Philippa Foot was actually addressing this exact point in her original paper—it has to do with the doctrine of double effect, a philosophical idea that goes all the way back to Saint Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. Basically, it means that an outcome can be more or less morally permissible depending on whether you actually intended it to happen when you acted—like, when we kill someone in self-defense, we intended only to save our own innocent life, and the result was that someone else died. If we pull the lever intending to deliberately smoosh a guy… not so great. But if the guy got
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