Charles Foster

This chapter considers realistic versions of the trolley problem. These include the Zebrugge ferry disaster, and the story of a dilemma for Churchill in the war. The chapter offers a way of resolving these real dilemmas, and some imagined but realistic dilemmas. We discuss Judith Jarvis Thomson’s 2008 solution to the trolley problem. Whilst we broadly accept her solution, we criticise her approach to the well-known driver version. We argue that we should simply accept that this version is a borderline case between killing and letting die, and not try to characterise it as one or the other. We should live with the resultant moral uncertainty this creates. We then turn to the implications of our analysis for the role of intuitions in moral reasoning. Thomson’s claims about the Transplant case accord with what 90% of people believe to be morally true about that case. However, her conclusion about the bystander case (that the bystander is not permitted to turn the trolley) is at odds with what 90% of people typically conclude. How can we choose which intuitions to rely on? We reply that we do not rely on intuitions in the Transplant case, and so are not guilty of being selective about which intuitions are legitimate and which are not.

We examine Joshua Greene’s empirical challenge to deontology. Greene accepts Haidt’s claim that moral reasoning is largely a post-hoc “moral confabulation”, but confines it to deontological intuitions. Consequentialist intuitions are exempted. We consider Greene’s “natural kinds” account of deontology and consequentialism. It fails because it mis-applies Kripke and Putnam’s understanding of natural kinds. We then turn to Greene’s famous claims about the moral irrelevance of personal force, which he uses to debunk characteristically deontological intuitions in trolley problem scenarios. We show that personal force does not explain these intuitions. Shooting someone at point blank range, for example, is not an application of personal force on Greene’s definition, yet would be as objectionable as pushing the fat man in front of the trolley in Footbridge. Finally, we show how action at a distance, such as the use of military drones, is also associated with emotional reactions, albeit reactions that come after-the-fact rather than ones accompanying the immediate action of pushing a large man, pressing a button or flipping a switch. These later emotional effects of impersonal violence are ignored by Greene, but undermine his simple opposition of cognitive and emotional responses to various trolley scenarios. We base our conclusions on real-life cases, not thought experiments.

In this chapter we apply the results of our analysis of the nature of moral truth in the previous chapter to Sharon Street’s anti-realism and her reliance on evolutionary debunking arguments to support it. We show how, ultimately, it is not possible to construe Street’s claims as attacking only a meta-ethical account of what it is to claim that there are moral truths. Her claims inevitably have substantive implications. We show that the source of her claims is a tendency to model ethical beliefs and claims on empirical beliefs and claims. Then, when she finds this comparison wanting, as inevitably she must, she becomes trapped in an impasse, the only way out of which seems to require denying the existence of ethical truth and objectivity. The solution is to reject the faulty modelling of ethical on empirical beliefs. Once we clarify what “true independent of our beliefs” means in a moral context, we are no longer saddled with the anti-realist and inevitably sceptical conclusions Street is forced to draw from the trap into which she has fallen.

Haidt, Greene and Singer agree that intuition is largely the driver of our moral judgements. Haidt argues that we have to accept this, but in his argument he caricatures both reason itself and the mechanics of reasoning. Greene does not agree that we have to accept the role of intuition in moral reasoning. We can and should learn to ignore our intuitions when facing the “unfamilar” challenges of our contemporary, technologically driven world. They were useful when we were evolving: they are now largely redundant. Singer agrees with Greene. We have charted a middle course between Haidt on the one hand and Greene and Singer on the other. We have done so by defending rational argument, reasoned persuasion and the role of evidence in changing attitudes.Singer relies on Street’s evolutionary debunking arguments: the result is that he rejects much commonsense morality. We debunk Street’s debunking, and Singer’s austere rationalism collapses. It is philosophically reputable to be commonsensically moral. Reason remains the ultimate arbiter of moral truth, but not in the way envisaged by Greene and Singer. Intuitions are already infused with rationality. Reason does not need to be the cause but only the ground of our moral judgements.

