One more try on the Phillipa Foot post

Reading the comments on the Phillipa Foot post from this morning, it seems to me that I have to expressed myself very badly as the whole discussion went off in a direction completely different from what I meant to talk about.

I'll try again and be very blunt this time.

• If we look at the Trolley Problem we'll see that it is highly artificial and we might assume that this artificiality was intended on Foot's part. after all, it's only a casually tossed off example.
• But if we look at another example, we find that it too is equally implausible even though, in this case, it is painfully obvious that Foot intends this to be a realistic example.

Here is what I mean. Look at the following paragraph from Foot and note particularly the emphasized bit:

A man may murder his child or his aged relatives by allowing them to die of starvation as by giving poison; he may also be convicted of murder on either account. In another case we would, however, make a distinction. Most of us allow people to die of starvation in India and Africa, and there is surely something wrong with us that we do; it would be nonsense, however, to pretend that it is only in law that we make the distinction between allowing people in the under developed countries to die of starvation and sending them poisoned food.

Let me repeat the relevant bit again. Foot says, and means it when she says this,"Most of us allow people to die of starvation in India and Africa, and there is surely something wrong with us that we do." That is so detached from reality that it cannot be taken seriously and yet she had no trouble writing it and believing it.

Phillipa Foot and the difference between ought and can

Whenever the Trolley Problem comes up, it occurs to someone in the discussion that there is something very artificial about it. It is a condition of the problem that we cannot simply yell, "Hey you guys, look out!" No one ever explains why this would be so however. At the same time, the problem requires that we should be able to do things that we typically wouldn't be able to do such as operate train switches or throw fat men off of bridges and stop the trolley.

In response, defenders of the problem inevitably say, "You're missing the point which is not to focus on what can be done but what ought to be done." This, as I have said before, is the classic Enlightenment move to rule out all considerations except those concerning what we ought to do.

As is typical of Enlightenment argument, the point is to be rational by narrowing the problem down to something we can be absolutely rational about. It is true that 12 x12 = 144. It doesn't matter for the purposes of calculation whether we are talking about twelve bags of twelve apples or twelve bundles of twelve rods of radioactive material. So, we say, forget "can", and just focus on "ought"; "can" is another problem we can deal with after we have established what we ought to do.

But was Philipa Foot really making such distinctions? I'm sure she thought she was but consider the following paragraph from her essay:

A man may murder his child or his aged relatives by allowing them to die of starvation as by giving poison; he may also be convicted of murder on either account. In another case we would, however, make a distinction. Most of us allow people to die of starvation in India and Africa, and there is surely something wrong with us that we do; it would be nonsense, however, to pretend that it is only in law that we make the distinction between allowing people in the under developed countries to die of starvation and sending them poisoned food.

Really? I wake up in the morning and allow people to die of starvation in Africa? How exactly do I do this?

Imagine an example where I really do allow someone to die. I am standing on the sidewalk and I see a trolley coming and the operator is arguing with a customer and does not see someone on the tracks. I could easily yell a warning to this person or push them out of the way and I don't. I just watch them die. Think of how different that is from the case of starvation in Africa.

Of course lots of very smart people believe what Phillipa Foot seems to have believed here or, at least, they tell themselves that they believe it. My guess is that they think they know that there is more than enough food to feed everyone on earth and also the means to transport that food to everyone who needs it. They don't actually "know" this in the sense that they have no means of doing the calculation nor of checking to see if it is true. But we have heard or read it somewhere so we believe it.

But, still, how do I allow people to starve in Africa. What could I actually do to prevent it? Write a big cheque? People would still starve. Campaign to have a government elected that would give more to foreign aid? People would still starve. Start a campaign to end world hunger by 2015? People would still starve.

In fact, people have been working to end hunger in Africa for a long time now. Very smart people have been working on the problem with significant resources.

What can she mean? Does she mean that we don't care enough? It seems like the distinction between ought and can—a distinction that is the only thing that keeps the Trolley Problem from being a foolish exercise is intellectual wheel-spinning— has simply vanished here. She doesn't seem aware of it.

Phillipa Foot and the horrible trolley problem

A professor who taught me Physics at university used to love to talk about the case of Niels Bohr. Bohr made, everyone agrees, valuable contributions to Physics; he won a Nobel prize. The problem is that virtually every doctrine proposed by Bohr was abandoned. The problem that Bohr presented us, as my professor put it with deliberate exaggeration, was to "explain how someone can be very important even though they were wrong about everything."

If you hear about Phillipa Foot at all today it will be in connection with something called the Trolley Problem and you will quite likely end up hating her as a consequence as it is painfully artificial problem that gives rise to all sorts of painfully artificial distinctions and nuances, not a single one of which is any damn use to anybody.

The trolley problem first comes up in the middle of a rather painful essay you can read here. No one reads the essay anymore because the problem is used considered independently of the particular problem Foot wanted to apply it to. Typically, we don't get the problem as she posed it either but a subsequent modification.

Here, for your interest, is the original problem as set up by Phillipa Foot:

... supposed that he is the driver of a runaway tram which he can only steer from one narrow track on to another; five men are working on one track and one man on the other; anyone on the track he enters is bound to be killed. In the case of the riots the mob has five hostages, so that in both the exchange is supposed to be one man's life for the lives of five.

