The overridingness of morality and Double Effect

You’ve been imprisoned in a cell with a torture robot. The cell is locked by a combination lock, and your estimate is that you will be able to open it in a week. If the torture robot is left running, it will stimulate your pain center, causing horrible pain but no lasting damage, and not slowing down your escaping at all. An infallible oracle reveals to you that if you disable the robot, through a random confluence of events this will affect your character in such a way that in a year you will be 0.1% less patient for the rest of your life than you would otherwise be.

Now, sometimes, a small difference in the degree of a virtue could make a big difference. For instance, perhaps, you will one day be in a position where an extremely arduous task will need to be done to save someone’s life, and you just barely have enough patience for it, so that if you were 0.1% less patient, you wouldn’t do it. You ask the oracle whether something like this will happen if you turn off the robot. The oracle replies: “No, it’s just that you will be 0.1% more annoyed whenever you engage in an arduous task, but that’s never going to push you past any significant threshold—you’re not going to blow up in a big way at your child, or neglect a duty, or anything like that.”

It seems obviously reasonable to disable the robot. Thus, enormous short-term hedonic considerations can win out over tiny long-term virtue considerations. It is thus not the case that considerations of virtue always beat hedonic considerations.

What are we to make, then, of the deep insight—perhaps the most important insight in the history of Western philosophy—about the primacy of morality over other considerations?

Two things. First, moral considerations tend to be much more important than non-moral considerations.

Second, we should never do what is morally wrong, no matter what the price for avoiding it, and no matter how small the wrong. But there is a difference between doing what is morally wrong and doing something morally permissible that makes one less virtuous.

Here is a second case. You and an innocent stranger are in the cell. The robot is set to torture the stranger. The oracle now reveals to you that right after the escape, you will forget the last two weeks of your life, and your life will go the same way whether you disabled the robot or not, with exactly one morally relevant exception: if you have chosen to disable the robot, then one day, feeling peckish and having forgotten your wallet, you will culpably steal a candybar from a cornerstore.

It seems obvious that you should disable the robot, despite the fact that doing so leads to your doing a minor moral wrong. The point isn’t that disabling the robot justifies stealing the candybar—at the time that you steal it, you will have forgotten all about the robot, so there is no justification. The point is that even though you should never do wrong that a good might come of it, nonetheless sometimes for the sake of a great good it is permissible to do something that you know will lead to your later doing something impermissible.

Sometimes theologians have incautiously said things like that the smallest sin outweighs the greatest evil that is not a sin. I think this is incorrect. But what is correct is that you shouldn’t commit the smallest sin for the sake of the greatest good. However, the Principle of Double Effect applies to future sins: you can foresee but not intend that if you perform a certain action—turning off the robot, say—you will commit a future sin.

The badness of non-intentional harming

Consider a trolley problem where on both tracks there is exactly one innocent stranger. Alice is driving the trolley. If she does nothing, the trolley will head down the left track. But the right track will get Alice to her destination three minutes sooner. Alice redirects.

It seems that Alice did something wrong. Yet, why? We can say that she intended to save the person on the left track and get to her destination faster, and did not intend to kill the person on the right track. What went wrong?

One option is this. In the proportionality condition on Double Effect, we need that the outcome chosen have a significantly better consequence than the alternative, and three minutes (normally) is not significant.

But that’s probably not right. There are times when it is permissible to redirect a trolley even when the outcome is a bit worse. For instance, suppose that we have a trolley setup with one person on each track, but things are such that if the trolley hits the person on the right track, the death will be a bit more painful. The trolley is controlled by the person on the right track. It seems obvious that the person on the right track is permitted to redirect the trolley to the right even though the outcome is a bit worse.

Maybe the issue is this. Even though it’s not always wrong to become the non-intentional cause of a grave harm to someone, we have moral reason to avoid becoming such a cause. This fits with our intuitions: we feel really bad when we become such a cause. Murray Leinster’s first novel Murder Madness is all about the horror of a drug that makes one involuntarily kill people (I won’t recommend the novel because of a number of pieces of outrageous racism).

This makes sense from an Aristotelian point of view. For a social organism, helping members of the group is a part of flourishing. This is true for animals that are not moral agents. A meerkat sentinel that saves the group by warning of a danger is thereby flourishing. This is even true in the case of non-intentional cooperative activity. A slime mold that, as part of a stalk, enables reproduction by slime molds that are part of the fruiting body is thereby flourishing. It makes sense, thus, to think that for social organisms harming members of the group is contrary to flourishing whether or not one is morally responsible for the harm, and even when the harm is one that one is not intending.

Proportionality and deterrence

There are many contexts where a necessary condition of the permissibility of a course of action is a kind of proportionality between the goods and bads resulting from the course of action. (If utilitarianism is true, then given a utilitarian understanding of the proportionality, it’s not only necessary but sufficient for permissibility.) Two examples:

• The Principle of Double Effect says it is permissible to do things that are foreseen to have a basic evil as an effect, if that evil is not intended, and if proportionality between the evil effect and the good effects holds.

• The conditions for entry into a just war typically include both a justice condition and a proportionality condition (sometimes split into two conditions, one about likely consequences of the war and the other about the probability of victory).

But here is an interesting and difficult kind of scenario. Before giving a general formulation, consider the example that made me think about this. Country A has a bellicose neighbor B. However, B’s regime while bellicose is not sufficiently evil that on a straightforward reading of proportionality it would be worthwhile for A to fight back if invaded. Sure, one would lose sovereignty by not fighting back, but B’s track record suggests that the individual citizens of A would maintain the freedoms that matter most (maybe this is what it would be like to be taken over by Alexander the Great or Napoleon—I don’t know enough of history to know), while a war would obviously be very bloody. However, suppose that a policy of not fighting back would likely result in an instant invasion, while a policy of fighting back would have a high probability of resulting in peace for the foreseeable future. We can then imagine that the benefits of likely avoiding even a non-violent takeover by B outweigh the small risk that despite A’s having a policy of armed resistance B would still invade.

The general case is this: We have a policy that is likely to prevent an unhappy situation, but following through on the policy violates a straightforward reading of proportionality if the unhappy situation eventuates.

One solution is to take into account the value of follwing through on the policy with respect to one’s credibility in the future. But in some cases this will be a doubtful justification. Consider a policy of fighting back against an invader—at least initially—even if there is no chance of victory. There are surely many cases of bellicose countries that could successfully take over a neighbor, but judge that the costs of doing so are too high given the expected resistance. But if the neighbor has such a policy, then in case the invasion nonetheless eventuates, whatever is done, sovereignty will be lost, and the policy will be irrelevant in the future. (One might have some speculation about the benefits for other countries of following through on the policy, but that’s very speculative.)