We examine Jonathan Haidt’s claim that moral reasoning is largely conducted at the behest of our emotions or intuitions. On this view, moral reasoning is merely a PR company or spokesperson for moral positions already formed by the emotional centres in our brain. Its role is to rationalise, excuse, and to enable people to uphold their reputations. He applies his ‘Moral Foundations Theory’, the pillars of which are the tensions between care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation, and liberty/oppression, to explain why conservatives and liberals can never agree. We take issue with all these claims and with the ‘Moral Foundations Theory’ itself. We claim that, while there is no doubt some truth to some of Haidt’s claims, many of them are overstated. In developing the Theory he fails adequately to distinguish between religion and morality. This failure is ultimately fatal to the Theory. We also question the conclusions Haidt draws from two thought experiments (one related to incest, one to cannibalism), and point out fundamental flaws in the experiments. We consider the true nature of reasons and rationalisations, arguing that reason need only be the ground for, not the cause of, moral judgements.

Corinne Rey gave masked gunmen the passcode to the Charlie Hebdo building. If she had not, she and her young daughter would have been killed. She has not been criticised by philosophers for doing so. This chapter asks whether the lack of criticism denotes a lack of confidence in thought experiments (such as trolley problems), which one might think would shed light on what Rey should have done, or whether it shows a fundamental problem with the use of such thought experiments. We argue for this second conclusion, drawing on Judith Jarvis Thomson’s observation that, in such thought experiments, no bystander is expected to sacrifice themselves to save the greater number. Why is this? It indicates, we suggest, that that there are reasonable limits on what anyone can genuinely be expected to do in these real life dilemmas. That lesson should inform our consideration of trolley problems. We clarify the various uses of the word ‘intuition’ in the literature. Then we add an important use of our own: the intuition that some challenges to our moral beliefs and judgements are misconceived. We make use of and defend this intuition throughout the book.

In earlier chapters we argued that all our moral beliefs are subject to the ‘Tribunal of Reason’. But we also claimed that the position supported by most self-styled rationalists and cognitivists including Greene and Peter Singer—consequentialism and its popular version, utilitarianism—are open to serious objections. Yet Singer is famous for claiming that he merely follows the argument where it leads, which seems to express an unshakeable commitment to reason and rationality. So how do we avoid some of the unappealing roads down which Singer and his allies seem willing to travel because of that commitment? In answering this question we subject some of the main claims of Singer’s utilitarianism to critical scrutiny. In particular, we show that many of his rejections of commonsense beliefs rely on the evolutionary debunking arguments that we have already shown to be flawed. By tracing his reliance on evolutionary debunking back to some of the misconceived claims made by Sharon Street, we explain both why Singer’s rationalism has become so austere, and why it is unnecessary. We also reject his claim that some intuitions (such as the intuition that five deaths are worse than one) are "different from the intuitions to which Haidt and Greene refer”. Singer is thus unable to render his own account immune from the very debunking he believes applies to non-consequentialist or common sense positions. We then show that Singer’s attempt to secure objectivity for utilitarian principles alone, while claiming that non-utilitarian moral positions are mere preferences, cannot succeed. Objectivity is either secured for all moral beliefs or none. Finally, we show that these points mean that utilitarianism is just one moral position amongst others, and cannot be considered the foundation of morality, as Singer claims it to be. We there by steer a course between Haidt’s radical intuitionism and Singer’s austere rationalism.

In this chapter we raise further doubts about empirical work on the trolley problem, but focus more on the thought experiments on which the empirical work relies. We show how, in some cases, illegitimate stipulations are made which render unsound the conclusions some writers draw from trolley problem scenarios, (including some of the empirical work). Some attempts to respond to these problems do not work. We argue that many of Frances Kamm’s attempts to devise trolley scenarios to question solutions proposed by Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thomson are misguided, because they confuse counterexamples with borderline cases. We then suggest that the endless attempts to derive clever scenarios questioning the application of suggested moral principles simply have no implications for the cogency of the principles we already use to deal with real-life dilemmas. At best, they are relevant to a Lego set world vastly different from our own.

