an open question, to impose costs on others that they could not be required to impose on themselves. For examples, we sometimes draft people to be a soldier, though that person need not volunteer. We may present evidence leading to someone’s conviction without his being obligated to confess or bear witness against himself.

I’ll admit I haven’t thought about, deeply about all these cases, but it’s at least open to me that this is possible. So it is possible that a bystander’s not being willing to redirect the trolley toward himself only implies that it is indecent of him to require someone else to redirect the trolley toward himself. It need not imply that it is indecent for him to impose the loss of life on someone else.

Similarly, if it is permissible for the bystander not to give up his life, he should recognize that the other person on the track also has the permission not to give up his own life. In fact, I believe that if the trolley is redirected even by the driver, that one person, if he has a chance to send it back, may send it back. I don’t think he just has to stand there and take it, but that’s the story for another day.

But it is still possible that it is permissible for the bystander to impose the loss on the other person, and also permissible for someone else to impose the loss on the bystander if that were needed in order to save the five. Certainly, in cases of letting die rather than killing someone, this difference between volunteering and having a cost imposed on you seems to hold. Suppose I would have to let myself drown rather than save someone, or rather, than save myself.

I’d have to let myself drown rather than save myself if I am to do what will save five others. I could permissibly refuse to let myself drown and let the five drown instead, I think. I have no official role, I’m not a lifeguard, et cetera.

Yet it would be permissible for me to let one other person drown, though he doesn’t want me to, in order to go instead to save five others. Here, I would permissibly impose a cost on that one by not aiding him, that I would permissibly not impose on myself by not aiding myself. This, of course, is a case of letting die.

And Thomson, as do I, believes that there is a moral difference between letting someone die and killing them. But the point is that more has to be said to show that a bystander may not redirect the trolley to the other person than that he should not make someone else pay a cost that he would not and need not pay himself. For I think this claim would be broad enough to en– you know, encompass the letting die case, and I a– I may let one person die instead, go save five, when I wouldn’t have to let myself die in order to save the five.

Now, Thomson does have a second argument for the impermissibility of the bystander turning the trolley. So far, I’ve just been examining that first argument, and it explicitly does not depend on considering what the bystander himself would or would not do to himself. She notes that even if the bystander would be an altruist if he could, he would give up his life to save the five.

The one person he would kill if he redirected the trolley in a two-option case where he can’t kill himself might not and need not consent to be an altruist. This, she thinks, makes the bystander doing what costs the other person his life impermissible. If this argument were sufficient in itself to make us, to make that bystander turning the trolley impermissible, I don’t think that the first argument would be needed at all, right?

So let us consider if this second argument is sufficient. First, as was noted earlier, imposing a cost on someone is not the same as requiring him to act altruistically And engage in self-sacrifice. Furthermore, it is not generally impermissible to do something to save the five when it would lead to the one person suffering a loss he could permissibly not consent to suffer.

Presumably, the one could permissibly not consent to give up the bystander’s life-saving assistance, as in my drowning case, so that the bystander may save the five instead. And yet it would be permissible for the bystander to do this, and in this sense impose the loss on the one. It is probably crucial for Thomson that the bystander would be harming, killing someone, not simply not aiding that one person.

But I think the formulation of her argument seems too broad to capture that alone. Note also that Thomson thinks the trolley driver is permitted and even required to redirect to the one person, even though that one does not consent to be an altruist or to the imposition of the loss any more than in the bystander case the one consented. She thinks that the driver, unlike the bystander, may do this, even he, if he would not redirect the trolley to save himself.

In a three-option case, such as is listed on your chart as handout number seven. That’s the driver three-option case. She thinks that he should turn it on himself or, you know, turn the trolley in such a way, for example, that it goes into a tree and he’s killed, right?

He can’t literally turn the trolley on himself, but he could do what would kill himself rather than the five or the one. Now, if he should do that, and she thinks he should kill himself, he would be unjust if he didn’t. Nevertheless, if he won’t, in that three-option case, he’s not going to do it.

He’s not going to do what kills him. Or if he’s in a two-option case where he doesn’t have the option to kill himself, right? She thinks that he has a duty, right, to turn the trolley on the unwilling one individual.

She says this because she says the driver would otherwise unjustly kill five who are also unwilling to be killed. By contrast, Thomson says the bystander will have done no injustice if he leaves the five to die, and this makes a significant difference to the permissibility of killing the one person. So there are several things that concern me about this additional component of the argument relating to the driver and his obligations.

Um, one is that, uh, suppose the driver gave as his reason for letting the trolley go on to the five that he could not deliberately bring himself to do what will kill someone deliberately do what will kill someone, namely turn to the one person in the two-option case, uh, in order to stop the killing of five people that will happen in a large part due to factors beyond his control. I mean, the brakes stopped, right? I personally doubt that we would say that this in itself involved just treating the five unjustly.

Uh, just as we would not say that he treated the five unjustly if he refused to topple the fat man to stop the trolley. But let’s assume that the trolley driver would be unjust to the five in killing them, if he does not turn the trolley to the other person in the ordinary two-option case. Thompson originally claimed that the mere bystander is permitted not to save the five when the cost to him of doing so would be very high.

But, you know, what if the cost again is very small? And what if he actually promised to save the five? He’s their bodyguard, right?

Uh, you know, it’s possible that someone will say, “Well,” that will involve some injustice to them too, if he doesn’t turn it.” Now, and presumably in this case, it would still be impermissible on Thomson’s view for the bystander to turn the trolley, since killing one person on the track is a more serious injustice, I, I would think she would think, than breaking a promise to the five. My point is only that the supposed impermissibility of a mere bystander turning that trolley just, it can’t depend solely on his committing no injustices if he doesn’t turn.

Of course, in arguing that the driver is permitted to redirect when the bystander is not, Thompson does not merely rely on the fact that the bystander’s letting die involves no injustice, whereas killing five people is an injustice. She also relies on what she calls the killing five versus killing one principle, which specifically says that A must not kill five if he can kill one instead. But, you know, for reasons I’ve mentioned before, this principle doesn’t seem to me to be quite correct.

For as I noted earlier, even the driver with his hands on the wheel headed to the five, I think may not set the bomb that will stop the trolley, uh, but also directly kill one other person on the side, and he may not topple the fat man. So it’s not the case that whenever you’re about to kill five, you can kill one instead. The fact that the driver will unjustly kill five people if he does not do what kills one other person, together with the killing five versus killing one principle, cannot by themselves be enough to free the driver to redirect to the other person just by themselves if they do not also free the driver to topple the fat man off the bridge or set that bomb off.

It might be suggested that something else, either on its own or in addition to his strong duty not to kill the five and the principle that I mentioned, explains the limited ways in which he may kill one person to save the five. This additional factor could be that the driver’s duty is to drive the trolley in the best possible way. So when not killing the five requires driving a trolley that kills one other person, he, but not a bystander, is permitted to kill.

By contrast, toppling people or setting bombs is not a duty of his, okay? And in these respects, he’s not any freer than a mere bystander. But suppose the driver had to topple a rock or set off a bomb that wouldn’t hurt anyone.

He would be obligated to do these things to save his five potential victims, though he has no special responsibility for rocks or bombs. It is the permissibility of what he could do that determines his duty to do it rather than kill the five, not his special duty for driving his trolley that determines the full scope of his permissibility. If the driver may do many things besides drive the trolley to stop it killing the five, then we cannot explain his not having permission to set off that bomb that will kill someone or topple the fat man to stop the trolley by his special responsibility for driving a trolley that a bystander lacks.

This again suggests to me that there is some difference in how an agent comes to kill an innocent, non-threatening person that makes some killings to prevent five being killed permissible and others impermissible. And my further hypothesis is that this is a difference that marks a distinction between permissible and impermissible killings in general for mere bystanders or for drivers. And so one might be tempted by strong claim two, which I have on the third page of your handout, a very general claim, that one will otherwise unjustly kill innocents does not give one any special permission that others lack to kill other innocent non-threatening people to prevent the first injustice.

It might give one an obligation to do what is others are permitted to do when others have no obligation. I’m not denying that. Now, this strong claim, um, is consistent with people who would otherwise unjustly kill innocents having other permissions that mere bystanders lack, not permissions to kill.

For example, the driver might have a permission to sacrifice his wealth to save his potential victims, even though it would seriously deprive his family, and a bystander might not have such a permission. Okay? This strong claim would also have to be consistent with the fact that having to not kill people may give one a much stronger reason for acting than merely not letting them be killed by others.

And that ordinarily, having a stronger reason can make acts permissible that are not permissible for weaker reasons. For example, it might be permissible to take your car without your permission if I have to get someone to the hospital, but not if I just wanna go for a drive. But suppose that I don’t have the duty to take someone to the hospital, but merely an option to.

I choose to do so. I think it is as permissible for me to take the car as it is for the person who has this duty. It is that someone needs to be saved, not whether I have a duty to bring that about that overrides the duty not to interfere with someone else’s car, I think.

My having a duty may be part of the stronger reason that I have to act, but it is not necessarily part of the stronger reason for overriding another person’s right to his car. I think this would support the permissibility of the mere bystander doing this. Now, I can think of some objections to that strong claim that I, that I presented.

I’m not going to go into them right now. Um, there might be indirect evidence in addition for the just general permissibility for, uh, bystanders and drivers to do these things, or for those who would otherwise let die to kill rather than just those who would otherwise kill. The most direct route, however, to showing, uh, you know, that there is this general permissibility is to consider, uh, a good account, to provide a good account of moral differences between different ways in which killing can come about, and that would help explain why some ways are permitted to near bystanders as well as to potential killers.

I’m not going to do that here. I, I’m going to try to look at some proposals in my second lecture. Now, in conclusion, I just want to say that I’ve considered Thomson’s arguments for the conclusion that one may turn the trolley only if this is the alternative to one’s killing people, not to one’s letting them die.

But I think there’s a different argument, uh, for this conclusion that, that she doesn’t give. So I would like to present this argument, which I found rather puzzling when I thought of it. Uh, consider the following, uh, case called Saving by Letting Die.

It’s the last case on your handout, number eight. Suppose, uh, all you have to do right now is look at the top part of that handout. The top part of eight.

Uh, consider this case where the… Suppose the trolley is on its way to kill eight people. See that little trolley sign there? A mere bystander is involved here, no drivers, and he can either turn it away to the left, thereby killing one person, or, um, turn it to the right, thereby blocking a pathway that he needs and will shortly otherwise use to save five other people whom no one else can save.

In this case, he faces the choice of saving the eight by either killing one person or doing r-what results in his letting five people die. He’s not going to use that pathway. They’re just going to die.

Now, when I thought about this case, I believe I found my r-intuitive reaction, the sort of reactions that Chris was talking about, was that the driver should turn the trolley so that it blocks the pathway, even though that results in his letting five people die, rather than turn it the other way where it kills one person. In this case, uh, obviously, uh, you know, he could let it go on to the eight, that’s another option, but I thought that he ought to turn it towards, uh, block, blocking that pathway to the five. So then, in this case, the bystander should not kill someone, it seems, as the alternative to letting five die.

How then could it be permissible for the bystander to kill one person rather than let the five die in Thomson’s original bystander case? I mean, what the hell is going on here? Excuse me.

Indeed, what seems especially puzzling to me is that now Look at the bottom of that diagram. If a trolley had, hypothetically, been headed to killing the same five people when they were not soon to die anyway. There’s nothing wrong with them.

It’s not that they need someone to come and save them. It would have been permissible for the bystander, I think, to turn it away from them so as to kill the one person. At this point, they have the, the men with the little nets out there for people who do trolley problems, right?

This just seems very odd. So it seemed odd to me. I mean, how could these be consistent?

(sigh)

Um, so the question is, how can it both be permissible to kill one rather than let five die in the ordinary trolley case and impermissible to kill one rather than let five die in the saving by letting die case? Now, I think that there is– that there are distinctions between these cases. One of them has to do with the fact that in this case, when you turn that trolley, you’re interfering with uh, the means to saving the five.

This is how non-consequentialists allow themselves to draw distinctions, you see. It’s true they are going to die, but it’s not as a result of your letting something go, namely a trolley, to them that will otherwise hit them. It’s as a result of your doing something that will interfere with the means to their survival.

Now, someone may say, you know, this is a mere quibble, but, um, I don’t think it is. And it’s, uh, an example of, you know, the distinctions that non-consequentialists, when they think about cases, you know, might appeal to. Now, at this point, all I want to say, uh, because I think time had ran out quite a while ago, is that, uh, my tentative conclusion is that, uh, the cases I’ve described in Thomson’s enormously interesting two thousand and eight paper, and even the saving by letting die case, uh, do not show that a mere bystander may not turn the trolley away from killing the five toward killing the one.

Uh, I just wanna conclude finally with a word about what the trolley problem is, as I conceive of it now. If both the driver and the bystander are permitted to turn the trolley, but neither may topple the fat man or set off the bomb that will kill another person to stop the trolley, then the trolley problem is about why it is sometimes permissible to kill even rather than let die in very many cases other than trolley problems, even when, oh, sorry, even rather than let die when we come to kill in some ways but not others. So understood, I think the trolley problem is a real problem that applies to cases not involving trolleys, and solving it may require explaining moral differences among different ways of coming to kill people.

If this is so, then a detective on the trolley cases cannot decide that something wrong was done just by finding out who done it. Further investigation will be needed. Thank you.

(applause)

[01:17:15] CHRIS KUTZ:
So we’re now going to take a five-minute intermission, and then we’ll return to hear Professor Thomson respond. Thank you. Okay, let me, let me begin.

Our commentator for today is someone about whose work, of course, you’ve just heard a great deal from Professor Kamm. Judith Jarvis Thomson, Professor Emerita of Philosophy at MIT, is generally considered the dean of trolleyology and one of the most influential moral, political, and legal philosophers of the last fifty years. Her work on basic moral concepts, including rights, risk, and harm, has been central to dis- to discussions in law, philosophy, and political science.

She’s equally known for her wonderfully concise but evocative examples and the sensitivity and creativity with which she dissects complicated moral issues. I would guess that many, if not most, of the people in this room have read her classic article, A Defense of Abortion, featuring the unforgettable scenario of waking up to find a violinist surgically attached to you. This is moral philosophy’s version of Gregor Samsa.

That article was published in the inaugural issue of the journal Philosophy and Public Affairs in 1971, and single-handedly made both the specific issue of abortion and the broader field of applied ethics reputable for philosophical inquiry. Wikipedia tells me, and therefore I believe it, that it is probably the most widely reprinted article in moral philosophy of all time. Like our lecturer, Professor Thomson is a native of New York, graduating from Hunter High School, and like Professor Kamm, earning her BA from Barnard.

She went on to take a second BA and MA from Cambridge University and a PhD from Columbia. She began her teaching career at Barnard, taught briefly at Oxford, and then joined the MIT faculty, where she’s now taught for over fifty years. She has, however, taken some time to teach elsewhere, including, I am proud to say, here at Berkeley in nineteen eighty-three, and frequently at Yale Law School.

She’s won virtually every fellowship and award imaginable, including a Fulbright, a Guggenheim, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the presidency of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association. She has herself been a Tanner Lecturer at Princeton in nineteen ninety-nine, and has given Berkeley’s Howison Lecture in two thousand and five, when by chance I also had the pleasure of introducing her. Most recently, in two thousand and twelve, she received the Quinn Prize for lifelong contributions to philosophy from the American Philosophical Association.

I mentioned Professor Thomson’s famous article about abortion, but that’s of course just one among more than a hundred. You may already know as well her books, Acts and Other Events, Rights, Restitution, and Risk, The Realm of Rights, Moral Relativism and Moral Objectivity, which she wrote with Gilbert Harman, and Goodness and Advice. Each of these is a classic.

She has also written in areas ranging from the philosophy of science to metaphysics to philosophy of language and logic. I will note that one of the major factors behind my own decision to study moral philosophy was the sheer pleasure I found in college in a seminar in which we spent most of the time simply working through, one by one, the essays in Rights, Restitution, and Risk. It showed me that moral philosophy could be at once fearless and funny, and clear without being dumb.

I can’t now pass up the opportunity to deliver to you one piece of a, uh, wisdom about our craft from Professor Thomson, which I think I’ve repeated to all my students. In a long footnote at the beginning of The Realm of Rights, Professor Thomson introduces the issue of gendered pronouns in prose. She says that while she agrees with the moral point of those who object to using he to refer to persons at random, she cannot opt simply for substituting she.

She writes, I quote here, “Prose should be transparent,” like a pane of glass through which one sees the thoughts behind it. Use of she for these purposes is like a smudge on the pane. It captures the attention.”

Introducing the moral point in this backhanded way, she writes, makes one, quote, “feel nagged.” This footnote, I think, captures so well the qualities of all of Professor Thompson’s work. Its transparent conveyance of the deepest efforts made by its author to understand her subject without nag or distraction.

I look forward now to hearing her engagement with Professor Kam’s brilliant lecture.

(applause)

[01:21:12] JUDITH JARVIS THOMSON:
Uh, uh, I think we, uh, can give out that handout. Uh, I thought this is-

[01:21:17] CHRIS KUTZ:
Oh, sorry. The water is not gonna survive there. I can hand it to you when you need it.

(laughter)

All right.

[01:21:21] JUDITH JARVIS THOMSON:
Uh, I, I’ve,

(coughing)

uh, done up a handout because it was very complicated stuff, uh, and it went by, uh, pretty fast, uh, I think. Can I have that?

[01:21:32] CHRIS KUTZ:
Yeah. Okay,

[01:21:33] JUDITH JARVIS THOMSON:
while that’s being given out. Uh, Francis starts, uh, today’s lecture with two hypothetical cases. Uh, and they’re familiar from the literature.

Uh, the first is transplant. That’s the surgeon who can cut up one to save five. Uh, most of us agree that he can’t do that.

He mustn’t do that. Uh, the second is, uh, I’ve called it trolley driver. Frances calls it, uh, what do we got?

Trolley driver two option case. That’s her diagram two. Uh, that’s the driver of the trolley can avoid running into and killing five by turning onto a sidetrack and killing one.

And most of us believe that the driver may proceed. Philippa Foot asked the good question, why that difference between transplant and the trolley driver? Frances thinks that in trying to answer the question why, Foot was trying to solve the trolley problem.

Not so. The trolley problem turned up in the literature only in consequence of a question that arose because of Foot’s answer to the question she asked. So let’s go back to Foot’s paper.

That’s a very distinguished piece of work, by the way, uh, and it was a pleasure to re-reread it in, uh, preparing for today. Uh, Foot surveyed some pairs of cases relevantly similar to transplant and trolley driver, and she suggested that the needed explanation lies in the distinction between negative duties and positive duties. The use she made of that idea suggests that she had the following principle in mind, the stringency principle.

Negative duties are more stringent than positive duties. Now, how does that, uh, principle bear on transplant and trolley driver? Foot is standardly interpreted, she’s standardly interpreted as taking it that the following principle is a consequence of the stringency principle.

I’ll call it the worseness principle. Although one, killing five is worse than killing one. Two, killing one is worse than letting five die.

That principle yields that although the driver may kill the one to avoid killing five, the surgeon may not kill the one to save five, and the stringency principle explains why. Now both of those principles are very attractive. So Foot’s solution to the problem she was dealing with was attractive.