One line of thought on these kinds of cases is that we need to forego such policies, despite their benefits. One can’t permissibly act on them, so one can’t have them, and that’s that. This is unsatisfying, but I think there is a serious chance that this is right.

One might think that the best of both worlds is to make it seem like one has the policy, but not in fact have it. A problem with this is that it might involve lying, and I think lying is wrong. But even aside from that, in some cases this may not be practicable. Imagine training an army to defend one’s country, and then having a secret plan, known only to a very small number of top commanders, that one will surrender at the first moment of an invasion. Can one really count on that surrender? The deterrent policy is more effective the fiercer and more patriotic the army, but those factors are precisely likely to make them fight despite the surrender at the top.

Another move is this. Perhaps proportionality itself takes into account not just the straightforward computation of costs and benefits, but also the value of remaining steadfast in reasonably adopted policies. I find this somewhat attractive, but this approach has to have limits, and I don’t know where to draw them. Suppose one has invented a weapon which will kill every human being in enemy territory. Use of this weapon, with a Double Effect style intention of killing only the enemy soldiers, is clearly unjustified no matter what policies one might have, but a policy to use this weapon might be a nearly perfect protection against invasion. (Obviously this connects with the question of nuclear deterrence.) I suppose what one needs to say is that the importance of steadfastness in policies affects how proportionality evaluation go, but should not be decisive.

I find myself pulled to the strict view that policies we should not have policies acting on which would violate a straightforward reading of proportionality, and the view that we should abandon the straightforward reading of proportionality and take into account—to a degree that is difficult to weigh—the value of following policies.

Double effect and causal remoteness

I think some people feel that more immediate effects count for more than more remote ones in moral choices, including in the context of the Principle of Double Effect. I used to think this is wrong, as long as the probabilities of effects are the same (typically more remote effects are more uncertain, but we can easily imagine cases where this is not so). But then I thought of two strange trolley cases.

In both cases, the trolley is heading for a track with Fluffy the cat asleep on it. The trolley can be redirected to a second track on which an innocent human is sleeping. Moreover, in a nearby hospital there are five people who will die if they do not receive a simple medical treatment. There is only one surgeon available.

But now we have two cases:

1. All five people love Fluffy very much and have specified that they consent to life-saving treatment if and only if Fluffy is alive. The surgeon refuses to perform surgery that the patients have not consented to.

2. The surgeon loves Fluffy and after hearing of the situation has informed you that they will perform surgery if and only if Fluffy is alive.

In both cases, I am rather uncomfortable with the idea of redirecting the trolley. But if we don’t take immediacy into account, both cases seem straightforward applications of Double Effect. The intention in both cases is to save five human lives by saving Fluffy, with the death of the person on the second track being an unintended side-effect. Proportionality between the good and the bad effects seems indisputable.

However, in both cases, redirecting the trolley leads much more directly to the death of the one person than to the saving of the five. The causal chain from redirection to life-saving in both cases is mediated by the surgeon’s choice to perform surgery. (In Case 1, the surgeon is reasonable and in Case 2, the surgeon is unreasonable.) So perhaps in considerations of proportionality, the more immediate but smaller bad effect (the death of the person on the side-track) outweighs the more remote but larger good effect (the saving of the five).

I can feel the pull of this. Here is a test. Suppose we make the death of the sixth innocent person equally indirect, by supposing instead that Rover the dog is on the second track, and is connected to someone’s survival in the way that Fluffy is connected to the survival of the five. In that case, it seems pretty plausible that you should redirect. (Though I am not completely certain, because I worry that in redirecting the trolley even in this case you are unduly cooperating with immoral people—the five people who care more about a cat than about their own human dignity, or the crazy surgeon.)

If this is right, how do we measure the remoteness of causal chains? Is it the number of independent free choices that have to be made, perhaps? That doesn’t seem quite right. Suppose that we have a trolley heading towards Alice who is tied to the track, and we can redirect the trolley towards Bob. Alice is a surgeon needed to save ten people. Bob is a surgeon needed to save one. However, Alice works in a hospital that has vastly more red tape, and hence for her to save the ten people, thirty times as many people need to sign off on the paperwork. But in both cases the probabilities of success (including the signing off on the paperwork) are the same. In this case, maybe we should ignore the red tape, and redirect?

So the measure of the remoteness of causal chains is going to have to be quite complex.

All this confirms my conviction that the proportionality condition in Double Effect is much more complex than initially seems.

On a generalization of Double Effect

Traditional formulations of the Principle of Double Effect deal with things that are said to have absolute prohibitions against them, like killing the innocent: such things must never be intended, but sometimes may be produced as a side-effect.

Partly to generalize the traditional formulation, and partly to move beyond strict deontology, contemporary thinkers sometimes modify Double Effect to be some principle like:

1. It is worse, or harder to justify, to intentionally cause harm than to do so merely foreseeably.

While (1) sounds plausible, there is a family of cases where intentionally causing harm is permitted but doing so unintentionally is not. To punish someone, you need to intend a harm (but maybe not an all-things-considered harm) to them. But there are cases where a harsh treatment is only permissible as a punishment. In some cases where someone has committed a serious crime and deserves to be imprisoned, and yet the imprisonment is not necessary to protect society (e.g., because the criminal has for other reasons—say, a physical injury—become incapable of repeating the crimes), then the imprisonment can be justified as punishment, but not otherwise. In those cases, the harm is permitted only if it is intended.

It still seems that it tends to be the case that intentional harm is harder to justify than merely foreseen harm.

Playing to win in order to lose

Let’s say I have a friend who needs cheering up as she has had a lot of things not go her way. I know that she is definitely a better badminton player than I. So I propose a badminton match. My goal in doing so is to have her win the game, so as to cheer her up. But when I play, I will of course be playing to win. She may notice if I am not, plus in any case her victory will be the more satisfying the better my performance.

What is going on rationally? I am trying to win in order that she may win a closely contested game. In other words, I am pursuing two logically incompatible goals in the same course of action. Yet the story makes perfect rational sense: I achieve one end by pursuing an incompatible end.

The case is interesting in multiple ways. It is a direct counterexample to the plausible thesis that it is not rational to be simultaneously pursuing each of two logically incompatible goals. It’s not the only counterexample to that thesis. A perhaps more straightforward one is where you are pursuing a disjunction between two incompatible goods, and some actions are rationally justified by being means to each good. (E.g., imagine a more straightforward case where you reason: If I win, that’ll cheer me up, and if she wins, that’ll cheer her up, so either way someone gets cheered up, so let’s play.)

