Monday, October 11, 2010

Trollyology

I was almost wholly uneducated when I arrived at Oxford. I found Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason & Keynes’s General Theory of Employment to be very hard. However my tutors seemed to regard me as somebody they could teach.

That comes from the obituary of Philippa Foot, Grover Cleveland’s English granddaughter, friend of Iris Murdoch & a distinguished moral philosopher who died last week on her ninetieth birthday. How we would all wish to find tutors like that for ourselves or our children.

I am ashamed to say that it took a contributor to Radio 4’s Last Word programme to tell me that it was Professor Foot who first formulated the ethical dilemma about the five railway workers & the runaway train – except that she called it a trolley. This has inspired a rich seam for study & research, affectionately known as trollyology.

Given that one of the biggest complaints about the NHS used to be about the time that patients spent on trolleys, that makes a splendid name for something which should be incorporated into every statement about 'saving lives' made by medical practitioners, especially in the field of public health, especially in the field of cancer screening.

The prime minister recently announced a new bowel cancer screening programme which, we are told, could save 3,000 lives. We are not told anything about the possible risks or other costs to patients, we are just meant to have faith in the experts judgement that a little discomfort or inconvenience & anxiety to many, even a little ‘overtreatment’ (as with DCIS & breast cancer), is just what any reasonable person would consider to be the right moral choice.




Posted by at