Uh, alas, as often happens in philosophy, some cases got in the way. Uh, in a case called bystander at the switch, that’s the bystander who can deflect the trolley from one direction to another, from a direction in which it, he will– the, the trolley will hit five to, uh, uh, uh, a direction on which the trolley will hit one. Uh, in that case, uh, if the clause two of the worseness principle is true, then the bystander may not throw the switch.

But surely he may throw the switch, everyone says. So now we have a problem. What makes it the case that the bystander may throw the switch and thereby makes that attractive clause two false?

It’s that problem that I gave the name the trolley problem to, and it’s plainly not the or even a problem that Mrs. Foot was dealing with. I’m trying to juggle things here. Uh, okay.

Now, uh, I’d, I’d like to stop to draw attention to the fact that there’s another way of interpreting, uh, the Foot article, and in fact, it’s a better way. She says she hasn’t argued that there aren’t any other principles. she says she meant to show only that we don’t need to appeal to the doctrine of double effect, which Frances talked about, to explain the difference between cases such as transplant and trolley driving.

So we do better to attribute to her, uh, a principle not about comparis-comparing acts one with another, but rather comparing features of acts one with another. Uh, in particular, we do better to, to, uh, attribute to her the principle I’ve called the other things being equal wor-worseness principle. That says, although clause one, other things being equal, killing five is worse than killing one.

Two, other things being equal, killing one is worse than killing five. That is, what’s the, uh, other things being equal, uh, if a-any of you have dipped into the reading i-in, uh, ethics, the ceteris paribus clauses are everywhere. We would all be lost, uh, without them.

What, uh, what, what this comes, it comes through very roughly is that what, uh, uh, I take clause one, other things being equal, killing five is worse than killing one. That is, given that somebody will be killing five, uh, uh, and another killing one, then we’ve got reason for believing that the first is worse. Of course, it’s not, uh, conclusive.

It doesn’t settle the matter. There may be more that emerges, uh, in the facts of the case, but as we say, as, as, uh, moral philosophers standardly say, other things being equal, it’s worse. Now, there’s an advantage, uh, to, uh, shifting to this, uh, way of interpreting, uh, the Foot article.

Uh, it suggests that, uh, uh, there’s a, there’s an important methodological, uh, issue, uh, in here. Instead of focusing on acts, uh, and, uh, shifting from one, uh, act to another c- Uh, comparing acts, uh, we should be looking at the features that are singled out by whatever our, our theory is.

And in the case of Philippa Foot, it’s this stringency principle. And, uh, in case of, uh, people who go in for, uh, uh, the moral theory of, of rights. Uh, it would be, uh, a theory of rights that would, uh, connect with which features, uh, you pick out.

Uh, I’m not, uh, going to take up time to talk about that. Perhaps we can spend some, uh, time on this at the seminar, uh, on Thursday. Uh, in any case, I think that other things being equal, Warrender’s principle is very plausible.

There’s nothing I know of in the, uh, non-consequentialist literature that conflicts with it, and there’s nothing in Frances’s two lectures that conflicts with it, uh, or, or so I, uh, uh, believe. Okay. Uh, in any case, uh, uh, that doesn’t mean we don’t have a, a trolley of, uh, a trolley problem, uh, because, uh, instead of now asking, uh, why the, uh, a bystander may throw the switch, we now ask what’s special about the circumstances of bystander at the switch that makes other things not be equal in that case?

So, uh, we still have the trolley problem, and I now just, uh, uh, mention, uh, in light of, uh, Frances’s consideration of, of what the trob– trolley problem is that, uh, there isn’t, uh, an issue for debate here. It’s a question of what the history is. Yes.

And the history of the, of the, uh, problem is such that the problem arises because of the bystander at the switch. We need to deal with him. And Frances, however, has something much larger in mind.

She says at the end of her first lecture, “Let me conclude this lecture with a final word about what the trolley problem is.” And then she says, I don’t know whether it is. Then the trolley problem is about why it is sometimes permissible to kill, even rather than let die in some ways, when we come to kill in some ways, but not others.

That’s a rather dark saying. But I take it that what she has in mind is that the trolley problem is about why we may kill in some circumstances and not in others. That hypothesis is confirmed by her adding that, quote, \”Solving it requires explaining the moral differences among different ways of coming to kill.\” Well, it would certainly be great to be provided with an answer, uh, to the quest-quite general question.

Uh, when can you kill? When m-may you kill, and when, and when may you not? And, uh, w-with an answer to the question why, uh, in each case.

That would be wonderful. Uh, I mention only three, uh, things, however, and that is, first, I don’t see any reason to think that solving the, uh, trolley problem, the narrower problem, uh, raised by bystander at the switch, requires solving the quite general problem that Frances is going to deal with in tomorrow’s lecture. Second, there’s nothing in Frances’s first lecture, the lecture that she gave today, that suggests a solution to the narrow problem.

And third, there’s a real danger that shifting attention from the narrower problem to the quite general problem, as Frances does, will cause the narrow problem to get lost in a jungle of hypothetical cases. We’ll have to see tomorrow whether that happens. Now, uh, uh, uh, point three, uh, uh, as, as I said, there’s nothing in Francis’s first lecture today that suggests a solution to the narrow problem, uh, that’s been called, uh, the trolley problem.

It isn’t, isn’t just my use, uh, of that term. It’s the standard use in the literature of the trolley problem, uh, in fact. Uh, uh, uh, as I said, there’s nothing in Frances’s first lecture that suggests a solution to that problem.

But she does have things to say about the bystander at the switch. I argued recently that we should reconsider. We should grant that the bystander may not, after all, throw the switch.

And I’ve very briefly summarized the argument. Uh, Frances went through this, but I, I, uh, I think it would be just as well if I went through it again. Uh, first step.

If you can throw the switch either so as to kill Alfred or to kill yourself, you may not throw it so as to kill Alfred. For you may not impose on him the cost of your saving the five on the ground that you prefer his death to yours. And you needn’t kill yourself.

Second, if you discover, oops, you find you can’t throw the switch so as to kill yourself, it won’t do to say, “Oh, what luck! “Now I can turn it on to him.” “You still may not turn it on to him,” for you may not impose on him the cost of saving the five which you wouldn’t be willing to pay yourself.

Now, if that argument succeeds, then the bystander may not throw the switch. And incidentally, it would be an interesting point that, uh, an intuition that’s very popular is a mistake. Uh, uh, uh, one sometimes wonders, uh, and many people often wonder whether too much of philosophy relies on, uh, the acceptability of, uh, intuition, uh, uh, claims that strike one as intuitively, uh, true.

Here would be a case in which a strong intuition really turns out not to be true if the argument succeeds. Well, but does it succeed? Francis thinks it doesn’t, and that’s putting it mildly.

(laughter)

Uh, I had the text of this lecture and, uh, as, as all the commentators, uh, uh, we all had did, uh, Uh, Frances devotes over eight pages of tight text to what it is, it’s a little explosion of little arguments to the effect that I got it wrong. Now, what do we do with, uh, those, uh? I certainly can’t, uh, deal with many of them.

Um, First, Kamm’s, some of the claims she makes, I just found baffling. For example, Frances claims that a person, quote, “need not refrain from” imposing costs on another person that he could but wouldn’t impose on himself.” What did she have in mind?

Does she really think that you may turn that trolley on to Alfred because you’d prefer his death to yours? That’s a, that’s a response to that a-argument. I, that, that question, I have, have no idea what to do with this, uh, with this argument.

Uh, second, some, some of the complaints that she makes strike me as idle. And for example, I assume that you may refuse to turn the trolley onto yourself to save five people. Frances says she agrees that that’s true, but she complains that I didn’t show that it’s true.

That’s an idle complaint. A consequentialist would say that you ought to turn the trolley onto a person whose death would be best if there is such a person, and if there is such a person and it’s you, then tough. But a consequentialist would also say that the surgeon ought to kill the one to save five in transplant.

I don’t feel the need. We’re, we’re, uh, operating within non-consequentialist assumptions, and I simply take it that among them is the fact that if you can save five by giving up your life, it is not required of you, other things being equal, that you do so. Uh, the third, category of, uh, of, uh, complaints that I, uh, some, some of them don’t seem to me to make contact with anything I said.

And Frances says, quote, “I think that sometimes it may be morally permissible to impose costs on others that they could not be required to pay on their own.” unquote. Why does she think that?

She says, quote, “For example, we may sometimes draft someone to be a soldier, though he need not volunteer.”

[01:39:40] F.M. KAMM:
Who’s that we? It’s at most governments who may draft people. Indeed, it’s only governments that can draft people, and what governments may do to people is not the same as what people may do to people.

Moreover, I say at most governments may draft people, because in case it hasn’t been noticed, on many views, not even governments may. And some of her other complaints, uh, would take more time to discuss than those that I’ve mentioned, and I’ve run out of time. Anyway, perhaps this issue will reappear later in the week.

Thank you.

(applause)

[01:40:42] CHRIS KUTZ:
Okay. Professor, uh, Professor Kamm will, uh, take a, a moment to respond to.

[01:40:46] F.M. KAMM:
I think the audience- Oh Should I? Do you want me to?

I don’t… I, I just that, uh, I, with respect to the second complaint that, that I don’t believe I, I, I ever complained that you hadn’t shown that a person doesn’t have to give up their own life to save the five. Um, I’m not sure why you say that.

I’ll look through my paper again. I don’t recall saying that. I didn’t require you to do that, certainly.

I assumed it as well. Um, need not re– Why do I think that you need not refrain from imposing costs, uh, on others that you would refuse to impose on yourself? I guess I gave those cases, um, I did it in with respect to the letting die cases, that I refused to let myself drown to save the five.

But there’s someone else who I could save, the one person, they don’t want to drown. Uh, I let them drown to save the five. I’m preferring my life to theirs with respect to saving other people.

Now I, I, I’m not, in this case, harming someone, but I certainly am doing, you know, letting them drown when I wouldn’t let myself drown. And I th– that was one of the cases that I gave to support the view that, you know, you could impose costs on others you wouldn’t impose on yourself. I also gave the example of the very selfish person who wouldn’t give a few pennies that he had a duty to give to save five people.

And I thought that even though he wasn’t doing it, if each, everybody did in fact have a duty to save the five, that he could impose the cost on someone else. Uh, true, he should be doing it, but that doesn’t mean that he can’t impose it on someone else who should be doing it. Um, so those were the things that I said to support that first claim.

Um, maybe I’ll leave it at that because we want to have question period.

[01:42:23] CHRIS KUTZ:
Okay.

[01:42:23] JUDITH JARVIS THOMSON:
Sorry, I, I-

[01:42:24] CHRIS KUTZ:
Would you like to-

[01:42:26] JUDITH JARVIS THOMSON:
Oh, I already mentioned a reply to this. And yet, the small amounts, uh, the, the, uh, I find that very puzzling. I mean, if suppose I would like to see to it that, uh, Oxfam gets, uh, $5.

Well, I don’t feel like paying it. Uh, it isn’t much money, but the fact that it isn’t much money doesn’t make it, it’s make it all right for me to steal from somebody else to pay for that $5 that I don’t feel like paying myself. So, uh, uh, I mean, the fact that it’s a small amount of money doesn’t seem to me to, to affect things at all.

And in the drowning case, that’s not doing anybody a harm. That’s a matter of choice of saving people.

[01:43:09] F.M. KAMM:
Yeah. I, I said it, it wasn’t just a small amount. It was something that I thought one would have a duty to do. So if it’s already established that you have a duty to give and that you’re not giving it, then that might put it somewhat differently, but cast of light on it.

[01:43:24] CHRIS KUTZ:
Thank you. We can take, uh, we have s- a little bit of time to, uh, take some questions from the audience. We have a floor microphone I’ll ask you to use because this is all being recorded. So if you’d like to pose a question. Anybody want to ride the trolley? Please come up, sir.

[01:43:45] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
I have a question for Professor Johnson. Uh, so maybe you’ll just tell me to read your article, but, um, anyways. So in the, the argument, uh, for the impermissibility of, of flipping the switch if you’re the bystander relies on saying that you don’t have the obligation to flip– to f– to turn it on yourself, right?

[01:44:03] JOHN:
But wouldn’t it be permissible to turn it on yourself, in which case it could also be permissible to, to, uh, turn it on someone else?

[01:44:10] JUDITH JARVIS THOMSON:
Uh, the, the fact that it’s permissible to do it to me makes it permissible to do it to somebody else?

[01:44:16] JOHN:
Uh-huh.

[01:44:16] JUDITH JARVIS THOMSON:
Well, I don’t think he would want to say that. Uh, uh, the fact that it’s permissible for me to… Well, uh, well, I, I mean, uh, to, to-

[01:44:28] F.M. KAMM:
Dye your hair.

[01:44:29] JUDITH JARVIS THOMSON:
To dye my… Oh, well, thank you, John. That was lovely. Permissible for me to dye my hair doesn’t make it permissible for me to dye Shelly’s hair. Uh. I think, I think you don’t-

(laughter)

If you don’t- Sure. No, I mean, I, I like, I like the i– the the question. I th- I think it’s a, a nice question. But I, I think, uh, you wouldn’t want to agree that, uh, the fact that I may do such and such makes it permissible

(cough)

for me to, uh, do the such and such to somebody else.

[01:45:00] JOHN:
Sure. But, but the, the– what the argument that you’re making is that if you can’t, uh, if, if it’s, uh, if you aren’t obligated to do it to yourself, um, then you aren’t permitted to do it to someone else, and that doesn’t seem to follow.

[01:45:16] JUDITH JARVIS THOMSON:
Uh, if-

[01:45:17] JOHN:
You’re saying you aren’t obligated to turn it on yourself, and hence you, you aren’t permitted to turn it on someone else.

[01:45:24] JUDITH JARVIS THOMSON:
Uh, if I’m not, uh, obligated to do something for somebody, Uh, uh, s- s- It– I, I, I’m a little lost.

If, if I’m not o– I’m not obligated to save five people. Let’s, uh, stick to the example. I’m not obligated to save these five people by killing myself.

And, uh, uh, uh, it wasn’t from that fact alone that I said that I may not, uh, kill the, the other fellow. But the thing is if, if, uh, I may not kill him because I would prefer that he, uh, die than that I die, and that seems to me to be right. That is, that I may not on that ground.

[01:46:16] F.M. KAMM:
Right. I think her claim that I’m not obligated to do it was preceding her conclusion that therefore I can let the five die. Yes. It wasn’t used as support for the idea that, uh, I can’t do it to someone else.

[01:46:29] JUDITH JARVIS THOMSON:
The, the idea– Yes. Uh, the idea is that if you’re not gonna, uh, s- give your own life up, then you’re going to have to let them die. Unless you can, of course, get him to volunteer, uh, but in case he says, “Sorry, uh, no,” then you have to let them die.

[01:46:51] F.M. KAMM:
I, I should probably leave this one to someone else.

[01:46:54] CHRIS KUTZ:
Now, one thing that seems like an obvious thing to say that neither of you said is that you might think that I’m required to turn the trolley on myself. I have an obligation to sacrifice myself, but I have an excuse for not doing so. It’s a form of understandable human weakness that I wouldn’t do so.

[01:47:10] JUDITH JARVIS THOMSON:
Do you really think- I don’t think either of us believes that human weakness that-

[01:47:13] CHRIS KUTZ:
No.

(laughter)

It’s what a, it’s what, it’s what the, I don’t know, it’s what the criminal law would say, uh, or might say.

[01:47:18] F.M. KAMM:
I doubt that the criminal-

[01:47:20] CHRIS KUTZ:
Yeah. Okay.

[01:47:21] F.M. KAMM:
Uh, uh, yeah, I don’t think the criminal law would say it, because the criminal law would not, uh, uh, think that it was merely an excuse but a justification. An excuse implies that, you know, you really ought to do otherwise, but the strain and so forth. But a person who did it would not be thought to have done something altruistic or supererogatory, but simply have done their duty, whereas the other guy was excused.

So I don’t think the criminal law would do that, actually, uh,

(laughter)

uh, what you said it would do.

[01:47:47] CHRIS KUTZ:
Professor Wallace.

[01:47:49] PROFESSOR WALLACE:
Something that, that figured in Frances’ lecture, uh, fairly prominently, I thought, was the, the Driver-Toppel case, uh, which she thought, um, told p-pretty decisively against the, the idea that if you, if you can kill one or kill five, you’re obligated to kill one rather than— kill fewer rather than, um, kill, uh, more people. And that seemed to be a principle that, um, Frances was attributing to, to Judy. And I guess I’d like to invite you both to, to say a little bit more about this case.

Uh, for Frances, um, the argument relies on having a firm intuition that, that it’s impermissible for the draw– the, the, the, the trolley driver to, to kill the, um, the, the one person by getting them to topple onto the tracks, uh, even if that’s, that’s a way of, um, avoiding killing, killing more people. Uh, and I’m not entirely… I, I, I, I sorta get the intuition, but I’m not sure how much weight I’d really want to attach to it.

And, and maybe argument just gives out at a certain point, and, uh, there’s nothing much more to say. But I, um, uh, but I’d also like to hear what, uh, Judy would say about that, that kind of case, which I thought it was interesting that, uh, Francis was introducing into the discussion, so.

[01:49:03] F.M. KAMM:
(breathing)

Well, um, uh, if I could just go back, I mean, I mentioned that, um, uh, uh, Professor Thomson had the, uh, the case of the doctor who had poisoned his own patients, right? And she dealt with the issue of at a later time, uh, could he, rather than anybody else, kill the one person to give the organs to that person. And, uh, I don’t think the doctor in that case can do it, all right?

Uh, and I think that pushing the fat man over the bridge, you know, if let’s say the bystanding driver, he wakes up after a faint. He– you know, he’s been thrown from the trolley and so forth. Uh, there’s a ba-bit of gap in time and so forth, and his people are gonna die, right?

And, uh, I don’t think that he can, uh, any more than the culpable doctor. He’s not culpable, but he’s responsible, right, for the deaths. Kill that, uh, trolley driver– uh, kill the fat man.

Um, so for the purpose of… Kill the fat man for the purpose of stopping the trolley. I wanna be clear that’s what I’m saying. Um, and so I just thought that, uh, the fact that at the very time, you see, I’m not saying that if he could redirect the trolley onto another track where it will topple a fat man, that he shouldn’t do that, because that’s the same as redirecting the trolley away from the five.

It’s just that it’s this idea of, uh, doing something, I hate to use this word because I don’t actually believe in it, but it sort of, sort of captures, you know, as a means to saving those five people that, uh, when it’s impermissible for others to do it, it doesn’t become permissible for him to do it, even in that very instant where it would be his option. But I, I’m interested also in what– and Judy thinks about it.

[01:50:44] JUDITH JARVIS THOMSON:
I don’t, don’t know what to say, Jay. Uh, that Fat Man case ap-appeared in an early paper of mine many years ago, and it, it still seems to me to be right. And, and so you ask yourself, “Well, what, what’s the source of that intuition?

What’s that issuing from?” And I think it’s that, that here’s this guy, he’s not involved, he’s not involved in the, uh, sit-situation. He’s outside of it, and he– the guy drags him in.

Uh, and it’s, it’s som-something like that that’s at work. I d- there’s no general thesis in here, uh, Because they, they instantly, uh, Frances starts thinking of, uh, the additional cases of dragging somebody in and, uh, and, uh, And it’s this kind of thing that I, I, I’m su-suggesting that we do well to avoid, but it’s, it’s something like that that seems to be responsible.

