Pushing the Fat Man

A defence of Nicholas Decker

I.

Let me sketch a familiar story. A trolley is barrelling down a track towards five trapped folks and someone (either the driver or a bystander with a lever) has the ability to shift it onto another track with just one stuck fellow. Some think the right heuristic is to count which track has fewer people on it and shift onto that one, others think it’s not that simple.

Those who think that’s not a simple choice find the footbridge version of the problem even harder. Here a fat man is standing on a bridge, looking out over the tracks as the bystander walks by. It immediately becomes clear that the trolley, which is racing towards the five, can only be stopped by shoving the man down in front of it.

This seems so personal and so violent that often even the counters find themselves sheepishly backing down from prescribing it as the right course of action.

Still, as the five becomes twenty, then a hundred, and then a thousand, some inevitably warm to the shove. The act becomes no less personal, but its consequence changes. Most admit there is some room for the consequences to matter here.

But say you don’t think altering the number of people on the other track matters, no matter how large that number gets—there are some things you just can’t do to innocent, non-threatening individuals. Can we alter the character of the fat man in a way that convinces you there is a need to shove him?

What if the fat man is also the driver? He has chosen to drive toward the group instead of stopping his trolley. To keep him up on the bridge with you in this scenario, suppose he is a remote driver, standing there with the controls. Is shoving him now required?

No, not yet. You can attempt to persuade him to stop the trolley and indeed this ought to be the first step. Attempting this, you quickly realize that he hates the group lying on the tracks.

The trolley itself is a somewhat indecipherable machine, but you have a sense that it could be overridden by the passengers onboard. As the minutes tick by though, you realize that none of them are taking the initiative. Not one of the fat man’s passengers seems comfortable wresting away control in order to save the group. Part of you wonders if they also hate the trapped folks.

Still, perhaps the controls can be gotten out of the fat man’s hands… and he’s gone and chucked them away, shattered into a thousand pieces. Onward, onward the trolley chugs.

You really do not want to shove. You would hate to live in a society where people act as vigilante shovers, shoving whoever they think must be shoved to protect the innocent. But it almost feels as though the fat man is goading you into shoving, testing just how far he can go before you’ll do something to stop him.

Squinting, you try to see if you recognize anyone you care about lying on the tracks. From nearest to farthest, you spy the rule of law, the Federal Reserve, the Supreme Court, the international order, and the global poor.

Unfortunately, you realize, the stakes are such that walking away would be inappropriate. Having tried everything except the shove, you are faced with the matter of which you value more, a (important) norm, or the basic structure in which you and your parents have, to this point, thrived.

II.

Nicholas Decker is an impressive economics grad student (and accomplished Substacker) at George Mason University who received a slurry of hatred from MAGA footsoldiers for expressing the thought that we are getting quite close to being in the aforementioned bystander’s position. He writes:

Evil has come to America… It has deprived us, in many cases, of trial by jury; it has subjected us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and has transported us beyond seas to be imprisoned for pretended offenses.

This all seems true. You shouldn’t deport individuals while a court hearing is in progress to enjoin those very deportations! Due process (in peacetime especially) seems an important principle.

As he notes on X, that the point of irrevocable damage “has not come does not mean that it can never come. I think we should think seriously about what that means, and prepare accordingly.”

And when is that time? Your threshold may differ from mine, but you must have one. If the present administration should cancel elections; if it should engage in fraud in the electoral process; if it should suppress the speech of its opponents, and jail its political adversaries; if it ignores the will of Congress; if it should directly spurn the orders of the court; all these are reasons for revolution.

Lots of reasonable people think we are in a constitutional crisis. Checks and balances are in danger. It is perfectly within the realm of acceptable discourse to ponder what might be justified if that goes the wrong way. Everyone should reflect on how bad things would have to get for them to protest, and then how much worse than that things would have to get to justify stronger action. These are important questions if you care about western values.

Glenn, another accomplished Substacker, puts this well:

Attempting to determine when it is appropriate to engage in political violence is, of course, a legitimate, legally protected — in fact, quintessentially American — and worthwhile endeavor. The United States was founded on the principle that if a government becomes tyrannical, “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it,” including through revolutionary violence.

III.

Anyways, the Secret Service visited Decker over this and his university publicly condemned what he wrote!

Obviously it would be permissible for Russians to take it into their own hands to eliminate Putin; for Chinese to eliminate Xi; for North Koreans to eliminate Kim Jong Un; and for Saudis to eliminate MBS.

Following the trolley logic, I believe it’s only reasonable to extend that to figures like Erdoğan in Turkey and Orbán in Hungary. They crossed a threshold whose precise borders are fuzzy but not entirely ill-defined. Those same borders can be crossed in any liberal democracy by bad enough actors, and it is a noble thing to try to make their exact shape clearer, as Decker has done.

Berated by the censorious MAGA crowd, he added a prescript earlier today which reads:

I wish to make a few points clear. Violence is a last resort, not a first resort. It must come after the exhaustion of all possible remedy. It is not, moreover, appropriate for decisions which are merely unwise or disastrous. It is to be employed only in defense of our Constitution, and of democracy. If it is resorted to, it must be narrowly targeted, and aimed only at extirpating those who have power, and are unjustly resisting giving it up.

Liberals repeatedly warned that Trump intended to act more deranged than at any point in his first term if he won again. They have been proven right. Some of those deranged acts, like the tariffs, have merely been unwise and disastrous. But in some respects, the derangement inches closer, day-by-day, to the fuzzy border. Hopefully it stops and turns around! But if it doesn’t, we want to know where the border is, and what is warranted if it’s crossed.

I hope more market liberals have the bravery to speak their mind openly on these matters. These are exceptional times.