Consider two trolley cases. In the first case, you can save your life, by flipping a switch. However, the blast will blow the train off the track and kill an innocent bystander who is standing by the side of the train tracks. Call this person Sam.
The other trolley case just moves the location of the innocent person. In this case, imagine there is an innocent passenger, Paul, who will blow up with the train.
In the applied ethics literature, there are a lot of people trying to preserve the intuition that it’s permissible to save your life even if it involves killing Paul, but NOT permissible to save your own life if it involves killing Sam. In Thompson’s words this would be “riding roughshod” over an innocent.
Michael Otsuka argues that these two cases are morally equivalent – that if it’s wrong in one it’s wrong in the other.
Those who maintain the cases are not equivalent are under some pressure to identify a morally relevant difference.
One candidate difference is what I will call “The Composite Object Defense” (I’m blogging from my phone – so I’ll stick in references later, but I know Helen Frowe is sympathetic to this strategy)
According to The Composite Object Defense, the difference between Paul and Sam is that Paul and the trolley form a composite object. Sam and the trolley do not. The fact that Paul is part of an object that’s going to kill you, explains why it is permissible to kill Pau.
This strategy, however, doesn’t fit well with any of the main candidate answers to the Special Composition Question.
Some people think that composition sometimes occurs and sometimes doesn’t. They might hold that the molecules of a block of ice form an object, but that One of my nose hairs, plus this crumb on the table, plus the top half of the moon do not. Which brings us to The Special Composition Question.
SCQ
What are the jointly necessary and sufficient conditions for some things to compose an object?
Put another way, when do some things make another thing?
It’s pretty difficult to provide a satisfactory answer to the Special Composition Question that doesn’t seem arbitrary.
Let’s consider two extreme answers that can easily avoid the messiness – Mereological Universalism and Mereological Nihilism. When do some things make another thing? The Universalist says, “Always,” and The Nihilist says “Never.”
I don’t want to get into the details of the merits of these answers. What is important for our present purposes is merely to note the problem with The Composite Object Defense, if either of these answers to the special composition question is correct.
If Universalism is true, then Paul is part of an object that’s going to kill you, but so is Sam. The problem goes in the other direction if Nihilism is true. If Nihilisim is true, then Sam is not part of an object that’s going to kill you, but neither is Paul.
So, the Composite Object Defense is incompatible with two of the main candidate answers to the Special Composition Question; it’s committed to there being a satisfactory restriction on composition.
In the next post, I’ll explain what I think the problem is with that. Here’s a brief preview. First, there well-known are puzzles and problems for restricted composition. Second we shall see that there aren’t very many restricted answers that will do the work that The Composite Object defense needs a theory of composition to do.
According to DDE, I don’t see why “it is NOT permissible to save your own life if it involves killing Sam.” Maybe there is some other reason that the folks you’re thinking of differentiate between Sam and Paul–perhaps you could briefly say what that is?
That’s a good question.
Otsuka has a few answers as to why he thinks it’s not OK to kill someone like Sam – http://www.jstor.org/stable/2265226 – but it sounds like you and Otsuka would be on the same side on the debate about moral equivalence. You and Otsuka are just on different sides as to whether we should regard the cases as permissible or not.
Your question is more directed toward folks that want to draw the line between Sam and Paul.
As far as I can tell, the folks who want to differentiate the two are appealing to intuition. Sam looks much more like a case of impermissible killing especially when you compare Sam’s scenario to other actions of killing in self-defense that they would agree are wrong (e.g., pulling someone in front of you to use as a human shield).
Paul on the other hand, looks more like cases that they would regard as OK, e.g. if someone were falling down a well and the only way to save your life was to vaporize them.
Apart from having strong intuitions about cases and about how the Paul and Sam cases resemble these other cases in relevant respects, I don’t know that they offer any other reason.
Since Paul is on the trolley, his presence would causally contribute to your death. However, Sam’s presence would not causally contribute to your death. Perhaps the intuition underlying the Composite Object Defense has less to do with whether or not there is something composed of the trolley and some seemingly innocent bystander. Perhaps the intuition underlying the Composite Object Defense has to do with the fact that Paul would causally contribute to your death whereas Sam would not.
I guess I should add that Paul is not operating the train, nor is Paul any part of the reason for the train’s momentum (e.g., the train is not moving because Paul paid for a ticket or anything like that). That’s supposed to be part of the case.
When the case is fleshed out that way do you still think that Paul causally contributes to your death?
Yes, after all Paul’s mass is part of what would strike you. If the Trolley were to strike you, you might be knocked 15 feet. But, if the trolley were to strike you and if Paul had not been on the Trolley, you would have been knocked only 14 feet rather than 15 feet. This all seems to suggest that he would causally contribute to your death even if he had no role in the initial movement or operation of the trolley.
Got it. I suppose we could complicate things (e.g. Paul is being moved along with the train by an Angel so that the presence of Paul’s mass add any additional force).
I don’t have strong intuitions that Paul and Sam are morally different – so I can’t say this with any high degree of confidence – but I suspect that people who thought it was OK to kill Paul but not Sam in the original cases would still think it’s OK to kill Paul if he just magically happens to be moving along inside the train without causally contributing to the final impact.
Although we’d have to ask those who thought there was a line to be drawn between Paul and Sam.
I don’t share that intuition either. I agree that you’ve chosen a good avenue for attacking this question.
For some reason, the ‘doctrine of double effect’ seems like it might be relevant, or its related intuitions.
For the record, I wasn’t embracing the DDE (I think there are some problems with it, though perhaps they aren’t fatal), but only raised it because it looks like according to it there is no relevant difference between the two cases. The human shield case would be different, it seems to me, according to DDE.
If all the work is being done by the intuitions, then some of the recent work on the role and stability (or lack thereof) of such intuitions seems really important.