Alan Saunders: Hello, this is The Philosopher's Zone with me, Alan Saunders.

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Alan Saunders: Well, firefighting, the courage of firefighters and to cooler spirits, the ethics of firefighters, has been much on all our minds lately. And after the recent death of a Canberra-based firefighter who was in Victoria helping out his colleagues there, we look at the ethical dilemmas faced by those whose job it is not only to fight fires but also to rescue residents and to stay alive themselves.

Shortly we'll meet a philosopher who's been thinking about these issues, but first, let's talk to somebody in the hot seat.

Keith Adamson has spent the past 36 years in the fire service, on the ground and behind the scenes. He's Deputy Chief Fire Officer for the Metropolitan Fire Board in Victoria, and he joins us now on the program during what is no doubt an extremely busy period. Thanks, Keith.

Keith Adamson: It has been a busy period, but thank you for having me.

Alan Saunders: Now you've got quite a history in the Fire Service, haven't you?

Keith Adamson: Yes, my father was a firefighter for over 36 years, and my older brother as well, and now my younger brother is, but we used to live in fire stations when I was younger, and my mother tells me I was conceived in a fire station.

Alan Saunders: OK, so you speak with a long-standing authority on these subjects. Now what sort of ethical considerations would firefighters have been confronting over the past week or so, thanks to the fires in Victoria?

Keith Adamson: Well the first thing that springs to mind probably is the level of risk to which you put yourself in order to save other people. I mean there's no point if an emergency worker of any sort goes to rescue a victim and finds themselves another victim. And our attitude is that a dead firefighter never saved anybody, and so you've got to weigh up that possibility of death or injury to the rescuer, in order to rescue someone who may be in a difficult situation anyway.

Alan Saunders: What about people who don't want to be saved? What about residents who want to stay because they think they can protect their houses better by staying with them? Now fires in Victoria are said to have moved very quickly. If a firefighter knows that somebody's in serious danger of death if they stay in their house, they haven't got the power to compel or force them to evacuate, have they?

Keith Adamson: No, and it will be very interesting to see what comes out of the Royal Commission regarding that. At the moment, anyone with a pecuniary interest can't be removed against their will, so even if they're choosing to stay to try and save their house, or whatever, or their belongings, you can't forcibly remove them. And another example of course is when someone has attempted suicide. You have to put that aside and say your job is to save the life.

Alan Saunders: So you sound as though you think perhaps you should be able to compel people to evacuate in certain circumstances?

Keith Adamson: Well certainly I think a lot of people's judgment would be extremely impaired in some situations, and the classic case for example, would be a parent trying to go back into a burning house to save their child. Do you try and restrain a person from doing it and then try and do it yourself, or if it's too dangerous for anyone, what do you do?

Alan Saunders: You mentioned people staying in a property because they have, as you put it, a pecuniary interest in the property; I presume they also might have a sentimental attachment to the property as well. Firefighters of course do also care for property, for the environment and other valuable items not directly related to the wellbeing of individuals, don't they? Does this become a tricky ethical juggling act as well?

Keith Adamson: Well the charter, or the mission of most fire services in Australia now, includes the protection of life, property and the environment in the event of fires or other emergencies. At the moment the fire services nationally are sort of I guess, fighting the battle against the interests of people who want to make buildings cheaper to build and easier to build, because the current Building Code only contemplates 'life, safety and amenity'. So the theory is that as long as people can get out of the building safely, after a fire starts, and the fire's not going to spread to adjoining properties, then it doesn't matter if the building burns down. But our charter of course is to save the property and to save the environment, and buildings which burn completely out have obvious implications for unemployment, the economy, the environment, and so forth, so it is again, we see ourselves as being the good guys if you like, because I don't think that debate has been had publicly whether buildings should be allowed to be virtually disposable.

Alan Saunders: Over the past few weeks, firefighters have been working round the clock and obviously often having to make snap decisions in stressful situations. Can you ensure that they have a well thought through ethical framework? I mean is it something that firefighters talk about during down time from actually fighting fires?

Keith Adamson: I'm sure firefighters talk about it all the time, both immediately after an incident, and in downtime, without knowing it. It all comes down to having enough training to give you the judgment to be able to do that risk assessment so that you're not putting people at risk unnecessarily, or too much so that they haven't got a chance.

Alan Saunders: Let's look at triage when making quick decisions about who to save first or which group of people to save first. How do you consider just how you can get the most people out safely? What sort of considerations do you have to make? I mean, children versus adults; heavy people who might be difficult to save versus light people who might be easier, so you could say two light people instead of one heavy person? Presumably these are all decisions that you have to make.

