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Peter Unger has tried to show that relying on intuitive judgments is a worthless methodology for finding principles, and he has also offered a novel approach to the Trolley Problem. Unger, however, deals not only with the questions of when may we harm some to help others and how we can best reason about this issue. He also considers how much we must sacrifice in order to stop strangers from suffering serious losses and whether our distance from them alters our obligations. Unger's ground for claiming that intuitive judgments in cases are worthless is that we can construct cases that generate the opposite intuitive judgments. He thinks that we must decide which intuitive judgments are correct and what to do by consulting general moral values, such as the importance of reducing suffering and death. This chapter examines Peter Unger's views on the permissibility of harming innocent bystanders and the duty to harm ourselves in order to aid others.

The traditional, but now unfashionable, interpretation of the means principle is that it is worse to harm a person intentionally than it is to harm them as a side-effect of one's actions. This account of the means principle regards the motivations of wrongdoers as important in determining whether or not an action is permissible. Many people now think that motivations cannot play a role in determining what is right or wrong. What is right or wrong is to be determined by the effects of the actions on others, and not by the motivations of the person doing the action. It is outwardly that we ought to look when deciding what to do, they claim, rather than inwardly. Chapter 7 defends a version of the traditional interpretation against this objection. It is argued that motivations with which an action is done are central to its permissibility.

The distortional psychological tendencies that promote misleading responses to moral cases not linked to lessening distant suffering are difficult to identify given the complexities in accounting for our responses to cases of ethically serious causal conflict. This difficulty lessens when we consider several‐option moral problems with at least two ‘active’ options rather than classic two‐option cases like the trolley problem, which distinguish between initiating and allowing. The features of several‐option cases liberate us from the influence of constraining factors that inhibit us from responding positively to loss‐lessening behavior. Whereas these highly subjective constraining factors, like protophysical thinking and projective separating, generate distorted moral responses, their positive counterparts, like projective grouping, show that since each person whom an agent's conduct might affect has an equal claim on his or her conduct, by his or her conduct there must occur the least serious suffering possible.

Moral and political philosophers commonly appeal to moral “intuitions” at crucial points in their reasoning. This chapter considers recent challenges to this practice—here referred to as “the Method”—based in empirical studies of moral intuitions. It contends that such studies do not justify radical or revisionary conclusions about the Method. A method is aimed at achieving certain goals. The key issue is the nature of the goals in relation to which the Method is to be evaluated. This chapter argues that the relevant goal is not the “realist goal” of discovering the truth about moral and political matters. The central point is that, the chapter argues, the systematic philosophical study of moral and political questions would be worthwhile even if it turned out that moral realism cannot be vindicated or that the Method cannot be vindicated in relation to the realist goal. If this is correct, then the goal relative to which it is crucial to vindicate the Method is not the realist goal. A Rawlsian view is more plausible, according to which the relevant goal is to “characterize our moral sensibility” as it would be in “reflective equilibrium.” It turns out, however, that this Rawlsian view has some, perhaps unwelcome, deflationary implications.

Lecture I begins with a brief history of changing views on what the Trolley Problem is and attempts to solve it. The lecture then critically examines Judith Thomson’s recent view that a moral distinction between killing and letting die, and between what a conductor of the trolley or a mere bystander may do to save people from the trolley, eliminates what she now thinks of as the Trolley Problem. The last part considers a different argument for the conclusion that Thomson now favors, but ultimately attempts to resurrect the Trolley Problem, suggesting that it is not who turns the trolley that makes the turning permissible.

One central objection to general deterrence as a justification of punishment is that it is wrong to harm offenders as a means to the greater good. This requires us to evaluate the principle that it is wrong to harm people as a means and to explore its limits. This chapter defends the means principle as a general moral principle. It is argued that the means principle provides the only plausible account of some deeply held convictions about the restrictions that there are on harming people. Whilst it is difficult to find a very clear independent argument for the principle, we can find some grounds to defend it. Endorsing the means principle is essential to maintaining a certain kind of moral status. Were the means principle not a valid principle we would all in principle be available for use as tools to the good of others. As autonomous agents we ought not to be available for use in that way. It is also suggested that there are exceptions to the principle grounded in the enforceable duties that people have.

This chapter begins with a brief overview of what are known as standard Trolley Problem Cases. Next, it points out that many cases that are presented as Trolley Problem Cases in the AI ethics literature in fact raise moral issues distinctive from the issues raised by standard Trolley Problem Cases. This chapter then critically examines some discussions that seek to apply the Trolley Problem to choices involved in self-driving cars, the use of e-cigarettes, and mammography. The final section considers conceptual and moral issues involved in the production and use of self-driving cars, such as the role and responsibility of those who program such cars, the liability of pedestrians and drivers to be harmed by such cars, and whether voluntary passengers of self-driving cars are even more liable to be harmed than pedestrians.

This chapter examines claims by some cognitive psychologists conducting functional neuroimaging experiments about the neural basis of moral intuitions. It questions the idea that there are distinct cognitive and emotional subsystems in the brain driving utilitarian and deontological judgments. The chapter appeals to neuroscientific research showing that cognition and emotion are interacting processes mediated by overlapping neural systems distributed throughout the brain, Still, the reasons we adduce to justify actions depend not only on overlapping brain systems but also on social and cultural factors external to the brain.

