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New Statesman
14-05-2025
- General
- New Statesman
Thought experiment 11: The Harmless Torturer
Illustration by Marie Montocchio / Ikon Images 'Do not walk on the grass,' requests the sign on an exquisite landscaped garden. If everyone ignored this sign, the garden would be ruined. But suppose, under the cover of darkness, I strolled across it. Nobody would ever know, and I would make no perceptible difference to the lawn. So what harm would I cause? The brilliant and eccentric Oxford ethicist Derek Parfit had as fertile an imagination for thought experiments as any philosopher of the past century. 'Derek specialised in discovering deep puzzles in philosophy – he produced problems that remain very difficult to resolve,' says the philosopher Jeff McMahan. One of those problems is the 'Harmless Torturer', from his 1984 masterpiece Reasons and Persons. It addresses the moral conundrum of actions with imperceptible effects. Imagine a torturer and a victim. The torturer turns a dial from one to 1,000 on the pain-o-meter, thus causing the victim immediate and agonising pain. Obviously wrong. Now imagine a variation. A thousand torturers have a thousand victims. At the start of each day, each of the victims is already feeling mild pain. Each of the thousand torturers turns a switch a thousand times, at ten-second intervals, on some instrument. Each turn of a torturer's switch affects that torturer's particular victim's pain in a way that is imperceptible. But, after each torturer has, in just under three hours, turned his switch a thousand times, he has inflicted severe pain on his victim. Let's call these 1,000 sadists 'Gradual Torturers'. Obviously, they have acted reprehensibly. But why? Suppose they're all arrested. At trial, the prosecuting barrister could put the case that each time the Gradual Torturers turned the dial they harmed their victims, because suffering can be made imperceptibly worse. The judge may be sceptical and think: how can pain be worse if the person in pain isn't aware that it's worse? The barrister might try another tack. Even though each turn of the dial wasn't bad, 1,000 turns of the dial was very bad indeed, because after 1,000 turns each victim certainly felt the change. That's why the behaviour of the Gradual Torturers is appalling. He inserts 'Harmless Torturers' who differ from the Gradual Torturers, as they don't each have one victim: Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Each of the thousand torturers presses a button, thereby turning the switch once on each of the thousand instruments. The victims suffer the same severe pain. But none of the torturers makes any victim's pain perceptibly worse. Don't we want to say that the Harmless Torturers have behaved as appallingly as the Gradual Torturers? The result has been identical: 1,000 victims ended up with the same unbearable degree of pain. But the prosecuting barrister can no longer argue that each torturer has made the life of one victim perceptibly worse. No Harmless Torturer has made any perceptible difference to any one victim. The issue of their actions must be explained in another way. As Parfit puts it: 'If we cannot appeal to the effects of what each torturer does, we must appeal to what the torturers together do.' An action is wrong, in other words, if it's part of a set of actions that together are wrong. 'Parfit's solution is not uncontentious,' says McMahan. Is the torturer who twists the dial from zero to 1,000 – thus causing excruciating pain to one victim – really not doing anything worse than the torturer who turns it from zero to one, with an undetectable impact, on 1,000 victims? Part of the problem is whether harms and benefits should be considered 'aggregative'. Do 1,000 mild headaches equate to one life-threatening illness? Do harms just add up? And can harms be balanced, on one side of a moral equation, with benefits on the other? Many philosophers have addressed the aggregative problem. In another example (not Parfit's), an engineer, whose job it is to transmit the World Cup to billions of football supporters, falls under the transmitter, experiencing regular, electric shocks. We could save him from the pain by cutting wires, causing a break in the TV broadcast for half an hour. Here, one man's suffering seems to outweigh the viewing pleasure of billions. Fun intellectual puzzles, but so what? Well, take an individual's contribution to climate change. It might be convenient for me to leave a light on, and the effect on climate change of my decision will be negligible. But is leaving lights on wrong? Or consider a vegetarian's approach to meat. Whether or not an individual chooses to eat meat won't lead to the maltreatment or killing of one less animal. So, although the Parfit thought experiments are wacky, says McMahan, 'they are ubiquitous in various forms in real life'. [See also: Thought experiment 10: The Trolley Problem] Related
New Statesman
23-04-2025
- General
- New Statesman