The case very vividly illustrates the distinction between:

1. Instrumentally pursuing a goal, and

2. Pursuing an instrumental goal.

My pursuit of victory is instrumental to cheering up my friend, but victory is not itself instrumental to my further goals. On the contrary, victory would be incompatible with my further goal. Again, this is not the only case like that. A case I’ve discussed multiple times is of follow-through in racquet sports, where after hitting the ball or shuttle, you intentionally continue moving the racquet, because the hit will be smoother if you intend to follow-through even though the continuation of movement has no physical effect on the ball or shuttle. You are instrumentally pursuing follow-through, but the follow-through is not instrumental.

Similarly, the case also shows that it is false that every end you have you either pursue for its own sake or it is your means to something else. For neither are you pursuing victory for its own sake nor is victory a means to something else—though your pursuit of victory is a means to something else.

Given the above remarks, here is an interesting ethics question. Is it permissible to pursue the death of an innocent person in order to save that innocent person’s life? The cases are, of course, going to be weird. For instance, your best friend Alice is a master fencer, and has been unjustly sentenced to death by a tyrant. The tyrant gives you one chance to save her life: you can fence Alice for ten minutes, with you having a sharpened sword and her having a foil with a safety tip, and you must sincerely try to kill her—the tyrant can tell if you are not trying to kill. If she survives the ten minutes, she goes free. If you fence Alice, the structure of your intention is just as in my badminton case: You are trying to kill Alice in order to save her life. Alice’s death would be pursued by you, but her death is not a means nor something pursued for its own sake.

If the story is set up as above, I think the answer is that, sadly, it is wrong for you to try to kill Alice, even though that is the only way to save her life.

All that said, I still wonder a bit. In the badminton case, are you really striving for victory? Or are you striving to act as if you were striving for victory? Maybe that is the better way to describe the case. If so, then this may be a counterexample to my main thesis here.

In any case, if there is a good chance the tyrant can’t tell the difference between your trying to kill Alice and your intentionally performing the same motions that you would be performing if you were trying to kill Alice, it seems to me that it might be permissible to do the latter. This puts a lot of pressure on some thoughts about the closeness problem for Double Effect. For it seems pretty plausible to me that it would be wrong for you to intentionally perform the same motions that you would be performing if you were trying to kill Alice in order to save people other than Alice.

Two looping trolley scenarios

As part of an argument against the Principle of Double Effect, Thomson argued that if one thinks that it is permissible to redirect a trolley that is heading towards a branch with five people (“Branch” in my diagram) so it heads on a branch towards one, then this redirection remains permissible if one adds a looping track to the right branch that comes back to the left branch, as long as the one person on the right branch is large enough to stop the trolley from hitting the five.

But, Thomson insists, in the looping case the trolley’s hitting the large person on the right branch is a means to the five being saved, and so the defender of Double Effect cannot hold that there is something especially bad about intentionally harming someone.

Subsequently, it’s been noted, implicitly or explicitly (Liao et al.) that there is an ambiguity in Thomson’s story. On one version, “SymLoop” in my diagram, the track becomes symmetric, so that just as the one would block the trolley from hitting the five if the trolley went to the right branch, the five would block the trolley from hitting the one if the trolley stayed on the left branch. On the other hand, in AsymLoop, the left branch continues on, and if the trolley were to go on the left branch without the five being there, inertia would carry it harmlessly forward and away from everyone concerned.

When talking about all looping trolleys with Harrison Lee, it has occurred to me that there is a not implausible view on which:

1. Redirection in Branch is permissible.

2. Redirection in SymLoop is permissible.

3. Redirection in AsymLoop is impermissible.

Here is why. In Branch, we have the standard Double Effect considerations, which I won’t rehearse.

Now, redirecting in AsymLoop is morally the same as a case where a trolley is heading down a straight unbranching path towards five people, and you grab a random large bystander and push them in front of the trolley to save the five (call this “Bystander Push”). For in both AsymLoop and Bystander Push, you are interposing a bystander between the trolley and the five. The only difference is the mechanics of who or what is moved (and motion is relative anyway). And most non-utilitarians agree that pushing the bystander in front of the trolley is wrong.

However, SymLoop is a bit different. Here we have six people towards whom a dangerous trolley is heading, and we try to rearrange the six people in danger in such a way that as few of them die as possible. What is analogous to SymLoop is not Bystander Push, but a case where the trolley is heading down a single straight path in a narrow tunnel (so narrow that stepping off the track won’t save one), on which there are five small people just in front of one large person, and we reorder the large person to be in front of the small ones. Call this Reorder Push.

I think there is good reason to think Reorder Push is permissible. We have a group in danger. By chance, the status quo is that the five small people are protecting the large person. But is that fair? They are smaller in body, but no smaller in dignity. If they were all the same size, so that no matter what order they were in, the same number would die, it would be fair to roll dice to figure out the order—or to just count the status quo as “the dice having already been rolled”. But when they are not the same size, there is a naturally preferred arrangement of the people in danger: the large one first, and then the small ones. (For a variant case, suppose the six people are all standing in a line in the tunnel perpendicular to the track, so that when the trolley comes, they all will die. It would be perfectly reasonable for the five small ones to move behind the one large one, and utterly unreasonable for the large one to move behind the five small ones—the large person shouldn’t get defended at the expense of five.)

If Reorder Push is permissible, so is redirection in SymLoop. In both cases, the trolley is heading towards six, and we are just rearranging.

Now, it may seem that the reasoning behind Reorder Push should be rejected by a non-consequentialist. But I don’t think so. Prior to learning of Thomson’s Loop case (and hence not in order to generate a response to Loop), I wrote a paper on Double Effect where using an idea of Murphy’s I defend a distinction between accomplishing someone’s death and accomplishing someone’s being in lethal danger. On the view I defend, it’s always wrong to accomplish someone’s death, at least under such conditions as juridical innocence, but accomplishing someone’s being endangered, even lethally, is not always wrong. In particular, it’s not always wrong when the person consents to it, or when one has appropriate authority over the person. Thus, just as it is permissible to jump on a grenade to save comrades, it is permissible to push someone on a grenade with with their consent (suppose that the hero is unable to themselves jump, and the person pushing the hero is unable to reach the grenade with their own body), and it may be permissible for an officer to push a non-consenting soldier onto the grenade.

Now, the trolley case is not a case of intentional killing but of intentionally setting up a situation that in fact has lethal danger in it. One does not intend the death of the one in redirecting the trolley, but instead one intends the absorption of kinetic energy—which absorption happens to be a lethal danger to the absorber. This is not absolutely morally forbidden, but is only forbidden in some cases. In particular, it is not forbidden in cases of consent. That’s why pushing a random bystander is wrong, but it is not wrong to push a volunteer who is otherwise unable to move. In the same way, redirection in either SymLoop or AsymLoop would be permissible with the consent of the large person on the right track. But as the case is normally set up, you don’t have this consent.