But it, it is in general an intuition that you cannot, uh, Uh, dr-dr-drag somebody, uh, into the, the path of the trolley. And, uh, modulo, uh, one getting– one’s getting an argument against it, uh, that seems like an intuition that we can rely on. Uh, all of these intuitions, though, m-

Uh, I, I, I think they’re… it’s a mat- a matter of just waiting and seeing. I, I mean, there, there’s, there’s room for ar-argument, uh, otherwise, but I don’t think it’s gonna arise here.

I think that’s, uh, that pulling the guy in from X is what, is what’s doing the work.

[01:52:07] F.M. KAMM:
I think it’s a, it’s a good, good question. Sir, can you come to the microphone? Can you come to the microphone, sir? Sir. Off track?

(laughter)

Oh, what can we do to him?

(laughter)

We can’t do… Yeah. I’ll start again.

I may be way off track, but today there was, um, sort of an accident with the military. Uh, some… uh, soldiers were killed and/or Marines were killed, Um, out in, in the West. And it made me think about being a general or being a trolley driver.

The question to me when I first got into these trolley driving questions was, isn’t there something we can do? Ar-aren’t we obligated to do certain things before we become trolley drivers? Yes.

Aren’t we obligated to do certain things before we become generals?

[01:53:02] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Aren’t we obligated to do certain things before we become teachers or philosophers? So I put it to both of you. Are there certain things we’re obligated to do? Maybe not drive trolleys is what I’m suggesting.

[01:53:21] F.M. KAMM:
Well, uh, Yeah. I, I, I don’t think that, uh, I would disagree with you that we ought to try to avoid being in situations of these sorts where we have to make these choices. But I don’t think that we should stop thinking about the answers to the situations that may arise, where either it would cost an awful lot to avoid being in these situations, and then you have to figure out how many people are going to be left to die if we spend a lot of money protecting trolley tracks or whatever.

Uh, so there are these, all these issues about… I agree with you, in a world of scarcity, uh, you know, what’s tragic or dile-dilemmatic situations we want to avoid being in. But I don’t think that that helps us at all or should be a substitute for trying to give an answer to what we should do when we do find ourselves in the situation.

[01:54:12] JUDITH JARVIS THOMSON:
Uh, I, uh, I think that’s a, it’s a, a good question because, uh, i-it seems to me that’s, uh, absolutely right. A trolley driver has an extra responsibility to take care of the public, uh, to, uh, avoid harming, uh, the public. And, uh, this is going to figure.

Uh, uh, similarly for generals, uh, uh, uh, s-similarly for, uh, anyone who o-occupies a, a, a role that, uh, involves, uh, being in charge of, uh, what happens to human beings or has, uh, responsibilities by virtue of, of occupying that role. It’s, it’s an important one. The question is whether or not, uh, that point shows that anything that was said about these cases won’t do.

Uh, that is, uh, you might want to say, “Look, take the trolley driver.” Uh, I, I, s- I think he’s got a…

And my own feeling is that i-if, uh, he can either kill, turn it onto one or kill it onto himself, then he ought to turn it onto himself. And I’m confirmed, uh, I feel slightly the stronger, uh, in that direction, given your point that this is a a trolley driver who’s, uh, uh, res-got responsibilities because of the role he occupies. But, uh, I think you would want to see whether or not that’s gonna show that any of the intuitions are false.

It might, in which case it would be of interest. Uh, but, uh, so, So I, I think it’s a good, good point.

(cough)

[01:55:49] CHRIS KUTZ:
Professor Dworkin? Or as I say, or,

[01:55:52] JUDITH JARVIS THOMSON:
Yeah. Okay.

[01:55:55] RONALD DWORKIN:
Uh, this is addressed to Judy, but I’m sure Francis will wanna comment as well. Uh, in your, uh, work on physician-assisted suicide, you drew a fairly sharp distinction between the intentions and, and or the motives with which a person acts and what is permissible.

[01:56:11] JUDITH JARVIS THOMSON:
Sorry, Jerry, I’m, I’m not getting it.

[01:56:13] RONALD DWORKIN:
Like, am I, am I not coming through?

[01:56:17] JUDITH JARVIS THOMSON:
Uh, yeah. On assisted suicide, on the assisted suicide thing.

[01:56:21] RONALD DWORKIN:
Right. Uh, you drew a fairly sharp distinction between the motives and intentions with which, say, a doctor acts and what is permissible for him to do. Uh, now, with respect to the, the issue of the bystander, uh, sometimes you seem to be saying, “Well, what I would be doing if I weren’t prepared” to impose the sacrifice on myself, uh, is by s- is by basically saying something like, “Well, I’d rather he die than that I die.”

Now, that’s a fairly despicable thing to say and says something about me, but it may nevertheless be the case, given that if I don’t do it, five people are going to die rather than one. It’s permissible for the person to impose the cost on the one, even though it– he didn’t do it for, uh, admirable reasons.

[01:57:03] JUDITH JARVIS THOMSON:
Is it? Anita, look, uh…

[01:57:08] F.M. KAMM:
W- uh, we’re operating, uh… So far everything that, that’s been said, I, I think, uh, fits into a conception of, uh, ethics that’s objective rather than subjective. We’re not, uh, operating on a, on a subjective conception of ethics.

And, uh, the fact that we’re operating with objective, uh, considerations as to whether or not a person may do anything doesn’t mean that it isn’t relevant, uh, what the situation is, and, and that is if my, uh, if the, the reason why I don’t, uh, turn it on, uh, myself, uh, well, f– uh, the reason why I turned it on him is that I prefer him to. But still, objective it is, we’re not just asking whether I’m at fault for doing this. We’re asking, given that I don’t want to die, uh, and that that fact is, uh, the supposed justification for my turning it on him, the answer is it isn’t.

The fact that I don’t want to die doesn’t justify my turning it on to him instead. And I, I’m n-now, uh, not asking whether, because it’s always got to be relevant what people’s wants are. We’re, we’re not, uh, invited because we’re gonna be objectivists about ethics to ignore the relevance of what people want.

[01:58:38] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
But I take it that the fact that you, you bring forward is not that, uh, it’s better that he die than I die, but that by doing so, I can save people, uh, five people by killing one.

[01:58:49] F.M. KAMM:
Yes, but, uh, see, see, if I don’t, uh, do it, oh, if I don’t kill myself, The other option is, I’ve got two, uh, remaining options: to kill him, uh, and, uh, let the five die. But, uh, nobody is required to, uh, sacri– to give– uh, to, to, to accept the cost, uh, of saving the five. Uh, nobody is required to do that.

And I am here, uh, imposing on him, uh, a cost, uh, to save. Look, uh, the the argument can go through without starting with the, the third, uh, three options. I introduced the three options simply because it makes it just that much more vivid that, uh, what, what the options are.

But let’s take the sec- take the, the two-option case. Uh, this guy is not required to save, to give up his life. I am not required to give up, uh, my life.

Nobody is, other things being equal, required to give up his life to save five. So how can I then impose this on him?

[02:00:05] JUDITH JARVIS THOMSON:
Uh, uh, because I would, uh, because, uh, it would be very nice that the five get saved.

[02:00:12] F.M. KAMM:
Yeah. See, the thing is that I, uh, Jerry, um, I try to distinguish between, uh, giving up your life to save someone else and imposing a cost that involves another person’s losing his life on that other person. So it, it seemed to me that, um…

I mean, Judy, one of Judy’s first questions to me was, you know, uh, h- Why do you think that you need not refrain from imposing costs that you d- wouldn’t impose on yourself? And it seems to me that, uh, I think that I consisten- consistently think that, look, I’m not going to give up my life, and I don’t have to give up my life to save those people, all right?

But I could understand it if someone else imposed the cost on me, just as I’m willing to impose it on someone else. So I’m willing to universalize that, right? Um, and, uh, it seems to me a consistent position.

I think Judy just doesn’t think it’s consistent, and the only thing I did was to, you know, try to support that was I gave these letting-die cases. Uh, that person I leave to drown to go and save the five doesn’t want to die. He doesn’t want to give up his life to save the five.

I could save him and save the five, but, you know, not bother him, not, you know, uh, by letting myself drown. I’m not willing to let myself drown, but I could understand it if someone left me to drown to go and save the five. These are different types of things that are done to you.

Uh, and I think Judy doesn’t think that they amount to– the difference doesn’t amount to much. So that’s how I would answer my, you know, your question. Uh, it’s not that I prefer that he die.

It’s just that, uh, if it were a question of someone imposing on me, all right, I don’t want to die, but I certainly wouldn’t say, “I prefer that you” impose it on someone else.” I could understand completely that you only tossed a coin between us or decided on other grounds that I was the one who was going to be left to die or harmed, okay? So it isn’t just this preference that I not die, because in that situation, of course, toss a coin.

It wouldn’t be right not to between me and someone else’s life or prefer them for one reason or another. But the giving up of one’s life is a different question.

[02:02:28] JUDITH JARVIS THOMSON:
I, I just want to repeat that the drowning case is, is, uh, very different. Uh, and, uh, it seems to me, uh, if I am not willing to give up my life to save five people, the, the prospect that somebody else will want to save those five people and therefore kill me to save them, uh, seems to me to be, uh, unacceptable. Uh, I’m entitled to, uh, resist this.

[02:02:55] CHRIS KUTZ:
Professor Hurka, did…

[02:02:58] PROFESSOR HURKA:
Alice, as a… I guess this is a question initially for Judy. It’s a related question, and the principle is that I may not impose on Alfred the cost of, you may not impose on Alfred the cost of your saving the five on the ground that you prefer his death to yours.

You could change that to you prefer your life to his. That would put a slightly different twist on it. And I think you’re often permitted to make choices because you prefer your life to somebody else’s.

And the question is, what’s the distinction between the cases where that is permitted and when it’s not? So a couple of examples. I mean, a simple example, you and Alfred are drowning, and there’s one piece of wood that can save you.

Um, I think you’re permitted to grab the piece of wood for yourself because you prefer your life to Alfred’s. I think that’s okay. Now, that’s a saving case.

It’s not an imposing costs case. But many people think that in innocent threat cases, and you might not agree with this, but many people think that in innocent threat cases, like I had in your case, with the fat man falls off the cliff and is going to land on you and kill you, you’re permitted to kill him, but he’s also permitted to try and kill you, because each of you is permitted to seek the outcome in which his own life is saved and the other one’s is lost, because he prefers his own life, and in order to secure that outcome, impose a cost, namely death, on the other person. So that’s an actively killing case rather than, um, a saving case.

And I think there are other cases where people would, some people would say, “I’m permitted to kill someone rather than let myself die because I prefer my being alive to my not being alive.” So the question is just, where do you draw the line, if you draw one, between cases where it is permissible to act on a preference for your life over somebody else’s, and the cases where it’s not.

[02:04:35] JUDITH JARVIS THOMSON:
Oh, there’s no way in which I’m gonna produce an answer to that, Tom. But, uh, to, to go back to, uh, the difference here, uh, in the one case, uh, uh, what’s in question, what’s in question in this, uh, uh, bystander case is saving five people. Uh, and, uh, uh, well, I, uh, uh, I understand if you grab the piece of wood before, uh, I get to it, uh, that’s fine.

I didn’t have any right to that piece of wood. I didn’t own. If I own the piece of wood, then I have a ground for objecting.

Uh, but if I don’t own the piece of wood, then whoever gets it first, uh, gets saved. Uh, but the, uh, tr– the, uh, bystander, the switch case, uh, is very different. Uh, it’s a matter of, uh, killing somebody to save five other people, that he is not r-responsible f-for, uh, bearing the cost of it.

I’m not respon… Uh, uh, which is, uh, very different from, uh, who gets to the, who gets to the… It isn’t as if we’re asking who gets to the saving of the five first, uh, and if, if I get there first, then I kill…

I get there first, then I, if I win, and so I kill him. Uh, it doesn’t, it doesn’t work like that, Tom. Um, uh, it isn’t as if, uh, if I get there first, then I can, then it’s okay for me to kill him, though neither of us need to be willing to bear this cost.

So, so, I have a, um–

[02:06:15] F.M. KAMM:
a preliminary case before the ones in which there’s killing, and you’re permitted… I thought there were cases where you were permitted to kill out of a preference for your own life rather than somebody else’s. Do you th– do you think there are no such cases?

[02:06:26] JUDITH JARVIS THOMSON:
Well, the innocent threat could– the situation, I think, think is, uh, difficult. Uh, um, uh, the, the difficulty lies in the fact that you don’t want to regard, uh, morality as licensing fights. Who wins?

Uh, and that’s what, what you’re inviting us to, uh, uh, attend to in the Innocent Threat. For, for people who haven’t… It’s this guy falls off a cliff, this fat guy falls off a cliff toward you.

Uh, and there you are, and he’s headed down. And now intuitively, when, when, when you’re allowed to knock him aside. So, uh, on the other hand, isn’t he then entitled to…

Now, what do we do with this? Uh, I dislike the idea that we should agree that ethics says, “Fine, there’ll be a fight.” Uh, uh, now, uh, why do I dislike, dislike?

Uh, I’m, I’m not sure I know what to say, but, uh, I resist it. Uh, it is that, uh, it seems to me ethics should always leave, leave it room for all of us to, to, uh, behave in the right way without fights, uh, with each other to see who, who wins. And, and w-what you’re offering us is exactly one of these, uh, messy, uh, cases.

I don’t know what to say about the innocent threat case. Intu- here’s another example of these cases where our intuitions are running us, uh, in, into trouble. And, uh, I think I’d like now to, to back off from this kind of case and ask, well, what, what should we consider as, uh, other things being equal, uh, relevant here?

Uh,

[02:08:09] F.M. KAMM:
So sorry, but it’s a great question. My sense was that, uh, Judy thought that the… I, I didn’t think she said what you said.

Uh, she could correct me up, uh, but she didn’t, So maybe I’m wrong. But I thought her view was that when the fat man is coming at you, he’s gonna be violating your rights.

And so, uh, when you try to stop him, even by killing him, he has no right of self-defense or defense to kill you, not at, at least to kill you in return. Um, so it isn’t a fight. All the right-

[02:08:37] JUDITH JARVIS THOMSON:
That’s to avoid the difficulty.

[02:08:38] F.M. KAMM:
Yeah.

[02:08:38] JUDITH JARVIS THOMSON:
Because, uh, y- uh, my, uh, uh, sense is you gotta, you gotta avoid that difficulty. You can’t have ethics licensing, licensing fights. At least so I think.

[02:08:48] CHRIS KUTZ:
Okay, we are…

[02:08:49] JUDITH JARVIS THOMSON:
Oh, can– Sorry.

[02:08:50] CHRIS KUTZ:
Thank you. Um, we– I know there are many questions left. Save them for tomorrow and Thursday.

[02:08:55] F.M. KAMM:
Yes, please, please come back. Come back. Things will get better.

[02:08:57] CHRIS KUTZ:
Come back. Um, thank you very much. Let’s give a round of applause.

(applause)

Ride home safely.

[00:00:00] JAY WALLACE:
Uh, welcome. I’m, I’m Jay Wallace from the Philosophy department, and I’m going to be moderating today’s, uh, events. This is the third day of our, uh, Tanner Lecture f-festivities featuring, um, Frances Kamm and our distinguished, uh, panel of commentators.

Uh, our procedure today is that each of the commentators is going to have up to twenty minutes to, uh, make some additional remarks about Frances’s lectures, um, elaborating on any issues that they care to, um, speak to that have come up in, uh, Frances’s, uh, Frances’s remarks. We’ll, uh, we’ll take a brief break at that point perhaps, and then Francis will have, uh, an opportunity to respond, uh, to any issues that the commentators have raised on any of the three days. Uh, and then we’ll open the, uh, floor for discussion.

There should be, uh, ample time for informal discussion. Uh, and, um, at, at, at At the end of the discussion, uh, the, the wall will magically disappear, and there will be, um, a reception that I encourage all of you to stay for and to take, uh, to take vigorous part in, um, which will, uh, provide further opportunity for informal discussion of the, um, of the stimulating material that we’ve been, um, we’ve been, uh, listening to this week. So without further ado, I’d like to invite, uh, Judith Jarvis Thomson to the podium to elaborate on her comments.

[00:01:33] JUDITH JARVIS THOMSON:
(cough)

I’m not going to, uh, uh, take time, there isn’t time, uh, to respond to all of the criticism that, uh, criticism that, uh, criticisms, plural, that, uh, Francis made of, uh, uh, papers by me. Um, I, I, I’ll reserve that for the printed text. What I thought I would do is to, uh, talk about the, w-what I take to be the central main principle, uh, suggested in Frances’s second lecture.

Uh, there’s the, uh, important principle. Uh, well, there’s the, the trolley problem. Uh, this is the picture I draw for freshmen when we talk about this problem.

Uh, he’s the bystander who can throw the switch. And, u- generally pe-people are inclined to say, “Of course, he may.” Turns the, uh, swi- uh, throws the switch, turns the trolley to the right, and, uh, runs down one, saving five.

I guess I might have put a, an arrow in here. Isn’t that a stationary trolley? Anyway, uh, the trolley’s in motion.

Uh, okay, now,

(cough)

Frances offers a principle which, uh, we should be able, I, I take it, to appeal to, to explain why the, uh, bystander may throw the switch. Uh, uh, what happened, uh, in, uh, yesterday’s session was that, uh, Tom suggested or argued that the principle, uh, Frances, uh, suggested picked out, uh, the wrong case, some cases that it shouldn’t have picked out. That is, that it wasn’t quite a correct generalization.

Shelly said, uh, even if it was correct, even if it were correct, uh, that wouldn’t be good enough because the generalization doesn’t explain anything. It simply is a generalization of which cases you may, uh, kill in and which cases you may not, and that there’s nothing morally significant in the, uh, notions appealed to in the predicate that would mark it as explaining why the agent may so act. Now, uh, I think that, uh, Tom was wholly right.

Uh, I think, uh, Shelley was probably right. I want to, uh, draw attention to a reason for, uh, possibly doubting what he had said. Uh, anyway, there’s the, the, uh, drawing, but there’s the problem.

Why may the bystander, uh, throw the switch turning the trolley onto the one? Frances’s principle, uh, I don’t know if you still have her handout. It’s at the bottom of, uh, page…

Page, what are we on? Page, uh, two-two. Uh, the principle of permissible harm says greater good or a component of it, I’m gonna leave out Fra- uh, Francis, as you recommended this, this, this complication or a con- may permissibly lead to lesser harm even directly.

Uh, mere means that are required to produce greater good or components that may not permissibly cause lesser harm, at least directly, and lesser harm’s needed to produce… that’s a k- complex, uh, uh, principle. Uh, uh, let me opt for the the simplifying description of it that, uh, Shelly, uh, gave us yesterday.

Frances would like us to accept, and this I think is quite clear, Frances would like us to accept that, uh, if the bystander throws the switch so that the trolley turns to the right track, then the turning of his turning the trolley onto the right track is his saving the five. Uh, so in this case, if the bystander throws the switch, it’s his saving the five that causes the death of the one. The death of the one is not a means by which the bystander saves the five.

It’s the product of his saving the five. Frances’s principle tells us that that’s okay. That is, you may cause the death of the one, given that your saving the five causes the death of the one, and the bystander’s turning the trolley is his saving the one.

