Double Effect Essay

“That Extra Piece of Track”
In 1985, a widely known moral philosopher named Judith Jarvis Thomson introduced a famous variant of the Trolley Problem called the Loop case. After doing so many of his colleagues considered the Loop case to be an absolute counter to the Doctrine of Double Effect. In Whitley R. P. Kaufman’s paper, “The Doctrine of Double Effect and the Trolley Problem”, Kaufman tries to argue against this widely accepted view by a variety of different means throughout the paper. These means range from viewing the Loop case’s unclear determination as a virtue to considering the case to be too complex or “…the Loop case should be dismissed as an anomaly, insufficient to call into question the Doctrine of Double Effect.” (Kaufman 22)
In this paper, I plan to more thoroughly explore how Doctrine of Double Effect interacts with the Loop case, show possible solutions to Kaufman’s complexity issue, and examine Kaufman’s footnote references to explain Bruers and Brackman’s algorithmic theory expectations and causal chains.
To first understand what the Loop case is trying to do, one must understand what the Doctrine of Double Effect is. According to Mark Timmons definition of Doctrine of Double Effect on page 83 of Moral Theory, an action which would lead to at least one good and one bad effect is permissible only if each of the following conditions is met:
1) The action itself must not be wrong
2) The bad effect must not be intended
3) The values of the good and bad effects must be proportional

Thomson’s Loop case was devised to be a perfect midpoint in between the famous Standard and Fat Man cases by allowing the track to loop back around onto itself. The Loop case’s aim is to show that it is morally allowed to flip the switch and using the Fat man’s live to save the other 5 lives around the loop.
This however, this can be seen as a direct violation of Doctrine of Double Effect and Kantian moral theory of using someone as a means. In Kaufman’s paper one of the primary explanations to this issue is DDE’s second criteria distinguishing an action that involves intentional harm and one that involves foreseen harm that is not intentional. In the Fat man case, it is obvious that the action of pushing the man onto the track from a bridge is wrong since he was in no danger before and he must be put into danger to save the 5 people making his death intended. In the Standard case, it is permissible to switch the trolley since the action is pulling a switch, a normal action, compared to shoving a man to his death, a morally suspect action. However, with the Loop case the man is already on the track, and without him being on the track the five would die either way the train is switched. “This is Thomson’s way of making the death of the Fat Man seem as far from intended as possible, even while it is in actuality necessary to save the five.” (Kaufman 30) This makes the extra piece of track connecting the two
tracks relevant and the presence for the fat man to be necessary for the five people to live.
If one phrases the action as choosing to save the five bystanders and just happen to notice that the fat man’s
existence is vital to saving their lives from the train looping back around DDE does not require one to let the five be killed. Kaufman goes on to give statistics from Harvard’s Moral sense Test showing that 90% of testers would switch the trolley in the Standard case but not push the fat man onto the track in the Fat man case. This shows that even when the cases yield the same results through similar means how the person views intentionality can be the moral deciding factor. “One’s intention plays an essential role in assessing the moral validity of an action.” (Kaufman 23) The most crucial statistic is the 50/50% split on Thomson’s introduced Loop case. This shows that people’s intuitions are not clear on the issue and that some moral obstacle is there stopping society’s intuitions from consistently picking the same answer. Kaufman describes this 50/50 split in relation to DDE’s inability to give finite results as “could rather be seen as a virtue of the theory.” (Kaufman 31) This can be confusing to understand since Kaufman is admitting that DDE has a short coming in borderline cases like the Loop case while his aim was to support DDE and not hurt it, however this is not his intention. The results showed in the Moral Sense data that society is split 50/50 on whether or not one should flip the switch. If one takes this data as being true and accepts that our intuitions are split that would mean if DDE did rule that there was a clear answer then DDE is clearly wrong since it is not consistent with the data. Since both DDE and the Moral Sense data have uncertain results, one can speculate that this is a good thing for DDE. If approached from this perspective it is possible to see the Loop case not as a counter to DDE but a supporting example.
One of the primary defenses against the Loop case against DDE is the whether hypothetical cases can provide relevant data about our intuitions. Kaufman argues elsewhere that “hypothetical cases can and should play an essential role in moral philosophy in allowing us to isolate the key variables that make a moral difference.” (Kaufman 25) He goes on to explain how allowing philosophers to conduct experiments is specific ways can cancel out competing “noise” and search for related variables that society shares. Kaufman explains that it is this characteristic of hypothetical cases that matters so much to testing DDE. Since there appears to be a universally shared moral opinion on the Standard and Fat Man case, it makes sense to question DDE in respect to Thomson’s Loop case since problems arise from it. This leads to the question of if the Loop variant can be considered a valid test for DDE. This stems from the rationalization that “…hypothetical cases cannot be wholly trusted to produce reliable moral intuitions unless they remain grounded in realistic scenarios..” (Kaufman 25) It is logical for one to consider the complexity of the Loop case being too much for an ordinary person to truly understand mentally and then making the appropriate moral decision from their mental conclusion. One could easily argue that a moral philosopher with years of education specialized in analyzing these sorts of situations is the only person truly capable of making the right moral choice in accordance to DDE. Society’s inability to give a determinate answer on the Moral Sense data test could be a deficit in their ability to cognitively understand the problem fully. This would give the appearance of a split in moral intuitions when in reality it is nothing more than a failure to understand the question. If one chooses to accept this reasoning one would say that the Loop variant is too complex to be a true counter to DDE. However, what makes the Loop variant so complex honestly? It is simply the Standard and Fat Man case blended together by the addition of a small piece of track that seems to make all the difference. So one could analyze some of the individual details of the Loop case and claim they are “too exotic” and would never occur in the real world which in the paper is presented as so. Some examples of this that are focused on is the actually looping of the track back onto itself, the almost unimaginable size of the fat man, and the perfect combination of the five individuals of the straight track. However, there are very simple solutions to some of these problems that could very easily happen in the real world. One could certainly see how a train track looping back onto itself as confusing and unusual especially in how sharply the curve is portrayed in J.J. Thomson’s The Trolley Problem on page 1401.