The Moral Relevance of the Past (Hanna)

The Moral Relevance of the Past (Hanna) 1. Past Fault: Recall that Quinn says of Rescue IV, given the choice to save 1 or 5, you ought to save 5 UNLESS it is your fault that the 1 is in harm s way. If that is the case, then you re obligated to save the 1 rather than the 5. Consider another example: Poisoner-1 You poisoned the tea of 1 person yesterday. Today they will drink it and die unless you stop them. You have a change of heart and are rushing to warn them in time. On your way there, you see 5 children drowning in a shallow pond. You do not have time to save both the 5 children and the 1 poison victim. You have two options: Ignore the 5 and save the 1; or, save the 5, ignoring the 1. However, note that if you save the 5, you will have retroactively become a killer (because you poisoned the 1 and they died). Thus, when YOU are the CAUSE of the 1 being put in harm s way, it is not really a choice between letting 1 die or letting 5 die. Rather, it is a choice between killing 1 or letting 5 die. And ordinary morality dictates that, in this sort of situation, you ought to let 5 die. (For instance, recall Foot s mountain road example, Rescue II, where you re racing to save 5, but in order to save them you ll need to run over and kill one person on the road. It is wrong to kill the 1, she says.) Jason Hanna formulates this initial intuition as the following: THE PAST MATTERS: If presently failing to save a victim will make it such that the agent has retroactively KILLED that victim (as happens if the agent fails to save the poisoned victim in Poisoner-1), then letting them die is morally equivalent to killing them. And that seems right. For instance, if I intentionally detonate a bomb which kills 10 people, then I am morally at fault for 10 murders. But, similarly, if I accidentally turn on a timer which will detonate a bomb in one minute, and then I intentionally walk away rather than turning it back off, I am also morally at fault for 10 murders. There seems to be moral equivalence here. In other words, the moral reasons against detonating the bomb are just as strong as the moral reasons against not turning off the detonator. But, if that s right, some weird problems arise for the DDA. For, consider a second case: Poisoner-2 You poisoned the tea of 5 people yesterday. Today they will all drink it and die unless you administer the antidote. You have a change of heart and are rushing to warn them in time. You are speeding down a narrow mountain road, and notice one unconscious person sprawled across the road ahead. If you stop to help them, it will be too late to stop the 5 from drinking the poison, and they will die. In order to remain full speed ahead to save the 5, you will have to run over and kill the 1 in the road. 1

Intuitively, it would NOT be permissible to run over the 1 here (it seems like Rescue II). However, THE PAST MATTERS entails that this is a choice between killing 1 and killing 5 in which case you ought to kill the one. In short, we are faced with two choices: (1) Accept THE PAST MATTERS.* (a) Intuitive verdict in Poisoner-1 (you ought to save the one poison victim) (b) Counter-intuitive verdict in Poisoner-2 (you ought to run over the 1) * for instance, this seems to be Jeff McMahan s view. He claims that retroactively killing (as in Poisoner-1) is wrong because it is a killing! (2) Reject THE PAST MATTERS.** (a) Counter-intuitive verdict in Poisoner-1 (you ought to save the 5 drowning kids) (b) Intuitive verdict in Poisoner-2 (you ought not run over the 1) ** for instance, this seems to be Judith Thomson s view. She claims that the morality of an action only considers the present tense; i.e., present actions. Thus, a problem arises. Which bullet do we bite here? Does the PAST MATTER, or not? 2. A Middle Ground: Perhaps we could adopt a 3-tiered approach, where: Presently kill > Letting die which makes one have killed > Presently letting die If there are not two, but THREE moral categories (doing, will-have-done, and allowing), each more easily justifiable, morally, than the last, then we get the intuitive verdicts: In Poisoner-2, given the choice between presently killing 1 vs. will-have-killed 5, it is worse to presently kill the 1 (so you should NOT run them over to save the 5). In Poisoner-1, given the choice between retroactively having-killed 1 vs. letting 5 die, it is worse to retroactively have-killed 1 (so you should NOT stop to save the 5). Plausibly, the will have killed middle-ground is generated by a special obligation that the agent has to the victim because they re responsible for the victim being in harm s way. 1 But what grounds this special obligation? Why do we have it? 1 For instance, there seems to be a similar middle ground here: We usually think that parents have special obligations to their children. As such, in a choice between saving your own child from starvation by feeding them, and saving 5 stranger s children by feeding them, you ought to save your own child. But, you may not kill someone else s child to save 5 of your own children. (In short: killing a stranger > letting your own child die > letting a stranger die) 2