This chapter discusses moderate (or threshold) deontology, its critique, and possible responses. Deontological theories prioritize values such as autonomy, human dignity, and keeping one's promises over the promotion of good outcomes. In prohibiting the infliction of harm on other people, they resort to distinctions such as that between actively doing harm and merely allowing it, and between intending to do harm and merely foreseeing it. Moderate deontology holds that constraints (and options) have thresholds. A constraint may be overridden for the sake of furthering good outcomes or avoiding bad ones if enough good (or bad) is at stake; and an option not to promote the good may be overridden for the sake of attaining enough good or avoiding enough bad. The chapter analyzes the main critiques leveled against deontology in general and moderate deontology in particular. It concludes that threshold constraints (and options) are an indispensable part of any acceptable factoral moral theory, but that threshold deontology suffers from a lack of methodological rigor and precision.

In her article “Turning the Trolley,” the author of this comment argued that the bystander may not turn the trolley onto one to save five. Lecture I argued that this view is mistaken. This comment contends that Lecture I’s arguments do not succeed. In this response to the second Tanner Lecture, the text then argues that the Lecture II’s reasoning depends on an unacceptable view of moral theorizing. In an addendum, this comment defends the claim that if you think the bystander may turn the trolley onto one to save five when the two tracks are not connected, then good sense requires you to think that he may do so when the two tracks are connected.

This chapter proposes a solution to the Trolley Problem in terms of the Kantian prohibition on using a person ‘merely as a means.’ A solution of this type seems impossible due to the difficulties it is widely thought to encounter in the scenario known as the Loop case. The chapter offers a conception of ‘using merely as a means’ that explains the morally relevant difference between the classic Bystander and Footbridge cases. It then shows, contrary to the standard view, that a bystander who diverts the trolley in the Loop case need not be using someone ‘merely as a means’ in doing so. This makes it possible to show why the Loop scenario does not undermine the explanation of the salient moral difference between the Bystander and Footbridge cases.

The trolley problem and cognate hypotheticals have played an outsized role in nonconsequentialist thought over the past fifty years. Taking Parfit’s On What Matters as a jumping-off point, the chapter argues that the features common to trolley problems—focusing only on determinate consequences, ignoring consequences to off-stage actors, reliance on secondary features unrelated to the tragic choices themselves, and treating the epistemic viewpoint of actors as an exogenous, morally neutral fact—suppress the fact that most of the choices we face are tragic, in the sense that they force a tradeoff between the fundamental interests of different people.

The trolley problem asks for moral justification. Is it morally permissible (as many people believe) for someone to divert a runaway trolley that would kill five people to where it will kill one different person instead, though it is not permissible to push an innocent bystander in front of the trolley, killing him, if that is the only way to save the five? This book attempts to answer this question. There are also a number of comments on the book’s proposed solution, and the text includes replies to the comments.

This comment discusses the book's positive account of the trolley problem, given in the Principle of Permissible Harm. This principle says an act that causes both a greater good and a lesser evil is impermissible if the evil results from a means to the good but can be permissible if the evil results from the good itself or from its noncausal flip side. This comment argues that this principle has counterintuitive implications—for example, that bombing an arms factory that kills nearby civilians is impermissible if the civilians are killed by flying pieces of bomb but permissible if they are killed by flying pieces of factory. It then argues that the principle lacks a persuasive philosophical rationale because it draws an arbitrary line in a sequence of means to an end and trades on an ambiguity in its understanding of “the greater good.”

This book is about nonconsequentialist ethical theory and some alternatives to it, either substantive or methodological. It explores nonconsequentialism and the Trolley Problem as well as particular aspects of nonconsequentialist theory pertaining to harming persons. It includes a discussion on prerogatives, constraints, inviolability, and the significance of status, along with a nonconsequentialist theory of aggregation and the distribution of scarce goods. It contrasts two subcategories of a method known as pairwise comparison—confrontation and substitution—by which conflicts might be resolved in a nonconsequentialist theory, and argues that substitution is permissible. The book also examines Peter Unger's views on the permissibility of harming innocent bystanders and the duty to harm ourselves in order to aid others, responsibility and collaboration, and new ways in which physical distance might bear on our duty to aid. Moreover, there is a section devoted to the views of others within the consequentialist and nonconsequentialist camps, including Peter Singer's ethical theory.

The scenarios of Chapter 15 induce a state of aporia: a (metalevel) scepticism about our ability to answer Cartesian scepticism. This is similar to the state of aporia that can be induced by considering trolley problems in ethics. A second ethical connection can be drawn, by considering ways in which brain-in-vat scenarios can leave their victims utterly lacking in ethical concepts. The moral is that our intuitions—metaphysical, semantic, epistemological, and ethical—carry us some distance in our response to scepticism, but they only carry us far. Since the reaction to Cartesian scepticism determines the location of a position on the realist spectrum—with external realism at one pole and internal realism at the other—there is very little to say about where to position oneself on that spectrum. This chapter concludes by criticising recent neo-Carnapian attacks on metaphysics, since neo-Carnapianism amounts to internal realism.