By contrast, if you remember in transplant, the surgeon cuts the one up, and the one’s death then is going to turn out to be a means or doing what will immediately cause the death of the one, is what causes then will enable him to cause the saving of the five by distributing the one’s parts. Uh, So, The distinction we’re to be relying on is whether or not what you do to save the five is itself, uh, uh, just a means which then causes the death of one, or is the death of the one a product that comes, as it were, after you have saved the one? And the principle then tells us that if it comes after, if it’s caused by the saving of the one, it’s okay.

Not so if that’s not the case, if the death is caused by the means rather than the succeeding in saving. Okay, that’s the

(cough)

principle. Uh, now,

(cough)

Um, the– as Shelly said, there’s a certain difficulty in here. It’s a little m-m-metaphysical problem about, uh, as to whether turning the trolley is itself saving the one. I’m going to just bypass that as Shelly did yesterday.

Let’s just assume that that works. Uh, Frances says the… what? The saving of the one I think is the flip side.

The, uh, uh, th-the saving of the one is the non-causal flip side of the turning. Let’s just suppose that the turning of the trolley is the saving of the one.

[00:08:53] SPEAKER 3:
Judy, you mean the saving-

[00:08:54] JUDITH JARVIS THOMSON:
Saving of the… I beg your pardon. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. So we’re going to assume that.

(throat clearing)

Now, uh, is that going to work? So is that principle going to, uh, do the job for us? Let me invite you first to make an assumption.

Uh, notice that that one on the right-hand track could be thin, and if he’s very thin, then when you turn the trolley, the trolley, the trolley will just run into him and then run him down and go on. I’m going to invite you to assume he’s very fat. Uh, if I can draw, I mean, a circle here.

(laughter)

He’s fat. So if you turn the trolley, it’s going to slam into him, and it’ll stop the trolley. Okay, now second, if you don’t turn the trolley, it’ll slam into the five, and I’d like them–

I’d like you to have in mind, they don’t need to be fat, but they need to be substantial enough so that if the trolley runs into them, it will get stopped again, just as it would if he ran it into the one on the right. Okay, now, when you make this assumption, this complex compound assumption, uh, I take it, it doesn’t affect whether you may turn the trolley. How much these parties weigh isn’t going to affect whether you turn the trolley.

Okay? So far so good? All right.

Now what we do, and again, I have a little trouble drawing with these pens. Uh, they don’t seem to have any ink. Uh, now what we do here is we add a little piece of track.

Now, if you turn the trolley, you will indeed save the five, but of course, only by smashing into the one that will, uh, stop the trolley. I take it there’s no plausible way in which you can view turning the trolley as itself saving the five, because turning the trolley isn’t going to, uh, uh, get the s– the five saved unless it hits the one. So what we’ve got here is a case in which the death of the one is not caused by the saving of the five.

Uh, it’s caused by the means you take to save the five. That means that by Francis’s principle, you may not do it. You may not turn the trolley.

Now, I, I would like you to consider whether adding that little piece of track could plausibly be thought to make that difference. Suppose you’re the bystander and you say to me, “May I, may I turn the, the trolley?” I mean, it’s– this is hidden.

We don’t see it. Uh, the, the, the bystander said, “May I turn the trolley?” And I said, “Alright, I can’t tell you.”

We have to first find out how much these guys weigh, And then we have to go out and look and see whether those tracks are going to converge. Because if they’re going to converge, then we can’t turn the– then you can’t turn the trolley. You mustn’t turn the trolley.

If they aren’t going to converge, then all is well. “Well, you, you, you may turn the trolley.” And this strikes me as a weird performance.

Uh, it, uh, I think it’s, uh, just about, uh, uh, flatly unacceptable. There are people who feel a little, uh, uh, uncomfortable about turning the trolley in this case. But t-uh, to, to take the view that, in fact, you may not turn the trolley is to take an extreme stand that, uh, strikes me as, uh, to put it mildly, off the wall.

Now, uh, so what have we got? We’ve got Francis’s principle is going to yield that there’s a difference here, though intuitively, uh, I suggest there isn’t. Uh, uh, I was afraid that people might, uh, uh, uh, complain.

They might say, \”Well, what is Judy doing dropping this case on Francis at the last minute without warning?\” This case appeared in a paper that, uh, I published twenty, twenty-five years ago, and Francis knows all about it. Uh, it’s, uh…

So there’s nothing dropping it on Francis at, at the last minute, but here we are. We’ve got this case, and it makes trouble for the principal. That’s just, uh, you’ve had your attention drawn to.

Uh, no, I think it pays, and this is going to get me finally back to Shelley. Uh, I think it pays… Uh, forgive me.

I, I don’t know that I’m running out of time. Uh, just to bring out what– why this appeared, what, what produced this, uh, case. Uh, somebody said to me, and I don’t remember whether it was in an article or in person, that, uh, the solution to the trolley problem is easy.

It’s wonderful how people always think the solution to this problem is easy. Uh, the so-solution is easy. Uh, we just appeal to a very familiar Kantian principle about using people.

In transplant, the surgeon uses the one to save the five. Uh, if God takes and rescues the one, then the surgeon isn’t gonna be able to save the five. He needs the one to save the five.

But when you, uh, turn the… That is, could we? We didn’t have this, uh, this was– this is the original trolley problem. We didn’t have this.

So when you turn the trolley, you don’t need that one there. You’re not using him. If God rescues the one, takes him off the track, then that’s all to the good.

You can save the five without killing the one. So in the, uh, transplant case, you use the one. In this case, you don’t use the one, and all is well, that’s the solution to the trolley problem.

So what, what do you do? You au-automatically insert the bit of track, uh, which now makes it the case that, uh… Let me put that back again. Yeah, who makes it the case that the, uh, one who saves the one by turning the trolley also uses the one, and yet everyone wants to say you may turn the trolley.

Now, uh, I, I just want to come back to, uh, Sh-Shelly, uh, about this. Uh, Shelly had said there’s no, uh, moral linkage, there’s no connect– moral connection, there’s nothing moral at stake in, uh, Frances’s principle that would explain why you may turn the trolley. But if you think back to what generated this in the first place, that’s that appeal to the Kantian principle.

It struck me afterwards that there really, just over the horizon, is a, a, a morally significant distinction, and that’s the distinction between using a person and not using a person. And Francis’s appeal to means could be viewed as a descendant of that, uh, idea. In which case, there is a linkage.

Uh, uh, there, there is something in the principle that’s connected with, uh, I, I don’t say is, but at, at any rate, it’s connected, uh, with morally significant differences. The problem is that it gives the wrong answer. So that remains, uh, and, uh, what, what’s to be done about it?

But Frances is well aware of, of, uh, this difficulty. I don’t know where she stands on, uh, the, uh, this case. It– we trolleyologists call it the Loop case.

Uh, I don’t know where she stands on this case, uh, at the moment, but, uh, at all events, something’s gotta get said about it. You can’t just leave this up in the air. It’s gotta be dealt with by anybody who wants to deal with the trolley problem.

So, uh, I’ll turn it over to, uh, Frances, uh, as to wh-wh-what she wants to do, but my, uh, immediate sense is that if she wants to allow that you may turn the trolley even when there is that track, bit of track in there, then she’s going to have to add epicycles to her principle. Now, once she adds the epicycles, that’s where I find myself coming out with Shelly and thinking probably this is going to not wind up, uh, as, uh, the morally significant distinction that, uh, uh, is needed, but that remains to be seen. So I just want just to conclude by drawing attention to, uh, uh, what I think is one of the several attractions of the view I was trying to sell on Tuesday.

Uh, because, uh, lo and behold, this is no problem for somebody who takes the line I was recommending that you take on Tuesday, uh, because there what we say is you may not do well either. Whether there’s a bit of track there or no bit of track there, that’s it. You have to not.

You have to just lay off. Uh, and, uh, that means then if that’s, if that’s right, there’s no trolley problem. That leaves a lot of interesting work to be done in ethics about killing.

Uh, but at least this problem, if you accept that, then would, uh, I hope like to see it become past history.

(Mm-hmm)

(applause)

[00:20:16] JAY WALLACE:
Okay, I’ll invite, uh, Tom Hurka yet now to the, uh, to the podium.

[00:20:22] TOM HURKA:
So I’m gonna c-continue on, um, uh, uh, with my, on my… A continuation of my remarks from, I guess, yesterday. So what I, what I talked about yesterday, I suggested, as, as Judy said, that there were cases where I thought Francis’s principle of permissible harm yielded counterintuitive implications.

One was that if we’re, if you’re bombing a factory with civilians nearby, then according to Francis’s principle, that’s impermissible if the civilians will be killed by a flying piece of bomb because the explosion of the bomb is a means to the destruction of the factory, which is the good you’re seeking. But if they’re killed by a flying piece of factory, that’s okay because the exploding of the factory just is, or is the, has the, as its non-causal flip side, the destruction of the factory, and I didn’t think that difference mattered. And a similar, um, case could arrive with– arise with trolleys.

Trolley’s coming at you, the only way you can stop it is by throwing a bomb. There’s a civilian next to the track. Sorry, not a civilian, it’s a bystander now.

Um, and, uh, according to Frances’ principle, and I thought she implicitly accepted this in her first lecture, um, throwing the bomb is impermissible if the ci– bystander will be killed by a flying piece of bomb, but permissible if the bystander will be killed by a flying piece of trolley. And again, I didn’t think that was, uh, something that could make a difference. So that was just a counterexample.

But, um, I don’t think countering, you know, trying to match particular intuitions is the only way we should go in moral theory like Shelly and I think Judy.

Um, I think, uh, our moral principles should not only match our particular judgments but also be intuitively appealing in themselves. And in fact, they have to be appealing in themselves if they’re to explain the particular judgments. And so now here I see a further difficulty in Frances’s principle in the– as she applies it in the central cases.

Namely, that the downstream causal distinction that she draws doesn’t seem in itself morally significant. So that’s what I’m going to talk about in the first half today. So the traditional deontological principles concern how you relate to something evil.

They say it’s more objectionable to cause than to unallow any– than to allow an evil or to intend rather than merely to foresee it. And the relevant evils are ones that matter in themselves, so they involve either the existence of an intrinsic evil, such as a victim’s pain when you torture him, or the destruction of an intrinsic good, as when you kill him. Now, Frances’s principle likewise concerns the causing of evils that matter in themselves, such as the deaths of the one in the trolley cases.

And I think a principle will be most plausible if the goods it permits the evils to follow from, remember, it’s okay if the lesser evil follows from the greater good, it’ll be most plausible if the goods it permits the evils to follow from likewise matter in themselves. For example, by being states that are intrinsically good. If being caused by a good is so important, shouldn’t the good in question itself be important?

Now, that condition is satisfied in a case from later in Frances’s second lecture, where five people who cure themselves from a fatal condition then breathe normally, and their expanding chests move some fatal germs in the atmosphere that kill another person, if you remember that example. Here, the death of the one results from the five’s being alive, which matters morally in itself. But the condition isn’t satisfied in other cases, most obviously in my factory bombing case.

And now I’m going to repeat something I said at the end yesterday. Here, Frances takes the relevant greater good to be the factories being destroyed, but that’s not something of intrinsic moral importance. The world isn’t any better just because a factory no longer exists.

Instead, the factory’s destruction matters only as a means, more specifically, as a means to the ultimate goods in the war’s just cause, which might be ending an unjust aggression or preventing a genocide. It’s because, and only because, it’ll further a good like this that the destruction is worth pursuing. In fact, we can describe a sequence of means leading to this ultimate good, including the planes taking off, the pilots pressing the button that releases the bomb, the bombs exploding, the factories being destroyed, and then whatever further means to our end the factory’s destruction allows.

Maybe there are a hundred means in this sequence, with the bombs exploding being number thirty-seven and the factories being destroyed number thirty-eight. What Frances’s principle does when applied to this case is say that an act that kills civilians in pursuit of the ultimate good is permissible if the deaths result from means thirty-eight, but not if they result from means thirty-seven or earlier. Why is that reasonable?

Why say causation by one means to an end is permissible, but causation by another means to the very same end is not? And why make the cut exactly between thirty-seven and thirty-eight? Why not between thirty-six and thirty-seven?

So the bombing is forbidden if the civilians’ deaths are caused directly by the pilots pushing the button, but not if they’re caused by that, quote, “good of his bombs exploding.” Or why not make the cut after thirty-eight? It seems that selecting any means in a sequence of a hundred and labeling it, labeling it a morally significant good is arbitrary and unmotivated.

Now, it might be replied that this just shows again that my, my bombing case isn’t relevant to Francis’s principle. Just because the case doesn’t involve of the, a good of the right intrinsically mattering kind, it’s not one to which the principle should be applied. But actually, if you read the principle more strictly, you get even more counterintuitive implications.

Because if the factory’s destruction is just a causal means to the truly relevant good, then bombing the factory is wrong by Frances’s lights both when the civilians are killed by a piece of bomb and when they’re killed by a piece of factory. In fact, killing civilians is then permitted only when it results from the final achievement of the war’s just cause, which means it’s never permitted during the war. But I think I take it that’s not an implication Frances would want her principle to have.

And I think the same difficulty arises in the trolley cases, which brings me to the question of what the greater good in the trolley cases is. Now, Frances, I recall, I mentioned this at the beginning yesterday, describes the good in the fat man and trolley diversion cases as, quote, “the five being saved.” But what exactly does that mean?

And is it something that matters morally in itself or only as a means? Now, different readings of the phrase are possible, but at one point, actually a couple, Frances equates the five being saved with, quote, “the five being alive.” And if this was the greater good, it would be something that matters in itself.

But we need to ask when the five would be alive, or if your intervention causes them to be alive, when it causes them to be alive. To sharpen the issue, imagine that the trolley will reach the divide in the track at eight o’clock, and that if you don’t divert it, it’ll then travel for ten minutes down the original track, until it reaches the five and kills them at 8:10. Now, given these facts, the greater good you achieve by the di-diverting the trolley can’t be their being alive at 8:01 or 8:04 or 8:07, since even if you don’t divert the trolley, they’ll be alive at those times.

It has to be their being alive at 8:10 and after. But I don’t see how their being alive at 8:10 can just be the trolley’s moving away or be something the trolley’s moving away has as its non-causal flip side. Remember, that’s Francis’s idea, that the saving of the five just is the trolley’s moving away.

But I don’t see how that can be the case. If the trolley moves away at eight o’clock, and the greater good is their being alive at ten past eight. Um, I assume the two outcomes are related in that way, and Francis hasn’t been clear about the meta– about the metaphysics, but it’s got to be that, in one language, one is a constitutive means to the other.

Anything, things related in that way have to be contemporaneous. They have to exist at the same time. But the trolley’s moving away happens at eight, and the five’s being alive at eight ten happens at eight ten, and nothing that happens at eight o’clock can be identical to something that happens at eight ten.

The trolley’s moving away at eight o’clock must therefore be a causal means to the five’s being alive at eight ten, and then given this reading of the five being saved, Francis’s principle doesn’t permit you to pr- to turn the trolley. What causes the death of the one, namely the trolley’s moving away, isn’t the greater good or something constitutively related to it, but a causal means to it. And the principle forbids acts in which the lesser evil results from a causal means.

That’s similar, I think, to what Judy was, um,

[00:28:29] JUDITH JARVIS THOMSON:
getting at

[00:28:29] TOM HURKA:
in her example with, um, when the loop is added, suggesting that there the turning of the trolley is a means to the, the saving, not itself the saving. A different reading of the five being saved equates it with the fives being saved from the threat of the trolley or being out of danger from the trolley. And sometimes in her lecture, Frances equates the five being saved with their being out of danger from the trolley.

Now, this good is plausibly seen as effectively equivalent to the trolley’s moving away, or as something the trolley’s moving away has as its non-causal flip side. Certainly, the fives being saved from the threat of the trolley happens at the same time the trolley moves away, namely at eight o’clock. But on this reading, the greater good isn’t something that matters morally in itself.

On the contrary, it matters only as a means. To see this, imagine that no matter what you do with the trolley, this is a Frances-type example, a rock slide will come and kill the five at eight ten. Here, saving the five from the threat of the trolley is pointless, and diverting the trolley would be wrong because it would needlessly kill the one.

So that the five are saved from the trolley matters only if it causes them to be alive at 8:10. Which means the situation, given this reading, is just like that with means numbers 37 and 38 in the factory case. Imagine that to divert the trolley, you have to pull a long handle, one so long that pulling it will knock a thin man off a bridge and kill him.

It’s a big, long handle, and it stretches out 15 feet behind you. Here, Frances would say that diverting the trolley is wrong because the thin man’s death will result from a handle pulling, that’s just a means. But if the five’s being saved from the threat of the trolley is likewise just a means to what really matters.

Why think a death resulting from it or from something effectively equivalent to it is any different? What justifies giving different means to the same end such a different moral status? So I s– I can see two readings of Frances’ phrase, uh, her term for the greater good, namely the five being saved.

On one reading, this good matters morally in itself, but the trolley’s moving away is only a causal means to it, and her principle forbids diverting the trolley. On the other reading, the trolley’s moving away isn’t a causal means, but the greater good doesn’t matter in itself, and it’s– and is itself only a means to what does. On this reading, the principle can only permit diverting the trolley by drawing an arbitrary distinction between means to the same end.

On neither reading is it true both that the principle of permissible harm yields the result Francis wants in the trolley problem and that it’s intuitively appealing in itself. So do I have a l– bit more time? Yeah.

So, um, So that’s kind of my criticism of Frances, um, that it has counterintuitive implications and that the principle– Oh, I should say, Yeah, I think I make two criticisms. There’s a counterintuitive implications and that it’s unmotivated in itself, and I think they’re, um, connected because in the counterexamples, the principle is drawing what looks like an arbitrary distinction between means to the same end, flying pieces of, um, bomb and flying pieces of factory.

And that’s explained if the principle is drawing in the applications Frances wants, an arbitrary distinction between items on a list of means to the same end. So those are my criticisms, but I wanna, um, I don’t wanna only criticize Frances, and I wanna conclude with some more positive points about her principle than the general type of idea behind it. So, um, I should say, by the way, none of the criticisms of the last criticisms apply to cases like the ones where the people breathe and make the germs, um, move through the air, because in that case, the greater good is something that matters morally in itself.

And I think it’s true that, as Francis says, that the people are permitted to save themselves, even if their breathing will cause the germs to move. And it may be that Francis’s principle gives the right explanation in that case. In addition, I think there are cases where an analogous, though not identical, principle, one that draws a similar downstream causal distinction, seems, to me at least, to be morally relevant.

Let me describe two of these cases from the morality of war. So I’m gonna– I think of these problems in war contexts, not in contexts involving tracks. So these cases involve the just war condition of proportionality, which says the resort to war is permitted only if the relevant goods the war will secure are proportionate to or sufficiently great compared to the evils it will cause.

In this assessment, the relevant goods don’t, in my view, include all the goods that the war will produce. They include those in the war’s just causes, plus some other closely related ones, such as the de-deterrence of would-be aggressors. But they don’t include the pleasure our soldiers may get from real action, and they also don’t include some– I also don’t include some economic goods.

Imagine that our or the world’s economy is in a recession and that fighting a war will lift it out of the recession as World War II ended the depression of the 1930s. I don’t think this economic benefit is relevant to justifying the war. An otherwise disproportionate conflict can’t become proportionate because it’ll boost, um, GDP.

