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Fanny Farfan Aguilar
PHIL 100
Royce, Grubric
“The case of the Runaway Trolley”
Aristotle
For Aristotle, a thing was happy when it fulfilled its purpose according to its own nature
“happiness is the state of actualizing or realizing a thing’s function, its entelechy”. According to
this philosopher a good life will provide the vital conditions and chances for a person to become
fully himself or herself and in which the person has the ability to do so. For Aristotle the ethical
concept comes from the experience and education, which means that our habits, values and
virtuous are shape since childhood and if we have acquired a habit it becomes our natural way to
be. He says that “ethical virtue is a state of being virtuous rooted in the human subject by long
experience” (Douglas p.172), however he also recognizes that virtue is in the middle of
deficiency and excess and it is not the only element in happiness. Aristotle’s ethic and virtue are
teleological which means that they have an end, purpose or goal. His position in the case of the
Runaway Trolley would be as a formal relativism in which the moral considerations will involve
practical judgments of that particular circumstance. Aristotle would definitely want to save
everyone’s life, and the general conduct would lead him to try the best for every individual so
they can fulfill their entelechy but the truth is that nobody can make a precise prescription on
anyone’s life. A reasonable person does not avoid life, and I believe Aristotle would apply his
concept of moderation by analyzing the situation between doing too much or not doing enough.
He says that “some actions are excessive by their very nature; they can have no mean” therefore
thinking about killing passes his concept of moderation which becomes excessive and has no
mean. So what can be seen as an act of valor or being the hero by saving the five people on
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board, according to Aristotle is an example of excess and deficiency being mistaken as an act of
courage when actually is murder, and this action cannot fit in the moderation status because its
very nature is imbalanced.
Immanuel Kant
Kant bases his philosophical “Metaphysics of Morals” in two different perspectives. The
phenomenal and the noumenal world, in which he asserts is possible to be determined or unfree,
and free. We have a phenomenal self that follows the laws of nature and a noumenal self that is
free, however the noumenal world is empirically and we cannot experience our freedom. Kant
distinguishes two types theories about reason: The theorical reason ruled by causes and effects
and the practical reason that begins with knowledge about moral conduct that provides a sense of
free will. Kant refers to his term “practical reason” as way to explain that we do not act on
