I heard this moral thought-experiment delivered as part of a lecture given on Channel 4 recently by a Yale professor of Moral and Political philosophy. I post it here partly out of nostalgia, because it made me chuckle in remembrance of my undergraduate days when I studied philosophy and struggled with similar moral problems. When attempting to derive general moral principles from a consideration of such thought experiments it quickly becomes clear that we often default to an intuitionist viewpoint that treats morality as a form of perception. It is very difficult to argue someone away from a position that they intuit as morally correct, even when they are unable to rationally delineate their position in the face of contrary evidence or consequences that verge on the unacceptable. Anyway, the thought experiment is this: seven road traffic accident victims are brought into A&E. Six of them are moderately injured, but not in imminent danger, while the seventh is at death’s door and requires immediate medical attention. Due to restraints in manpower and material, if you triage the seventh as priority, by the time you have treated him or her the other six will have died. Because of their lesser injuries overall, with the same manpower and materials, the six could be successfully treated, but in the interim, the seventh will have died. Who do you treat? And why? If you treat the Seventh, the other six will die, and most people I suspect would feel uncomfortable with this consequence. However, would you be comfortable with effectively sacrificing the Seventh to treat the Six? How would you rationalise the choice? Utilitarians would be able to justify this position, on the basis that the consequences of an act are the measure of it’s moral rightness or wrongness. However, people who hold categorical positions, such as thou shall not kill, might find themselves prohibited from such a trade off insofar as they would be unable to get past the Seventh, or to defer treatment. Such deferment would constitute an act of omission. If you commit yourself to an act of omission on this occasion, does that make you a consequentialist, a utilitarian? Thou shall not kill, unless….it is to save 6 other people at a later date? Another interesting thought-experiment the Professor outlined was this one: a man is in hospital dying of multi-organ failure. He needs a new heart, a new liver, new kidneys, a spleen…In a room next door, a young RTA victim has just expired, and he is signed up to the organ donation scheme. A solution to this medical situation is clear. But now consider this twist: the RTA victim is not yet dead, but dying. Only, not quickly enough. There is no hope for survival, but if he doesn’t die quick, quicker, it will be too late to help the patient with multi-organ failure. What do you do? Very few people would do anything other than nothing. Categorical imperatives would prevent most from speeding up the RTA victim’s demise in order to assist the patient in need of the organs. But the result is, both die. From a consequentialist viewpoint, is this acceptable? It does appear to be the worse case scenario. Without wanting to argue for either position, because that is not the reason I started this post, I would like point out that there is a branch of categorical morality that that is in a sense Platonic: it asserts that an act, for example, is right or wrong according to an objective reality, a moral reality that you are either in accord with, or in contravention of. Moral laws exist in the way that the laws of physics exist for many scientists, or mathematical entities for many mathematicians: they are there to be discovered. Although this is a deeply traditional view, and one perhaps that most of us hold as a working attitude, it has been throughout the 20th Century unpopular amongst many schools of critical thought. Moral realism in the old school Platonic sense has given way to theories of emergent meaning which describe morality as evolving upwards from below, so to speak. In Marxist theory, for example, the prevailing morality of a society is dictated by underlying structures of an economic nature. And more recently, we have attempts to account for moral attitudes and beliefs from an evolutionary standpoint. This is part of a wider reversal of meaning from the old Logocentric view which held that meaning proceeds from a transcendent source, or is underwritten by a source out with the world, to the view that meaning is created from below and within the system or world we inhabit. The simplest example of this reversal is the contrast between the old ‘Adamic’ theory of language, so called because the belief is that a word, like Apple, has meaning because it encodes the essence of the object it refers to, and theories of language that view words as arbitrary signs whose meanings are dictated by convention. The word apple means what it does because we who use this word assign it to that object. We could, of courses, assign another, and this is what in fact other languages do. In the Bible, this ‘fallen’ view of language is expressed by the Tower of Babel story: a confusion of tongues disconnected from a transcendent source, each tongue now randomly assigning it’s own words to things. Where issues of morality and meaning become really interesting is in consideration of the implications thrown up by mathematics and the laws of physics. As I mentioned earlier, many, if not most, mathematicians and theoretical physicists, would regard themselves as functionally Platonic, in the sense that they experience a strong sensation of discovery in their breakthrough work. Discovery, in contrast to invention or fabrication. Whether or not this is a neurological feature, one part of the brain discovering the output of another part, maybe…nevertheless many mathematicians and physicists speak of perception when it comes to either seeing a solution to a problem, or uncovering a law. The ontological status of mathematics and the laws of physics is fascinating and rich in implication for theories of meaning and strong versions of theories of moral realism which hold that moral laws exist as objective entities which we perceive, sometimes as through a glass, darkly, when engaged in assessing whether an act or action is right or wrong. That the universe possesses structure and beauty, and that these features can be expressed mathematically and formulated as laws with great predictive power, is exceedingly strange. It is certainly a stumbling block to those who insist that reality is brute and simply ‘there’, and that all of our investigations of it and so-called knowledge are merely nets thrown over the top of an inherently meaningless void.