Fascism & Pushing the Fat Man

Most people know the classic trolley problem: a train is hurtling toward five people on the track. You have the option to pull a lever, diverting the train onto another track where there is one bystander. Do you pull the lever, sacrificing the one to save the five? From a utilitarian perspective—where the focus is on maximizing the greatest good or happiness—the answer is yes. One life lost is deemed preferable to five.

To make the hypothetical more visceral, you can make the action you take more direct, more personal, instead of the dispassionate pulling of a leaver. One can imagine a fat man standing on a bridge over the track. In the same way the train is hurtling towards five people, but if you push the fat man over the side of the bridge, it will cause the train to derail and this will give you the same result, one will die and five will live. It’s exactly the same outcome, the only difference is you’re not so much an anonymous bystander but you’re in the fray. In theory though if your answer was yes before it should be yes now.

Another alternative is instead of talking about trains and tracks, you can talk about sacrificing an innocent individual and harvesting their organs, in order to perform life saving surgery on five people who need those organs in order to live. Again, the outcome is exactly the same – one dies to save the five.

The alternative position is the virtue ethic position, which is the moral argument position: killing an innocent person is inherently wrong and therefore one should not pull the lever or push the fat man even if the outcome is preferable, because killing someone, especially killing someone who is innocent, is fundamentally wrong.

Personally, I lean uneasily in this virtue ethics direction. In practice though, I’m really not so sure, I’m torn in both directions. Perhaps if the stakes were more extreme, I would swallow my sense of moral correctness, and just pick the utilitarian option - what if it were one innocent person to save ten, or a hundred, or a thousand…

The classic killing-baby-Hitler thought experiment is very similar. You step through a time machine and you’re taken to Austria; you find yourself in a small town in the year 1890, and there in a crib is the little one-year baby Adolf, all cute and innocent looking. Should you kill him? Now by definition in this moment he (not taking into consideration original sin) is completely innocent, but the thought experiment assumes that history will unfold in exactly the same way without intervention, just as the previous thought experiments do not allow for the possibility of those people on the tracks at the last minute jumping out of the way, or the organ-less individuals somehow receiving what they need from somewhere else or alternative care.

No. If you do not kill little baby Adolf, history will unfold exactly how it did, including the Holocaust, and the military and civilian casualties of WW2. Conservatively we’re talking about at least 80 million deaths. Now maybe it makes me crazy, but given this equation I cannot see how you could possibly justify not committing baby murder.

That brings us to the exciting world of the 2024 political election cycle (hope you detected some British irony there). So, the charge goes that Trump is a fascist or that Trump is a Hitler. To quote JD Vance, his running mate, he said in 2016 … "I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler." Now in reality what people mean by this is very unclear. Does anyone literally think he is going to cause the kind of human suffering that Adolf Hitler caused? I find it highly improbable. Maybe there are some out there that think this, there are idiots out there.

To be clear. If you don’t know me, I am 100% supporting Harris in the election, despite being unable to vote, not being an American citizen. I personally believe that Harris is the strongest candidate on literally every substantive issue. Now, if you were to ask me if I think that I personally, or my family personally, would be better off under Trump or Harris, I am very unsure about that. Perhaps we would be better off under Trump. But I believe that one should vote for who would be better for America at large, not yourself.

I think it is important to highlight this, because I, as a middle-class person, and especially, one might make the case, as a white male middle class individual, am greatly insulated from the negative effects of a possible Trump presidency. I would probably even fair well in the most dystopian, fascistic, Hitlerian America one might imagine, maybe.

So, there is something about this insulatedness of middle-class America that is motivating me to write this. There is a lot of talk amongst liberal Americans about how fascistic and Hitlerian Trump is; I’m torn as to how true this may be. I think Jan 6 was insane but there are always the checks and balances… But if you think it is true, then there is by definition an existential threat in this country, and as such, at the very least, entertaining a more extreme stance does not seem to me to be out of place - that is unless you don’t “really” think there is a fascistic or Hitlerian threat, or if you take a principled pacifist position. A lot of politics is just theatre after all.

I suspect what is really at play, more than most would like to admit, is this insular middle-class existence factor. For most white middle class “Americans” a second Trump presidency won’t change all that much. There will just need to be a bit more theatre, we’ll wear our complaints on our sleeves, but really why make the fuss.