Thought experiment 10: The Trolley Problem
Illustration by Marie Montocchio / Ikon Images Philippa Foot set the trains, or trolleys, in motion. In 1967, Foot, a well-to-do Englishwoman, the granddaughter of the former US president Grover Cleveland, published an article about abortion. Foot was then Oxford-based and this was the year that abortion was legalised in the UK. Among the questions that interested Foot was whether it might be right, or at least acceptable, to take the life of the foetus as a side effect of a medical procedure that was required to save the mother. A variation of Foot's trolley case runs as follows. A train is hurtling down a track, its brakes having failed. Five people are tied with ropes to the track ahead. They will die if hit by the train. You are standing by the side of the track and could pull a lever diverting the train down a spur. The decision would be easy were it not for the fact that one person is tied on this spur. Although Foot's explanation is contentious, most people agree with her that it would be right to pull the lever. In 1987 an American, Judith Jarvis Thomson (whom we've met in this column before – see Thought Experiment 2: The Unconscious Violinist) entered the debate with a variation: Footbridge. Once again, the out-of-control train is hurtling towards five innocents. This time you're on a footbridge next to a fat man (to appease modern sensibilities, now portrayed as a man carrying a heavy backpack). If you push the man over the bridge to his death, his weight will stop the train. The puzzle is this: in both cases it looks like the option is to kill one to save five, but in Footbridge, most people believe it would be wrong to topple a man to his death. Why the difference? This is the Trolley Problem, or what Thomson called 'a lovely, nasty difficulty'. It has sparked a mini-industry ('trolley-ology') of academic papers about runaway trains; in some of them, the scenario is so ludicrously convoluted that it is hard to see why we should give credence to any intuitions they elicit. But the problem has proved not merely to be of interest to philosophers. Psychologists and neuroscientists have jumped on the tram-wagon; so too have political scientists and sociologists. Here are the sorts of things that have been studied. Does it make a difference if you're forced to wait a few seconds before responding to trolley scenarios, or if the scenarios are presented in your second language? What happens if those who'll be killed are in your 'out-group'? Suppose you could push one chimpanzee over the footbridge to save five chimpanzees – in other words, is it more acceptable to apply a crude utilitarian calculation to animals than humans? My favourite study varied the name of the Fat Man. He was called Tyrone Paton (a stereotypical African American name) to one set of subjects and Chip Ellsworth III (a name redolent of old white money) in another. Pushing Tyrone would save 100 members of the New York Philharmonic. Pushing Chip would save 100 members of the Harlem Jazz Orchestra. Conservatives, the study claimed, were indifferent between these choices, but liberals (presumably keen to demonstrate their anti-racist credentials) were more likely to push poor old Chip. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Unusually for a philosophical thought experiment, the Trolley Problem has escaped the confines of the ivory tower, becoming a meme on social media, even turning up in TV programmes, such as The Good Place. My own view is that the Trolley Problem has a solution – or at least an explanation. The reason it's acceptable to turn the train down the spur is that you don't intend the death of the person tied there. If this person were to escape from the ropes, and flee in time, you'd be delighted. Then nobody would die. But you need the death of Backpack Man – for if he were somehow to bounce off the track and run away, the train would trundle on and kill the five. There are implications here for many areas of life, including the conduct of warfare. There's an important moral distinction between 'intending' to kill civilians and a legitimate military operation in which it's foreseen that some civilians will die. For many years now, the Trolley Problem has been taught to future officers training at the US military academy West Point. There are potential implications too for autonomous vehicles. A driverless car might be unable to break in time from an accident immediately ahead of it, and face a 'choice' to plough on or to veer to one side. Perhaps on the left there are two children, and on the right three adults. How should the car be programmed to respond? Still, trolley-ology, one of the most famous thought experiments, has been so exhaustively analysed one detects a sense of exasperation within the profession whenever the topic is wheeled on. The out-of-control train may finally be running out of steam. David Edmonds is the author of 'Would You Kill the Fat Man?'. [See also: Thought experiment 9: Mary's Room] Related