Now, without the consent of the large person, AsymLoop and SymLoop come apart, as do Bystander and Reorder Push. Grabbing someone towards whom the trolley is not heading, and putting them in front of the trolley, whether by pushing (Bystander Push) or by moving the trolley (AsymLoop) is a wrongful case of accomplishing their lethal endangerment. But when that person happens to be in the lucky status quo where they are in the path of the trolley, but are being protected by the bodies of the five, they ought to refuse that costly protection. They ought in justice to consent to reordering or redirection. Now, in some cases, actual consent and obligation-in-justice to consent have different moral effects (e.g., in sexual cases the difference is very significant), but in other cases they may have similar moral effects. It is quite reasonable to say that in endangerment cases, actual consent and obligation to consent have similar moral effects. (One hint of this is that endangerment cases are ones where authority can have an effect to consent; sexual cases, for instance, are not like that—authority does nothing in the absence of consent there.) Thus, even without consent, redirection in SymLoop is permissible—but not so in AsymLoop.

Final remark: I wonder if it matters whether it is justice or something else that requires the consent in these kinds of cases. Intuition: One has a moral duty to jump in front of a trolley that is heading towards a hundred (but mabe not towards five) people. If so, and if it doesn’t matter whether the obligation is in justice or in some other way (say, charity), then once enough lives come to be at stake, then redirection in AsymLoop and pushing the non-consenting bystander become permissible. But if the obligation has to be one of justice, then one might hold that the redirection and pushing remains wrong even when there are more lives at stake.

Acknowledgment: The thinking here is greatly influenced by arguments from Harrison Lee about volunteering in loop trolley cases, but the conclusions differ.

Doing, allowing and trolleys

Consider a trolley problem where the trolley is heading for:

• Path A with two people,

but you can redirect it to:

• Path B with one person.

If that’s the whole story, and everyone is a stranger to you, redirection is surely permitted, and probably even required.

But add one more ingredient: the one person on Path B is you yourself. I am far from sure of this, but I suspect that you aren’t morally required to save two strangers at the expense of your life, though of course it would be praiseworthy if you did. (On the other hand, once the number on Path A is large enough, I think it becomes obligatory to save them.)

Now consider a reverse version. Suppose that the trolley is heading for Path B, where you are. Are you permitted to redirect it to Path A? I am inclined to think not.

So we have these two judgments:

1. You aren’t obligated to redirect from two people to yourself.

2. You aren’t permitted to redirect from yourself to two people.

This suggests that in the vicinity of the Principle of Double Effect there is an asymmetry between doing and allowing. For you are permitted to allow two people to be hit by the trolley rather than sacrifice your life, but you are not permitted to redirect the trolley from yourself to the two.

Now, you might object that the whole thing here is founded on the idea, which I am not sure of, that you are not obligated to save two strangers at the expense of your life. While I am pretty confident that you are not obligated to save one stranger at the expense of your life, with two I become unsure. If this is the sticking point, I can modify my case. Instead of having two people fully on Path A, we could suppose that there is one person fully on Path A and the other has a limb on the track. I don’t think you are obligated to sacrifice your life to save one stranger’s life and another’s limb. But it still seems wrong to redirect the trolley from yourself at the expense of a stranger and a limb. So we still have an allowing-doing asymmetry.

Another interesting question: Are you permitted to redirect a trolley heading for you in a way that kills one stranger? I am not sure.

Forced choice and deontology

Suppose the only way to save five innocent people is by killing one innocent person. The deontologist says: you must refrain.

But what you have a forced choice between killing one and killing five?

How could that be? I know of two ways.

First, a psychological block. Perhaps you are brainwashed into killing, but it’s left to your free will whether you are to choose one victim or five.

Second, you can tie the outcomes to cases where effort is required to maintain the status quo but where at least mental effort is needed to stop maintaining it.

As a little introspective experiment, I held my breath for 20 seconds. It took a mild to moderate amount of effort to do so, increasing towards the end of the time period. As our language of “holding” indicates, holding one’s breath is an action. But at the same time, it was clear at all the times that breathing would also be an action—a deliberate interruption of the holding that would also take a mental and physical effort.

Similarly, imagine you’re holding an extremely heavy suitcase. The on-going holding is an effort. But at the same time, to let the suitcase go would also be an effort: you would need to bend your knees to lower it to the ground, or at least move your fingers to release your grip.

In both the breath and suitcase cases, there is no such thing as refraining from action. Holding is an action and letting go is an action.

Very well, now imagine that an evildoer has set things up as follows. They informed you that if you don’t kill the one innocent, five innocents will die. And then they set up a machine that will shoot the one innocent if you let go of the suitcase in the next thirty seconds. What should you do?

If you hold on for thirty seconds, then your effort will ensure that overall four people will die. Even if we grant that you are not intending this tragic consequence, it is wrong to act in a way that produces such a consequence. Think about this in terms of Double Effect (I am grateful to one of our grad students for the connection): holding on to the suitcase has an evil consequence that is disproportionate to whatever goods are involved in holding on.

If you let go, however, then only one person will die. This seems better. But if that’s why you let go, then you are letting go in order that that one person’s death should prevent the deaths of the five. And that violates deontology.

Here is a tentative suggestion. Standard deontological principles have an unstated presupposition: refraining from action is possible. If refraining is impossible, the principles apply at best in modified form.

Double Effect and trivially good ends

Suppose I am facing the classic trolley situation: a trolley is hurtling towards five persons on the left track, but I can redirect the trolley onto the right track where there is only one person.

A normal decent person will redirect the trolley in order to save the five persons, tolerating the unintended death of the one person as a side-effect. But now imagine that Alice redirects the trolley solely in order to enjoy the feeling of moving the railway switch. She realizes that this spells the death of the person on the right track. But she reasons as follows:

I am not intending the death of that person. I am intending the pleasant feeling of moving the railway switch. I foresee the death of one person on the right track. However, the overall foreseen consequences of the action are positive: five live, one dies and I have fun, instead of five dying and one living. Thus the Principle of Double Effect applies. I am aiming at a good (fun), with the bad effect (death of one) not intended as either an end or as a means, and the good effect is proportionate to the overall consequences, since the overall consequences are positive.

There is something with Alice’s failure to intend to save the lives of the five. What is wrong? Here is one suggestion:

1. In the proportionality condition of the Principle of Double Effect, we do not simply compare the good and the bad effects, but we compare the intended good effects to all the foreseen bad effects.

In the case of a normal decent person, saving the five persons is intended, and proportionality holds. But Alice doesn’t intend to save the five and so there is no proportionality.

