## Metadata - Author: [[David Edmonds]] - Full Title: Would You Kill the Fat Man? - Category: #books ## Highlights - Most of Anscombe’s complications need not concern us, but she was the first to point out that an action can be intentional under one description yet not under another. The action of the person who sends the fat man hurtling off the bridge can be intentional under the description “pushing the fat man,” but not under the description “stretching his triceps.” Of course, the pusher of the fat man does stretch his triceps, but it would sound peculiar to say that he intended to do so. ([Location 981](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00F8MIJ0I&location=981)) - A contemporary review of Bentham’s book, Rationale of Judicial Evidence, complained that “Even the cabinets of diplomacy can scarcely ever have witnessed so successful an employment of words for the concealment of thoughts, as is here exhibited.” ([Location 1115](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00F8MIJ0I&location=1115)) - A utilitarian trolleyologist is an oxymoron. The raison d’être of this philosophical sub-genre, trolleyology, is to identify differences between cases in which either one or five people die. But the utilitarian rejects the notion that there are intrinsic differences in these cases: the utilitarian doesn’t take seriously the difference between intending and foreseeing, acting or omitting, doing or allowing, between negative and positive duties. ([Location 1231](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00F8MIJ0I&location=1231)) - What is the philosophical value of appealing to such polls and surveys? None: it’s a worthless exercise, say some, including the eminent Cambridge philosopher Hugh Mellor. “If this is philosophy then questionnaires asking people whether they think circles can be squares, is maths—which it isn’t.” ([Location 1375](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00F8MIJ0I&location=1375)) - We are in a position of reflective equilibrium, said Rawls, when our set of beliefs about principles and our beliefs about individual cases have achieved a sort of coherence. ([Location 1417](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00F8MIJ0I&location=1417)) - As Anthony Appiah puts it: “Would you rather have people be helpful or not? It turns out that having little nice things happen to them is a much better way of making them helpful than spending a huge amount of energy on improving their characters.”5 ([Location 1834](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00F8MIJ0I&location=1834))