Human Kindness and the Smell of Warm Croissants

A judge confronts a crowd of demonstrators, enraged by the barbaric murder of a member of their community. They are demanding that the author of this barbaric crime be found. If this fails, they threaten to avenge themselves by attacking the quarter in which another community, whom they suspect of shielding the murderer, now lives. The judge does not know who the author of the crime is. In order to avert the sack of the entire quarter and the massacre of a great number of its inhabitants, he decides to accuse an innocent person and to have him executed.¹

A pilot whose plane is about to crash steers toward the least populated zone of the city, knowing that he will inevitably cause the death of some of its inhabitants, in order to avoid killing a far greater number of them.²

Indeed, the idea that there are things that we cannot do, no matter what the beneficial consequences for ourselves or for society as a whole may be, is the pivot of the deontological conception.³

The principle that states that we must never use a person simply as a means in order to obtain an outcome, even if it were desirable, is an expression of this conception. So too is the thought that there exist fundamental rights that we cannot in any circumstances violate.

If we have intuitions of this sort, we will reject with some distaste the utilitarian arguments that allow us to justify the sacrifice of an innocent for the good of society.⁴ We will rule out, a priori, without brooking any argument, the moral possibility of executing an innocent person in order to avoid bloodshed.

The second scenario contradicts these conclusions. It does indeed seem that, in this sort of circumstance, the idea that it is legitimate to sacrifice a small number of people in order to avoid killing many others does not run counter to our intuitions. We will reckon, in all likelihood, that what the pilot does is rational, and even that it is his moral duty. We will judge him to have behaved in a “responsible” fashion.

If we think that what he does is fine from all these points of view, this means that our intuitions are not systematically deontological or antiutilitarian. They may give utilitarian thought the credit for possessing a degree of moral value.

The antiutilitarians could, however, retort that our deontological intuitions are not completely annulled by the belief that the pilot does well to go and crash into the least populated zone of the city. They will say that we probably have the feeling that our fundamental, inviolable, inalienable, and intangible rights are not threatened in this case, whereas they are when an innocent is sent to the gallows.

Executing an innocent person is violating his fundamental rights to a fair trial and to not being tortured or killed without an acceptable public justification. None of these rights is violated, however, when a pilot chooses to crash into the least populated zone of the city.

This is why the deontologist might reckon that he can, without contradicting himself, judge it to be repugnant to have an innocent executed in order to preserve the lives of numerous persons, and morally permissible for someone to crash their plane in a fairly uninhabited zone of a large city in order to kill fewer people.

Having an individual executed in order to avoid bloodshed is a decision that should, in principle, shake our deontological principles, supposing we have any, to their very foundations. It contradicts the notion that there are things we must never do, and that violating the fundamental rights of persons is one of them. But the judge could reply that it is precisely because he has a lofty idea of these fundamental rights that he decides to have the innocent executed. He calculates that violating the rights of a person is justified if it is with a view to avoiding violations of the still greater rights of other persons. Now, if a residential quarter of the city is sacked and its inhabitants massacred, the quantity of fundamental rights violated will be huge, or greater, at any rate, than if one innocent were executed. The judge reckons that his action is just because he has acted in such a way that the sum total of fundamental rights violated is the smallest possible. Can he be reproached for this?

In actual fact, I am putting into the mouth of the judge, who is perhaps not a great expert in moral philosophy (and has no need to be such), the so-called consequentialist arguments upon which utilitarian ideas rest.⁵

According to these arguments, what we must do is maximize the good or minimize the evil in general, whatever our conception of good and evil may be. In asserting that the good is pleasure, well-being, or the satisfaction of people’s preferences, and that evil is suffering, misery, or whatever goes against people’s preferences, the utilitarians are simply rendering this principle specific. But a consequentialist can quite readily define the good in terms of respect for rights, and evil in terms of violation of rights. A good attitude so far as he is concerned would entail maximizing respect for rights and minimizing violation of rights.⁶

This is exactly the kind of idea that causes the adversaries of consequentialism to howl with derision! For them, the mere fact of thinking of making calculations of this kind suffices to morally discredit those conceptions that allow them.⁷ This is the proof that their minds are “corrupted,” as Elizabeth Anscombe has put it.⁸ In order to illustrate this unsympathetic judgment, she proposes the following thought experiment:

Imagine that ten persons, the victims of a shipwreck, are stranded on a rock on the open sea, without water or food. Some distance away another shipwrecked person has managed to cling to another rock. He does not have any water or food either. All of them will die very quickly if no one comes to their aid. A navigator in the vicinity will have enough time to save either the group of ten or the individual on his rock. Let us suppose that he decides to help the isolated person rather than the ten others, although not for a morally ignoble reason (for example, the isolated individual is white, the ten others are black, and the navigator is white and a racist).

Will he have done something wrong if he chooses to save one shipwrecked person rather than ten?⁹

Elizabeth Anscombe thinks that he will have done nothing wrong. She justifies her position by saying that the ten people abandoned and left for dead would have no cause to complain.

