Alexander Mccall Smith - Isabel Dalhousie 05 Read Online Free PDF Page A

past. It was true that Isabel had dismissed him from the editorial board, along with his co-plotter, the ridiculously named Professor Lettuce, but she had done so only because he and Lettuce had conspired to remove her from the editorship. That was why she had decided to buy the
Review
and clean out the Augean stables. So he was in no position to claim that he had been treated badly; the composition of her editorial board was entirely up to her, and she had decided that it would include neither Dove nor Lettuce. They had been informed of this decision and thanked for their past contribution; as conspirators they could hardly complain.
    She turned to the paper which accompanied Dove’s letter: “Taking the Trolley One Stop Further: A Reexamination Along Different Lines.” That, thought Isabel, is a mixed metaphor: stops and lines were different features of trolleys, and it was confusing to bring them both in. Dove was trying to be clever, in an elegant, postmodernist way, but she was not impressed.
    She read past the title page, which was followed by a page-long summary.
    â€œA trolley car,” wrote Dove, “is careering out of control down a slope. Ahead of it on the line are five people who have been tied there by a mad philosopher. You, however, realise that by flicking a switch you can divert the trolley onto a spur line. There is one person standing on the line. If you flick the switch, one person will be killed; if you do nothing, five will die. Do you flick the switch?”
    I have never had any doubt as to what I would do, thought Isabel. I would flick the switch. It was perfectly simple. Unless, of course, Dove and Lettuce were among the five—She stopped herself. That was an uncharitable thought, and she realised that she should not think it. But the delicious, childish fantasy came back.
    â€œIt is not so simple,” Dove continued. “Since Philippa Foot first posed the problem, a number of writers have examined it in greater detail, most notably Judith Jarvis Thomson, who changed the conditions of the thought experiment by taking out the spur line and introducing an innocent fat man. This fat man is on a bridge directly above the trolley line. If he is toppled from the bridge directly in front of the trolley, his bulk will be sufficient to stop it and therefore save the five people farther down the line.
    â€œFor many, that changes the nature of the problem, in that the fat man was never at risk until you toppled him over the parapet. Your intervention there is different from your intervention in flipping the switch. In this paper I explore that distinction and introduce another complication: the fat man is not innocent at all, but a serial killer who has a few good years of murder ahead of him. Does this make it easier to throw him over the bridge?”
    Yes, thought Isabel. Of course it does. I would not hesitate to throw a serial killer off a bridge, provided I was sure that this was the only way of stopping him. For a moment she imagined herself locked in a struggle with a fat man on a bridge, in much the same way as Sherlock Holmes wrestled with Moriarty above the Reichenbach Falls. Holmes toppled over, and she feared that she would, too, which was not the way the thought experiment was meant to end.
    â€œNo,” continued Dove. “We have no right to take upon ourselves a godlike power to save the lives of others. In this paper I examine why this almost counterintuitive conclusion is right.”
    Isabel flicked through the pages that followed. Here and there a phrase caught her eye:
we must respect the moral luck of others
and
moral desert cannot be allowed to determine life-and-death decisions.
Oh, can it not? thought Isabel. She, for one, disagreed with that profoundly. We did not all have an equal right to life; she would have no compunction in saying that those who did some good for humanity should be preferred when it came to saving lives. If she was in a