Thinking about cases

Social Philosophy and Policy

Volumn 18, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 44-59

  Kagan, Shelly ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0038845228     PISSN: 02650525     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/s0265052500002892     Document Type: Article

References (7)

1. This is similar to an example of Judith Jarvis Thomson's, offered while making a similar point; see Thomson, Rights, Restitution, and Risk (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 257.
2. See, especially, Shelly Kagan, The Limits of Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
3. In the basic case, a runaway trolley will hit and kill five children, unless you throw a switch which will divert the trolley onto a side track, saving the five, but killing a sixth child trapped on that side track (who would otherwise be safe). A large number of variants of this basic case have been discussed. See, e.g., Judith Jarvis Thomson, "Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem," in Thomson, Rights, Restitution, and Risk 78-93; and Frances Kamm, "Harming Some to Save Others," Philosophical Studies 57, no. 3 (1989): 227-60.
4. In the basic case, a runaway trolley will hit and kill five children, unless you throw a switch which will divert the trolley onto a side track, saving the five, but killing a sixth child trapped on that side track (who would otherwise be safe). A large number of variants of this basic case have been discussed. See, e.g., Judith Jarvis Thomson, "Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem," in Thomson, Rights, Restitution, and Risk 78-93; and Frances Kamm, "Harming Some to Save Others," Philosophical Studies 57, no. 3 (1989): 227-60.
5. See, for example, Peter Singer, "Sidgwick and Reflective Equilibrium," The Monist 58, no. 3 (1974): 516.
6. See for example Peter Unger's discussion of protophysics and psychological grouping principles in his Living High and Letting Die (New York: Oxford University Press 1996).
7. It might seem that an emotivist or expressivist account of moral claims would have an easy time accommodating these facts, since there is nothing especially surprising in the suggestion that people's emotional (and other) attitudes vary, and that they can be readily generated in response to never before considered cases. But even accounts of this kind, it seems to me, should be troubled by the ease and force with which intuitions can be generated in response to trolley problems (and the like) since it is not at all obvious why these should so readily engage our emotions or other pro-attitudes, nor why minor changes in the cases should elicit such drastically altered reactions.