But now imagine that in 1990, Saddam Hussein had occupied not only Kuwait, but also the Saudi oil fields, which would he have liked– he would have liked to do, and then drastically reduced both countries’ oil production, driving up world oil prices and hurting, um, the economies of nations around the world. I include African nations because I want you to be sympathetic in this case. Now, here it seems to me, just intuitively, that the fact that a war against Saddam would remove that harm to African countries or give them the economic benefit of cheaper oil is a relevant good.

And the question is, how can that be if ending the global recession is not a relevant good? So I’ve given you one example where economic benefits of war seem not to count, and yet in another case where we, we, you know, stop Saddam from driving up the world oil price, it does seem to matter. Why?

What’s the difference? Well, here’s my albeit tentative suggestion. The way war lifts an economy out of recession is by calling for more industrial and especially military production, where that additional production b- boosts GDP.

That’s certainly how World War II ended the Great Depression. But industrial production is only a means to the war’s just cause rather than part of it. And that’s why this economic benefit doesn’t count.

It’s caused by an intermediate step. But in the Saddam case, the reduction of oil prices follows from our ending his occupations of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, which is the war’s just cause. Since here the economic benefit follows from something good as an end, it’s, it is, uh, morally relevant.

Here’s another pair of examples. To fight the nineteen ninety-one Gulf War, the US put together a large coalition of nations, including Arab ones, and albeit more informally, Israel. And the resulting contacts between Arab nations and Israel contributed to an attempt to settle the Israeli-Pal-Palestinian conflict via the Oslo Accords.

This was mid-nineties. That attempt ultimately failed, but imagine that it had succeeded and led to Israeli-Palestinian peace. Even so, I don’t think the good of that peace would have contributed to the proportionality of the nineteen ninety-one war.

And my reason is that what led to the peace was the formation of the coalition, which was a causal means to the war’s just cause rather than part of it. But now consider the two thousand and three Iraq War, one effect of which was to stop Iraq’s payments to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. And imagine that the result of this was a cessation of suicide bombing, and then, though of course it didn’t happen, Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Here I think, tentatively again, that the good of the peace would have been a relevant benefit because it would have followed from the ending of Iraq’s support of terrorism, and that is a legitimate goal of war. I mean, that’s a legitimate just cause in war to end support of terrorism. So my tentative suggestion then, based on my tentative intuitions about ca- pairs of cases like these, is that some benefits of war, economic in one case and those of an unrelated peace in the other, can’t help justify the war if they follow causally from a means to its ultimate just cause, but they can do so if they follow from the just cause itself.

That’s a downstream causal distinction, just like the one in Frances’s principle, and it’s drawn on the same basis. That isn’t to say it’s the same distinction. It concerns the morality of a whole war rather than of an individual act, though I imagine parallel cases can be constructed about individual acts.

More importantly, it involves the production of goods rather than evils. Frances’s principle, if you recall, concerns how the evil of the one death is caused. It’s when that evil results from a means to the good of the five being saved that saving the five is forbidden, and when the evil results from the good itself that it’s permitted.

But my suggestion concerns the production of goods. The question is whether, for example, an economic benefit results from a means rather than from an end that determines whether that benefit can help justify a war. In a non-consequentialist moral views, the causation of goods is often treated very differently from the causation of evils.

As many of you say, it’s morally more objectionable to actively cause an evil than merely to allow the evil to come about, but they don’t say it’s morally more creditable to actively cause a good. If you can choose between actively saving one person and letting someone else save five, you should let the other person save the five. So the fact that a certain distinction looks or may be important when we’re producing goods doesn’t imply that it’s similarly important when we’re producing evils.

It may be relevant in one of those contexts, but not the other. Nonetheless, my tentative suggestion is the same, in the same family as Francis’s, because it too draws a downstream distinction in how a morally significant result is caused and draws it on the same basis, namely, whether the result follows from something good or only from a means to it. The suggestion that this kind of distinction may matter in moral evalu– in the moral evaluation of actions was, to my knowledge, first made explicitly by Frances, and is among her many novel contributions to ethics.

Even if it doesn’t completely solve the trolley problem, and let’s be clear that no one else has solved it, uh, other- unless Judy persuades us that we should just forget the trolley problem, um, nobody else has got a principle that handles all the cases correctly. So even if Frances’ principle doesn’t solve the trolley problem in that case, it’s a fruitful distinction to have in mind when exploring the intricacies of non-consequentialist ethics that have been the primary focus of Frances’ brilliant philosophical writings.

(applause)

[00:38:49] JAY WALLACE:
Thank you. Uh, Shelly? Shelly Kagan now will, uh, will make some remarks.

[00:39:00] SHELLY KAGAN:
Yesterday, I suggested that even if Frances’s principle matched all of our intuitions perfectly, it wouldn’t yet constitute solving the trolley problem because we needed to see whether there was an independently plausible, uh, rationale that could be provided. And although Frances offers us language that suggests that there’s a rationale there, wh-when I try to actually stare at the underlying technical distinction behind her principle, I don’t see how it maps up to the independent principle, independent, uh, rationale. A-and, and as a result, I’m inclined to conclude that, uh, even if she’s captured the intuitions adequately, that doesn’t mean that we should accept her principle as a correct moral principle.

Instead, we should, uh, look for something that’s got a better rationale. But, but that was all against the background of a simplifying assumption, namely that, uh, we’re all on board about the intuitions that she appeals to about all of the cases. And so it’s just worth bearing in mind and making now explicit the fact that, of course, that’s not the case.

Um, people don’t agree about, uh, the cases, not just, uh, I’ll, I’ll talk about a couple of examples, but it’s not just about the, uh, exotic, complicated, uh, novel ones that, that Frances, uh, introduces. But even for some of the simplest cases, uh, like many of the people in this room, I’m sure have thought about the trolley problem, talked about it with a lot of students over the years. Even when we introduce the, the the original simple, uh, case that, that Judy introduced years ago w-without the loop, just the simple, uh, bystander case.

There’s always some people who say, “No,” you can’t throw the switch at all.” Uh, and, uh, there are always people who say, “Yes, you may throw the switch, and in fact, you’re required to throw the switch.” And other people say, “No, you may throw the switch, but you’re not required to do so.”

People’s intuitions here just, just differ.” And, uh, when you introduce the loop variant, uh, Judy may think it’s, uh, uh, ludicrous to think that adding those few feet of track, uh, could make a difference. But for whatever it’s worth, my own opinion is not very much.

My own intuition is throwing those few feet of track in do make a difference. That’s my- That’s my intuition for what it’s worth.

Some of my students share it, some of my students don’t share it. As it happens, by sheer coincidence, uh, two weeks ago, just before, uh, we went on break at Yale, I was teaching the trolley problem to, um, uh, one of my upper-level classes in normative ethics, And, uh, I said, “Oh, look, I’m about to go off to, to, to Berkeley to comment on Fra- on Frances Kamm,” uh, on, on the trolley problem. Let me run a couple of the cases past you, because there, of course, were some brilliant, uh, novel cases that Frances introduced that I’d never thought about before.

I w- I won’t actual- I mean, if anybody’s curious, I can tell you which ones it are, uh, which ones they, they were, but it, it’s not really important for the point I’m trying to make.

For one of the cases that she talks about just in passing, uh, as a… This is, now this, of course, is a, this is an utterly unscientific survey, right? Don’t–

Nothing turns on this in any significant way, but it, it, it illustrates the point. In, in one of the examples, Frances says, and you know, here’s what people are going to think. Um, uh, half of the students agreed with her, half of the students didn’t, didn’t agree with her.

In another one of the cases, uh, where the-

[00:42:14] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
the names of the ones that didn’t agree.

(laughter)

[00:42:21] SHELLY KAGAN:
My students did ask whether, uh, uh, in the printed version of this, there’ll be a footnote thanking the Yale students in, uh, my normative ethics class for this, uh, this evidence. Uh, uh, in another one of the examples when Frances mentions, “Oh, you know, here’s the case, and, and here’s clear what we, you know, intuitively what we should do,” three-quarters of my students did not have the intuition, uh, that, uh, uh, she was looking for. Now, this seems to me should give us pause.

I mean, it’ll give anybody, uh, who’s trying to do ethics pause when we bear in mind the wide levels of divergence. And I think one moral of the story, at least on the face of it, is puts more weight on trying to find an independently plausible rationale. Uh, it would be one thing if all of our intuitions, uh, were completely lined up.

Even then, I was suggesting yesterday, that really wouldn’t be good enough. But at least it would be something. We’d have the direct support of, uh, uh, everybody’s intuitions.

On the other hand, if people’s intuitions are widely, uh, divergent, then, uh, we’re not going to get the kind of progress I think we’re all hoping for in moral philosophy if we simply each of us maps our own intuitions. You know, so it, it might be that Frances’s principle maps her own intuitions perfectly, but if they don’t map, uh, uh, Tom’s intuitions, where does that leave us? If they don’t map my intuitions, where does that leave us, and so forth.

So, so that, that’s a, that’s a, that’s a worry. And, and again, if we had an independently attractive rationale, maybe something that we could all see the attraction of that would support a principle, that would be an argument for it. If Frances’s principle consequently, uh, if she could make good on her thought that it’s substitution in the cases where the principle allows it, it’s subordination in the cases where the principle doesn’t allow it, uh, then we’d say, “Oh, well, insofar as I think that subordination is bad, mere substitution is not so bad, I can see why maybe I need to accept the principle even though it doesn’t match all of my intuitions.”

But if she doesn’t have that independent rationale, she’s just stuck with the fact that she’s got a bunch of intuitions that a lot of other people don’t have. A- and I say that actually even though, much to my surprise, very, very frequently I share Francis’s, uh, uh, intuitions in ways that I, I hadn’t anticipated.

All right, now, what kind of answer could Frances, uh, give to that? Well, we’ll see what kind of answer she can give to it, but at least one answer that occurs to me because it’s, you know, I’ve known Frances for a long time and have had a lot of discussions with her over the years. And one kind of answer that at least over some periods of some discussions she’s, uh, been, uh, gi-given is something like this.

She says, “It’s as though I’m just exploring a chip, uh,” in my brain.” Uh, this is Frances, you know, speaking. “It’s as though I’m just exploring”– All right, I can’t do that.

Um, I can’t, I can’t imitate her voice well enough. So, Uh, what’s that?

[00:45:06] FRANCES KAMM:
I don’t use technical words like that. Chip? Chip. Except in connection with cookies.

[00:45:09] SHELLY KAGAN:
Yeah.

(laughter)

Um, and I’m, I’m, I’m actually fairly confident the word chip was, was, was, what was, what was, when you used it. You know, there’s just some program in her brain that kicks out, uh, intuitions about, about cases, and she’s doing a kind of reverse engineering, uh, uh, as to what the underlying, uh, uh, program, program looks like. And that’s a fascinating piece of psychology.

Uh, but in terms of h- its justificatory force, Of course, it’s a very limited interest, uh, to us, uh, unless it happened to be the case that we all had the same chip, and I’m suggesting that that’s probably not, in fact, uh, the case. Well, there’s a different possible answer that, uh, uh, Frances, I suppose, could offer, which is to say this. And again, this is an answer that I don’t know whether she’ll want to endorse it today.

But, uh, there have been times in which I’ve heard her say things like this. And I, I, again, I don’t mean to dismiss this either. It’s, it’s quite intriguing.

Um, it’s to say basically, she would never put it this way, but I don’t care what everybody else’s intuitions, uh, are. And in particular, she doesn’t care what my students’ intuitions are. Uh, the, the, the analogy she gave, I, I think at least on some occasion, was that she thought of herself a bit like, uh, a wine taster, right?

Now, trained wine tasters can, can make all these subtle dis- determinations and discriminations which vulgar drinkers of wine, uh, uh, certainly-

[00:46:30] FRANCES KAMM:
That is an objection.

(laughter)

[00:46:32] SHELLY KAGAN:
Uh, uh, s- s- You know, certainly people like me, who I don’t actually even like wine, so they all taste like the same to me, right? So, uh, but, you know, the, the, the random wine taster’s opinions just don’t count.

Uh, why should we care about what the random wine taster thinks? Uh, whereas we should pay attention. And so, w-

You know, those of us in the elite, uh, uh, group who’ve, who’ve, who’ve delved in the, in the minds of, uh, moral philosophy for… Is, is that what moral philosophy is looking in the minds? I’m not sure. For, for decades, that’s, uh, you know, those are the people who… A- and, and maybe Francis who’s, who’s delved in this particular area deeper than maybe any of us, uh, uh, maybe that’s the person.

So you could imagine a story along that, uh, uh, of that line where she’s just saying, “You know what? My intuitions are, uh, epistemologically superior, uh, uh, uh, in a way that the, the others don’t. So I don’t really care about the fact that people disagree with me.

Um, uh, I, I just don’t care.” Uh, and again, that’s a, that’s a possible answer, and I’d be intrigued to hear whether Frances is prepared, as it were, to say it to you guys out loud. Um, uh, or whether that’s, or whether that’s not, uh, you know, her, her current take on, on the matter.

I will, I will remark, uh, in just bringing this, this, this strand of discussion to a close, that there are places in the lectures, at least in the written text of the lectures, I wasn’t, uh, uh, paying enough attention during the verbal presentation as to whether this, this– these phrases showed up, uh, w– in which she didn’t merely say, “My intuition is that,” uh, but rather, at least in the written text, she’d say things like, you know, uh, people would think or it seems to me likely that people would think. And so at least, uh, maybe that’s a slip, but if it’s indeed her considered view that it’s not just a question of what she happens to think, but what we all think, uh, then the fact that we’re not all on board with her intuitions is a problem, it seems to me. I don’t think she’s yet come adequately, uh, uh, uh, to, to…

She hasn’t yet adequately dealt with, and I’d be curious what her, her current thinking on that issue is. So, so that’s all I wanna say in terms of, uh, you know, sort of m-m-my comments. Um, but, uh, I, I do actually wanna just take this opportunity to say, here are two things that my fellow commentators raised that really, really intrigued me.

Uh, and, and so this is a plea to, uh, Frances in part to, you know, th-th-there’s been a lot of stuff for her to talk about, and I’m sure she won’t have time to talk about all of them. So, so here’s just my way of flagging, here are two things I’m especially eager to hear her say something about.

So, so one is this, one is, h- uh, Judy’s response to Francis’ response to Judy’s recantation, uh, uh, argument. So, you know, I read Judy’s paper, and that persuaded me.

Yeah, it’s kind of interesting. And then I read Francis’ critique, and I thought to myself, “Oh, my gosh, Judy’s argument, horrible, horrible. Francis completely destroyed it.”

And then I heard Judy’s response. In fact, oh, my God, Francis’s critique, horrible, horrible. Judy’s.

So here, here’s what it seems. I, I’m, I’m very impressionable, apparently. I’m easily swayed.

Uh, s-so, so here is the, here is what seemed to me to be the nub of, uh, Judy’s response. She says, “There’s a lot of window…” Uh, th-this isn’t the way Judy put it, but here’s, here’s, as it were, what, what I mean to be a friendly reconstruction of Judy’s, uh, comments.

“There’s a lot of window dressing in Francis’s criticisms, where, for example, Francis points out correctly that Judy talks about what’s the right thing to do in a certain three-option case, and then draws conclusions from that about what to do in the standard two-option trolley case.” And strictly speaking, as a matter of logic, what we say is permissible in the three-option case doesn’t entail anything about what follows in the two-option ca– And all those remarks are, are, are, are, are correct.

But of course, for all that, it could still be that what we’ve learned from the three-option case should carry over to the two-option case. So, so the, uh, so, so this is all a lot of kind of preliminary ground clearing. That Francis says a lot of things about certain analogies, disanalogies, and the like, but none of it touches the, the core issue.

This is to take Judy’s, just Judy’s, uh, complaint. None of it touches the core thought, and the core thought, I hope I get this right, is this: If we’re in a situation where I’m not required to take on some sacrifice to achieve a greater good. He’s not required to take on some sacrifice to achieve a greater good.

Then it is not permissible for me to impose said sacrifice on the other guy. It’s as simple as that. And you can strip away all of Frances’s critique.

Unless she has given us reason to doubt that principle, then Judy’s argument still goes through. Uh, because I take it that at least as in terms of, uh, their debate, they’re both in agreement, uh, that neither par-party is required to turn the trolley upon, uh, himself or herself. So, you know, Frances has, has, y-you know, a v-variety of ex-uh, of, of examples that are supposed to show.

For example, she, she gave us yesterday, or maybe it was, uh, Monday, uh, Tuesday’s lecture, first lecture, you know, the story where, and, and, and it’s not that Francis made any mistakes about this, but rather just it doesn’t yet touch the principle. Francis points out that, for example, in a case in which I ought to make a small sacrifice, you know, a nickel, whatever it was, to save a life, um, and you ought to make that small sacrifice to save a life, and I completely unacceptably refuse to do it, I’m nonetheless still permitted to force you or to impose the nickel sacrifice upon you. Francis points this out, and of course, that, that intuitively, that’s it, that seems perfectly right.

But of course, none of that touches Judy’s central principle, because Judy’s principle talks about a case in which neither party is required to do it. So what I’d like to know is whether Francis has a direct counterexample to that central principle. I mean, it may be that all we can do is just dance around it.

Maybe what we’ll discover is all the relevant cases are just as controversial as the trolley problem itself, and that would be interesting to discover. But at least I found myself intrigued by the thought that, huh, I don’t have any clearer other case myself, and maybe Judy’s principle is right. I don’t know, but I’d like to hear what Francis has to say about that.

And then just a, a, a quick remark similarly about what I especially liked, uh… Well, of course, the thing I, I most adored about Tom’s, uh, lecture yesterday was the letter from the tr- from the old trolley man. I mean, it’s like, how can you not just love that?

But, but, you know, and of course, I, I, I, I completely share with Tom the intuition that really, you know, shrapnel from the bomb versus shrapnel from the trolley, that matters morally. I’m completely with him in thinking that doesn’t matter morally. But I’ve long since learned not to trust my int- my own intuitions, uh, uh, about things.

Um, but what I had independently had some worries, uh, about Whether or not, even given Frances’s technical distinction, whether she applied it correctly in all of her cases. And Tom, uh, uh, today, uh, especially I think made that point very, very nicely, uh, about whether or not some of the things that Frances needs to call, needs to claim are the non-causal flip side of the greater good, are in fact the non-causal flip side of the greater good. That, that just wasn’t always clear to me in some of the cases, and then rather than just belaboring the point, ’cause Tom’s already made it, I think, uh, so, so nicely, I’ll just say, Yeah, that seems to me a really important issue as well.

Uh, and I’d like to hear, uh, maybe Francis could just respond directly to, uh, to, to that. So let me especially invi-invite that. Just to, um, uh, uh, I’ll conclude on, totally uncharacteristically, a mildly positive note, um, of me.

I mean, that is to say, uh, uncharacteristic of me. Uh, I do wanna say that, of course, I, I mean, I’m just in awe of Frances’s ability to, uh, think of just ingenious case after ingenious case and, and, and keep all these complications straight and, and let alone find a principle, you know, forget everybody else’s intuitions. The ability to find any principle at all that matches all of one’s own intuitions is remarkable.

I certainly can’t do it. Uh, and I’m in awe of her ability to do that, uh, in her own case, um, um, but, but, but beyond that, uh, one of the things I especially liked, uh, was one of the things that she mentioned towards the end of yesterday’s lecture, which is when she started asking the question, you know, initially, so what can the five do? Can they deflect the trolley, and so forth and so on?

