Turning The Trolley Thomson Analysis

Judith Jarvis Thomson wrote the article Turning the Trolley in order to refute Philippa Foot’s principle about killing and letting die. In Foot’s point of view, there are two duties, one of which is negative duty of noninterference, and the other duty is positive duty of goods and services. According to Foot, when there is a conflict between two duties, the negative duty of noninterference can overrule the positive duty of goods and services. In her example, letting five people die is permissible if the only alternative choice is killing one innocent person. However, when you have to either kill five people or kill one person, you should choose to kill one person. Thomson has a different view, she at first argues against Foot’s principle, but after she discussed with her PhD student, she changed her mind and went on support Foot’s principle. In this essay, I will present how Thomson uses Bystander Two Options and the Fat Man analogy to prove her point against Foot, and how she uses the Bystander Three Options to prove Foot is correct. Thomson at first argues against Foot’s principle. …show more content…
She claimed that the trolley problem is a non-problem. Through proposing another example, the bystander three options example, Thomson argues that if to save five, A needs to kill one, he could kill himself instead of killing B. However, it seems overly demanding to kill A himself in order to save the five, neither should A kill B because he could kill himself. Thus, Thomson’s another principle is that A must not kill B to avoid killing five if he can instead kill himself to avoid killing the five. This principle is different from the principle derived from bystander two options, because they are contradictory. According to Thomson, the bystander three options principle is correct, because letting the five die is better than killing the innocent person. Therefore, Thomson turns to support Foot’s