Jennifer MacLure, <i>The Feeling of Letting Die: Necroeconomics and Victorian Fiction</i>

The feeling of letting die has largely been the field of moral philosophers.Since Philippa Foot's original posing of the so-called 'trolley problem' in 1967, to Judith Jarvis Thomson's essay 'Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem' (1976), through numerous other scholarly articles and even an episode of the television show The Good Place (2017), philosophers have used the 'trolley problem' to question the line between killing versus letting die, and how we respond, both in our feelings and in our moral thought, to even minute differences between examples of those two concepts.In the standard version of the trolley problem, we are on an unstoppable trolley headed towards killing five people.If we flip a switch, we can instead kill just one person.Is it better to do nothing and let those five people die, or should we take action that will instead kill only one person?And what changes about our feeling if, instead, we ask about killing a healthy person so their organs can save five other people?The feeling of letting die changes as we change the conditions of that deathand that life.Jennifer MacLure's engaging and well-argued book suggests that much of Victorian literature engaged in a related thought experiment: one that helped readers to explore and deal with the feeling that wein order to live under capitalismmust become comfortable with letting some people die that we might otherwise save.It is a dark and compelling thesis, and one that she supports with extensive readings of both canonical and non-canonical works from the Victorian period.Starting with the New Poor Laws, England wrestled with how to deal with the uncountable and unaccountable damage that public social policies and private corporations did to real people, particularly the poor, the young, the old, and the infirm.That we might let some people die so that the rest of us can continue to live seems harsh, but this ongoing decision is indeed baked into capitalism.