by anybody of any size, and if you’re standing next to the fat man, then presumably the proper action is not to push the fat man, but to leapfrog over the railings and sacrifice yourself. A courageous and selfless act, but in this example, it would be a futile gesture: ex hypothesi you are not bulky enough to stop the train.
Figure 2 . Fat Man. You’re on a footbridge overlooking the railway track. You see the trolley hurtling along the track and, ahead of it, five people tied to the rails. Can these five be saved? Again, the moral philosopher has cunningly arranged matters so that they can be. There’s a very fat man leaning over the railing watching the trolley. If you were to push him over the footbridge, he would tumble down and smash on to the track below. He’s so obese that his bulk would bring the trolley to a shuddering halt. Sadly, the process would kill the fat man. But it would save the other five. Should you push the fat man?
Even though the man’s size is a necessary component of the thought experiment, and even though he is fictional, drawing attention to his scale is considered by some to be indecent.Thomson introduced us to the fat man in an article in 1985, when academics had long internalized the need to be cautious and sensitive about prejudice and language, particularly as it pertained to race, religion, sex, and sexuality. The obese, however, were not seen as a self-identifying group subject to discrimination and in need of linguistic policing. By 2012, a UK parliamentary body was recommending that calling someone fat be deemed a “hate crime.” And in many of the articles about trolleyology, the fat man has undergone a physical, or at least a conceptual, makeover: he has become a “large” man, or a “ “heavy” man, or a man of girth. Better still, for those easily hurt, a near-duplicate philosophical problem has been devised that removes the need to allude to the potential victim’s corpulence. This time you’re standing on a footbridge next to a man with a heavy backpack. Together, the man and his bag would stop the train. Of course, there’s no time to unstrap the backpack and jump over the bridge wearing it yourself. The only way to save the five is to push the man with the bag.
However described—and I am going to refer to the fat man with his traditional label—it looks, once again, as though the DDE might help explain the typical moral intuition here: that we can turn the train in Spur but not push the fat man (or man with bag). As previously argued, in Spur you don’t want to kill the man on the track. But with Fat Man, you need the obese man (or the man with the heavy bag) to come between the trolley and the five at risk. If he were not there, the five would die. He is a means to an end, the end of stopping the trolley before it kills five people. It would be a noble sacrifice if the fat man were to jump of his own accord. 2 But if you push him you are using him as if he were an object, not an autonomous human being.
Like Philippa Foot, however, Thomson was told not to resort to the DDE to explain the difference. She wanted to appeal to the notion of “rights.” Like Foot, she was preoccupied with one of the touchstone issues of the day, abortion, and had already appealed to rights theory in her most famous article on the subject, “A Defense of Abortion.” 3 This article imagined that you wake up one day lying next to a famous violinist, both of you plugged into a machine. The violinist had had a fatal kidney ailment. On discovering that you alone have the right blood type to help, the Society of Music Lovers hooked the two of you into a contraption so that your kidneys could be used by him as well. Medical staff explain that, regrettably, were the violinist to be unplugged, he would die but, not to worry, this awkwardness will only last nine months, by which time he’ll be back to normal and the two of you can go your separate ways. Thomson’s claim was