Would You Kill the Fat Man by David Edmonds Read Free Book Online

others.
    View through the Kamm-corder
     
    History’s best-known trolley victim, the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi, is celebrated for his ornate, neogothic/baroque designs.
    His unfinished masterpiece, the Sagrada Familia , draws millions of tourists with its weird, somewhat threatening spires like bejeweled cruise missiles. If there’s a philosopher whose style most resembles Gaudi’s, it’s Frances Kamm. A night creature, she toils away into the early hours devising thought experiments. “I feel that I’ve been admitted to a whole world of distinctions that haven’t been seen by others or at least not by me. And I’m taken by it as I would be by a beautiful picture.” 15
    In the search for a formulation of the principles that should govern how we can and can’t treat people, Kamm offers (and critiques) some bafflingly baroque principles. Layer of complexity is heaped upon layer. There are principles galore. There is the principle of alternate reason, the principle of contextual interaction, the principle of ethical integrity, the principle of instrumental rationality, the principle of irrelevant goods, the principle of irrelevant need, the principle of irrelevant rights, and the principle of Secondary Wrong. And we should not forget the principle of the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives of Permissible Harm, or the principle of SecondaryPermissibility. The latter two are sufficiently significant to merit their own acronym, the PPH and the PSP.
    There’s also a smorgasbord of doctrines. However, among them, one is worth highlighting, because it illustrates the ingenuity of Kamm’s work, the fine and subtle distinctions she draws, and also because this distinction, at least, has powerful intuitive appeal. She calls it the Doctrine of Triple Effect. It has a third distinction in addition to the two that are familiar from the DDE, namely effects that are intended and effects that are foreseen. She explains it through what she calls the Party Case.
    Suppose that I want to give a party, so that people have a good time, though I realize that a party would result in a terrible mess: there would be glasses to wash, carpets to vacuum, and wine stains to scrub off. I foresee that if my friends have fun, they will feel indebted to me (not a nice feeling) and so help me clean up. I decide to hold the party but only because I foresee that they’ll help me afterward. But I don’t hold the party in order to make my friends feel indebted, and thus help me: this is not part of my goal. My reason for holding the party is so guests have fun. 16 Kamm draws the conclusion that I don’t intend that my guests feel indebted. Similarly, says Kamm, there’s a distinction between doing something because it will cause the hitting of a bystander, and doing it intending to cause the hitting of a bystander.
    This pretty distinction can assist in various trolley scenarios. 17 Take the Six Behind One case.
    The bystander’s predicament is almost exactly as in Spur, with this difference. Behind the one person on the spur are six people, tied to the track. The one person, if hit, will block the trolley. Since it is permissible to turn the trolley in Spur, a natural intuition is that it must be equally permissible to do so in Six Behind One. But in Spur, the decision to turn the train was justified on the grounds that there was no intention to kill the one. As evidence for this we can imagine how we would feel if this person managed to escape: relief and joy. It would be the best of all possible worlds. The trolley would have been diverted from the five, and no one else would have been killed.

     
    Figure 5 . Six Behind One. You are standing on the side of the track. A runaway trolley is hurtling toward you. Ahead are five people, tied to the track. If you do nothing, the five will be run over and killed. Luckily you are next to a signal switch: turning this switch will send the out-of-control trolley down a side track, a spur, just