FOOT (Philippa).
Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy.
THE TROLLEY PROBLEM
A collection bringing together the most important philosophical articles by the English philosopher Philippa Foot (1920-2021) written between 1957 to 1977, including the first appearance in book-form of the famous ethical dilemma best-known as the ‘Trolley Problem’.
The ‘Trolley Problem’ is a thought experiment in which a runaway trolley is headed toward five people who will be killed by the collision, but it could be steered onto a track on which there is only one person. The dilemma ‘raises the question of why it seems permissible to steer a trolley aimed at five people toward one person while it seems impermissible to do something such as killing one healthy man to use his organs to save five people who will otherwise die’ (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
The work was inspired by Foot’s reading of Thomas Aquinas’ work on virtue ethics, in particular his double-effect reasoning, by introducing a distinction between ‘negative rights, rights to non-interference, versus positive rights, which obligate others to provide some service. Negative rights would enjoin others not to initiate a fatal causal sequence, and positive rights may give rise to an obligation to prevent a fatal causal sequence from running its course. Foot’s contention is that negative rights carry greater weight than positive rights’ (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
The thought experiment appears in the chapter titled ‘The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect’, originally published in 1967 as an article in the Oxford Review.