And that's the whole thing. Entire libraries of writing have been produced as result.

Typically, the problem is modified so that the moral actor is not the driver  but a bystander. We watch the trolley/tram come running and we see the driver slumped over the controls. Fortunately, there is a switch we can operate but we only have the two choices: we can either allow the train to keep running and kill five men or we can pull the switch and shift it onto another track where it will kill only one.

It's very important to the problem (and largely unimportant to everything else) that not acting will kill five people.

If the person teaching the problem is even halfway honest, they will begin by acknowledging how artificial the problem is. Why, just for starters, can't we just yell at the workers to get out of the way?

The answer to that is because the problem says we can't. When you're taught this in philosophy, you are told that the trolley problem helps us "get at" certain important distinctions.

What sorts of distinctions you ask. Well, here's one based on a modification to the problem raised by Judith Jarvis Thomson. Suppose that you are standing on a bridge overlooking the trolley track. Again, you can't yell but there is a fat man standing near you whom you could push over the edge and stop the trolley. Would it be okay to kill him in order to save five others on the track below? If we compare that problem with the original we can see a difference. In one, we are pulling a lever to save five men and that will have the unfortunate consequence of killing a sixth man whereas in the other we are committing an active act of homicide to save the five.

Big difference? I'm not so sure.

But I never get that far. I get off this particular tram long before. For starters I saw a tram hit a big Mercedes sedan once. Even with the tram driver leaning on the brakes with all his might that tram dragged the Mercedes all the way across the intersection and then some, reducing it to a useless mass of twisted metal in the process. There is no fat man in the world fat enough to stop a trolley.

But even if we allow that this is a wimpy little trolley that can be stopped by throwing a fat man over the edge of the bridge, how are we going to get him there? I suppose the man might be standing in just the right place that that we could come along and tip him over but how likely is that? And he isn't going to go willingly. And he has to be pretty darn fat because he does have to stop a trolley after all. Are we so strong that we can subdue the guy, get him off the ground and over the rail? And you wouldn't want to miss.

And therein lies the most basic fault with the problem: it takes it for granted that we have the expertise required to do the thing required. That is a terribly artificial assumption. Think of the basic level where you are a bystander and there is a switch. Okay, even assuming that the transit authority in this town is so irresponsible that they leave switches open so that any juvenile delinquent can come along and throw them, do you you know how to throw such a switch? I mean, just looking at it can you even tell which track is currently selected? Wouldn't it be awful if you pulled the switch when it was already set to go down the track where only one would be killed and you killed five?

Let's go back to our fat man for a second. Have you ever wrestled a grown man off his feet? I used to be a bouncer and I can tell you I'd hesitate before thinking of such a thing.

And would you even look? I mean, imagine yourself standing on the bridge watching this out of control trolley come hurtling along and seeing the men in the way. Would you even turn away to look for something to throw over to stop the trolley?

I could keep going but I'm sure you get the point: this is just a stupid exercise. Arguing about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin is a deeply practical exercise by comparison.

No one makes decisions on these grounds and even if they did it probably wouldn't be of much use to them because you also need considerable expertise to actually make any of these choices. You would also need the intestinal fortitude to actually do it. If you actually saw this trolley hurtling along your most likely reaction would be to stand there helplessly and watch it happen. (And there is a good argument to be made that standing there and watching it happen is in fact the morally right thing to do.)

Although no one deals with problems this way in real life  this is the way a lot of ethical argument was actually carried out in universities and in applied medical ethics and here, I think, we begin to see the terribly useful service Phillipa Foot has performed. She pushed this sort of argument to point where most students come up with a different formulation of the problem: How seriously do I have to take this crap? Or, as the Serpentine One put it back in her university days, If I don't learn this will it prevent me from graduating?"

Foot herself, by the way, ultimately decided that this sort of problem wasn't very important. For Foot, what the trolley problem was meant to highlight was that evaluating moral choices in terms of consequences was just not a satisfactory way to go about things. She thought the way to approach ethics was to look at arguments for why people should want to strive to develop virtues.

As it turned out, none of her arguments for why we should develop virtues was any good. But she got us headed down the right path.

Phillipa Foot

Has died.

She was one of the great founding figures in the revival of virtue ethics and a hero of mine when I was in university. I'll have a lot more to say about her tomorrow.

For now, I'd like to confess that I was once madly in love with her.This was before I'd read even a word of her philosophy; at a time when I thought I would find nothing of value in her writings (for reasons that I will explain tomorrow).

What I fell in love with was her name. It  was the only thing I knew about her when I fell in love with her. Isn't "Phillipa Foot" the most perfect name imaginable? And if not that name, how about her maiden name "Phillipa Bosanquet"? These are like the names of heroines in classic English novels only I don't think there is a novel in the entire English novel tradition quite good enough to contain Phillipa Foot.

Back when all I knew was her name, I fell in love with her and I imagined a secret affair I would have with her. It would have to be secret because a woman with a name like Phillipa Foot would insist on her privacy. I used to imagine sitting with her having tea and oatmeal cookies in a quiet room having a quiet conversation about novels and morality using every bit of my will power to remain relaxed and calm although I would be craving the great sex I knew we would eventually work our way up to.

Great sex I won't elaborate on here not just because it never happened but also because, you know, it would be a betrayal of everything a woman with a name like Phillipa Foot would stand for.