Was something that was their due denied to them? No. Had they a greater entitlement to be helped than the isolated person? No. What wrong in the end has been done to them? None whatever.

What reproach could they then level at the navigator?

None, if his motive was at no point an “ignoble contempt”¹⁰

Elizabeth Anscombe does not use her thought experiment to test theories, whether consequentialist, deontologist, or of some other kind. She denies the value of moral theories in general, that is to say, the idea that we could know in advance what the most morally pertinent factors in a given situation are (rights, consequences, and so on). But she by no means rules out the possibility that the consequences might be pertinent in a particular situation.¹¹

What, on the other hand, she appears to exclude in the thought experiment of the Shipwrecked is the notion that questions of quantity have any moral value whatsoever. She seems to think that, provided that one does not have a “corrupt” mind, they are questions that one should not pose.¹²

I am not sure that I understand what she means by a “corrupt” mind, or that I am able to give a clear account of it. I will therefore use a thought experiment to make my point.

Suppose someone asks you: “who should beat a wife who has been unfaithful, her brother, her father, or her husband?”

You will reply that it is an absurd, badly framed question, and that you do not wish to answer it, for it is already tainted by a way of thinking that you reject. It assumes that unfaithful wives must be beaten, a scandalous notion in itself.

The same goes for the navigator. If someone asks you, “Whom should he help, the ten who are shipwrecked, or the one who is all alone on the rock?” you must reply, “That’s a badly framed question. It assumes that the navigator ought to take into consideration the fact that there are more shipwrecked persons on one rock than on the other.¹³ Yet I reckon that nothing justifies this assumption from the moral point of view.”

If this is indeed Anscombe’s argument, it is clear enough, but I have to say that I do not find it convincing. It in fact implies that if the navigator has decided to save one person, rather than ten, he will have done nothing wrong. Indeed, there will be nothing to discuss. Anyone posing such a question probably has a “corrupt” mind, by dint of their envisaging a moral situation in terms of quantities.

Yet I do not see why “is it better to save ten persons rather than one?” is a question that we should refuse to pose.

Does Anscombe’s conception imply that a pilot whose plane is going to crash into a big city asks himself a question he should not pose if he wonders how best to steer toward the least densely populated zone?¹⁴

Does it imply that if the pilot chooses to crash into the most densely populated zone, he will not have done anything wrong, for its inhabitants will have no cause to complain (well, when all is said and done, it will no longer be very much of an issue for them, so perhaps we should say rather that their families will have no cause to complain!), since they will not have been refused something that was due to them?

Who could agree with this? We can of course deny the moral value of quantities, but this way of refusing a debate does not seem to me to be philosophically justified. We know perfectly well, moreover, that the reasons for rejecting thought experiments are not always very good ones.

In a psychology test, the following question was posed: “what is the color of bears living on an ice floe where everything is white, bearing in mind the fact that bears are always the same color as their natural habitat?”

Some rejected the question, saying that they could not possibly know, never having been on an ice floe. If the inquirer insisted, specifying that the answer was contained in the question and that they simply had to reread it, they would refuse to do so.¹⁵

There is also the well-known story of the schoolboy. When a maths teacher said to him, “Let X be the number of sheep,” the schoolboy objected, “But … what if X isn’t the number of sheep?”¹⁶

In short, we need to know whether Elizabeth Anscombe’s a priori rejection of consequentialism in general, and of one of its expressions, namely, taking quantities into moral consideration, is not equally unjustified, even if it cannot be, of course, equally absurd.

An empirical inquiry into the ideas we really form of consequentialist calculations should perhaps help us to not take this high-sounding vocabulary too seriously.¹⁷

We are concerned here with a comparative study of students from, on the one hand, the United States and, on the other, the Republic of China, to whom the story of the judge and the furious crowd was told.

The respondents had to indicate whether they found the judge to have made an “immoral” decision in having the innocent executed, on a scale of 1 (total disagreement) to 7 (complete agreement).

The American students tended to award the judge a grade of 5.5, signifying “agreement with the assertion that the judge’s decision is immoral,” but not “complete agreement” They did not award him 6.5 or 7: we do not find the total agreement that the anticonsequentialists should expect.

Furthermore, the students from the Republic of China, responding to the assertion that the judge’s decision was immoral, awarded, on average, a grade of 4.9. They were even less likely than the American students to be in complete agreement with the notion that the decision was immoral.

Can it be that all these students, representing as they do vast populations, have minds “corrupted” by consequentialism?

According to the authors of the investigation, the minor differences between American and Chinese students are statistically significant. In their view, they indicate a more pronounced tendency on the part of students from the Republic of China to not disapprove of the judge’s decision to have the innocent person executed.

But we should not conclude from this that there exists a profound “cultural” difference between the American and the Chinese students. The divergences in the grades awarded are not huge.

At any rate, it would be absurd to conclude, on the basis of these answers, that the students from the Republic of China are less rationalist or universalist than the American students, although that is precisely what the most relativist philosophers, those keen to persuade us that people “think differently in the East,” might do.