I am inclined to think the suggested proportionality condition asks for too much. Suppose Bob is an agent much like in the original trolley situation, except that he is tied down, near the switch, in such a way that his leg protrudes onto the left track after the switch. Bob is (rightly) terrified of getting his leg amputated, and decides to redirect the trolley. He then notices that on the right track there is a person, and so if he redirects the trolley, that person will die. He is about to resign himself to loss of the leg, when he looks at the left track and notices that there are five people there. He reasons that while a person will die, on balance the consequences of redirecting are good, and redirects the trolley solely in order to save his leg.

While we would prefer it if Bob intended to save the five people on the left track, I do not think Bob did anything wrong. What was wrong with Alice’s action was that her end, the pleasure of flipping the switch, was execrably trivial in comparison to the death of the person on the right track. Bob’s end is far from trivial. Thus, I suggest:

2. In the proportionality condition of the Principle of Double Effect, we do two comparisons. First, we ensure that the intended good effects are not trivial in comparison to all the foreseen bad effects. Second, we ensure that the foreseen good effects are proportionate to the foreseen bad effects.

The five-five trolley

The standard trolley case is where a trolley is heading to a track with five people, and you can redirect it to a track with one person. It seems permissible to do so.

But now imagine that a trolley is heading to a track with five people, and you can redirect it to another track also with five people. Why would you bother? Well, suppose that you enjoy turning the steering wheel on the trolley, and you reason that there is no overall harm in your redirecting the trolley.

This seems callous.

Yet we are in cases like the five-five trolley all the time. By the butterfly effect, many minor actions of ours affect the timings of human mating (you have a short conversation with someone as they are leaving work; this affects traffic patterns, and changes the timing of sexual acts for a number of people in the traffic), which then changes which sperm reaches an ovum, and hence affects which human beings exist in the next generation, and the changes balloon, and pretty soon there are major differences as to who is in the path of a hurricane, and so on.

But of course there is still a difference between the five-five trolley and the butterfly effect cases. In the five-five trolley, you know some of the details of the effects of your action: you know that these five will die if you don’t redirect and those five if you do. But note that these details are not much. You still may not know any of the ten people from Adam. In the butterfly effect cases, you can say a fair amount about the sort of effects your minor action has, but not much more than that.

What’s going on? I am inclined to think that here we should invoke something about the symbolic meaning of one’s actions. In the case where one turns the steering wheel on the trolley for fun, while knowing epistemically close effects, one exhibits a callous disregard for the sanctity of human life. But when one has a conversation with someone after work, given the epistemic distance, one does not exhibit the same callous disregard.

It is not surprising if callousness and regard for sacredness should depend on fine details of epistemic and other distance. Think of the phenomenon of jokes that come “too soon” after a terrible event: they show a callous disregard for evil. But similar jokes about temporally, personally and/or epistemically distant events may be acceptable.

Moral fetishism and intentional aiming

For a long time I’ve had an odd fascination with cases where you have to intentionally aim at something that is neither your end nor a means to your end. The first case to come to my mind was something like this: Let’s say you want to send a nerve signal from your brain to your forearm (e.g., maybe you are hooked up to a device that detects these nerve signals and dispenses chocolate covered almonds). What do you? You wiggle your fingers! Wiggling your fingers, however, is not your end. But neither is it a means to the sending of the nerve signals. On the contrary, the nerve signals are the cause of the finger motions. But you can’t directly aim at the nerve signals, so you have to aim at finger wiggling instead.

A more ordinary kind of case I’ve found is follow-through in racquet sports, where you continue racquet motion after hitting the ball (or shuttle), because your brain will make the swing weaker at the time of contact unless you’re trying to continue the movement after the swing. But there is no point to the movement after the time of contact—the ball isn’t somehow magically steered by the racquet once it no longer touches it. So the movement of the racquet after impact is neither means nor end.

Outside weird laboratory setups and some sports cases, it is hard to think of cases of this odd phenomenon where one takes aim at an action that one neither instrumentally or finally cares about. But I’ve just realized a very interesting application. There is a philosophical literature about what people call “moral fetishism”. Those who push this line of thought think that there is something wrong with aiming your actions specifically at rightness of action, instead of at the thick reasons (your friend’s need, your promise, etc.) that make the action right.

Now, I think there are cases where you need to aim at rightness. The cases that come to mind are ones where you need to rely on a moral expert to figure out what is the right thing to do and why. One family of cases is where you are a small child and are relying on parental authority. Another is when you are a medical professional, are dealing with a morally complex case, and are relying on the advice of an ethics committee. And probably the most common case is when you are a religious believer and you are relying on what you take to be divine revelation about what is right (a different case is where you are a believer and are relying on supposed revelation about what is commanded by God). One may take these cases to be a refutation of the objections to moral fetishism, since in these cases one may be driven to pursue rightness by genuine conscientiousness rather than by any fetishism.

However, over the last couple of days I’ve realized that there may be a way of acting in these cases in a way that gives the objectors to moral fetishism what they want—and that I actually rather like this way of acting in the cases. When an action is right, there are reasons why it is right. In straightforward cases, we can easily say what these are: it helps a friend in need, it fulfills a promise, etc. But the cases in the previous paragraph are ones where the agent cannot give these reasons. Nonetheless, these reasons exist, and the adviser is thought to have them.

We can now imagine that the agent aims at rightness not because the agent values rightness in and of itself, but because the agent values the thick but unknown reasons for which the action is right. This could be rather like the finger-wiggling and racquet-sport cases. For it could be that just as the agent doesn’t care about the finger-wiggling and follow-through as an end, and neither is a means to what the agent cares about, similarly the agent doesn’t care about the rightness, and the rightness is not a means to what the agent cares about, by aiming at rightness the agent gets what they do care about, which is acting in accordance with thick (but unknown) reasons. Furthermore, like in the finger-wiggling case, the thing one really cares about—the nerve signal or the satisfaction of thick reasons—is explanatorily prior to the thing one aims at. (The follow-through case is a bit more complicated; probably what aims at is a whole swing, of which the good hit is a part, so the good hit is a part of the whole swing and in that way prior to it.)

It may help to think about a specific moral theory. Suppose utilitarianism is correct, and one has a moral oracle that tells one what the right action is, and one acts on the deliverances of this oracle. One need not care about the rightness of these actions—but they are right if and only if they maximize utility, and it is the utility maximization one cares about.

Thus in the case where one relies on testimony to do what is right, but one cares about rightness because one cares about the values that rightness yields, one is no more and no less a rightness fetishist than the typical racquet-sport coach is a follow-through fetishist. But in any case, what is going on is not problematic.