We interrogate and criticise the reliance, by Joshua Greene and many others, on the results of functional brain imaging. Greene’s ‘dual-mode’ model of brain function draws deeply on these findings. The reliance typically caricatures brain anatomy and function, concentrating on gross structures rather than micro-circuits, ignoring the degree of cross-connection in brain circuitry, failing to take into account a mass of confounding variables, and implying that the ‘intuitive’ areas of the brain are evolutionarily primitive. We examine Greene’s “myopic module” hypothesis and show, contra Greene, that it fails to explain our differing responses to various trolley scenarios. We also examine his attempt to “debunk” the moral distinction between acts and omissions and argue that he fails to do so. We cast doubt, too, on his claim that, when not driven by “automatic settings” the inherent flexibility of manual mode thinking makes it more reliable. We then turn to the neurobiological roots of altruism and selfishness, including the role of mirror neurones, and observe that (contra Greene and others) the real moral world is not neatly divisible into personal/impersonal moral choices. If intuitions are indeed correctly characterised as rough-and-ready heuristics, our embodied nature means that we cannot simply ignore the operation of those heuristics in understanding our moral decision-making. While this is sometimes acknowledged by utilitarians, they have yet to appreciate the full ramifications of this for their utilitarian theory.

The labels ‘truth’ and ‘true’ apply, we suggest, to what is asserted or believed, not to the sentence in which the assertion is contained or the belief expressed. Things are true in and of the world independently of the existence of any person to utter statements about them. We criticise Joshua Greene’s confused and internally contradictory account of moral truth. We can differ about moral beliefs in a way that we cannot sensibly (assuming we have all the relevant facts) disagree about factual beliefs, but this is not a sufficient ground for arguing that there is no such thing as a moral truth. We examine various types of moral propositions, including propositions such as ‘abortion is wrong’ and ‘torturing innocent children for fun is wrong’. If people disagree about the abortion proposition, what does that tell us about moral truth? The proposition is a conviction to that effect: a conviction, to be philosophically (and morally) reputable, must be justifiable, but it is not capable of proof or disproof. The proposition cannot be regarded as either a moral fact or a moral fallacy. The torture case is different. No rational person could disagree with the proposition. The torture for fun of innocent children cannot (in a logical sense) be justified, and the proposition is a moral fact.

Rape (for instance) is wrong. But conventional philosophical methods do not provide adequate reasons to justify the wrongness per se, let alone to reflect adequately the degree of wrongness. Rules such as ‘rape is wrong’ do not need philosophical justification: nor are they properly vulnerable to the sorts of criticisms commonly made in the course of a rigorous, conventional philosophical interrogation. Joshua Greene is committed to claiming that it is an open question whether or not rape is wrong. We disagree, but, importantly, disclaim the label ‘intuitionist’ if the label means that it is only by intuition that we know that rape is wrong. We enquire into the true nature of norms, and investigate the role of emotion in moral reasoning, contending that the old reason/emotion dualism is misconceived and morally dangerous. It involves pretending that we are disembodied brains in vats. A view of ourselves so divorced from the realities of human life is unlikely to produce good moral—or philosophically respectable—results.

Though the concept of the selfish gene (articulated in Richard Dawkins’s book The Selfish Gene) is now dated, it is still influential in evolutionary psychology and in some accounts of the nature of morality. Jonathan Haidt applies the concept at the organism level (not the gene level) to endorse Glaucon’s famous picture of humans as beings who act out of self-interest even when they are putatively acting morally. We examine these claims in the light of Richard Dawkins’s claim that the term “selfish” when applied to genes does not have its everyday meaning, but an unrelated technical meaning. Dawkins now invites us to “mentally delete” the passages in his book that apply selfishness and altruism in the everyday sense to the organism. Haidt has declined that invitation. As a result, he is driven to explain human nature as predominantly selfish, so accepting, wrongly, the Glauconian account of ethics. We show that this is a mistake. Once corrected, the puzzle about how altruism and morality could have evolved falls away. Morality is not a trait with only one inflection, but works in two directions, applying both to ethical and unethical conduct.

