On the modern battlefield, where civilians and combatants are often indistinguishable, and virtual warfare is increasingly common, soldiers are routinely required to grapple with life-changing (and potentially life-saving) moral dilemmas in a split second.

Prospect magazine reports that in an effort to establish a consistent code among U.S. troops caught in these ethical crosshairs, West Point is requiring that all of its officers-in-training take a course on “just war” theory, which includes a series of classic, academic conundrums rooted in the writings of philosopher and theologian, Thomas Aquinas.

The first scenario, which will be familiar to most college kids, is called Spur: A runaway train is hurtling towards five unsuspecting people. If you simply flip a switch you can send the train into a spur (a stretch railroad track reserved for loading and unloading) and save their lives. But one man is chained to the spur and will be killed. What would you do?

While you’re mulling that over, consider Fat Man: The same train (or trolley) is about to kill five people. You’re standing on a bridge over the tracks next to an overweight fellow. If you push him off the bridge his bulk would stop the train and save the endangered. The action will, however, kill the “fat man.”  Do you shove or don’t you?

According to Prospect writer David Edmonds, “study after study” has established that about 90 percent of people faced with these hypothetical questions could live with switching the train onto a spur, and roughly the same percentage believes it’s wrong to sacrifice the heavy guy.

“What, then, is the relevant ethical distinction between them?” Edmonds asks. “This question has spawned a thriving academic mini-industry, called trolleyology.” And “trolleyology encapsulates the deepest tensions in our moral outlook. To test out our moral intuitions, philosophers have come up with ever more ingenious scenarios,” which attract “some of the smartest minds in moral philosophy.”

One of those wise guys is Jeff McMahan of Rutgers University, who “believes the trolley problem lends weight” to a doctrine of double effect, first established by Aquinas. “Crudely put,” Edmonds writes, “the doctrine allows you to perform and act that has some bad consequences, if on balance the act is good, and if the bad effects are unintended.”

This would explain why the cadets Edmond spoke to while reporting for Prospect were uniformly fascinated by trolleyology and would not kill the fat man. “They explained that the two scenarios represent the distinction between targeting a military installation knowing that civilians will be killed, and deliberately killing civilians. It’s the difference, they say, between how the U.S. and how al Qaeda wage war.”

Officers at West Point acknowledge that creating a class of philosopher-soldiers equipped to think freely carries risks in a field that regularly demands groupthink. And there’s more than a few philosophers who believe the world is too complex to use trolleyology as a way to train armed men and women to deal with the real world.

On the other hand, as more and more wartime decisions are made in front of a computer screen, where officers tell drones and robots who to shoot and who not to bomb, scenarios once considered entirely hypothetical might begin to more closely resemble the real thing.

Image by West Point Public Affairs , licensed under Creative Commons .

You don’t have to spend much time digging around in the Utne Reader’s library to learn that alchemy of one sort or another remains an enduring obsession of both science and society. The magazines and newspapers of our time are full of stories that are essentially about people trying to turn one thing (usually worthless) into something else (usually something of value). On one end of the spectrum you have the alchemy of celebrity as exemplified by Lady Gaga, and on the other there are the alchemists of the Green movement, who are trying to save the earth. You could, I suppose, disagree about where the most interesting alchemy is taking place, but you’d have to be living in a pretty shallow pool to think that anything Ms. Gaga is up to is of greater relevance than—just for instance—the work of Gerardine Botte. And as fascinating as I may find the antics of the former, I’m even prepared to argue that Botte’s got Gaga beat in the interesting department.

A professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Ohio University, Botte has, according to Conservation Magazine, somehow figured out how to turn urine into hydrogen fuel. It turns out that urine contains two compounds—ammonia and urea—that are necessary for the production of hydrogen.

I’ll be honest and admit that I don’t have any idea how the hell this business might work (and, yes, I did read the article), but it sounds legitimate and potentially inspiring. And should you wish to write off Botte as a crackpot, understand that she’s apparently not alone in embracing urine’s energy potential; Conservation’s Sarah DeWeerdt reports that there’s also a company in the U.K. that is already at work on a fuel cell “powered directly by urine.”

Botte, though, might already be one step ahead of the Brits. She is the chief technology officer for a recently-launched company, E3 Technologies, that aims to commercialize what they call “pee power.” E3 hopes to have a “GreenBox” prototype on the market by the end of 2011.

Source: Conservation   

Panel image by Stephen Edmonds, licensed under Creative Commons.