Office Hours, Thursday, Four Till Five

Dr. Helen Marsh had taught introductory ethics for thirty-one years and could do the trolley problem in her sleep, and sometimes suspected she had. She knew the beats. The lever, the five, the one. The fat man on the bridge. The surgeon with five patients and one healthy visitor. She knew the faces the students made, the ones who said "obviously" and the ones who went quiet, and she knew that in week nine about a third of them would decide that morality was just feelings and stop doing the reading. The evening course was different. The evening course was adults with jobs, who'd paid, and who did the reading because they'd paid. That year it had fourteen people in it, and one of them was Frank Doyle, fifty-eight, a bricklayer with a back that had ended his career and a reading list he was working through in order. Frank came to office hours every Thursday. Nobody came to office hours. Helen had scheduled them for thirty-one years as a formality, and Frank turned up at four on the dot with a notebook. Mostly he asked about words. What Kant meant by a maxim. Whether Mill had ever actually met a poor person. Whether "virtue" was a thing you had or a thing you did. Good questions. Twenty-year-olds' questions, but asked by a man who wanted the answer for something. In November he came in and sat down and didn't open the notebook. "Trolley problem," he said. "Go on." "Pull the lever, five live, one dies. Don't, one lives, five die." "That's the shape of it." "Right. And everyone in the room says pull it, more or less." "Most people." "Then the fat man. Push him off the bridge, same sums, and nobody'll do it." "That's the interesting part. Same arithmetic, different answer. So what's the difference? Is it the touching? The using of a person as a means?" Frank looked at her for a while. "I've been on sites for forty years," he said. "I've seen a scaffold go. I've seen a lad go under a mixer. I've pulled people off things and I've not pulled people off things because I couldn't reach. I've never once, in forty years, stood there and done a sum."

"No. Nobody does. The problem's a thought experiment. It isolates the—" "I know what it does." He wasn't rude. He was patient, the way he'd have been patient with an apprentice. "What I'm asking is. If nobody does the sum. If in forty years it's never once been a sum. Then what's the sum for?" Helen had an answer. She had several. She'd given them to thirty-one years of students. The experiment isolates intuitions. It reveals the structure of our judgements. It's not meant to describe a real decision but to test the principles behind one. She didn't give them. "I don't know," she said. Frank nodded, like that was what he'd come for. "When the scaffold went," he said, "I was closest to Danny. Not the other two. Just where I was stood. I got Danny. I've never worked out if that was a decision." He opened the notebook, finally, and wrote something down, and she couldn't see what. "You'd have had me pulling a lever. I just had hands and I was where I was." They sat with that until five. It was the first Thursday in thirty-one years that office hours had run to time. She's retiring in the summer. She's been thinking about what to do with the trolley problem. She still teaches it. She just puts a bricklayer on the bridge now, and asks where he's standing.