Abstract
The doctrine of double effect and the many other principles that philosophers have advanced to remedy the doctrine’s defects were meant, in the words of Warren Quinn, "to capture certain kinds of fairly common intuitions about [a set of canonical] pairs of cases." Both cases in each pair “have the same consequential profile,” in that "agents bring about the same good result at the same cost in lives lost or harm suffered." But they exhibit differing deontological characteristics, leading the “common intuitions” to which Quinn refers to deem one but not the other case in each pair permissible. Over time, though, the body of cases has ballooned to embrace ever more complex situations about which intuitions are far less shared, and the principles advanced to explain those intuitions do not necessarily generate the “common” permissible/impermissible distinctions in each canonical pair. My goal is to offer a principle that does so, and to suggest that it reflects a unique deontology.
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Notes
The crushing of the skull in Craniotomy and the mental harm in Guinea Pig are both necessary – both must happen given the facts of the case – for the end to occur. The fetus can’t be removed without its skull being crushed; the guinea pig cannot go through the process of dying of X without suffering a mental harm of some sort. But, as one reviewer notes, the two cases differ in that the skull-crushing eliminates a barrier to the fetus’ removal, while the mental harm does not eliminate a barrier to the guinea pig’s dying.
So let’s suppose a version of Craniotomy that gets rid of this difference. Suppose that instead of the craniotomy being prior to the process of removal, it was concurrent with it, just as the mental harm experienced by the guinea pigs is concurrent with the process of dying. In this case, call it Craniotomy (Concurrent), the fetus’ skull is in fact small enough to make it out of the birth canal (there’s no barrier to be eliminated), but the state of technology is such that the instruments used to remove it inevitably crush its skull as it is being removed. In other words, the physical harm incurred by the fetus does not eliminate a barrier to removal, just as the mental harm in Guinea Pig does not eliminate a barrier to their dying of the disease. And – just to keep the parallel – let us suppose that the death of the fetus comes at the end of the process of removal just as the death of the guinea pigs comes at the end of the process of dying: the crushing itself does not kill the fetus just as the mental harm of the guinea pigs does not kill them.
My intuition – and it’s an intuition supported by the deontology I am advancing -- is that Craniotomy (Concurrent), which requires us to crush the fetus’s skull if we are to harm it further by removing it from the womb (even if the crushing does not eliminate a barrier to that removal), is for that reason more troubling than Hysterectomy, in which we simply remove it from the womb. Perhaps not all will share that intuition. But it’s certainly not an unreasonable one, and at this stage no one theory can account for all the different intuitions philosophers seem to have about the various cases.
Consider a physical harm done to one human agent as a means to the physical harm of a second human agent, not the same one or its continuing physical substrate. Say a trolley has to run over one person, killing him, in order to then hit a second, killing him, in order to then be stopped, thus saving five. Or consider a physical harm done to one group of agents that’s a means to mental harm in a second group, but not in the second group’s capacities as the first group’s mental continuers. Say that instead of the civilians’ deaths in a bombing campaign causing anguish in the survivors over the fate of the dead civilians, their deaths simply cause the survivors to fear for their own lives. It seems to me that those making the canonical cuts could either extend their harms-as-means-to-harm deontology to include these cases – where the second harm is done to a noncontinuous entity in both the physical and the mental senses -- or not, depending on other normative considerations. The harm-as-means-to-harm principle is a trunk that could lead to either of these branches, but exploring them lies beyond the scope of this paper.
In the canonical Switch, the one is presumed unable to escape the trolley for reasons that are generally not stated because they lie outside the facts of the case. She is stuck on the track – whether she’s tied down or trapped in some other way – for reasons apart from our own actions. And so if she happened to be trapped on the track in a physical position that required her to see the trolley rushing at her, causing her mental anguish, that too is a fact that arises outside of the facts of the case – much as, if the guinea pigs are already in an irreversible coma, that fact arises outside of the case – and so it does not qualify as a harm we inflict on her as a means to her death. This version of Switch would be every bit as permissible as the canonical version. And if we do happen to be the ones who tie the one down or otherwise trap her in a position that requires her to see the trolley rushing at her, then we have inflicted an additional physical harm on her as a means to the further physical harm of her death, and that would be impermissible.
What, to borrow a version of Bridge formulated by Judith Jarvis Thomson (1985, p. 1410), if instead of pushing the man off the bridge, all we have to do is wobble the handrail that he is leaning on, causing him to topple off the bridge? On the principle I am advancing, whether Bridge involves our pushing or merely wobbling, what we do is wrong because, as the means to its first harm of the man’s being killed by the trolley, Thomson’s version of Bridge would still additionally involve the harm of the man flying through the air and striking the ground.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Tom Hurka, Mark Migotti, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.
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Stark, A. The Trolley’s Last Stop before Consequentialism: Exploring the Terrain. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 20, 1021–1035 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-017-9841-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-017-9841-y