Ethics are concerned with maximising the thriving of individuals and societies. One cannot maximise the thriving of a person unless one has some idea about what sort of creature that person is. Ethics follow ontology. Many answers have been suggested to the question ‘What is a human?’ and the less fundamental question ‘What are the defining attributes of a human’? Many of those answers are theological, and hint that the essence of a human is indefinable; that humans are unknowable, contradictory and mysterious. This article contends that, since behaviourally modern humans have been hunter-gatherers for an overwhelming proportion of their history, we are still foundationally hunter-gatherers, and that accordingly useful insights into our constitution can be gained by examining the quintessential characteristics of Upper Palaeolithic people. Those characteristics are wandering, a relationship with the non-human world, consciousness, story-telling and a consequential ethical sense, a metaphysical instinct, and an operating system based on symbolism and metaphors. Those characteristics (many of which overlap with the conditions of human thriving described by Martha Nussbaum) have ethical corollaries. The article builds on the work of Peter Hacker in contending that it is not only legitimate but necessary to derive ethics from biology and evolutionary history. Humans emerge from this examination, as they emerge from theological speculation and from the work of most creative artists, as unfathomable. The mysteriousness of humans is a reason for according them moral weight. The article suggests that ethicists should take the lead from creative artists, not vice versa.

This article examines whether social media users can validly consent to their own use of social media. It argues that, whether or not social media use is analogous to public health interventions, there is an obligation to provide users with information about risks and benefits, and absent that provision, there is no valid consent. Many or most users, in any event, do not have the capacity to consent, according to the criteria for capacity articulated in the ‘four abilities’ model: the ability to express a choice, the ability to understand the facts pertinent to the decision in question, the ability of a subject to believe that the information applies to them, and the ability to reason—in the sense of being able to consider and weigh (with reference to the patient’s own concerns, circumstances, and values) the main possible outcomes of the decision to opt for the intervention and the decision to opt not to undergo it. Even if an individual social media user is capacitous according to these criteria, many will fail to be judged capacitous if (as it is argued should be the case), a further criterion, identified by Jennifer Hawkins must be satisfied, namely that the individual can look after their own interests at least as well as most other people can. It follows from this consideration that not only can regulation of social media (in the form of a ban) be justified under Mill’s harm principle, but that non-regulation cannot be justified.

