What's the Use of Philosophy?

This book dedicates only a few pages to the trolley problem. The way Kitcher treats it, however, lends a sense of the kind of philosophy he criticizes and the kind of philosophy he favors. The trolley problem is doubtless the moral dilemma best known both inside and outside of the circle of professional philosophers. The dilemma, set forth by Philippa Foot in the context of a debate about abortion rights in the 1960s, is based on a thought experiment. Imagine you are next to a lever able to switch the rails of a trolley whose brakes are broken. The trolley is on track to hit five people fastened to the rails. If you activate the lever, the trolley will go on other rails where only one person is fastened. Should you activate the lever, causing the death of one but saving the lives of five people? The majority of respondents believe that would be the right action to take. If we slightly change the situation, however, our intuition seems to switch. Imagine that there is no lever but a person next to you big enough to stop the trolley if you throw him under it. (It seems to me that there is something intrinsically fat-phobic in this thought experiment.) Fortunately, the majority of respondents would not push that man onto the rails. As Kitcher asks, “Why [in the first place] are you supposed to think of pushing the fat man as an option?” To which he adds: “When I walk around the world, spotting people, corpulent or not, on the parapets of bridges, I am not inclined to think of their potential as obstacles to impede runaway trolleys. . . . So when I'm asked to consider what I'd do in [the ‘fat man’ scenario], one of the supposed options isn't even on the cards.”Thought experiments of this kind aim at highlighting our moral intuitions. Kitcher considers two ways in which thought experiments may be criticized. The first consists of verifying whether the highlighted intuitions in the scenarios can be applied elsewhere. In that context, Kitcher criticizes the way that Peter Singer proposes a scenario allowing him to ask if we would rather save a boy from drowning in a river or continue our way toward a planned party. Of course, we should save the boy, but does that thought experiment say anything about how we should act more broadly in the world? Should we stop partying until no one in the world is at risk of dying? The gap is wide between a particular individual who can be saved by a simple brave act of mine and the innumerable individuals in life-and-death situations but for which no single act could save them. Kitcher does not analyze the original use of the trolley dilemma in this way, but there is also, it seems to me, a broad gap between the man hesitating between pushing the lever (or not) and the woman (or health professional) hesitating between aborting or not. Recognizing, at least for the sake of argument, the equal moral status of the fetus and the woman, the idea of Foot was to determine when abortion should nevertheless be allowed. She argued that if a woman needs a surgical operation, for example a hysterectomy, for her survival, that operation is allowed even if it will indirectly but foreseeably kill the fetus. The fetus is then in the position of the lone person on the trolley track. In contrast, Foot argues, if the death of the fetus is in itself the means to save the woman, it should not be allowed, in the same way that we have a moral intuition against pushing the fat man on the rail.The trolley problem became a research program of its own, quite independent of the question of abortion, with ever more variations, each widening the gap between the bizarreness of the thought experiment and any real-life situation. And here is the second way in which Kitcher analyzes thought experiments. To what extent, he asks, are they able to set off real intuitions? Next to his doubts about the capacity of the trolley scenarios to provoke genuine intuitions (since they are so far away from anything we normally experience), Kitcher considers all the debates around the trolley dilemma as a symptom of what he calls the pathological development of philosophy. (When philosophers cease addressing real-life problems in an open debate with various social actors and begin to talk only to their colleagues, that development is pathological.) Inspired mainly by John Dewey, Kitcher wants philosophy to become what these days we call applied philosophy: theoretical philosophy, in other words, should serve the broader society. He names several colleagues whose work he admires, showing that the program he advances is not only theoretically tantalizing but is also possible, since already practiced by some philosophers—even if, as he admits, it can be difficult for a PhD or a postdoctoral student to pursue such practical goals, as they are not taken into consideration in the selection processes for academic jobs. (He addresses that problem in his last chapter, written in the form of a letter to young scholars.)