Would You Kill the Fat Man Read Online Free PDF

that it might be very nice of you to permit the violinist to remain yoked to your body, but he or the hospital would have no right to insist that you do so.
    Likewise, Thomson appealed to rights in Fat Man. Toppling the fat man is an infringement of his rights. But turning the trolley in Spur is not an infringement of anybody’s rights. “It is not morally required of us that we let a burden descend out of the blue onto five when we can make it instead descend onto one.” 4 The bystander is not just minimizing the number of deaths by turning the train down the spur; he or she is minimizing “the number of deaths which get caused by something that already threatens people.” 5
    Note the similarity to Foot’s argument that in Spur one is merely redirecting a preexisting threat, whereas pushing the poor fat man introduces a completely new threat. This distinction feels plausible: it feels as if it should carry some moral weight. But one trolleyologist 6 insists it does not. She offers, as evidence, Lazy Susan. 7

     
    Figure 3 . Lazy Susan. In Lazy Susan you can save the five by twisting the revolving plate 180 degrees—this will have the unfortunate consequence of placing one man directly in the path of the train. Should you rotate the Lazy Susan?
     
    In Lazy Susan, you can save the five by twisting the revolving plate 180 degrees—this will have the consequence of placing one man directly in the path of the train. Nonetheless, says the inventor of this scenario, it’s permissible to turn the lazy susan—even though this is not about diverting an existing threat; for the individual who will die, it introduces an entirely new threat.

     
    Figure 4 . Loop. The trolley is heading toward five men who, as it happens, are all skinny. If the trolley were to collide into them they would die, but their combined bulk would stop the train. You could instead turn the trolley onto a loop. One fat man is tied onto the loop. His weight alone will stop the trolley, preventing it from continuing around the loop and killing the five. Should you turn the trolley down the loop?
     
    You may not share that intuition. If you do, the search for a principle to explain our other intuitions in Fat Man and Spurcontinues. But what’s wrong with the DDE as the answer? Why wouldn’t Thomson appeal to that? Well, because of a trolley problem she invents that we can call Loop.
    A number of weeks have passed since you were faced with an instant and excruciating choice in Spur of whether to turn the train down the side track. Then, you made the correct decision: you turned the train. In the interim, workers have extended the side track, so that it circles around back to the main track. Once again you’ve gone for a walk and find yourself in the midst of a similar nightmare, though with a slight modification. In Loop, the train is heading toward five men who, as it happens, are all skinny. If the train were to collide into them they would die, but their combined bulk would stop the train. You could instead turn the train onto a side track. The side track has one fat man. His weight alone will stop the train, preventing it from continuing around the loop and killing the five. There’s this key difference. In Spur, if the single man were to escape, that would—in the much lampooned words of the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz—be the best of all possible worlds. 8 Not so in Loop. In Loop, if the man on the side track were to disappear, the five skinny men would be killed: this time you need his death to save the five. The collision with this man is therefore surely part of your plan.
    Nonetheless, writes Thomson, given that we agree that it would be acceptable, if not obligatory, to turn the train in Spur, it must be equally acceptable to do so in Loop, for, as she puts it, “we cannot really suppose that the presence or absence of that extra bit of track makes a major moral difference as to what an agent may do in these cases.” 9
    If