Lewis was not, and is not, very popular in the academy. I think there are three reasons.First, he did not stick to his subject, which was medieval and Renaissance literature. He wrote highly successful children's books, theological works, and articles accessible to nonspecialists, and was an acclaimed broadcaster. All this allowed his critics to suggest that he was not a proper academic, because proper academics do not throw their nets so wide.Second, he was good at everything he did (except perhaps some areas of philosophy: he was famously bested by Elizabeth Anscombe when he ventured onto her home ground). This was perhaps the most infuriating thing about him. The justification for academic superspecialization is that one cannot do more than one thing really well. But Lewis did. He was a better Renaissance scholar than those who criticized him, moaned about him in the Oxford cloisters, and blackballed him for appointments. He is relentlessly readable; therefore (said his detractors) his scholarship must be shoddy.Lewis infuriates me too. Often, when I think I have had an original thought in some domain a million miles from Renaissance literature, I discover not only that Lewis had had that thought already, but had explicated it, seeing angles I never noticed, and more often than not he had exploded it, using a tenth of the words I used, and all in devastatingly simple prose that would entertain and illuminate the most uninterested plumber.And third, of course, he was a Christian, which was then becoming an unforgivable sin, as it remains now in the humanities (though not the physical sciences or mathematics). The usual (stated) objection to academic Christians is that their theological commitment precludes objectivity, but Lewis's academic writing (notably his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Excluding Drama [1954]) was so good that that indictment could not stick, and his opponents descended into incoherent fulmination about superannuated paradigms.These reasons help to explain the chilly reception (or, more often, nonreception) by self-billed “serious thinkers” of Lewis's “space trilogy”: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength (hereafter THS). In relation to THS there is another reason: the novel is about them. No, about us. Lewis's view of us is just too keen, his diagnosis too alarming.The main concerns of THS are dehumanization, the role of institutions in that dehumanization, and the desire of individuals to be part of an esoteric circle. More broadly, it concerns the nature of evil. Its debt to the Divine Comedy and to Charles Williams, Lewis's fellow Inkling, are clear.The central character is a young academic, Mark Studdock. We all know him. His education had been “neither scientific nor classical—merely ‘Modern.’ That left him pathetically manipulable. The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by: and he had neither peasant shrewdness nor aristocratic honour.” Studdock was “a man of straw, a glib examinee in subjects that require no exact knowledge.” He stood for nothing; he weighed nothing.Humans are not supposed to be weightless. We will do anything to convince ourselves that we have mass. Many of our strategies are counterproductive. Some are disastrous and lead to dissolution. Studdock's strategy is one of the commonest and most catastrophic: he tries to get to the center of things—to the “Inner Ring” whose geography is described by Lewis in his 1944 lecture (and later essay) of that name. At some level, at least occasionally, Studdock knows the stupidity of this ambition, but he closes his eyes and his mind. And he begins to be used by forces far greater than any he had dreamed of.The book opens with a merciless (and horribly entertaining) account of academic politics. Read it and cringe in recognition: the mechanics of toadyism; the devices for getting your own way with a committee (put the real business in coded form at the end of an agenda, to be dealt with on a hot day after lunch); infuse everything with an appeal to self-interest, but never put it quite like that, for fear of awakening long-dormant altruism. Obfuscate: do not call the sale of an ancient woodland in which Merlin's body lies “the sale of Bragdon Wood” but the sale of “the area coloured pink on the plan.” Learn to talk like the bursar of Studdock's college, for each of his sentences was “a model of lucidity: and if his hearers found the gist of his whole statement less clear than the parts, that may have been their fault.” As a manual for getting your own way in institutions, The Prince is artless and benign beside THS.Studdock becomes a pawn in a big and diabolical game. A vast organization, the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments, known, of course, as “NICE” (never underestimate the importance of an acronym), which turns out to be the instrument of dark supernatural forces, is becoming a state within a state. It is unaccountable. That is its tagline, indeed: it will be free of the red tape that inhibits the research of more conventional institutions. And who can define with sufficient exactitude the difference in principle between tedious administrative red tape and moral stricture? If you are in with the NICE, anything goes.The NICE's project is the unmaking of everything that is quintessentially human and, eventually, everything that is biological. Life itself is just too unhygienic. Beauty is a joke. Sentiment a delusion. Love merely a result of chemical interactions in the brain. Nothing signifies.The NICE has a handful of opponents—a raggedy bunch (including a bear) under the direction of Ransom, who has traveled outside planet Earth in the previous two books in the trilogy. The company, it turns out, is the remnant of the old Arthurian kingdom of Logres, which has always been in tension, if not war, with the modern kingdom of Britain: “Haven't you noticed that we are two countries? After every Arthur, a Mordred; behind every Milton, a Cromwell: a nation of poets, a nation of shopkeepers: the home of Sidney—and of Cecil Rhodes.” They recruit Studdock's wife, Jane, who can spy clairvoyantly on the NICE, and then a revived Merlin comes from his tomb to their aid.THS is strong meat. Many will balk at its supernaturalism, and perhaps in particular its complementarian view of the relationship between the sexes. But hear Lewis out: you might not agree with him, but he is always interesting. When I read THS thirty years ago, I thought it a ripping yarn. It still is. But now I see it as prescient, prophetic, and profoundly important. It should be on every university reading list, for every subject, and no one should be allowed to hold any kind of public office until they have shown that they have assimilated its lessons.