All that said, I think caring about rightness as such to some degree is also appropriate. That’s because one should care about oneself, and acting rightly is good for one.

Probabilistic trolleys

Suppose a trolley is heading towards five people, and you can redirect it towards one. But the trolley needs to go up a hill before it can roll down it to hit the five people, and your best estimate of its probability of making it up the hill is 1/4. On the other hand, if you redirect it, it’s a straight path to the one person, who is certain to be killed. Do you redirect? Expected utilities:  − 1.25 lives for not redirecting and  − 1 lives for redirecting.

Or suppose you are driving a fire truck to a place where five people are about to die in a fire, and you know that you have a 1/4 chance of putting out the fire and saving them if you get there in time. Moreover, there is a person sleeping on the road in front of the only road to the fire, and if you stop to remove the person from the road, it will be too late for the five. Do you brake? Expected utilities:  − 5 lives for braking and  − 1 − 3.75 =  − 4.75 lives for continuing to the fire and running over the person on the road.

I think you shouldn’t redirect and you should brake. There is something morally obnoxious about certainly causing death for a highly uncertain benefit when the expected values are close. This complicates the proportionality condition in the Principle of Double Effect even more, and provides further evidence against expected-value utilitarianism.

Probabilistic trolleys

Generally people think that if a trolley is heading for a bunch of people, it’s wrong to push an innocent bystander in front of the trolley to stop it before it kills the other people, with the innocent bystander dying from the impact.

But imagine that it is 99% likely that the bystander will survive the impact, but 100% certain that the five people further down the track would die. Perhaps the trolley is accelerating downhill, and currently it only has a 1% chance of lethality, but by the time it reaches the five people at the bottom of the hill, it has a 100% chance of lethality. Or perhaps the five people are more fragile, or the bystander is well-armored. For simplicity, let’s also suppose that the trolley cannot inflict any major injury other than death. At this point, it seems plausible that it is permissible to push the bystander in front of the trolley.

But now let’s suppose the situation is repeated over and over, with new people at the bottom of the track but the same unfortunate bystander. Eventually the bystander dies, and the situation stops (maybe that death is what convinces the railroad company to fix the brakes on their trolleys). We can expect about 500 people to be saved at this point. However, it seems that in the case where the bystander wasn’t going to survive the impact, it would have been wrong to push them even to save 500.

There are at least two non-consequentialist ways out of this puzzle.

1. It is wrong to push the bystander in front of the trolley in the original case where doing so is fatal. After all, one is not intending the bystander’s death, but only their absorption of kinetic energy. In my 2013 paper, I argued that this constitutes wrongful lethal endangerment when the bystander does not consent, even if it is not an intentional killing. But perhaps that judgment is wrong.

2. It is wrong to push the bystander to save five, but not wrong to push them to save five hundred. While this is a special case of threshold deontology, one can make this move without embracing threshold deontology. One can say that no matter how many are saved, it is wrong to intentionally kill the innocent bystander, but lethal endangerment becomes permissible once the number of people saved is high enough.

Initially, I also thought the following was an appealing solution: It matters whether it is the same bystander who is pushed in front of the trolley each time or a different one. Pushing the same bystander repeatedly unjustly imposes a likely-lethal burden on them, and that is wrong. But it would be permissible to push a different bystander each time onto the track, even though it is still almost certain that eventually a bystander will die. The problem with this solution is this. When the sad situation is repeated with different bystanders, by adopting the policy of pushing the bystander, we are basically setting up a lethal lottery for the bystanders—one of them will be killed. But if we can do that, then it seems we could set up a lethal lottery a different way: Choose a random bystander out of, say, 500, and then keep on pushing that bystander. (Remember that the way the story was set up, death is the only possible injury, so don’t think of that bystander as getting more and more bruised; they are unscathed until they die.) But that doesn’t seem any different from just pushing the same bystander without any lottery, because it is pretty much random which human being will end up being the bystander.

More on proportionality in Double Effect and prevention

In my previous post, I discuss cases where someone is doing an evil for the sake of preventing significantly worse goods—say, murdering a patient to save four others with the organs from the one—and note that a straightforward reading of the Principle of Double Effect’s proportionality condition seems to forbid one from stopping that evil. I offer the suggestion, due to a graduate student, that failure to stop the evil in such cases implies complicity with the evils.

I now think that complicity doesn’t solve the problem, because we can imagine case where there is no relevant evildoer. Take a trolley problem where the trolley is coming to a fork and about to turn onto the left track and kill Alice. There is no one on the right track. So far this is straightforward and doesn’t involve Double Effect at all—you should obviously redirect the trolley. But now add that if Alice dies, four people will be saved with her organs, and if Alice lives, they will die.

Among the results of redirecting the trolley, now, are the deaths of the four who won’t be saved, and hence Double Effect does apply. To save one person at the expense of four is disproportionate, and so it seems that one violates Double Effect in saving the one. And in this case, a failure to save Alice would not involve any complicity in anyone else’s evildoing.

It is tempting to say that the deaths of the four are due to their medical condition and not the result of trolley redirection, and hence do not count for Double Effect proportionality purposes. But now imagine that the four people can be saved with synthetic organs, though only if the surgery happens very quickly. However, the only four surgeons in the region are all on an automated trolley, which is heading towards the hospital along the left track, is expected to kill Alice along the way, but will continue on until it stops at the hospital. If the trolley is redirected on the right path, it will go far away and not reach the hospital in time.

In this case, it does seem correct to say that Double Effect forbids one from redirecting the trolley—you should not stop the surgeons’ trolley even if a person is expected to die from a trolley accident along the way. (Perhaps you are unconvinced if the number of patients needing to be saved is only four. If so, increase the number.) But for Double Effect to have this consequence, the deaths of the of the patients in the hospital have to count as effects of your trolley redirection.

And if the deaths count in this case, they should count in the original case where Alice’s organs are needed. After all, in both cases the patients die of their medical condition because the trolley redirection has prevented the only possible way of saving them.

Here’s another tempting response. In the original version of the story, if one refrains from redirecting the trolley in light of the people needing Alice’s organs, one is intending that Alice die as a means to saving the four, and hence one is violating Double Effect. But this response would not save Double Effect: it would make Double Effect be in conflict with itself. For if my earlier argument that Double Effect prohibits redirecting the trolley stands, and this response does nothing to counter it, then Double Effect both prohibits redirecting and prohibits refraining from redirecting!

