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Thomson is right, the DDE cannot be the principle to justify a distinction between Spur and Fat Man. 10 For in Loop we don’t merely foresee the fat man’s death: we need the fatman to die—we intend his death. Turning the trolley in Loop falls foul of the DDE.
    So it looks as if we’ve hit the buffers again. We have identified a common intuition that it is sometimes wrong to take a life even though five lives would be saved. Can we ground this intuition in principle? The attempt to do that takes us back to the eighteenth century and the remote Prussian outpost of Königsberg.

CHAPTER 6
     
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    Ticking Clocks and the Sage of Königsberg
     
Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.
     
—Immanuel Kant
     
    AN ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD BOY has been kidnapped. He was last seen getting off the Number 35 bus on his way home on the final school day before the autumn holiday. He’s now been missing for three days and is considered to be in mortal danger. The police have arrested the chief suspect. He was captured after picking up a ransom of one million Euros. The ransom had been demanded in a note left on the gate of the boy’s home—and had been dropped, as agreed, at a trolley stop on a Sunday night. Instead of releasing the boy, the man went on a spending spree with his million Euros. He booked a foreign holiday; he ordered a C-class Mercedes.
    The police are as certain as they can be that they have the guilty man—a tall, powerfully built law student, who’d previously been employed to give the boy extra tutoring. Now they urgently need to locate the boy. They don’t know how long they have to save his life: is he locked away in a cellar, withoutaccess to water and food? The interrogation of the law student begins: the clock ticks—and ticks, and ticks, and ticks. A search involving 1,000 police, helicopters, and tracker dogs yields nothing. And, after seven hours of questioning, the suspect has still not given up the boy’s whereabouts.
    The police officer in charge writes down an instruction to the interrogators: they are to threaten to torture the suspect. “A specialist” will be flown in, they tell the suspect, whose function it will be to inflict unimaginable pain until they extract the information they need.
    The suspect cracks. He reveals where the boy is being held.
    An Icy Gust
     
    This kidnapping occurred in Germany in 2002. The kidnapper was Magnus Gäfgen, a law student in his mid-twenties. The victim, Jakob von Metzler, was the heir to a fortune: his father ran Germany’s oldest family-owned bank.
    The story does not have a happy ending. Frightened, under pressure, faced with a horrifying ordeal, Gäfgen told the police that Jakob could be found at a lake near Frankfurt. When they arrived, they discovered the boy’s body: he’d already been killed, and was in a sack, wrapped in plastic and still dressed in the blue top and sand-colored trousers in which he’d last been spotted.
    The case became a cause célèbre , not just because Jakob came from a prominent family, but more especially after allegations surfaced of the torture threat. Frankfurt’s deputy police chief, Wolfgang Daschner, who had written the “torture” note, gave various interviews to the press. He’d faced a stark choice, he said. “I can just sit on my hands and wait until maybe Gäfgeneventually decides to tell the truth and in the meantime the child is dead, or I do everything I can now to prevent that from happening.” 1
    The torture threat, apparently, had not been an idle one. A martial arts trainer had been put on call: the police believed the suspect could be hurt without lasting physical damage being inflicted upon him.
    There were expressions of outrage at Daschner’s behavior. One MP from the Green Party warned that, “if you open the window, even just a crack, the cold air of the Middle Ages will fill the whole room.” 2 But Daschner also had vocal supporters, and polls showed that the