by Peter Brady
The English philosopher, Phillipa Foot, once told a story which is well known to moral philosophers. A number of explorers were trapped in a cave. Water was rising in the cave and there was only one small exit. Unfortumately, a fat members of the party had become stuck in the exit and could not be removed. The only way the others could clear the exit was to blow the man up with dynamite which they had in their possession. If they did not do this they would all die. Let us suppose that the explorers were all students of ehtics. They discuss their predicament. Should they blow up their fat friend?
The Lesser Evil
Grey: The simplest and quickest way to solve this problem is to choose the lesser of two evils.
Green: "The lesser of two evils" can mean many things. A person who thinks that no matter what he does will commit a sin may choose what he considers to be the lesser of two evils or the least of many evils. Subjectively, he will not be guilty of doing wrong. Of couse, a person who is ethically well-informed will never have to face such a dilemma.
Grey: That is not the case I have in mind. I mean that of two evils a person may choose the lesser one.
Green: If he is absolutely committed to doing evil, for example, to stealing a large sum of money from a bank, a friend may counsel him to take a smaller sum than he planned, for example, $500,000 instead of one million dollars. The friend does no wrong in advising him to take less, provided he does not really want him to take any. The thief is, of course, guilty of stealing the sum he takes.
Grey: No, I am not thinking of that case either. I am thinking of our present somewhat precarious situation. To put the matter bluntly, if indelicately, we should blow up our fat friend and get out of this place as quickly as possible. In this situation it is not wrong to blow him up. He knows his Scripture and will be glad to make the sacrifice and give his life for his friends.
Green: You know your Scripture too, no doubt. You will realise that you are following one of the few ethical principles that gets its name from the New Testament, "The Caiphas Principle". In recent years it has been popularised under other names, Proportionalism, for example, though Proportionalists would never admit it.
Grey: I am glad to find myself in such good company.
Green: Congratulations! But I am afriad you will not find many good arguments for their ethical views. As a matter of fact, they have never been able to refute the criticisms that have been levelled against their method of making moral decisions. They have never been able to show how they can know the good and evil of actions and all their effects to decide which action will be the lesser evil; much less have they been to show how one can add and compare values that are incommensurable.
Grey: But surely this method has a respected place in traditional Catholic ethics. For example, in the fourth condition of the Principle of Double Effect?
Green: It has nothing of the sort. According to traditional Catholic ethics there are certain kinds of actions, perjury, murder, adultery, and others, that are always and in all cir cumstances morally wrong. This is a basic principle of Catholic ethics and of the Principle of Double Effects which was developed to deal with difficulties arising from the fact that there are moral absolutes. Proportionalists deny the existence of most moral absolutes, especially those in the "inner worldly" sphere. Moreover, in evaluating the proportion between good and bad effects, those who use the Principle of Double Effect, evaluate them according to moral principles such as the Golden Rule. Proportionalsim eliminates the need for the Principle of Double Effect and rejects the moral principles on which it is based.
White: The problems of Proportionalism have been discussed for over thirty years and those of its close relative, Utilitarianism, for over one hundred. We have not so much time to discuss our problem. I think one can agree that our purposes should always be good. We should not use evil means to achieve them. Surely it would be wrong for us to blow up an innocent man to save our lives? To allow the intentional killing of any innocent human being is, in principle, to undermine all justice. The lesser of two evils, my foot!
Responsibility
Green: You are right. To blow up our fat friend, even to save our own lives, would be murder. It would be the direct killing of an innocent man. The immediate effect of setting off the dynamite would be his deaht. We would be responsible for his death.
White: We could be responsible for causing his death without being morally responsible for doing something wrong.
Green: But surely if we knowingly and willingly do the action that causes his death we are morally responsible for the death?
White: Well, we need not have chosen to do it. We would then neither cause his death nor bear any moral responsibility for it. But if we do the action that causes his death we are morally responsible for his death insofar as we need not have done the action, but we are not necessarily responsible for doing wrong.
Green: I can see that if death rarely, if ever, resulted from such an action a person would not necessarily be guilty of doing wrong. But we know that the dynamite will certainly kill him.
