‘IS IT MORALLY PERMISSABLE,’ PART II. . .

Gentle reader, please see PART I for the context and the two scenarios.

Consider that in the hospital scenario, if there is no tissue compatibility there is no way to save even one of the five.  In the train scenario, if the side track is empty, the engineer must switch tracks – the switching becomes an obligatory act.

There is a Guiding Principle that can help us: It is permissible to cause harm as a by-product of achieving a greater good AND it is impermissible to use harm as a means to a greater good.  In the train scenario, killing one person is a by-product – an indirect though foreseen consequence.  The key act – switching the switch to turn the train – is, in and of itself, neither positive nor negative, neither good nor bad.  In the hospital example, the surgeon intentionally harms one person in order to strive to save five people.

The distinctions between the two are crucial and they combine to provide a rationale known as the principle of double effect.  In the moment, most of us humans don’t pause and think about this principle.  Research – and my experience with my students – affirms that folks who are given these two scenarios respond and judge them immediately.  Few take even a brief time to think through the scenarios and even fewer take even a cursory look at the underlying principles that might help guide them prior to responding.

On the other hand, the participants’ responses seem reasoned and rational even though there is little sense that deep reasoning has occurred.  Researchers report that few participants are able to generate this principle [think: the principle of double effect] as an explanation or rationale for their judgments [so it was with my students – I only recall one student, a philosophy major, who was able to provide the guiding principle for her judgments].

Such dilemmas [think: dilemma = a forced choice where BOTH a positive and a negative outcome will likely occur] do occur in ‘real life.’  In 2005, after Katrina ran amok, a member of the Texas Army National Guard talked about his dilemma: ‘I would be looking at a family of two on one roof and maybe a family of six on another roof, and I would have to make a decision who to rescue.’

With these dilemmas, a decision to take one path over another isn’t immediately obvious.  We can ask, for example, whether our two scenarios depend upon absolute numbers (kill one to save five; or kill a hundred to save a thousand).  The dilemmas is maintained – the agent must choose and what ought to be done is not obvious (for the engineer or the soldier – it appears to be clear when it comes to the surgeon).

If all participants respond in the same way – so far all who responded to the two scenarios have done so – and if all are unable to coherently explain ‘why’ (think: to explain the underlying principle(s) that guided them) then what?

My current thinking is that we humans have been endowed with a moral faculty – a capacity, if you will, that enables us to unconsciously and automatically evaluate a limitless variety of actions in terms of principles that dictate what is permissible, obligatory and/or forbidden.

We know at an emotive level, for example, that to kill another human being is wrong and as we ‘mature’ and develop our rational capacities we add the ‘reasonable’ and ‘rational’ to the emotive.  When it comes to what is Morally Permissible then, we come into the world endowed with a moral faculty and as we develop our intellectual capacities we then develop the guiding principles that support our endowment.