I think what we need is some careful way of computing proportionality in Double Effect. Here is a thought. Start by saying in both versions of the case that the deaths of the four patients are not the effects of the trolley redirection. This was very intuitive, but seemed to cause a problem in the delayed-surgeons version. However, there is a fairly natural way to reconstrue things. Take it that leaving the trolley to go along the left track results in the good of saving the four patients. So far we’ve only shifted whether we count the deaths of the four as an evil on the redirection side of the ledger or the saving of the four as a good on the non-redirection side. This makes no difference to the comparison. But now add one more move: don’t count goods that result from evils in the ledger at all. This second move doesn’t affect the delayed-surgeons case. For the good of saving lives in that case is not a result of Alice’s death, and the proportionality calculation is unaffected. In particular, in that case we still get the correct result that you should not redirect the trolley, since the events relevant to proportionality are the evil of Alice’s death and the good of saving four lives, and so preventing Alice’s death is disproportionate. But in the organ case, the good of saving lives is a result of Alice’s death. So in that case, Double Effect’s proportionality calculation does not include the lives saved, and hence, quite correctly, we conclude that you should redirect to save Alice’s life.

Maybe. But I am not sure. Maybe my initial intuition is wrong, and one should not redirect the trolley in the organ case. What pulls me the other way is the hungry bear case here.

Proportionality in Double Effect and prevention cases

Suppose you are visiting a hospital and you see Bob, a nurse, sneaking into Alice’s hospital room. Unnoticed, you look at what is going on, and you see that Bob is about to add a lethal drug to Alice’s IV, a drug that would undetectably kill Alice while leaving her organs intact. You recall with horror that two days ago you had a conversation with Bob and he described to you how compelling he finds the argument that it is sometimes obligatory to kill one patient in order to provide organs to save multiple other patients, when this can be done secretly. At the time, you unsuccessfully tried to persuade Bob that the consequentialism behind the argument was implausible. You happen to know that if Bob were to die right now, then four people could be saved. You could now yell, push Bob away, and prevent Alice’s murder.

Here is a Double Effect argument that you shouldn’t stop the murder. Your action of pushing Bob away has two sets of effects: (a) Alice isn’t murdered and (b) four patients who would be saved by Alice’s organs die. Of these, (a) is an intended good and (b) is an unintended evil. So your action is an action to which Double Effect is relevant: it is an action with two effects, an intended good and an unintended evil. But Double Effect makes it a necessary condition for the permissibility of an action that the evils not be disproportionate to the goods. And here the evils are disproportionate to the goods. So you shouldn’t stop Bob, it seems.

Now, one might question the proportionality judgment. Maybe while four deaths are disproportional to one death, four deaths are not disproportionate to one murder? This is mistaken, however. For suppose you see an assassin trying to murder someone with a long-range shot, and you see four innocent people near the assassin. The only way you have to stop the assassin is with a hand-grenade, which would kill the four innocents as well. It is clear that four deaths of innocents are disproportionate to the one murder: you should not stop the murder by blowing up the assassin.

Suppose you bite the bullet and agree that you shouldn’t stop Bob. Then I have an even more problematic version. Go back to your disquieting conversation with Bob about killing patients for their organs. Suppose that Bob disclosed to you in the course of that conversation that it wasn’t a merely hypothetical question, as you assumed, but that he was actually planning on acting on it. It seems completely clear that you should try to persuade him out of this murderous plan. But the exact same Double Effect argument seems to apply here: There are two sets of effects of your persuading Bob not to do it—one person isn’t murdered and a number of people die. The bad effects are disproportionate to the good ones, so Double Effect seems to prohibit you from persuading Bob out of his plan.

Maybe though this second case is different from the first, in that it is one of the basic tasks of a fellow human being to persuade others to act well—this is a central part of our human communal interaction. So it may be that once we take into account the good of persuading others to act well, and add that good to the intended goods, now the four deaths are no longer disproportionate. But now increase the numbers. Perhaps Alice has some weird mutation in her heart tissue such that culturing her heart tissue would save a thousand lives. Now the death of a thousand seems clearly disproportionate to preventing one murder and obtaining the goods of persuading others to act well. Imagine that I had a choice between preventing an explosion that would completely destroy a ship with a thousand people on board and persuading someone not to commit an “ordinary” murder. I should prevent the sinking of the ship. Yet even in the thousand patient case I have the intuition—admittedly, now weaker—that I should try to persuade Bob not to murder Alice, or at least that it is permissible to do so. Especially if Bob is my friend.

What’s going on? Is it the case that when we consider the good of persuading someone to act well, we should not count against that any goods that would result from their acting badly? Is it—a graduate student suggested this to me—that if I fail to persuade them to act well in order to obtain the goods that would result from their act badly, then I become complicit in their bad action? I think there is something to this idea. It may even apply in my earlier case of not stopping Bob physically from the murder, but it seems particularly plausible in the case of refraining to persuade.

In any case, if I am right that it is right to persuade Bob out of his plan to murder Alice, we really do need to understand the proportionality condition in Double Effect very carefully. That condition seems to become significantly context-sensitive. Double Effect is not a simple structural principle by any means.

Objection: When it’s a matter of stopping Bob’s murder of Alice, you don’t cause the deaths of the patients who need Alice’s organs to live. The patients die of whatever conditions they die of, rather than from your action.
So those deaths don’t figure in the Double Effect proportionality calculus.

Response: Imagine that I could stop an ordinary murder, but to do that I would have to park my car in a place that would block an ambulance from getting to the scene of an unrelated accident, where a number of people would die of their injuries if the ambulance were not to get there in time. When considering my action of parking my car, I do need to consider the deaths of the people the ambulance would save, even though they die from their injuries rather than from my action. If the number of people the ambulance would save is large enough, I ought not block the ambulance’s path to prevent one murder.

"Pun not intended"

Some people think that an outcome of an action foreseen with practical certainty is also intended. If so, then pretty much every case where someone writes “pun not intended” is a case where what they write is false. For one foresees with practical certainty that by disseminating the message one is punning.

Trolleys and chaos

Suppose that determinism is true and Alice is about to roll a twenty-sided die to determine which of twenty innocent prisoners to murder. There is nothing you can do to stop her. You are in Alice’s field of view. Now, a die roll, even if deterministic, is very sensitive to the initial conditions. A small change in Alice’s throw is apt to affect the outcome. And any behavior of yours is apt to affect Alice’s throw. You frown, and Alice becomes slightly tenser when she throws. You smile, and Alice pauses a little wondering what you’re smiling about, and then she throws differently. You turn around not to watch, and Alice grows annoyed or pleased, and her throw is affected.

So it’s quite reasonable to think that whatever you do has a pretty good chance, indeed close to a 95% chance, of changing which of the prisoners will die. In other words, with about 95% probability, each of your actions is akin to redirecting a trolley heading down a track with one person onto a different track with a different person.