And then she asked, “And can–” What, what differences, of any, can the one do, uh, in terms of, uh, deflecting, uh, uh, the trolley?” And discovered, much to her surprise, uh, that her own intuitions were that basically the one could deflect the trolley onto the five, um, in which case, all this talk about the greater good versus lesser good was kind of a red herring. I found that a fascinating and deep point because much to my utter dismay, I’m a consequentialist, I shared the intuitions too, right?

So happily, I say, well, forget the intuitions, right? This, this, this is just self-interest speaking there. But, but, but, but nonetheless, intuitively, uh, I, I found myself sharing those intuitions, and so I wanna say there’s a…

I think there’s gotta be a very, very deep point there, at least for anybody who wants to embrace that set of intuitions. And, uh, I, I really commend, uh, Francis for having, uh, noted it.

(applause)

[00:56:27] JAY WALLACE:
Okay, um, thank you to all three commentators for those really stimulating, uh, and helpful remarks. We’re going to take a five-minute break to give Frances a couple of, uh, min– uh, moments to kind of collect her thoughts and, uh, everyone to stretch their legs, and then we’ll reconvene. Uh, Frances will respond to any of the comments that have been offered over the last, uh, three days that she cares to speak to, and there’ll be opportunity for, uh, fairly extensive discussion with members of the audience.

So five minutes, and, uh, we’ll reconvene. Let’s take our seats and, and have Frances Kamm who will respond to, uh, respond to various comments.

[00:57:12] FRANCES KAMM:
Okay. So, um, I, uh, got an itinerary, and my itinerary said that I would speak first. Respond to commentators, it said, and then the commentators would follow.

And I found that a little odd, but I thought I was supposed to respond to what they told me previously. So I’m going to try to incorporate some of that with what I heard today so that, um, you know, uh, I can deal with the great new bows and slings and arrows of fortune, right? That have been cast at me.

So, um, I want to thank, you know, all of them for their comments. I know this is a lot of work, um, to do. But before I forget, I wanna thank Ellen Gobler, who has been giving me such tremendous assistance.

Uh, quite unbelievable. She’s probably bringing in the King of Sheba tomorrow, but she can still arrange for a wake-up call, you know, for a little old Cam who has odd sleeping hours. So I really wanna thank her.

So, um, Okay. So I thought I was dealing, you know, with my other commentators, and I was dealing backwards, uh, in time, Kagan, Hurka, and Thomson. But I just do want to read again, um, this principle.

I mean, uh, Judith Thomson referred to this principle at the bottom of your handout. And, um, I, uh, want to, uh, read a couple of paragraphs that I left out because I was trying to make things simple,

(laughter)

relatively speaking. Um, okay. Now, um, I w– discussed, you know, turning the trolley away in the standard trolley case and this Lazy Susan case where you turn people away from the trolley.

And I said I’m discussing this in the context where there aren’t any other threats. And then I said there may be other cases. I didn’t say this because I left this paragraph out.

There may be other cases in which turning away a threat or turning people away from a threat is not sufficient to save the group of people. For example, it may be that turning away the trolley also helps possibly, you know, the five, five deal with some additional problem, some other fatal threat to them. In these cases, turning the trolley can be seen as having its flip side.

You will see that in your, uh, little description of the thing. Um, uh, a component of the good of the five being saved, for they need to be without this trolley threat in addition to being without other threats, right? Hence, although moving the trolley may also be a causal means to saving the five by allowing them to, you know, deal with other threats, turning the trolley is not a mere causal means to that end.

So then I generalized a bit, and I said we have this principle that, you know, again, I was very roughly saying, well, here’s this, um, idea, greater good or a component of it, or a means having these, namely the greater good or a component of it, as a non-causal flip side may permissibly lead to lesser harms, even directly. Mere means that cause greater good or components of it may not permissibly cause lesser harm, at least directly. And lesser harms cannot simply be justified by greater goods that they are needed to produce.

I said it was a rough description, and I called it a downstreamish principle. And one of the reasons I said it was downstreamish rather than a downstream view, and I mentioned a little of this, is because

(cough)

in certain cases, removing the trolley threat that would kill the five people will result in the harm to the one person, playing a further causal role upstream to the greater good, sustaining or producing the greater good or a component of it. And sometimes this may be permissible. I actually think I read this paragraph.

Now this, I said, is a complication I will not discuss here, but its possibility shows, I believe, that in considering the permissibility of actions that will harm people, we should consider both how the lesser harm comes about and the role of the lesser harm in bringing about the greater good. So I’m going to come back to that because it relates to the discussion of the loop case that, that Judy gave. Now, I just wanna go back a bit, uh, and I wanna talk about some case— Shelly’s remarks.

In general, the approach that I adopt may be described as follows: consider as many case-based judgments as you can or has come to you, whatever. Don’t ignore some just because they conflict with simple or intuitively plausible principles. I mean, what would we have done if people had said, “Oh, I keep on thinking about this transplant case, but God, it’s so obvious that promoting the greater good is the only thing to do.

Just forget about it, okay?

[01:01:44] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
That’s true. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:01:47] FRANCES KAMM:
Uh, all right. So don’t ignore them, all right? Uh, work on the assumption that some other principle can account for the judgment.

Be prepared to be surprised at what this principle is, then consider the principle on its own to see if it expresses some plausible value or conception of the person or relations between persons. This is necessary to justify it as a correct principle, one that has normative weight, not merely one that makes all of the case judgments cohere. This is only a working method.

It remains possible that some case judgments are simply errors, and we need an error theory for them. I say consider your judgments rather than do a survey of everyone’s judgments, because I believe more is accomplished when one person considers her judgments deeply and tries to analyze and justify their grounds than if we do mere surveys. Because after all, judgments are expressions of belief, and we want to know why we believe things.

Now, this is a quote from the introduction to Intricate Ethics. I’m just reading that, okay? But I remember when I, you know, re-looked at it that, you know, when John Rawls, with whom I’m not comparing myself, nor Plato, nor Aristotle, nor anybody else, right?

Uh, he says, you know, “Why, why am I discussing my particular conceptions of justice?” He said, you know, “What else can I do?” You know, I think this is right.

These are my beliefs. I can’t do surveys and spend my time analyzing that. Um, but I do want to mention that in terms of surveys, you know, there is this, uh, s-website that Marc Hauser used to run, the psychologist, uh, now in the dark somewhere, uh, at Harvard, um, where he claims, you know, that just independent of culture, inde–

Now, he didn’t say in everybody had them, but he said that ordinary the variables that you might think would distinguish people’s intuitive judgments about cases, religion, blah, blah, blah, age, just didn’t do it. People would consistently come in with some responses and not others. All right, so I just want to put that and mention that.

Um, now Kagan says he could see the plausible value in a killing, killing and letting die distinction. He said that, right? He doesn’t believe it, but he could see what’s onto it, and even a mean side effect distinction.

Now, I accept that there is a distinction between killing and letting die in morality on many measures. I said, you know, how much effort you have to make, et cetera. I just don’t think it implies that the duty not to kill takes precedence over the duty not to aid when the killing would occur in certain ways, as it does in the trolley case, okay?

I do not think that when harm to someone is a required means to good for others and is brought about in certain ways. I do think, I do that this can render sometimes an act impermissible. Though I think that if it is brought about in certain other ways, this is not the case.

And I wrote this before I heard Judy’s remarks today because they were about…

[01:04:41] JUDITH JARVIS THOMSON:
now.

[01:04:42] FRANCES KAMM:
For example, in the loop case, turning the trolley away from the five results in the one being hit, and his being hit is causally required to stop the trolley from looping. I think the fact that this, his being harmed has this causal role does not make the act impermissible because of the way it’s brought about, and also because of the part– or the particular role it has in preventing interference with a good that to some degree we’ve already achieved of the five being free from that initial threat to them. Now, I’m going to try to say a little bit more about that, but I actually do think that there’s a difference between, uh, acting because you see that harm to someone will have a causal role and acting in order to bring it about.

And I think that using people as means, when people think of that, they think about acting in order to bring it about that someone can be useful. And I don’t think that’s what’s going on here in the Loop case, But I, I’ll try to come back to that. Another reason I don’t think the means-side-effect distinction is adequate, um, is because, uh, while I buy Philippa Foot’s view that we cannot operate on the five, saving the five by using a gas that will itself harm, uh, you know, someone as a, a side effect, to kill someone as a side effect.

On the other hand, I think that if we know that if we save the five by innocent means, then their normal breathing will move some deadly germs in the environment that will kill someone. We know all this is going to happen, and I think it’s still permissible to save them. So that’s why I don’t buy the straight killing, letting die distinction.

Um, so I’m not willing to give up on the view that there are morally significant differences in the way harmful side effects come about. Sometimes it’s possible– permissible, sometimes not. Uh, Kagan says that he can see a plausible moral value in the distinction between subordinating some people to others versus substituting some people for others with respect to threats, let’s say.

But he does not see that the distinction maps onto or supervenes onto the sort of distinctions I’ve drawn in the– that principle of permissible harm, roughly described. Um, I think he, I think. He does not object that the, the idea of substitution could surve-supervene on the moving of a threat away from some others onto us, from some onto others, Uh, um, or resulting in a new threat created to others.

And I don’t think that he objects to the idea of subordination supervening on, let’s say, toppling someone in front of the trolley as a means of helping others. I think his primary concern was how the fit, you know, um, his concern is how to fit using means, mere means that have harmed to others as a mere side effect into the subordination category, which is where I put it. Okay.

My la– my latest try on this. My current reason for fitting it in there is as follows, and I appreciate all the help, you know, I can get on this. Using a bomb that would turn the trolley, as I see it, is a mere means to turning the trolley.

If it didn’t turn the trolley, it wouldn’t have any good characteristics in itself, even as a component of some greater good, that would justify harming a person as a result of using it, it seemed to me that when we decide to use the means, let’s say the bomb to stop the trolley, right? Despite the harm it will cause to that bystander, at that time, we are choosing between using it, right, and a person’s life when we wouldn’t otherwise, of course, merely because of the usefulness of the means to yet others, the five. And I thought there was something wrong with that that smelled.

(laughter)

I’m not a wine taster. I’m a, you know, shit detector or something.

(laughter)

Sorry, sorry.

(laughter)

I go– In New York, they don’t enforce the dog cleaning ordinances very carefully. Uh, you have to use your own, uh, abilities, all right? Um, so, uh, it smelled of subordination to the per- of, to the person in virtue of the value being given to the means by its relation to the welfare of other people, the five.

Now, I think that my view about this is connected to my view about a case that I presented at the end of my first lecture called The Saving by Letting Die case. Now, in that case, if you recall, uh, a trolley was headed to eight, and the idea was that-

[01:09:15] AUDIENCE MEMBER 1:
Can you tilt it,

[01:09:16] AUDIENCE MEMBER 2:
just a little more

[01:09:16] AUDIENCE MEMBER 1:
so we can see? Okay.

[01:09:18] FRANCES KAMM:
Yeah. Trolley was headed to eight, right? And, uh, th-this bystander, right, could turn it to one, uh, you know, person, or they could turn it to this pathway, right, that they needed and were going to use to save five people who were dying,

Right? Uh, they were going to use this, so after deciding what to do. In this case, they were going to rush off to save the others.

[01:09:42] SHELLY KAGAN:
But that will block it?

[01:09:44] FRANCES KAMM:
Yeah, that will block it. You turn it this way, it’s going to block it. Okay.

So in this saving by letting die case, right, I’ve just described it. Uh, okay, turning the trolley onto a track where it kills one other person, or alternatively in direction where it blocks a path that is required means that the bystander will use, and that only he can use, no one else can use it now, to save the five other people. I suggested that, that, that in this case, the bystanders should turn the trolley toward the path, thus sacrificing the means of saving the five rather than killing the one person.

If you remember, I said, you know, “What’s going on here?” You know, letting the five die. Is it letting the five die, you know, rather than killing one?

Then how come I also want to say, you know, how can it be consistent to say that if there had been a trolley going to the five when they were perfectly okay, they’re not dying or anything, or I could turn it to the one, that I could still believe that I should turn it to the one. Remember I said, “What’s going on here?” There was a top part of the diagram and the bottom.

So I was very intrigued by this case when I, when I came up, you know, hit me. Um, Now, the thing is that here, what I said was, in my current views was that I thought that it would be wrong to kill someone just to be able to save the means that has value for saving other people. And it seems to me that this is something that’s resonating with me, and it has something to do with why I think that the means, all right, now you may disagree, all right?

I think that, uh, why, why the means that, you know, in this case, it’s, it’s another case in which a mere means confronts a person’s, you know, in a choice, it’s not exactly the same, where the means will actually cause the harm. Here, the means is not causing any harm, but I’m still choosing between using the means, maintaining the means, right, for what good it can do to others and another life. It’s obviously not exactly the same.

I think that this point may also be re-related to a point that Jeff McMahan makes in his discussion about proportionality calculations in war, namely the fact that our bombs will destroy machines that are needed and would be used to save lives. You know, when you figure how much good is done by this bombing, you know, how many munitions we save, how many lives are lost. He says he doesn’t think that we should count all the people whose lives will not be saved because we destroy those machines, the way we do people who our bombs will actually kill.

They’re gonna die. There’s no doubt about that. Oh, my time’s up.

Life is over. Oh, no. Okay.

Anyway, uh, and I think this is a related intuitive judgment. Okay, so I just wanna say wh– something about why I put it in that category. I’m sure it’s not satisfactory, but I just wanna say.

Um, okay, so I’m gonna skip this part here on this part. And now I think I’m gonna go on to some of the things that Thomas Hurka has been concerned with. How am I doing on time?

When should I end, uh-

[01:12:50] ORGANIZER:
You have about twelve minutes.

[01:12:51] FRANCES KAMM:
Oh, gosh. Okay. So, um, I’ll deal with some parts.

Uh, uh, Tom– One of Tom’s concerns is whether there could be a moral distinction between harms coming about as a, as a result of a threat being removed from five, or five being removed from the threat, and harm resulting from a mere means to the removal of the threat from the five, like a bond that would move the trolley, but part of which would hit a bystander and kill him. He doesn’t think there is a moral distinction between a trolley being destroyed, whose flip side, let’s suppose, before his other criticisms, is that the five are not threatened by it, and that’s a real good. When part of that trolley will hit a bystander, uh, he doesn’t think there’s a distinction between that and a bomb being used to destroy the trolley when part of it hits a bystander.

Uh, he says, “I should not distinguish between these two bits of flying material as morally significant.” Uh, I think, by contrast, that it is permissible to blow up that trolley that is a threat, knowing that eliminating this threat to the five will result in a part of the trolley being a threat to others. But I don’t think it’s permissible to use that bomb that would itself kill the bl– uh, the bystander.

And this isn’t because I’m distinguishing between, you know, different parts, uh, you know, mechanical part one, part two, but it’s because of what I was just trying to explain before about what I thought was at stake when you choose between using a means, right? That will harm someone. Um, or you put the, you know, you refuse to sacrifice, you’re employing a means, uh, in a contest with another life, okay?

Uh, now, so that bears on why I think there’s distinction, this distinction, right? Um, morally speaking, that it’s morally significant, not just about different pieces of metal. Okay, so now let me see if I can skip over some material and go to something.

All right, so another one of Tom’s criticisms, uh, I had a long discussion about his, uh, views, uh, on war and his views about what he thinks my views were on war. And I mentioned last time that, uh, he quoted a passage from Ethics for Enemies, and he seems to think that I believe that the principle of permissible harm, which we– I read applies in wartime. I think that it—it, he says, “I think that it has bizarre conclusions like that you can bomb a factory and kill people, but you can’t use bombs that will kill people.”

And he seems to think that I suggested that, well, so much the worse. You know, they laughed at Galileo or Christopher Columbus. But that isn’t what I said.

I said that I wanted to point out that if we were… I said, if, check page one forty-two, if we were to apply that principle, this would be the results, okay? And I don’t see that just war theory really has to abide by this principle.

Okay. And since two thousand, in my first paper on just the issue, Justifications for Killing Con– Non-combatants in War, I’ve been trying to, you know, figure out, you know, what is, uh, sh– what is going on in, in, in collateral damage in just war theory, or what should be going on. And, um, I think I briefly mentioned that I think that the reason it doesn’t matter whether they’re killed by the factory blowing up or the bombs, right?

Is that, uh, the sorts of people who will be harmed are not your standard ordinary, uh, innocent people, innocent victims.

(breathing)

They may be neutrals who get higher inviability ratings. You may not even divert a trolley towards them, even if the principle of permissible harm says in other cases you can divert. Uh, you may not divert a missile, Right?

That’s going between the two warding– warring parties and will kill a lot of people, even in the just country, right? Innocent civilians onto people, fewer in number in a neutral country. I don’t think you can do that.

And likewise, I think that it may be that citizens of an unjust country, though they’re not fighters, and they may be opposed to their government, may have some responsibilities or to, to bear costs imposed on them for the sake of stopping their regime from being unjust, and we’re gonna impose those costs. Now, f- more technically, Har-uh, Hurka wonders about speaking about blowing up a factory as a greater good in itself. This is if you were to try to apply the principle of permissible harm to war contexts, which I don’t think you should.

Um, or if you apply it, you know, you just say, “Look, uh, there are different sorts of people here that we’re dealing with.” Um, but suppose you were trying to apply it. He says, “How can you say that blowing up this factory,” you know, is a greater good?

Uh, it’s just another one of these means to what’s really a greater good, you know, the end of the bad people or the just cause coming about,” right? And, um, I guess I, at one point in that 2000 article on justifications for killing non-combatants, I tinkered with the idea that blowing up the factory was a, not a means to the just cause, but a component of it. You know, you’ve gotten rid of a little bit of the enemy.

Okay? I didn’t think that worked. Um, I thought maybe, you know, the flip side of getting rid of these factories was, you know, well, fewer people are going to be threatened.

There aren’t any arms. Okay? But the thing is that it may be that what really, if you were to try to apply something like a principle of permissible harm that I described to these cases, you just have to focus on the states of affairs, whether they’re intrinsic goods or not, greater goods or not, that you think actually, if they came about, would justify the deaths.

Now, uh, if you think that the factory blowing up when they’re doing these military calculations, you know, do justify a certain number of deaths. Of course, you may think it’s only because it will ultimately lead to the war being won, but you’re not thinking about whether the war being won justifies these deaths. You’re thinking about this factory, taking it out, will that justify these particular deaths?

You contrast with the means that you would use to blow up the factory, these bombs, right? And you think, would blowing off these bombs by itself justifies these deaths? And you say no.

Okay? So that’s why I don’t think that blowing up the factory is just like means number thirty-eight, where the blowing up the bomb is means number thirty-seven. I’m closing my eyes because I try to, you know,

f- get into this. I’m sorry. I apologize.

But anyway. So the thing is that, um, I, I do wanna say something further about this business about, um, what the greater good is. All right, so I must say that, you know, Tom’s analysis, I’m not sure if I can follow it, but, you know, the question is when you turn the trolley away and the f– one version, the second version of it is when the threat is away, you know, the five are free of the threat, you know, is that a greater good?

I mean, suppose some rocks fall on them, all right? Um, again, I wanted to say that I do think that, um, I was dealing with a situation where there are no other threats, uh, and I said that. But the thing is that, uh, when the, uh, th-the people are alive, even for a few seconds before the rocks fall on them, those few seconds when the trolley is away before anything else happens, I, I realize, you know, time is granular and non-granular, and there’s this whole metaphysical issue, but the thing is that I don’t see that just as a means to the greater good.

