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Notes
In order to avoid biases associated with weightism, Fat man is sometimes modified to involve someone on a large chair or with a heavy backpack.
In her first articulations of the Trolley problem, the second case is not Fat Man but rather Transplant (1976, 1985). The latter involves a surgeon who is deliberating about whether to harvest organs from one healthy person in order to save the lives of five unhealthy patients. Thomson calls it the "trolley problem" because she is particularly interested in explaining the permissibility of turning the trolley, but she invites those who are more concerned with explaining the impermissibility of harvesting the organs to call it the "transplant problem" (1985, 1401). However, in both of these publications, the Fat man case shows up as virtually interchangeable with Transplant. I have taken the liberty of actually interchanging them because Thomson herself does so in a subsequent publication (2008).
In so doing, Thomson was responding to Foot. Foot's original version of Trolley queried whether the driver of the trolley may throw the switch. This was to illustrate the principle that killing five is worse than killing one. (Foot's larger goal was to show that the principle that killing is worse than letting die (as an instance of the more general principle that negative duties are more stringent than positive ones) can do more explanatory work than the Doctrine of Double Effect (Foot, 2002).) In switching the focus of the question from the driver to a bystander, because the deontic status of throwing the switch is supposed to remain constant, Thomson used this variant of Foot's example to evince a problem for Foot's own principle (the bystander, unlike the driver, would kill one or let five die). In Thomson's later work, however, she maintains that her original argument was based on a mistake: although it is permissible for the driver to turn the trolley, it is impermissible for a bystander to do so. She thus comes to embrace the principle that killing is worse than letting die (2008).
(Thomson, 1985, 1403).
(Thomson, 1985, 1403).
(Thomson, 1985, 1403).
(Friedman, 2002, 164).
GMS, AA 04: 393.05-07. All citations are in accordance with the standard Prussian Academy pagination. All translations are my own.
GMS, AA 04: 429.10-12, emphasis omitted.
This point is made in (Kleingeld, 2020b, 8).
(Kleingeld, 2020b, 7).
(Kleingeld, 2020b, 15-16).
(Kleingeld, 2020b, 19).
GMS, AA 04: 429.34-430.01.
(Kleingeld, 2020a, 402).
(Kleingeld, 2020a, 404).
A further problem arises for Kleingeld's account because she, like Thomson, speaks of using persons as mere means: as noted in section 1 of this paper, Kant's FH is in terms of using the humanity in persons as a mere means.
(Pogge, 2004, 55).
(Nyholm, 2015, 87).
Indeed, an action could be determined to be permissible if but only if an agent happened to test a permissible maxim, and this would be a matter of happenstance: because there is no fixed enumeration of maxims, there is not even a semi-decision procedure for the category of permissibility.
GMS, AA 04: 421.06-07, emphasis omitted.
MS, AA 06: 423.22-23.
The Trolley problem faces a similar problem when it comes to utilitarian ethics, at least when it comes to act utilitarianism. On at least one popular understanding of the difference between act and rule utilitarianism, the former assesses act tokens whereas the latter assesses act types. But obviously any act type can be instantiated in infinitely many scenarios, and again there is no inductive scheme that can be used here to move from the particular to the universal, nor is it possible to evaluate all of these infinitely many act tokens one-by-one. So the best one would be able to do on an act utilitarian theory to determine the deontic status of an act type would be to make plausible generalizations about the circumstances in which an agent would perform a token of this type and then, on the basis of these generalizations, to make further generalizations about whether these tokens, in the main, tend to promote aggregate utility. As with Kantian ethics, nobody has done anything like this kind of work to date. (If we accept Lyons' contention that act utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism are extensionally equivalent, then we wind up in the same boat regarding rule utilitarianism, for the theory of relevance that we have to accept would make it impossible to determine, in any given instance, whether we have typed our token correctly (Lyons, 1965).)
However, there is an added twist for Kant's ethics that does not, I think, arise for utilitarianism. Kant's ethics does not assess maxims in the abstract; indeed, it is unclear whether the idea of a maxim in the abstract is even coherent. A maxim is an agent’s subjective principle of acting, the representation of a law that s/he governs him/herself by. So what we need to ask is whether that agent can universalize that maxim, whether that agent would be failing to use someone at the same time as an end in acting on that maxim. However, I am going to overlook this complication for present purposes.
MS, 06: 217.01-08.
However, if this is so, the deontic status of the action would be subject to amphiboly: the action involves others, but its deontic status is based on duties to oneself.
This example is based off a similar one in Kleingeld (2020a, 399-400).
References
Foot, Philippa. 2002. Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Friedman, Alexander. (2002) Minimizing Harm. https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/8155
Kleingeld, Pauline. 2020a. How to Use Someone ‘Merely as a Means’. Kantian Review 25 (3): 389–414.
Kleingeld, Pauline. (2020b) “A Kantian Solution to the Trolley Problem.” In Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics 10 (ed. Mark Timmons), Oxford University Press: 204-228. Accessed from philpapers: https://philarchive.org/archive/KLEAKS.
Lyons, David. 1965. Forms and Limits of Utilitarianism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nyholm, Sven. 2015. Kant’s Formula of Universal Law Revisited. Metaphilosophy 46 (2): 280–299.
Pogge, Thomas. (2004) “Parfit On What’s Wrong.” The Harvard Review of Philosophy XII.1: 52-59.
Thomson, Judith Jarvis. 1976. Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem. The Monist 59 (2): 204–217.
Thomson, Judith Jarvis. 1985. The Trolley Problem. The Yale Law Journal 94 (6): 1395–1415.
Thomson, Judith Jarvis. 2008. Turning the Trolley. Philosophy & Public Affairs 36 (4): 359–374.
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Kahn, S. Kant and the trolley. J Value Inquiry 57, 487–497 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-021-09838-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-021-09838-6