White: Even in that case, a person need not necessarily be morally responsible for doing wrong, that is, be guilty of doing wrong.
Green: I can agree that if, for example, I choose to learn the computer, I know that I will inevitably make mistakes, which I will not make if I do not learn the computer. Certainly one does not do moral evil by unintentionally making mistakes on the computer. But we must be serious. We are talking about killing our fat friend.
The Effects of Our Actions
White: Well, what would you say about the man who jumps into the icy sea because there are too many people on the life-raft? Is he guilty of committing suicide?
Green: That is different. The immediate effect of his action is that the life-raft becomes lighter and is in less danger of sinking. So unless he intends to commit suicide, he does not do so.
White: Perhaps we can agree, them, that even if I do something that will certainly cause a person's death I am not necessarily responsible for wrongful killing, i.e., murder. In other words, I can be responsible for causing a bad effect, without being responsible for wrongdoing.
Black: That seems to be a reasonable conclusion. But I am not too clear about this notion of "immediate effect". For example, there is the old problem about the warship that is guarding a convoy of merchant ships. Some ships are attacked by a submarine and are sinking. In order to escape, the captain of the warship orders his ship "full steam ahead". He knows that as a result life-boats will be swamped or run down and men will be drowned. Is the death of these men the immediate effect of his action?
Brown: It seems that there are two equally immediate effects, one that the warship begins to escape, the other that the men in the water are killed or drowned. Many of our actions have two equally immediate effects - when I give a present to a friend, I impoverish myself materially while I enrich my friend.
Black: Or there is the case of the woman who, during a famine, starves herself to keep her children alive. A time comes when she knows that if she continues to deprive herself of food she will die. Is her refusal to eat the immediate cause of her death? Is she guilty of committing suicide?
Brown: This notion of "immediate effect" is certainly not too clear. There can be two or even more immediate effects. The effects can be temporarily immediate, physically immediate, and there can be the psychological and moral effects on the agent himself. Instead of looking at the problem as a matter of cause and effect, let us look at the purposes and means employed, that is, at the intentions and choices of the agent, and their effects.
Intentions and Choices
Green: I agree that we alwaus have to consider intentions and choices. Obviously, there must always be good. And one must never intend to bring about a bad effect, but only to allow it when one has good reason for doing so.
Black: In the case mentioned, the man on the life-raft, the warship going full steam ahead and the woman keeping her children alive, the aims of the agents were good, they chose good means to achieve these aims, they did not intend to cause the bad effects and they had good reasons for permittiing them to occur.
Grey: How does all this apply to the case of our fat friend? It is well that he is not able to hear this conversation. He would have died of anxiety long ago.
Black: Our problem is like the case of the man who kills in self-defence. His purpose is to save his life and he chooses to use an appropriate degree of force. In fact, in the circumstances he has to use so much force that he knows he will kill the man, but he does not intend or choose to kill him. It is not because the man dies that he saves his life but because he stops the attack. The death is the unintended side - effect of his action.
Green: I would say that he intentionally killed the attacker in self-defence. The man's death was the means, or at least the immediate effect of the means, by which he defended himself. Direct killing in the case is quite legitimate. After all, he was unjustly attacked.
Black: I stick by my analysis. It is one thing to choose to use appropriate means to defend oneself, it is another thing to choose to kill a man to save one's life.
Change the Description
Green: The fact is that he kills the man to save himself.
Grey: Green is quite right. There is an old trick in Ethics; describe an action in one way and it is a good action, describe it in another and it is bad. This is what gives ethics a bad name. Some philosophers have argued that, if necessary, one can remove the brain from the head of an unborn child and crush the skull to enable the child to be delivered and so save the mother's life. They do not call this process "killing the child" but "reducing the dimensions of the head". Of course, they will say one does not intend to kill, only to reduce dimensions. You might as well say that when you lop off a man's head you only intend to stop his headache.
White: Certainly, we have to consider what a person actually does when we evaluate his responsibility. And the agent has to be sincere and rational in describing his choices and intentions. A person who beheads another to stop his headache is completely irrational. But a driver who finds that the brakes of his car are faulty can swerve to avoid killing a number of people and knowingly but unintentionally kill one person who happens to be on the road. He is not guilty of murder. A pilot who crashes his damaged plane in the sean because he does not want to kill people on the beach where he might have landed safely is not guilty of suicide. Descriptions are important. But they must fit the facts.