Hanna appeals to restorative justice here: When you harm someone, this generates a special obligation to compensate them, pay restitution, rectify the situation, etc. For instance, if I accidentally break your phone, I should buy you a new one. If I accidentally break your arm, I should pay for your medical bills, and also do something really nice to make it up to you. And so on. Note that this is an appeal to some reason OUTSIDE of the DDA. It s not the duty of non-maleficence that s doing the work here. Rather, it s the duty to mitigate, prevent, or offset the harms associated with their wrongful behavior. Hanna thinks that, in both Poisoner cases, when you poison the victim s tea, you have immediately wronged them (though you have not yet harmed them). Wronging someone generates a special obligation to restore justice e.g., by preventing or mitigating the harm, or, failing that, compensating them, etc. Since the harm has not yet occurred, the agent has a special obligation to prevent the harm. This obligation is stronger than the duty to save the 5 in Poisoner-1, but weaker than the duty to refrain from killing the 1 in Poisoner-2. For instance, imagine that I have injured you and caused you to be in great pain. This generates an obligation to compensate you, ease your pain, make it up to you, etc. Imagine that easing your pain will cost me $1,000 in medical expenses. I am obligated to do so even if I could alternatively relieve FIVE times as much pain by ignoring your situation and donating the money to a certain charity. However, I may not injure someone else in order to help you. For instance, imagine that, in order to help you, I need to steal a machine from someone else whose condition is not as bad as yours, but will still be in some pain if I steal from them. It seems that I must allow you to suffer in this case. And the Restorative Justice proposal seems to account for all of this. 3. Future harms: However, now imagine two more cases: Violent Sleepwalker-1 You are diagnosed with a condition called violent sleepwalking. Without medication, you will certainly sleepwalk tonight and will seriously injure one person, paralyzing them from the waist down. However, the medication is expensive. You will only be able to pay for it if you use the money that you had set aside to donate to a charity which will cure 5 people with paralysis from the waist down. You decide to donate the money to the charity. Five paraplegic patients are treated and cured. But, you sleepwalk and paralyze one person. It seems that you ought to have purchased the medicine in order to avoid doing harm. 3

Violent Sleepwalker-2 You are diagnosed with a condition called violent sleepwalking. Without medication, you will certainly sleepwalk tonight and seriously injure five people, paralyzing them from the waist down. However, the pharmacy closes in 5 minutes. You are racing down the road, and must run over one person in order to make it to the drug store in time, seriously injuring them such that they will be paralyzed from the waist down. You step on the gas, run them over, and make it to the drug store just in time. It seems that you ought not have purchased the medicine in this case; i.e., you should not have run over the one person in the road. The Restorative Justice proposal will not explain this difference. For, at the beginning of both stories, the agent has not yet wronged anyone and so there is no one to whom they are specially obligated to compensate. In other words, restorative justice gives rise to an obligation to repair wrongs already done. As with the past-looking Poisoner cases, in the forward-looking Sleepwalker cases, we cannot appeal to the DDA in order to explain the difference. It cannot MERELY be the fact that doing harm (including future doing) is worse than allowing harm which explains the difference. For, then, Sleepwalker-2 is really a choice between doing harm to 1 or doing harm to 5 in which case you really ought to run over the 1 in order to get to the pharmacy in time. 4. A Further Problem: So, there are some issues that need to be worked out. But, all of that aside, there s still the following weirdness. [I ve altered Hanna s examples here.] Gas-1 Yesterday, you set a timer to release a poisonous gas that will kill five people today. The poison is in one sealed room with 5 people, and the remote detonator is in a second, sealed room with one person. Today, you ve had a change of heart. You want to prevent the gas from killing the five. However, the only way to do so is to damage some pipes which will flood the second room with water, short circuiting the remote detonator, but also killing the one person in the second room. You have two choices: (a) Do nothing, which will make it the case that you have killed the five people in Room 1, or (b) Kill the one in Room 2 in order to prevent yourself from having killed the other five. This is just another version of the sort of situation that occurs in Poisoner-2. So, the verdict is that you should NOT kill the one person. Rather, you should let the five die and in doing so, you will have killed the five. However, now consider a second case: 4

Gas-2 As with Gas-1, except this time, you aren t sure whether there is anyone in Room 2. Before flooding Room 2, you ask your assistant to go and check whether there is anyone in there or not. After waiting a while, you grow impatient, breaking the pipes which will flood Room 2, killing the one, and saving the 5. Your assistant comes back and then reports that, indeed, there is one person in Room 2. Just then, you discover that there is actually a safety valve which can be turned, which will cut off the water supply to the building before Room 2 is flooded. You have two options: (a) Do nothing, which will make it the case that you have killed the one in Room 2 by flooding the room with water, or (b) Turn the valve to cut off the water, which will make it the case that you have killed the five in Room 1 by releasing a poisonous gas. What should you do? It may seem to be a choice between making it such that you WILL HAVE KILLED one, or that you WILL HAVE KILLED five. Therefore, you ought to have killed one rather than five (i.e., you should do nothing). But, that s rather odd, considering that, in Gas-1, you ought not to have flooded the room in the first place. For, this would be to maintain that: (i) It is morally wrong to initiate harmful action A, and that (ii) If one has already initiated harmful action A, it is morally permissible to fail to stop it before it harms anyone. Given our verdict in Gas-1, in Gas-2 the agent WRONGFULLY initiated the flooding. Moments later, the agent has the opportunity to undo his action. It therefore seems that the agent is obligated to do so. But, wait. If that s right, then the agent has a stronger duty to refrain from having killed one rather than to refrain from having killed five; i.e., given a choice between: (a) You HAVE killed the 5, but HAVE NOT killed the 1 (b) You HAVE NOT killed the 5, but HAVE killed the 1 You ought to choose (a), making it such that you HAVE killed 5 rather than 1! Why in the heck would it be so much more important to prevent one s self from having killed the 1? Answer: The agent initiated the threat to the one MORE RECENTLY. But, then it seems that MERE temporal proximity is morally relevant. But, that s super weird, and seems false. Just as one surely doesn t have a much stronger duty to not kill someone nearby (e.g., by strangling them) compared to far away (e.g., with a sniper rifle), surely one does not have a much stronger duty to prevent one s self from having killed more recently in the past rather than further in the past? The alternative is an error theory. Perhaps our intuitions in some of these cases are just wrong. But, then, this might cast more suspicion on the entire project of the DDA. What a mess! 5