Unger begins by noting what he takes to be a puzzle. This is brought out in two cases and our intuitive judgements about those cases.
The first case Unger provides is Vintage Sedan:
“Not truly rich, your one luxury in life is a vintage Mercedes sedan that, with much time, attention and money, you’ve re- stored to mint condition. In particular, you’re pleased by the auto’s fine leather seating. One day, you stop at the intersec- tion of two small country roads, both lightly travelled. Hearing a voice screaming for help, you get out and see a man who’s wounded and covered with a lot of his blood. Assuring you that his wound’s confined to one of his legs, the man also informs you that he was a medical student for two full years. And, despite his expulsion for cheating on his second year final exams, which explains his indigent status since, he’s knowledgeably tied his shirt near the wound so as to stop the flow. So, there’s no ur- gent danger of losing his life, you’re informed, but there’s great danger of losing his limb. This can be prevented, however, if you drive him to a rural hospital fifty miles away.. . . Now, if you’d
aid [him], you must lay him across your fine back seat. But, then your fine upholstery will be soaked through with blood, and restoring the car will cost over five thousand dollars. So, you drive away. Picked up the next day by another driver, he survives but loses the wounded leg.”
(1996, pp.25-26)
Unger notes that most people, when confronted with this case, share the intuition that this behaviour is despicable. Our judgements of someone who acts in this way are not likely to be favourable.
This is then compared with a second case: The Envelope: “In your mailbox, there’s something from (the U.S. Commit- tee for) UNICEF. After reading it through, you correctly believe that, unless you soon send in a check for $100, then, instead of each living many more years, over thirty more children will die soon. But, you throw the material in your trash basket, includ- ing the convenient return envelope provided, you send nothing, and, instead of living many years, over thirty more children die soon than would have had you sent in the requested $100.”
(1996, p.25)27
In contrast to the first case, we do not find this case to promote a hostile reaction. Despite many more people (thirty, rather than one) suffering a much greater loss (death, rather than loss of a limb) which could be pre- vented by a much lower cost ($100 rather than $5,000), the typical intuition in this case is that the agent in this case has done nothing wrong. We feel nothing like the disapprobation we feel in the first case. Therein lies the puzzle. Why would our intuitions judge the conduct in first instance so harshly, but the second so leniently?
27
We might note that the particular figures for how much itactually costs to save a life are estimated to be significantly higher than this. InThe Life You Can Save, Singer estimated that we could confidently judge that the best charities could save a life for “between $200 and $2000” (2010, p.103). This would, however, not phase Unger or affect his conclusion, as he maintains that “it’s badly wrong not to provide vital aid even if it costsmany thousandsof dollars to less by justone the number of distant children who’ll die young rather than live long” (1996, p.145)
In attempting to show that this puzzle is not easily resolved, Unger ex- amines several factors that potentially ground asymmetries betweenVintage Sedan and Envelope, and amends the cases slightly for each of these factors to demonstrate that our intuitions seem to persist. Among the factors he considers are physical proximity, social proximity, informative directness, experiential impact, the thought of a disastrous further future and whether there are multiple or unique potential saviours. Keeping the cases extremely similar to the original versions ofEnvelope and Vintage Sedan, Unger then attempts to remove these factors, (ideally) to show that our intuitions do not change, and thereby that what our intuitions are sensitive to is something different.
Unger eventually claims that the factors that do affect our intuitions in these types of cases are extremely strange, clearly not of moral relevance and because of this, that we should ultimately reject (or ‘liberate ourselves from’) these intuitions. The major factors Unger identifies as the culprits are what he refers to asprojective separating and protophysics.
Projective separating is a term Unger uses to describe the way we group people when we consider certain cases. Typically, and of no moral relevance (Unger claims), we. . .
“. . . view the world as comprising just certainsituations. Like- wise, we view a situation as including just certain people, all of them then well grouped together within it. . . viewing all the world’sother folks as being only inother situations”
(Unger, 1996, p.97)
The upshot of this separation is that when we group one set of people with a problem separately to another, who do not have the problem, we deem it unfair – and morally wrong – to impose losses on the group without the problem in order to aid the group that does.
As well as explaining why we do not negatively judge the conduct in
Envelope – because the children are in a different situation – and why we do in Vintage Sedan (because we are in the same situation as the ex-medical student), Unger notes that this explains our responses in other difficult cases. In Philippa Foot’s original trolley case,28 for example, where an agent can
28
In that discussion, she actually refers to a “runaway tram”, but the case is otherwise the same (1967).
change the track of a trolley to prevent it killing five, but doing so will divert it towards one person, the typical verdict that she ought to do so can be explained by us grouping all the seven in the same situation. Foot notably attempts to explain the intuition in this case by invoking the doctrine of double effect.29 However, Unger provides a separate example, like the trolley case, but which apparently leads most to a different verdict. The case in question, Yard, also features an empty trolley heading towards five people, but where it can be stopped by sending another empty trolley to collide with it. If one does that, the trolleys will both be derailed, fall down a hill and into someone’s yard “where they will wreak fatal havoc on the yard’s owner, asleep in his hammock” (1996, p.98).