Means, Ends and Side-Effects
Green: How is all this relevant to our present problem?
Black: Well, as in the case of self-defence, we want to save our lives. Our purpose is good. The way in which we do this is by removing our fat friend from the opening of the cave. To do so we choose to blow him up. We do not intend to kill him but only to free the opening. His death is the unintended side-effect of the act of opening the cave.
Green: How on earth can you blow a man up and not intend to kill him?
Black: It is one thing to want to remove a man from the entrance to the cave. It is anther thing to want to kill him. It is possible to imagine that we can blow him out of the cave without killing him.
Grey: That is exactly the kind of sophistry that I was talking about a few moments ago. It is known as the technique of "directing one's intnetion". You can justify anything with its help. You can bomb a city and its inhabitants into dust and claim that you only intended to destroy the buildings. Of course, you can imagine a bomb that will destroy buildings and not kill people... it will cause the buildings to disintegrate slowly so that the people will have time to escape... it is one thing to bomb a city... another to annihilate its inhabitants. But in reality, you must not drop a nuclear bomb on a city.
Green: That is true. Clearly, it is one thing to imagine something and it is something else for it to be possible. You can imagine the time before creation or the space beyond all space, but could there be a time before creation or a space beyond all space? I can imagine shooting a person in the head and merely making him unconscious... the possibilities of imagining things are endless. And so too are the possibilities of self-deception if we admit such rationalisations into our moral thinking.
Towards a Solution
White: Let us get back to reality. As a result of scientific progress, it is now possible for a person to live, at least for some time, with an artificial heart. Would we allow a person will a strong heart but a malignant and inoperable brain tumour to donate his heart before death? He does not want to kill himself, and he does not save the life of the recipient of his heart by killing himself, but by having his heart implanted successfully in the recipient. It is one thing to donate a heart: it is another thing to kill oneself. I do not know of any ethician who would permit the donation of a heart of a living donor in any circumstances.
Green: A good point!
Brown: There are indeed similarities between our present problem and the case of killing in self-defence. But there are significant differences also. In the first place, our fat friend is not an unjust aggressor. Secondly, merely blowing him up will not, of itself, save us. We then have to get out of the cave. In the case of self-defence one and the same action has a good and a bad effect. The one act both saves and kills. In the third place, I do not accept the contention that the death of our fat friend is merely a side-effect of our blowing him up. To open the cave it is necessary to choose to blow him up, to make his body disintegrate, in order to free the opening. It is because he has been blown to pieces - i.e. killed, that we will be able to get out of the cave. If we blow up our friend intentionally, we shall be intentinally blowing up an innocent man. And the immediate effect of our action will be that we are murderers.
Grey: Out fat friend has not been showing much interest in our discussion.
Brown: It seems that we shall have to adjourn our little meeting and resume it in more propitious circumstances. The problem concerning our friend, I should say, our dear late lamented friend, is now a merely theoretical one, and the water is rising fast in the cave. It will soon be up to our necks. I thank you, ladies and gen tleman, for a most interesting and stimulating discussion.
And so the discussion ended.
Books and Articles
1. FINNIS J., Fundamentals of Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon 1983) especially 85-94, 106.
2. O'CONNELL T.E., Principles for a Catholic Morality (New York: Seabury 1978) 152-154, 165-173.
3. ANSCOMBE G.E.M., Medalist's Address: Action, Intention and 'Double Effect' in Dahlstrom D.O., et al., The Role and Responsibility of the Moral Philosopher (The American Catholic Philosophical Association 1982) 12-25.
4. BOYLE J.M.Jr., Double-Effect and a Certain Type of Embryotomy, Irish Theological Quarterly 44 (1977) 303-318; "Praeter intentionem" in Aquinas, in Thomist 42 (1978) 649-665.
5. FINNIS J., Object and Intention in Moral Judgments according to Aquinas, in Thomist 55 (1991) 1-23.
6. FLANNERY K., What is Included in a Means to an End?, in Gregorianum 74, 3 (1993) 499-513.