This book is about the respective roles of intuition and reasoning in ethics. It responds to a number of well-known philosophers and psychologists, and proposes a new perspective – radical in its moderation. It examines in depth the work of the philosopher Joshua Greene and the psychologist Jonathan Haidt. With the so-called empirical turn in ethics, much work has been done to try to isolate the role of reason and intuition in forming our moral judgements, with Haidt and Greene leading the research programmes and attracting much of the professional and public attention, and many others following. The current view – shared by both camps – is that intuition is largely the driver of our moral judgements – a view summed up in Haidt’s slogan ‘intuition first, strategic reasoning second’. Haidt believes we have to live with this and accept it. Greene does not: he contends that our intuitions, while suitable for the environments in which we evolved, are worthless in the modern, global, technological age, and to avoid ethical disaster we must learn to adopt reason as the arbiter of moral truth. This book steers a middle course between these two positions and is therefore of great interest to philosophers and psychologists alike.

Martin was a twenty-nine-year-old anthropologist working on animism in Siberia when a bear leaped on her. He raked her with his claws, put her head into his mouth, and was about to crush her skull when she stabbed him with her ice axe. He loped off into the woods, carrying part of Martin's lower jaw and, if Martin is right, half of her soul—but leaving half of his soul in return. Martin lay bleeding in the snow. She managed to fashion a tourniquet that slowed the bleeding from her leg. Miles away, a friend was fishing. He fell backward and blacked out. When he came to, he knew that something bad had happened to Martin.But was it bad?It certainly seemed so for a while. A Russian helicopter lifted her to hospital. Her wounds were treated, but the hospital seemed more brutal than the bear. She was strapped to the bed, unable to move her arms or legs. She wheezed through a tracheostomy tube. A malevolent nurse rammed food agonizingly into her with a syringe. Copulating doctors and nurses moaned and grunted in the side room next to her. Her jaw was roughly screwed together. On the plane back to France, the low cabin pressure reopened her scars. Her weeping mother dabbed at the blood with a tissue. In the French hospital, Martin took off her bandages in front of the mirror and wept “for my bear, for my old, lost face.”She had been invaded. She was now half-human, half-bear, a Siberian friend had told her: “He didn't want to kill you, he wanted to mark you. Now you are medka, she who lives between the worlds.” To be healed, she had to forgive the bear, for she would not otherwise forgive herself. At night she went “underground” to “speak to my bear.” Her head was “a ball scored with swollen red-claw marks and sutures. I am nothing like myself anymore, and yet I've never looked more like my own spirit; it has been imprinted on my body.”The invading bear had created a bridgehead into her. Other entities followed. The most immediately dangerous were bacteria and surgical scalpels. The surgeons did not know what they were toying with: “My body has become a territory where Western surgeons parley with Siberian bears. Or rather, where they try to establish communication.”The surgeons never did establish communication, and so their sort of healing would not work. Martin knew that she would only find healing in her “lair” in the Siberian forest, from those “who know bears and the questions they bring with them, who still speak with them in their dreams, who know that nothing happens by chance.” And so back she went.There was no epiphany. But there was the quiet healing that comes from recruiting all the agencies in the tundra; in distilling agency itself and dripping it over her wounds. And asking the right questions can heal too. The right questions are questions that are too big for answers.What is this book about? Martin is clear that what did not happen was that “a bear attack[ed] a French anthropologist somewhere in the mountains of Kamchatka.” What did happen was that “a bear and a woman [met] and the frontiers between two worlds implode[d].... Mythical time meets reality; past time joins the present moment; dream meets flesh.”Eye of the Wild poses an unnerving set of fundamental questions about what it means to say, as we all blithely do: “I am”—about how many souls we can accommodate, how we can broker a respectful or at least tolerable conversation between them; about our porosity to the cosmos we comfortingly assert is out there. This book is plangent, frigid, and chilling. It is a mosaic of jagged fragments that, viewed in the right light, perhaps add up to the scarred face of a young woman, all the lovelier for the scars. Yet the fragments do not add up to a proposition, for this is a book about what happens when you are brave enough to go to a place where no proposition could ever land.