Some people—a minority—think that it is wrong to redirect a trolley heading for five people to a track with only one person. I wonder what they could say should be done in the Alice case. If it’s wrong to redirect a trolley from five people to one person, it seems even more wrong to redirect a trolley from one person to another person. So since any discernible action is likely to effectively be a trolley redirection in the Alice case, it seems you should do nothing. But what does “do nothing” mean? Does it mean: stop all external bodily motion? But stopping all external bodily motion is itself an effortful action (as anybody who played Lotus Focus on the Wii knows). Or does it mean: do what comes naturally? But if one were in the situation described, one would likely become self-conscious and unable to do anything “naturally”.

The Alice case is highly contrived. But if determinism is true, then it is very likely that many ordinary actions affect who lives and who dies. You talk for a little longer to a colleague, and they start to drive home a little later, which has a domino effect on the timing of people’s behaviors in traffic today, which then slightly affects when people go to sleep, how they feel when they wake up, and eventually likely affects who dies and who does not die in a car accident. Furthermore, minor differences in timing affect the timing of human reproducive activity, which is likely to affect which sperm reaches the ovum, which then affects the personalities of people in the next generation, and eventually affects who lives and who dies. Thus, if we live in a deterministic world, we are constantly “randomly” (as far as we are concerned, since we don’t know the effects) redirectly trolleys between paths with unknown numbers of people.

Hence, if we live in a deterministic world, then we are all the time in trolley situations. If we think that trolley redirection is morally wrong, then we will be morally paralyzed all the time. So, in a deterministic world, we better think that it’s OK to redirect trolleys.

Of course, science (as well as the correct theology and philosophy) gives us good reason to think we live in an indeterministic world. But here is an intuition: when we deal with the external world, it shouldn’t make a difference whether we have real randomness or the quasi-randomness that determinism allows. It really shouldn’t matter whether Alice is flipping an indeterministic die or a deterministic but unpredictable one. So our conclusions should apply to our indeterministic world as well.

Murder without an intention of harm

I used to think that every murder is an intentional killing. But this is incorrect: beheading John the Baptist was murder even if the intention was solely to put his head on a platter rather than to kill him. Cases like that once made me think something like this: murder is an intentional injury that one expects to be lethal. (Cf. Ramraj 2000.)

But now I think there can be cases of murder where there is no intent to injure at all. Suppose that amoral Alice wants to learn what an exploding aircraft looks like. To that end, she launches an anti-aircraft missile at a civilian jetliner. SHe has the ordinary knowledge that the explosion will kill everyone on board, but in her total amorality she no more intends this than the ordinary person intends to contribute to wearing out shoes when going for a walk. Alice has committed murder, but without any intention to kill.

In terms of the Principle of Double Effect, Alice’s wrongdoing lies in the lack of proportionality between the foreseen gravely bad effect (mass slaughter) and the foreseen trivially good effect (satisfaction of desire for unimportant knowledge), rather than in a wrongful intention, at least if we bracket questions of positive law.

It is tempting to conclude that every immoral killing is a murder. But that’s not right, either. If Bob is engaged in a defensive just war and has been legitimately ordered not to kill any of the enemy before 7 pm no matter what (so as not to alert the enemy, say), and at 6 pm he kills an enemy invader in self-defense, then he does not commit murder, but he acts wrongly in disobeying an order.

It seems that for an immoral act to be a murder it needs to be wrong because of the lethality of the harm as such, rather than due to some incidental reason, such as the lethality of the harm as contrary to a valid order.

Triple effect, looping trolley and felix culpa

Frances Kamm uses her principle of triple effect to resolve the loop version of the trolley problem. On the loop version, as usual, the main track branches into are two tracks, track A with five people and track B with one person, and the trolley is heading for track A. But now the two tracks join via a loop, so if there were no one on either track, a trolley that goes on track A will come back on track B and vice versa. If we had five people on track A and no one on track B, and we redirected the trolley to track B, it would go on track B, loop around, and fatally hit the people on track A anyway. But the one person actually on track B is big enough that if the trolley goes on track B, it will be stopped by the impact and the five people will be saved.

The problem with redirecting to track B on the loop version of the trolley problem is that it seems that a part of your intention is that the trolley should hit the person on track B, since it is that impact which stops the trolley from hitting the five people on track A. And so you are intending harm to the person on track B.

In her Intricate Ethics book, Kamm gives basically this story about redirecting the trolley in the loop case:

• Initial Intention: Redirect trolley to track A to prevent the danger of five people being hit from the front.

• Initial Defeater: The five people come to be in danger of being hit from the back by the trolley.

• Defeater to Initial Defeater: The one person on track B blocks the trolley and prevents the dangers of being hit from the back.

The important point here is that the defeater to the defeater is not intended—it is just a defeater to a defeater. Thus there is no intention to block the trolley via the one person on track B, and hence that person’s being hit is not a case of their intentionally being used as a means to saving lives.

But this defeater-defeater story is mistaken as it stands. For given the presence of the person on track B, there is no danger of the five people being hit from the back. Thus, there is no initial defeater here.

Now, if you don’t know about the one person on track B, you would have a defeater to the redirection, namely the defeater that there is danger of being hit from the back. But learning about the person on track B would not provide a defeater to that defeater—it would simply remove the defeater by showing that the danger doesn’t exist.

That the story doesn’t have a defeater-defeater structure does not mean that one is intending the one person to be hit. Kamm might still be right in thinking there is no intention to block the trolley via the one person on track B. But I am dubious of Kamm’s story now, because I am dubious that the danger of being hit from the front yields a worthy initial intention. For there is nothing particularly bad about being hit from the front. It is only the danger of being hit simpliciter that seems worth preventing.

It is interesting to me to note that even if Kamm’s story doesn’t have defeater-defeater form, the main place where I want to use her triple effect account seems to still have defeater-defeater form. That place is the felix culpa, where God allows Adam and Eve to exercise their free will, even though he knows that this would or might well (depending on details about theories of foreknowledge and middle knowledge) result in their sinning, and God’s reasoning involves the great goods of salvation history that come from Adam and Eve’s sin.

• Initial Intention: Allow Adam and Eve to exercise their free will.

• Initial Defeater: They will or might well sin.

• Defeater to Initial Defeater: Great goods will come about.

Here the initial defeater is not mistaken as in the looping trolley case—the sin or its possibility is really real. Moreover, while it’s not an initially worthy intention to prevent people from being hit from the front, unless they aren’t going to be hit from behind (or some other direction) either, it is an initially worthy intention to allow Adam and Eve to exercise their free will, even if no further goods come about, because free will is intrinsically good.

Thus we can criticize Kamm’s own use of triple effect while yet preserving what I think is a really important theological application.