I again, I do think of it as a component. I mean, you’ve gotta… You’re, you know, your good of your being alive for a long time is composed of your being alive now and your being alive then and then and then and then.

And it may also be a means to that, you know, later stages, but it’s not just that. Uh, the other thing is that I don’t see why Tom thinks that this problem doesn’t arise in his other ca– in the other cases. Namely, suppose the five cure themselves, right?

And they breathe out, and then the germs come, and they kill the one. And he says, “I don’t see a problem. Their being alive is the greater good.”

But look, they’re only alive for a couple of seconds, and then they breathe. Who knows? Maybe the rocks are going to fall on them.

So I don’t see why the same problem doesn’t arise in this case. You say, “I see they’re saved,” okay? But look, I mean, what causes the germs to move is just the first few seconds of their being saved, right?

And that’s not the greater good, you know. It’s got to be a component of something much larger. I mean, in general, when we go to save five people rather than one, we say, “I’m trying to produce the greater good.”

But we know that saving them, you know, who knows what’s going to happen to them after I leave them? Okay. We assume, right, that that good is going to occur.

Now, the other thing is, with respect to his, I’m very happy that somebody’s finding some use for something, you know, the greater good versus mere means distinction. I’m just wondering whether he might think, yeah, four minutes, right, and then the bombs go off. So I’m just wondering whether he thinks that, um, suppose that we hadn’t, you know, we, we win the just cause and that stops, uh, the terrorist stuff and the Arab-Israeli peace comes about, right?

And suppose the just cause being won lasts for about one week, and then things start over again, right? Are you gonna say, “Well, it wasn’t really the greater good that led to the ending of the Arab-Israeli conflict.” Okay?

So I’m just worried about this problem appearing in lots of other cases, uh, that you mentioned that you think… seem to think is immune to it. Um, okay, so now let me deal with some of the things that Judy said. Uh, Shelley, uh, how can I deny Shelley his requests?

I mean, you know, what Uh, this one’s for you, Shelley. Torch Song or something. Okay, so the idea here is that, um, I was concerned.

I mean, you know, it goes without saying that, that I have enormous respect for this article. I mean, I don’t usually spend time thinking about articles as much as I thought about Judith Thomson’s article. And I, I wasn’t even concerned in my first lecture with whether her conclusion was right or wrong, but just her arguments for it.

And I do think that, um, uh, I dealt with two parts of it that were of real concern to me, the idea that if you’re not willing to impose a certain cost on yourself, right? A large cost that you, you know, you don’t have to, that you may not, um, impose it, right? Uh, on another who also didn’t have this, this duty, you know, to, to do this.

Um, and, um, the case that I gave Shelly that I sort of thought it’s, it’s not a harming case, but I think there are harming cases. You know, when I’m– if I, if I let myself drown, I can save five people. You know, I move into a, a place where I will not be able to get out of and whatever.

I can save five people, and I’m not going to do that. I don’t have to do it. It’s blah, blah, blah.

All right? Uh, you want me to save you? You’re right next to me, right?

One person. And, uh, you don’t wanna give up my assistance.

[01:23:16] SPEAKER 5:
Right.

[01:23:17] FRANCES KAMM:
And I could assist you, but I leave you to go and save the five people when I know it’s not gonna cost me my life, but it’s gonna cost you your life. So in that case, I thought, you know, look, it’s at least the case that, you know, I’m not willing to make a sacrifice, and yet I think I can impose that loss on someone else. And my related point was that I don’t think I’m making the other person be an altruist.

Sometimes Judy says, “If you’re not willing to be an altruist, why you making him an altruist?” I’m not making him an altruist. Giving up your own life is a different thing, and I’m not asking him to give up his own life.

Uh, I’m not asking that. I’m doing something that is going to cost him his life, and that is not requiring altruism for him, and the the morality of that may be different. Okay, finally, the tr-

The, uh, the loop case. Okay. So what I said about the loop case, and I wanted to say that I didn’t think it was inconsistent.

Do I take my microphone? ’cause cabarets usually have moving microphones.

(laughter)

I guess this is not a cabaret.

(laughter)

This is a microphone? No.

(laughter)

Um, uh, uh, yeah, and this is another brilliant Thomson case, okay? Uh, so, uh, the five are have the trolley coming at them, right? And you, someone could turn them away, let’s say bystander or driver or whatever.

Um, and it would loop around and kill them. That’s the way I usually draw this diagram. And I thought that the way I, the way I looked at this, it wasn’t that I ignored the causal role of this individual.

If he’s not there and he doesn’t get smashed, this trolley’s going to go round back, all right? The way I look at it is, first of all, that what I have, the way in which he comes to have the trolley, you know, have this causal role, is by my getting this threat away from these people. Okay?

And they’re not going to survive at all if I don’t get that threat away from them. Whatever else needs to be done. So I’m getting it away from them, and I’m not, you know, this is one of these things where I see, you know, the, a component, a component of the greater good.

Their being alive, you know, for a certain amount of time and so forth, as a, uh, you know, flip side of this that I’m doing. Now, I wouldn’t do that unless I thought he was gonna be hit. So the way I look at it is, I’m acting because I know that he will be harmed.

It will have this causal role, and I wouldn’t do it otherwise, admittedly. But nevertheless, the only thing I’m doing that has this effect on him, Right, of killing him and the f-subsequent, f-with the subsequent role, is just moving that trolley away that has, as its flip side, an important thing, namely a component of this greater good. If I were on the trolley and I found that it was going to jump over him, lo and behold, all I had to do to get it away from the five was do a certain amount of effort.

And that’s not enough. It’s going to jump. If I could give it a little wiggle, then it would smash into him.

I don’t think I’m permitted to give that wiggle because that’s a mere means, you see. It doesn’t have that relation to that component of the greater good. Okay, this is Frances’s wild fantasies, but I just want to say that this is the way I look at this.

Now, I think that what’s happening here is that I’m s- actually involved in sustaining some sort of a, I called it a structural equivalent, we can call it a component, of the greater good. If it weren’t that there was this additional threat produced by my getting rid of the trolley going in, you know, this way, right, I’d be home free. And a further effect of my doing this sustains what I have done originally.

Okay, that’s the way I look at it, as sustaining. Now, the one thing, how does this relate to mere means? Uh, Judy tried to help me out.

She thought my views relate to mere means. But see, the thing is that I really do think that when you act because you know this bad thing is going to happen and it’s going to have a causal role, this is not what people are ordinarily talking about when they think of using someone as a mere means. Um, so let me tell you that if you were to wiggle this thing, then I think you would be using him as a mere means.

And just my finale– I know, I hear the encore. They’ve, they’ve asked for an encore. I can’t deny them.

(laughter)

So I just want to say, okay,

(laughter)

you… I just want to say, look, Tom has introduced the war thing, so this may be clearer in some ways if you think about the following case. Usually, people say you can’t terror bomb civilians.

You’re using people as a mere means to awaken fear in the population so that the population will call for surrender, okay? Can’t use people’s mere means. However, you can bomb the factories, you know, side effect harm, collateral harm, okay?

But now consider an in-between case. You’ve got to bomb a factory, and it’s unfortunately gonna have collateral harm of killing some children in a school that’s always there in a philosopher’s example, right? And that will in fact make the parents unhappy, you know, and, you know, as a result of that, okay?

Now the thing is that in this particular case, if the children had not been killed, the parents would quickly have rebuilt that factory. There would have been no point in bombing it. It’s a waste of time.

They’re going to rebuild within a day, okay? It’s only because the deaths of the children are going to make them so sad and grief-stricken that they won’t be able to rebuild. Because you know that will happen, the side effect of your bombing will be this, and it will have that causal effect.

That’s the only reason you continue with your project of blowing up that factory. Now, I think that that action is permissible. I don’t think you’re allowed to do anything deliberately to make it the case, other than bombing the factory for other reasons that you have, to make it the case that the children die and the parents are grief-stricken.

But if the children’s death is going to be a side effect of doing that, which it wouldn’t have made any sense to do unless you knew it wasn’t going to be rebuilt, it’s permissible to do it even though the deaths of the children clearly you’re depending on the causal role. So I think that things are more complicated in my world than everybody else’s, and I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is. Thank you.

Thank you, thank you. Thank you, everybody, for letting me go on.

(applause)

[01:29:46] JAY WALLACE:
So, um, the floor is open for, for questions and discussion.

[01:29:52] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Hi, I, I really learned a lot from your talk, and I, I really, uh, appreciate the chance to ask you this question. Uh, I, I had a question about a, a brief comment that you made in your lecture yesterday. Uh, you said something to the effect of, “If the bystander were, were a bodyguard or maybe had promised, uh,” I mean,

I, I don’t know if you actually said this, but we might think by extension, had promised, you know, the one or the five that he would save them, that might change how things work. And I, I just, I wanted to invite you to say a little more about that. It, it does seem puzzling.

We normally think that if it’s wrong to turn the trolley, uh, and we normally think that, you know, a promise to do something wrong doesn’t change your reasons to do that thing, uh, and yet we do sometimes, as you were sort of pointing out in the war case, think that some roles, at least, can change, uh, can give us permissions. I mean, the, yeah,

I guess your colleague Arthur Applbaum might deny this, but a lot of people think that, uh, uh, a role can give you a permission or, or, or even require you to do something that would otherwise be immoral. So I, I guess I just wanted to invite you to say a little more about that.

[01:31:03] FRANCES KAMM:
Thank you very much. Um, I think I mentioned the bodyguard case only in one context, namely the surprising result. I mean, that I thought.

I don’t know if it is true or not, but it seemed to me that if the one person had a threat coming at them, right, they might, uh, move it away. And I described various ways in which it might be moved, you know, by their, uh,

(breathing heavily)

breathing heavily and it moves away, or by their pushing it away, or by their having a shield, right? That it will hit it up against and it’ll move away. And I thought that that would be permissible even if a greater number of people would be harmed by that threat then, right?

And so there the, the question was, you know, how can it– it can’t be the case that you’re producing the greater good. You know, you’re, you know, you’re making things worse from the point of view of the overall good. One person is saved and five are died.

So what I said was, I still thought that one person could do it. And then I went on to go back to the standard bystander case where you have someone who is, um, uh, not themselves threatened, but has to deal with the threat. So I thought that somebody might say, “Look, uh, you know, do you think there are any implications from what the one person can do on his own behalf for what someone, a bystander can do for him?”

Okay. So to begin with, what the one person is doing is not imper– I think impermissible. What he’s not doing on his own behalf is not impermissible.

What he’s doing, right? So the question is, can this, uh, bodyguard, suppose the bystander were his bodyguard. That’s where I introduced the bodyguard or a close friend.

Could a close friend or bodyguard help that one person move the threat away, even though the five people would be harmed? And I thought that, yes, it would might be permissible for that person, but the person would not necessarily be doing something impermissible morally because… And why did I say that?

Because I said, at least according to non-consequentialists, we don’t have a duty to always act from the impartial point of view in which we maximize the greater good. We could sometimes, for example, give more attention to our families or our friends. That doesn’t mean we can go out and kill people ordinarily to save them.

We mustn’t do impermissible things, right? But if the by– if, if the person himself could do this, and it wasn’t impermissible, then I thought that somebody could help him do it. Now, there may be cases where, you know, there’s a break, uh, between what you can do permissibly and what someone can help you to do.

But in this case, I thought it might be permissible so that the bystander who was a bodyguard would not be acting impermissibly. On the other hand, this was not the bystander that I ordinarily think of. I ordinarily think of someone who was an impartial agent, right?

And I don’t think the impartial agent should help the one person push away the threat to the five. I did say that even an impartial agent, I thought, um, should perhaps remove the one person off the track, even if this would lead to the trolley, let’s say, not hitting him and looping around to the five. I didn’t discuss it in the context of the loop case.

I thought that was different. But I didn’t say that a bodyguard could do everything. And impartial…

I said an imp– I, I didn’t s- I didn’t say that all bystanders were bodyguards. Some of those who are bodyguards for people may do sometimes what those people themselves could permissibly do, but impartial bystanders not.

So it wouldn’t it. It didn’t license impermissible acts on the part of anybody.

[01:34:44] ORGANIZER:
Just use the microphone. Okay. Laura?

[01:34:51] LAURA:
Uh, thank you for, um, your lectures and all the comments. This has been super interesting. I have a qu– uh, a point about the Loop case, which is involves both, um, an objection to your response to it, but also a suggestion for a different response you could take.

So first, um, notice that when there’s no person on the track, when we just have five people versus no people, that, um, adding the five feet of track makes a big difference. In– Without the five feet of track, you’re morally required to turn the trolley away to not hit the five people, and when the track, the five feet of track is there, it doesn’t matter what you do, um, because the trolley’s going to kill them either way. And, um, so this is– this presents an objection to–

I, I took it that your response to the circular case with the, um, large person was that, um, in turning the, uh, trolley towards the large person, you’re sort of primarily doing this act that’s, um, removing the, the trolley from the five people, and it has this extra consequence, um, though it’s not sort of part of the means you’re taking that the, the trolley won’t loop around and hit them. Um, so the objection t-to that response is that turning the trolley away from the five people actually isn’t an act of, um, or turning the trolley right isn’t an act of turning it away from five people in the loop case, so it can’t be that that’s the act you’re doing where there’s this sort of as a side effect, um, the person gets hit and stops the a sort of secondary effect of the act because it just wouldn’t count as an act, uh, as the act of doing that without the larger person. But then I thought, um, given that there really is a big difference between the status of the act when there’s no one on the track, w-uh, when there’s five feet and when there’s not five feet, um, why not just deny the claim that the extra five feet of track, uh, shouldn’t make a difference to what you do?

It clearly makes a difference in the case in which there’s no one else on the track, so why can’t it also make a difference in the case in which there is someone else on the track? So why not just say, um, yes, in– if there is someone on the track, and he’s required to stop the train, I can’t turn the train, but that’s because it’s sort of relevantly equivalent to pushing the person off the bridge.

[01:37:22] FRANCES KAMM:
Yeah. Well, it’s the last part. I mean, this is very interesting, and I wish you would, you know, send me these remarks.

I don’t know exactly, uh, how to respond to them. Oh, I don’t know, exactly know how to respond to them right now. I think it’s very interesting.

Um, I don’t think that it’s equivalent to pushing, toppling someone. Now, you seem to want to say that it is because this action of turning the trolley away from the five, um, is something that one wouldn’t do at all if the one person wasn’t there and there was this extension, right? And, um, I guess I, I’m not convinced that the fact that when there’s nobody there, you want to say turning it away from them, right, is just equivalent to letting it go towards them, right?

Um, I, I’m not– Maybe the difference between, you know, letting it go towards them and turning it is not going to be sufficient to, you know, play on what I should do. But I’m not sure that it’s not, it’s still not that when I turn it away from them.

Okay, um, it, it is one part of what they need to have done in order for them to be saved. Sure, something else is going to need to be done, right? And so that’s why I’m resisting the idea that when I turn it, you know, when there is a person on the track, that it’s just like pushing.

It has no other, or, or, or I don’t want to get into the whole up close and personal thing. You press a button and you topple someone off a track, purely mechanical means. Um, and that that action that you’re doing to get him off the trolley, off the uh, off the t- off the bridge, has just no other role to play except getting him off that bridge.

I don’t think the turning of that trolley’s only role is to hit that man. I don’t-

[01:39:04] SHELLY KAGAN:
What other role does it have?

[01:39:06] FRANCES KAMM:
Well, as I see it, I mean, um, getting the trolley away from one of the ways in which it can hel– hit the five. I know it’s gonna go around, but that’s gonna stop, be stopped. I admit, I mean, that’s the way I see it.

[01:39:19] SHELLY KAGAN:
I mean, yeah, but how does it constitute a piece of the saving?

[01:39:23] FRANCES KAMM:
I think of it as, uh, you know, there’s a threat coming at them in from one direction. I know this can be described around in very different ways is, um, you know, you’ve got to get rid of that threat from that direction, or they’re gonna be dead. Uh, if you turn it another way, you know, it may also be dead, Something may happen along the way that stops that from happening, and they won’t be dead.

Um, I, I, maybe she can answer this better than I can. I don’t know, but

[01:39:50] SHELLY KAGAN:
yeah. There if you want to-

[01:39:52] FRANCES KAMM:
Yeah, yeah. They, you have the experts on the, on the loop.

[01:39:55] SHELLY KAGAN:
Tom, did you? Um, or would you-

[01:39:57] TOM HURKA:
Well, I think, I mean, what Frances is doing is equating the greater good with people’s being free from threats. I mean, that’s, that was my-

[01:40:04] FRANCES KAMM:
No, I wasn’t doing that. I said I wanted to distinguish between a component of a greater good and the greater good. And, and with-

No, you know, sustaining the greater good, I mean, I, I didn’t wanna say that people still being subject to a looping trolley, I’ve achieved the greater good. No. Is there a component?

[01:40:18] TOM HURKA:
No, it’s fine. Yeah, but, but the, the, the, the big thing is

[01:40:21] FRANCES KAMM:
there being a structural equivalent.

[01:40:23] TOM HURKA:
The, the big thing, will there be, will the, the greater good of which these other things are components are they’re being free from all threats. So they’re being free from this threat is a component, and they’re being free from this other threat is another component, and what that adds, a-adds up to is they’re being free from all threat. But that seems to me still a means.

It’s not something that matters in itself. What matters in itself is that they be alive, and that they be alive is something that they’re being free from threats, either one threat or all the threats taken together, causes as a means. That’s the way I see it.

Okay. So I, I-

[01:40:55] FRANCES KAMM:
We see it differently.

[01:40:56] ORGANIZER:
Laura, did you want to follow up with this?

[01:40:58] LAURA:
Um, sure. Just a brief thought about about the loop. So you said that, um, in turning the trolley away from the people, I’m, uh, avoiding one threat to them, and then there’s this separate issue of what happens when it loops around.

I just worry that, um, something that’s playing our, a role in our intuitions is the sort of proximity of, uh, the trolley in this direction, but kind of not in this direction.

[01:41:30] FRANCES KAMM:
Well, because I discussed cases where it might even take longer for the trolley to hit them from the front than from the loop. So I don’t want to deal with that. Um, and, uh, I, I do think that there are– the, the, the situation where you create a threat as a result of doing something to save them from, you know, part of it or one way in which it would harm them is also different from situations in which, let’s say, a tractor were headed at them, you know, or, or Tom’s rocks were gonna fall on them, and turning that trolley would push the fat man into, you know, the rocks and make a barricade or stop the tractor.

I actually think that sort of case may be different. So, um, but, you know, I’m, I’m sorry, uh, uh, loopology is, uh, a subdivision of trolleyology, and I’m not prepared to discuss it. Yeah.

Yes.

[01:42:17] JUDITH JARVIS THOMSON:
The question about this, uh, uh, I’m, uh, a little puzzled. I-if you imagine there’s nobody on the right-hand track, then, uh, what happens is that turning the trolleys becomes pointless, uh, if there’s nobody there. Uh, so, uh, uh, it, it isn’t as if there being or not being a, a, a, a piece of track there, uh, makes a difference as to what you may do.

