THIS summer, I’m doing some research on the doing/allowing problem—the philosophical debate over whether there’s a moral difference between directly causing harm to someone and allowing harm to come to that person—with one of my favorite philosophy professors. It’s been rewarding; I’m learning a lot about several deep issues in ethical theory, issues surrounding the rational authority of moral reasons, the relationship between reactive attitudes and the impersonal evaluative standpoint, and the commensurability of various sorts of practical reasons. Nonetheless, my work so far has put me in a position to make a rather uncomfortable observation: philosophers like to endanger fat men. Consider just a few examples from the ethical theory literature. 

In trying to make sense of the famous ticking time bomb scenario in which a terrorist has planted a bomb and refuses to reveal its whereabouts, David Sussman suggests the following analogy. A particularly sadistic fat man has wrestled his victim to the ground and, while no longer fighting (just as the terrorist is no longer planting the bomb), the fat man is sitting on him and waiting for him to suffocate (just as the terrorist waits for the bomb to go off). Sussman concludes that self-defense principles justify the police in physically harming the fat man.

In Judith Jarvis Thompson’s version of the famous trolley problem, we debate the permissibility of pushing a fat man onto the trolley tracks in order to stop the runaway car from killing five others.

In Judith Jarvis Thompson’s version of the famous trolley problem, we debate the permissibility of pushing a fat man onto the trolley tracks in order to stop the runaway car from killing five others. Thompson’s position is that we may not push the fat man—such an act would be killing, while watching the trolley pass is merely allowing deaths to come about, things that are, on her view, very different. But the question remains: why specify that the man is fat? Why not push, say, a man of unspecified weight with a powerful magnet in his pocket?

Others reject this distinction between doing and allowing, pointing to the impersonal value of the lives that could be saved. Many of these are consequentialists, those who judge the rightness of an action solely by the outcome it produces. There is also disagreement about whether the intention of the person pushing the fat man matters.  Is he doing it in order to save the five innocents or in order to kill the fat man? On accounts that do not give moral weight to intention, like Derek Parfit’s, one is doing the right thing even if one’s intention is fat man murder.

It’s not as if this is just an in-joke in the literature and all thought-experiment characters are going to be fat. Think of the five innocents ahead on the track that many are so concerned to save. If they all fit there—stuck in the trolley’s way together—it’s clear that they’ve all been dieting.

Clearly, the philosophical world is a dangerous one for the overweight. As a person who has a hard time motivating myself to go for a run, this pattern worries me. What if I’ve chosen the wrong field? I can see it now… I’ve just finished my thesis and am getting ready to defend it when a consequentialist pushes me in front of a trolley.