In the original trolley case, we see all the people on the tracks as grouped in the same situation, along with the runaway trolley. The trolley there is a problem for all the people on the tracks. InYard, however, we see the group of people on the tracks as in the same situation as the trolley, but the yard’s owner as unconnected.
Unger attempts to demonstrate just how our intuitions are affected by this phenomenon with a several-option trolley case, where a runaway trolley will, without any action from the agent, kill six people. Unger then intro- duces options at several stages. The options are as follows (and illustrated in the picture on the next page (1996, p.90)):
A Do nothing, and a trolley hits and kills six people.
B Press a switch, diverting the trolley to the a track with three people on instead. If you press this, the six people will survive, but the three will die.
C Press an alternative switch, which will push another trolley, which would divert a second trolley, with two people aboard, to hit the first trolley, stopping it but killing the two people aboard this trolley. This will save six people trapped on the track, but the two people on the trolley die.
D A fat person nearby is roller skating, with special roller skates you can control with a remote control dial. You can activate the skates and
29Foot compares the trolley case to one where a judge can frame an innocent person
for a certain crime to prevent riots and was engaged in trying to find what makes this impermissible, yet the trolley case permissible.
push the fat person into the trolley. The fat person will die, but the trolley will stop and the six will be saved.
Unger claims that when confronted with all of these options, people typically judge that people should choose option D – killing the heavy skater to save the six. That is to say, they have a positive verdict of someone who takes option D. However, if people are only confronted with options A and D, people intuitively think option D is terribly wrong.30
30
Unger does note that order effects play a role in this. People have a tendency to attempt to be consistent in the evaluations, so will often show a reluctance to change their verdicts of whether D is wrong given only the addition/removal of options. Despite the differences in verdicts with the differences in presentation, Unger notes the prevalence of the verdicts he describes (1996, p.92).
Projective separation can explain this distinction, because when only confronted with options A and D, the heavy skater appears to us in a totally different situation to the six people on the tracks. When the four situations are presented, however, B seems close enough to A, C close enough to B, etc. so we do not engage in projective separation. Rather, in that case they are in the same group.
Unger claims that grouping people in our minds is this way is clearly morally unimportant, and that our being influenced by this type of factor is a feature of our thinking we should fight against.
The second psychological factor Unger calls our attention to isprotophys- ical thinking. This is the the term Unger gives to a variety of unusual ways features of movement affect our judgements. He presents five “protophysical principles” which supposedly distort our intuitions in many cases:
1. When serious loss will result, it’s harder to justify moving a person to, or into, an object than it is to move the object to, or into, the person.
2. When serious loss will result, it’s harder to justify changing the speed of an moving object, or changing its rate of motion, than changing the object’sdirection of motion.
3. When there’ll be big loss, it’s harder to justify speeding up an object than slowing down an object.
4. It’s a lot harder to justify taking an object at rest and setting it in motion than to justify taking an object in motion and increasing its speed.
5. Should serious loss result, it’s harder to justify imposing a substantial force on an object than it is to justify allowing a force already present (just about) everywhere, like gravitation, to work on the object.
(Unger, 1996, pp.101-2)
Unger again makes use of a variety of examples where our intuitions do not seem to represent our values to illustrate these principles. To briefly illustrate, the first of these principles does some work in explaining our intuitive reluctance to push a fat man (or redirect a fat skater) into a moving trolley, but our acceptance of merely changing the direction of the trolley.
Unger also notes that when just presented with options A and C in the multi- option case, there is a resistance to option C, where one movespeople, rather than just moving objects (1996, p.102,n.15). Option C does violate the first principle, but because it it does not violate any others, Unger suggests that one intermediary case (B), is enough for us to overcome that resistance.
While projective separation and protophysical thinking are the main factors he discusses, Unger notes that there are a wide array of additional psychological features which seem to divert us from making good moral ver- dicts. Behaviour with typically negative stereotypes (like pushing someone, as opposed to causing them to be moved by remote control), with more psychological distance (where the causal chain between you and the poten- tially suffering patient is longer) are other such features he mentions (1996, p.105). He also notes that these features often play in tandem, with ‘fac- tors of protophysical thinking [doing] at least some of their deceptive work
through encouraging the work of other distorting factors, like the factors of projective separating” (1996, p.103).
Unger claims that none of the complex set of strange factors are morally significant. They do however serve to distract us from living morally decent lives. By being alert to these factors and how they might warp our thinking, Unger suggests, we can remedy this and realise that even to live a morally decent life (not even a morally good one) will require much more than is typically accepted.