It’s just that if there’s, uh, i-if there’s, um, a, a piece of track there, then it, it just is– it’s a waste of your time to bother, uh, turning the trolley. I don’t see any ground for concluding from that, that where there is somebody on the track, that the presence or absence, somebody on the right, that the presence or absence of some of that piece of track then makes a difference as to what you may do. Uh, th-that strikes me as just not, uh, uh, following at all.

I mean, not, not even a good reason, uh, to think it. So, uh, I, I think one wants to re-resist this. I do want to mention, uh, uh, about intuitions on, uh, this case.

It isn’t as if, uh, we ought to ignore, uh, in-intuitions. Uh, uh, uh, uh,

(breathing)

(coughing)

as Francis says, we have to operate with our own intuitions. That’s all we’ve got. That’s our equipment.

Uh, we also have friends, and we, uh, operate to some extent off their intuitions. But it isn’t as if what you’re, you should– you do then is just ignore competing, uh, intuitions. Uh, J.L. Austin said what you do when you run across somebody with a weird intuition like the one that the presence or absence of four feet of track makes a difference as to whether you may turn the trolley, what, what you do is you find that person interesting.

You’re trying to find what’s, uh, what’s generating this, uh, uh, difference. And, uh, uh, that suggests that be-behind an intuition, there lurks, uh, some kind of, uh, beginnings or m-mi-mini theory that’s generating it. A-and, and so it is– it’s of great interest to see why.

Uh, but, uh, I must say that doesn’t, uh, in the, the least incline me to mistrust my, uh, intuition. What, what makes you mistrust them is somebody’s producing an argument that shows that there’s, there’s trouble for them. So I, I stuck in an additional, uh, issue that concerned me, uh, in that response.

[01:44:58] JAY WALLACE:
Okay. We’ve got lots of questions here, so let’s push on a little bit, John.

[01:45:04] JOHN:
Thank you. It’s been a great three days. Uh, many decades ago, f– at UCLA, Philippa Foot introduced Iris Murdoch, who talked about the trolley problem, and it was very intriguing, and, uh, and I followed it to a certain extent.

And I’m wondering, in a general way, how you would judge progress on this problem over the decades? And my second question is, taking the classical five versus one, and the five consists of Adolf Hitler, Hermann Göring,

(laughter)

Joseph Goebbels, uh, the Nazi group, and the one person is Gandhi or Einstein or Carnap. Yeah. But, uh, my intuition is-

[01:45:51] FRANCES KAMM:
May I take this, uh-

[01:45:52] JOHN:
mow the Nazis down, for instance,

[01:45:54] FRANCES KAMM:
that this is, uh, uh, I, I really welcome that because what that brings home is that all of these claims, all of the ethical claims that have been being made by all of us, they are all, s- there’s a suppressed ceteris paribus clause, uh, uh, uh, introducing them, every one of them. Uh, when you introduce further facts, uh, of just that kind or further facts about the ki– the kinds of things that Shelley takes so important. I mean, you’re gonna blow up all of ch-

Uh, China if you turn that drill, but now you, you better not turn the… All these things, uh, uh, have to be just set aside. What we ought to be working on is not, uh, and he– here I’m trying again to sell the idea that I was recommending on on Tuesday.

We shouldn’t be worrying about whether we’ve got uh, the, this case. Uh, we we shouldn’t be worried about particular. We have to be worried about features that acts have and ask, “What is it that, uh, what is it that’s generated by the presence of this or that feature?”

And that gives you an other things being equal, uh, claim. Uh, uh, and all the rest of this can come in as a, you can, one after another, you can bring in sections and say, “Now, here’s something that makes, that might make things not be equal, and now we take that seriously and see. Uh, uh, but anyway, that’s, uh, I,

I, I welcome that. Hmm. Uh, Abbas?

[01:47:30] ABBAS:
Let me say, thanks. This has been fascinating. Um, I wanna ask what the principle of permissible harm says about two modified cases.

Uh, the first is a modified version of, I think, what was called the driver two-option case, although I don’t have my handout with me. And the modification goes as follows. Uh, I’m the driver.

If I do nothing, the, uh, trolley will continue on its present course. Uh, but then five people will be randomly selected in some way who will then be killed. You could tell a story, maybe, you know, the, uh, trolley will sort of go off into a plaza, and who it kills will be sort of, uh, random.

But it doesn’t matter, I don’t think, the details. So five people will be randomly selected, and they will be killed. If I pull the lever, it’ll divert it, and now only one person will be randomly selected and killed.

So let’s call that the randomized driver two option case. I want to compare that with, uh, a randomized version of the topple case, where if I do nothing the trolley will proceed, five people will be randomly killed. Um, if I push a button, then from the same population that I’ve been drawing these random people all along, one person will be randomly selected and somehow catapulted onto the, onto the track, toppled onto the track, and that will prevent the train.

Now, for whatever it’s worth, I don’t have an intuition that, that there’s any difference in permissibility in these two cases, um, when it’s randomly determined who will be either on the, the alternate track or who will be toppled. But it seems that the principle of permissible harm should say that there is a difference, because in one case, the evil is the non-causal flip side of the, of the good, and the other case, you just have this means effect. So I’d like you to comment on that.

[01:49:12] FRANCES KAMM:
Thank you. Um, let’s see what I can do with that. So I guess in these, u-um, cases that we’re dealing with standardly, we really do think of, uh, the one person as, uh, uh, sort of separate from the five.

That is to say, of course, each person is a separate person and all that sort of stuff, but the idea is that they’re not thought of as coming from some sort of pool of people, you know, ex ante. Uh, you know, if you, you go with the idea that ex ante we’re all this pool of people, and we have a greater chance of being on the side of the five, uh, you know, just numerically rather than the one, the side with the one, you’d say, “Well, we each maximize our chances of survival if we have a principle that says go from five to one or something.” And that would give you the same result with, you know, toppling someone, right?

Um, but I think the way we’re thinking about this, uh, at least the way I think of it is I don’t, I don’t think in, in ex ante, in those ex ante terms. That’s one thing. Um, so I’m thinking of the fi– of the one person as someone who, um, uh, you know, in no way benefits from the decision to turn to one.

There was no point at which he, you know, ex ante would have benefited from this. Um, now, in your case, what you mentioned, I think, was that the f–the one person who would be toppled, and maybe you also said the one person who, to whom the trolley would be turned, would be randomly selected from some group of people. And so, uh, then, uh, you might think of it, that sort of case in which when you topple someone, uh, I don’t know if you’re thinking about, uh, you know, actual consent or something.

I, I don’t actually believe that people can consent to everything that minimizes their risk of harm or something. But I mean, if what you’re thinking about here is that, um, someone from the group who, you know, had, uh, well, you know, reduced their chances of being harmed in some way by being thrown from the bridge rather than possibly being one of those to whom the trolley would go, oh, all right? If that’s what you’re thinking is going on here, then it’s, it’s possible that you might wanna say that in some sense, um, it’s to the benefit of that one person, you know, to sign on to this sort of a thing.

And that would, you know, put to one side a restriction introduced by the principle of permissible harm, which is really concerned with making someone worse off, right? When they were really at no earlier time made better off by having this, you know, principle from five to one. I mean, if, if that’s what you have in mind, I’m not sure.

But, you know, I, I also feel rather uncomfortable with the idea, I must say I, I, I’m not sure whether it’s uncomfortable, I mean, morally worried about, uh, cases where you think that you can treat someone contrary to, let’s say, this principle, right? Uh, simply because it’s ex ante, uh, it was in their interest, given that they were in the group from all these people were selected, you know, where they would be. Um, when this person at the time—I mean, can they in a sense waive their right not to be treated impermissibly?

Uh, can they say, in a sense, it’s in my interest, uh, you know, to risk being toppled rather than to, you know, have a rule that says nobody can be toppled when I might have a higher probability of being one of the five, right? And I could have been saved. Um, is that sufficient?

You know, is that an alienation or an, an ex-ante waiver of, um, what would ordinarily be impermissible conduct towards that person when at the very time that you do it to them, it’s certainly not in their interest to be toppled, right, at the very time. Um, so I’m worried about cases like that, but I think that’s what’s going on in your case, and that’s the way it’s different, and that’s the way. Follow up?

[01:53:10] ABBAS:
Yeah. So, you know, what I had in mind was, um, if the one person who will be killed if the car is diverted is randomly selected from a population, and also the one person who will be, uh, killed by toppling onto the track is also randomly selected if I push the button, um, So, yeah,

it’s actually not so por-important about the five, whether they’re randomly selected or not. I don’t s- I don’t have the intuition that there’s any difference in moral permissibility of having the person selected first.

[01:53:37] FRANCES KAMM:
Then I don’t see. I mean, uh, if it wasn’t that each of them stood to gain something, you know, by having this agreement and being part of the group, Okay where the five and the one would have been selected, I, I don’t think, see that it’s random. I mean, it is just, I thought, in our world, I guess, random, that, uh, someone is, uh, you know, on the bridge and another person is on the track, and that we can turn to one and not turn to the other.

So that, that doesn’t affect my judgment. Uh, of course, if it were the same person and you would s-say to me, “Look,” we’re either going to put you on the left hand of the track and turn the trolley on you, or we’re going to put you on the bridge and topple you. We are definitely going to do one or the other.

That’s a different case because then the person, you know, either way is going to be dead. And certainly, if he’d only be paralyzed if he were toppled, ordinarily, I don’t think you can paralyze, you can topple people if they’re only going to be paralyzed by a trolley, you know. But if he were to be killed if we directed the trolley onto one track and only paralyzed if we toppled him, then I think toppling would be permissible.

I call that principle secondary permissibility because it’s in his own interest. But, um, I, I, I… Maybe these remarks have been helpful.

I’m not sure. Thank you.

[01:55:05] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
What about the, the question in, in terms of your intuitions of not the, the greater good, but the great enough good. Eh, the… What number beyond five would it have to be before it actually changes your intuition?

That if the move from one to two or two to five is just a, a rhetorical move to make the point, what number would be enough for you to change the direction of the tro-trolley? Who’s that directed to?

[01:55:34] FRANCES KAMM:
Who- to whom is that directed?

[01:55:36] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
You.

[01:55:37] FRANCES KAMM:
Oh, me. Well, I think it’s permissible to turn the trolley, but for a bystander. So for me, I think it is, uh, it’s rather your question is rather to someone who thinks, uh, saving five people does not give the bystander permission to switch to one, right?

That you’re imagining such a person. Um, and then the question to them would be, well, what, you know, what if it were a million or a thousand, uh, so forth?

[01:56:03] TOM HURKA:
Uh- How about the Topple case?

[01:56:04] FRANCES KAMM:
Oh, right. Okay. But before we get to Topple, I just wanted to say, with respect to five versus two, you see that’s the interesting thing about the trolley.

I mean, some people say, well, you know, five is a lot of people, and five is the point at which we’re allowed to divert, you know. And my sense is it really doesn’t have to do with an upper limit having been reached on the people you’re willing to let die, that two would also be enough, okay? Now, it’s a little trickier when it’s one versus one, okay?

When there isn’t any justification at all for turning that trolley, except perhaps giving people an equal chance. I’m not sure what Foot is going to say about that. But I think these cases are cases of, um, the action is permissible.

You’re gonna minimize if the action is permissible, right? There’s disagreement about that, the turning of the trolley, then you can do it to minimize even if it’s two to one. But now Topple, uh, with, you know, a, a million people, um, huh.

Uh, you know, again, I’ll, I’ll go back since I think Topple is like, you know, is like transplant, you know. Uh, we don’t ordinarily we could maybe find the cure for cancer by, uh, just, you know, taking people and, uh, using them in medical experiments, taking their organs, killing them. Probably millions of lives could have been saved already, and we don’t do that, okay?

So it seems like, at least in transplant, all right, uh, what you’re doing, And I don’t think it’s the up close and personal. If we programmed a machine that worked all night on these people and dealt with them, you know, and we got the cure for cancer. Now, if you tell me that these very people, going back to your case, are ones who are as much at risk of getting cancer as others, right?

And somehow you think that, um, they’re wanting to minimize their chances of getting risk, o-of getting cancer, right? Uh, makes them willing to participate in the lottery to be chosen in this way. I’m not sure that they can, you know, that their deciding in this way can give us permission to treat them.

But if you just imagine what’s imagined in transplant, this person who in no way would have benefited ex ante from this procedure, but a million people could be used. I think that’s just what the NIH is up against, and we’re not permitting them to do it. And I don’t think it’s just because we don’t want the government to get involved.

I think, um, it’s not an appropriate way to treat people, and that is a prior constraint on seeking to benefit them. Thanks very much. Uh, uh, I just have a few points that I, that I was, uh, hoping to raise, and I’ll, I’ll leave it, uh…

Yes, I will. Yep. Um, so in these lectures, the questions about permissibility to kill or conversely to let die has, has been a cen– uh, the permissibility to kill or to, to let die has been a central theme.

So the issue of the relationship between people who may be killed or otherwise left to die and the agent, the trolley driver, has been raised, but I feel only in passing, and I, I was hoping that you could say a bit more about this. And for the most part, we’ve been asked to consider the responsibility of either the agent driver or the neutral bys-bystander, uh, directing the trolley. So what I’m wondering is alongside killing and letting die, shouldn’t we be considering the ways in which, uh, second-order agents, uh, whose death carries less responsibility are being produced?

So to put it in another way, uh, it seems that there are humans whose lives are less valued than others, for instance, because of their citizenship status. So these individuals are, in a sense, made to live as more bare life or more bare biological life and to occupy subject positions. Um, and I think this is a question about personhood and, uh, a person’s status.

So is there an inc– as there’s an increasing number of people who can be killed more or less at any time, for instance, uh, stateless people or people who are considered terrorists, um, and yet technically when they’re killed, no murder has been committed, and therefore no one’s really responsible. Um, furthermore, uh, no one who caused them to die will be considered responsible. So, uh, what I’m wondering is if we take the basic trolley problem, um, not unlike the gentleman up front, um, but what if on one track there are five stateless refugees and on the other track there’s an American citizen?

Does that change the nature of the considerations?

[02:00:38] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Thank you.

[02:00:38] FRANCES KAMM:
Uh, well, it doesn’t change the nature of the considerations for me. Um, I think that, uh, in many of the cases… In other words, I don’t think that being a stateless citizen is like being Hermann Göring or Adolf Hitler.

Uh, it doesn’t change the situation. Um, but, uh, I do think that in many of the cases where you– perhaps you’re thinking about where it seems like, uh, the statelessness or the non-US citizen status of people is making a difference to whether we attack them or not. Uh, there may be other things besides whether they’re stateless or US citizens that are as, is held, at least, at least held to justify treating them differently.

Namely, whether they themselves are threats or aggressors or planning harm against other people. And, uh, in these cases that we’ve been dealing with, we’ve been assuming that neither the one person on one track nor the five on the others is a threat to anybody or has produced the trolley being sent to, you know, the five, let’s say. And so, um, some of the, the, the concerns you have, right, where these categories come up may be related to other factors that, as Professor Thompson said, make things not all other things equal.

So I think that’s what best I can do with your point. Thank you.

[02:01:58] JAY WALLACE:
We have time for one more question.

[02:02:10] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Thank you all for your comments. Um–

[02:02:13] FRANCES KAMM:
Speak up, please.

[02:02:14] AUDIENCE MEMBER 3:
Oh, uh, thank you for your comments. Um, to use a real-life example that involves so many of the elements brought in here, bombings, war, tracks, numbers of people, how long people live, even Goering and Hitler, um, uh, and this issue is still controversial sixty-eight years later. Uh, at the very end of– close to the end of World War II, uh,

[02:02:45] FRANCES KAMM:
munitions and other factories were bombed right on the outskirts of Auschwitz, and Auschwitz was skipped, and there were discussions at that time as to whether Auschwitz should be bombed too. There were even photographs of… from– taken from the planes showing, uh, the, the camp. Um, people who were innocent Innocents would have been killed.

More, perhaps hundreds of thousands of more would have been saved. The ones that would have been killed, majority, the vast majority would not have lived very long. A few of them may have survived had they not been bombed.

Uh, and this is still an issue now in retrospect and was a discussion then. How, how might you apply the issue of permissible harm and what is the greater good or the least greatest harm, uh, to that issue? Well, I, I know that people on the panel may wanna answer that, but if, was it directed to Jenny, to me?

Did you want– Yeah. See, I actually did write about this because, um, I I hope I’m not being too personal.

My mother was in Auschwitz, and my father was in Auschwitz. And, um, I, uh, was asked to write, um, by some analytic philosophers. There’s a volume called, you might be interested, Analytic Philosophy and the Holocaust.

And actually, I wrote about something related to that, um, uh, collaboration. One of the things that, uh, you know, with the Nazis in order to save, in order, it is called Harming Some to Save Others from the Nazis. That’s the title of the article.

It’s in this, uh, collection of, uh, a book that I have that c- came out the 2012, um, The Moral Target: Aiming at Right Conduct in War and Other Conflicts. And one of the things that, uh, I think people were afraid of was this issue of collaboration, that somehow, you know, because the Nazis were going to do worse, right, that they would bomb and maybe more lives would be saved ultimately, but nevertheless, they would be doing the bombing, uh, and the killing rather than the Nazis.

And, uh, this, this issue of agent relativity, is it me or someone else, right? If the, if the, if this raises the question I raised at the very beginning. You know, if the Nazis do this, I will have let the people die.

If, uh, I interfere and minimize, I will have been the killer, right? So in some sense, it’s the killing and letting die issue, you can see. But the thing is that I think one thing that’s relevant here is, that came up in the other gentleman’s question is, you know, uh, if there was very little chance of your surviving, uh, my understanding is they thought of bombing the trains taking people to Auschwitz, right?

Um, and they thought this would, you know, reduce the numbers of people ultimately that they would close the camps. I mean, um, if you think of those people as someone– people who were just going to work, you know, it did say, “Arbeit macht frei”, right? Work makes free.

Then you would think, well, you know, um, I’d just be killing people who are going to be working just in order to save lots of lives, and that doesn’t seem right because these people would be used for the sake merely of saving others. But the idea I think was, people who proposed this were, look, these people have an extraordinarily high probability of dying, all right? Uh, it may be that, you know, and everybody who would go in the future, not just the ones that are present, so we’re not just dealing with present people, but the people who would have been sent.

Um, these people’s probability of dying is not increased that much if we killed them, right? And it may actually increase dramatically the possibility of other people living. And I don’t think thinking in these terms, let me just put it this way, is immoral or necessarily wrong.

Uh, and, uh, you know, if you look at some of the ways in which I discuss these issues in that article, you’ll see that I take this very seriously. And I also don’t think that the issue of, “But it’ll be us who will be doing it,” or we will in some sense be collaborating in the deaths of these people, is definitive either. So I do think that this is still an important issue to discuss it.

You’re absolutely right, many of the issues we’ve discussed bear on it, and it’s still a matter of debate, and I’ve tried to contribute to that. Thank you for your question.

[02:06:59] JAY WALLACE:
Great. At this point, um, I’d like to invite you to join us, uh, for further informal discussion over refreshments. But before doing so, let’s all, uh, take this opportunity to thank Frances Kamm and our wonderful commentators.

(applause)

It’s been great to have you all here, and, um, yeah, please join us for refreshments.

[02:07:26] FRANCES KAMM:
I wanna thank… Can I just say… Mike, so I wanna thank the Department of Philosophy and the Tanner Committee for inviting me, and these wonderful people, wonderful people for participating in all this. Thank you so much.

(applause)

Barry? Barry? The best is the Tanner Committee.