Ethical Dilemma

Would you kill the fat man? The Trolley problem and what you answer tell us about right and wrong.
David Edmonds.

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

Churchill's Dilemma 

On June 13, 1944, an explosion by a German's flying bomb ("doodlebugs")at south-east of London marked the beginning of a new torment to the capital that would last several months and cost thousands of lives. The Nazis were already on the retreat on the Eastern front. The missiles were aimed at the heart of the capital which was both desely populated and contained the institutions of government and power. On June 18, 1944, it landed on the Guards Chapel near Palace, in the midst of a morning service attended by civilians and soldiers: 121 were killed. But Nazis faced two problems: first, most of the bobms fella few miles south of the center; second, this was a fact of which the Nazi were ignorant. 

If the Germans could be deceived into believing that the doodlebugs were hitting their mark, then they would not readjust the trajectory of the bombs. That could save lies. The details of this deception were intricately plotted by the secret service and involved several double agents, including ZigZag and Garbo. Both ZigZag and Garbo were on the Nazi payroll but working for the Allies. The Nazis requested eyewitness information about where the bombs were exploding, and for a month they swallowed up the regular and misleading information that ZigZag and Garbo provided. An adviser estimated it may have saved as many as 10,000 lives.

There was an impassioned debate between Morrisson (minister for Home Security) and Churchill (PM). Morrison was the son of policeman from south London, felt more burden that the operation would impose on the working class areas south of the center. The British intelligence (MI5) destroyed the false reports dispatched by Garbo and ZigZag, because it might not take kindly by the residents of South London. 

By the end of August 1944, the Brits got better at shooting down the doodlebugs, and the launching pads for the missiles in Northern France were overrun by the advancing Allied forces. On early September, the war agianst the flying bomb was over. In total the bombs had killed around 6,000, destroyed mostly the areas of south London. Nonetheless, it's possible without the double-agent, many more buildings would have been destroyed and many more lives lost. Churchill probably didn't lose too much sleep over the decision since he face excrucriating moral dilemmas on an almost daily basis. 

Spur of the Moment

A man is standing by the side of a track when he sees a runaway train toward him, the brakes have failed. Ahead are 5 people tied to the track. If the man does nothing, the five will be killed. He is next to a signal switch, turning this switch will send the train down a side track, a spur, ahead of him. Alas, on the spur he spots one person tied to the track.

Gordon Brown (at that time is a Brit PM) during TED interview was asked "you're on vacation on a nice beach. You got new that a massive earthquake and tsunami is advancing on that beach. At one end of the beach there is a house containing a family of 5 Nigerians. The other end, there is a single Brit. You have time to alert just one house." Mr. Brown answered: "Modern communications, alert both."

But sometimes you can't alert both. Sometimes, you can't save everyone. But at heart. they'r about what's right and wrong, and how we should behave. And what could be more important than that?

The Founding Mothers

Philippa Foot (born in 1920) believed there was a right answer to train dilemma. She taught philosophy at Oxford in 1947, "subjectivism", which maintains that there are no objective moral truths. Before WWII, the Vienna Circle (a group of intellectuals of mathematicians, logicians, philosophers) developed "logical positivism" which claimed that for a proposition to have meaning it must fulfill one of two criteria: either it must be true in virtue of the meaning of its terms (2+2=4 or "all trains are vehicles"), or, it must be in principle verifiable through experimentation ("the moon is made of cheese" or "five mean ahead are roped to the track"). All other statements were literally meaningless. 

These meaningless propositions would include bald moral assertions, such as "the Nazis were wrong to gas Jews" or "the Brits were justified in using subterfuge to alter the trajectory of the doodlebugs". The English philosopher A.J. Ayer, who'd attended sessions of the Vienna Circle, later he would say of logical positivism that "the most important of its defects was that nearly all of it was false. Ayer developed what is pejoratively called the boo-hooray theory. If I say "the Nazis were wrong to gas the Jews" that's best translated as "the Nazis gassed the Jews: boo, hiss." Likewise, "the Brits were justified in using subterfuge to alter the trajectory of the doodlebugs" is roughly translatable as "the Brits used subterfuge to alter the trajectory of the doodlebugs" hoorah, hoorah."

The notion that ethical claims could be reduced to opinion and to personal preferences to "I approve," or "I disapprove", to "hooray-boo".

During 1950s and 1960s there was ordinary language movement in philosophy discipline in Oxford, which believed that, before philosophical problems could be resolved, one had to attend to the subtleties of how language is deployed in every day speech (e.g. "by mistake" and "by accident"). 

Foot were preoccupied with the virtues. In answer to the question, how should I behave, in any particular moral dilemma, one approach emphasizes moral obligations and duties: for example, the duty never to lie. Inspired by the work of Aristotle and Aquinas, they stressed the importance of character. An action was good insofar as it exhibited the behavior of a virtuous person. A truly virtuous person will exhibit many virtues. The virtues include pride, temperance, generosity, bravery, and kindness. Foot was said to prize "honesty" as supreme among the virtues. An alternative, utilitarianism, states that what matters are the consequences of an action, whether for example the acion saves the most lives, or produces the most happiness. 

Wittgenstein (born in Vienna 1889, died in Cambridge 1951), interrupted a speaker who had realized that he was about to say something that was clearly ridiculous, and was trying to say something sensible instead. "No", said Wittgenstein. "Say what you want to say. Be crude and then we shall get on." Wittgenstein believed that philosophical puzzles were natural, easy to make, and yet arose out of conceptual confusion, and so dissolvable by an analysis of language. He was skeptical that philosophy had anything to contribute to ethics. 

Saint Thomas Aquinas drew up the principles required for a war to be described as just. Intentional killing could never be justified, but if a person was threatened, and the only option to save their life was to kill the assailant, this killing could be morally permissible, provided the intention was self-preservation, and not the taking of a life. Thus, was born the Doctrine of Double Effect. The DDE explained based on a distinction between what a man foresees as a result of his voluntary action and what he intends. It is called double effect because of the twin effects of some actions: the one aimed at, the other foreseen but not intended. In Catholic theology, DDE has been pivotal to the church's explanation of why there are only rare cases in which abortion is acceptable. It is permitted in certain circumstances to target a military installation in war, foreseeing that it will bring about some civilian casualties ("collateral damage"); it's not permitted to deliberately target civilians. 

There's practical worry that DDE could be used as an excuse to skip over or shimmy around the taking of responsibility - especially when actions are taken on behalf of a state. 

Foot went on to highlight what to hear was a crucial point. In Spur one is merely redirecting an already existing threat. But in hospital case, in taking the life of the healthy man, we have introduced a whole new threat. 

"Always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as means to your end" (Immanuel Kant).