Keith Adamson: Certainly. And even decisions that you're not qualified to make, like Who is more likely to survive than someone else? And so I think under extreme pressure and extreme circumstances, no matter how much training you've had, how much experience you've had, you're going to make decisions I think based on your own internal value, and people would probably I think rescue children obviously first, and make sure they were safe before rescuing an adult. And these are the sort of things that you don't even have time to think about usually, it's just get in, act in your best possible judgment according to everything you know, rather than contemplate it too long, because by the time you've made up a mind, whether it be male or female, or old or young or whatever, it's going to be too late.

Alan Saunders: Well it's obviously children first, but is it women and children first these days, or are women equal to men when it comes to being saved?

Keith Adamson: That's a good question. It would probably depend on the individual. I still think that most firefighters and don't forget we have plenty of female firefighters these days, most firefighters, the males ones, probably in my guess would tend to save women first, but that's really hard to tell these days.

Alan Saunders: Do you think you're a different person when you've got your firefighter's hat on, compared to the rest of the time? When you put the hat on, do you fell as well as the weight of the hat, do you feel the weight of responsibility?

Keith Adamson: One of the most trusted professions in all of the surveys you see done, right up there alongside paramedics, is the firefighter profession. And I believe there is a very strong onus on us to honour that trust. So therefore the public expects that firefighters will do the right thing all the time. We have to deal with people when they are at their lowest ebb. Now the worst moment in their life might be your house fire, it might be a very small house fire to a firefighter, but the worst thing that happened to that family. But it also extends to whether you take sick leave when you're not sick, and whether you do the right thing in I guess doing the right thing with the money that the community gives you to run the Fire Service, so that you're not wasteful, and that you're giving the best possible value. And I think the community expects that, and that we should honour that trust.

Alan Saunders: Well let's hope the worst is past. Thanks very much for joining us today, Keith Adamson, Deputy Chief Fire Officer at the Metropolitan Fire Board in Victoria.

Keith Adamson: My pleasure.

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Alan Saunders: Not a lot of academic work has been done on firefighting ethics. And that's partly because it has been seen as similar to medical ethics, particularly emergency medicine ethics. Now medical ethicists have identified four principles that should govern practitioners. They are justice, respect for autonomy, non-maleficence (that's not doing bad) and beneficence, that's doing good of course.

Well to look at some of these and how they might apply to firefighters, we're joined now by Per Sandin. He works at the Department of Philosophy and the History of Technology at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and right now he's a visiting Fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics in Canberra. Per, welcome to The Philosopher's Zone.

Per Sandin: Thank you.

Alan Saunders: Per, you've arrived in Australia from your home in Sweden, just in time for one of this country's greatest-ever bushfire disasters, with the greatest-ever loss of life and property from bushfires. Given that you've been thinking about the ethics of firefighting, have events in Australia shaped or altered your thinking?

Per Sandin: Well I don't think it's really changed my thinking about firefighting in terms of my ideas about it. However, I thought I would think mostly about everyday problems of firefighting, structural firefighting, in houses and buildings, but presumably I will have to think more about questions of disaster firefighting, sadly enough.

Alan Saunders: Now situations very much like those that firefighters and other members of fire and rescue services face, are actually quite familiar, are stock examples in moral philosophy. I suppose perhaps the most famous one derives from the English philosopher and anarchist thinker, William Godwin. At the end of the 18th century he argued that 'though I and my neighbour are both of us people and of consequence entitled to equal attention'. In reality, he says, Archbishop Fenelong, who's a philosophical writer of the period, was of more worth than his valet, and if his palace were to be in flames and the life of only one of them could be preserved, you should go for the Archbishop. In fact in an earlier version of the story, it's not the valet, it's your own mother. And to prefer anybody else to the archbishop would in fact have been a breach of justice. That indicates a pretty cool approach to things, but it does go straight to the heart of an important issue, doesn't it?

Per Sandin: Yes indeed. What Godwin is advocating in that passage is actually a criterion for giving priority to people of social worth. And that has been tried in medical ethics as well. There was in the '60s in Seattle, for instance, where the first artificial kidneys were operative and they were of course more patients than there were artificial kidneys, and in the beginning they actually allocated kidneys on the basis of social worth. That means that you had a greater chance of receiving treatment if you were a churchgoer or a family father, or something like that. But that is considered very appropriate later on.

Alan Saunders: Well the very presence in the literature of this sort of example, is a reason, isn't it, to study the real thing, to study some real life cases.

Per Sandin: I think so. There are hosts of philosophers who have been using rescue situations, not only fires, but all sorts of rescue situations as examples, in order to elicit moral intuitions, and those intuitions are supposed to tell something about moral theory. We have one famous example as Peter Singer's example in his paper on "Famine, Affluence and Morality," from 1972 I think where he uses the example of rescuing a child from a pond, and everyone is supposed to agree that you have a duty to do that even though to some cost to yourself, such as ruining your shoes, or your suit or something like that. While many people don't have an intuition that you have to donate the equivalent sum of money as your suit would cost to saving someone on the other side of the earth, say a starving child in Africa. Other philosophers, Derek Parfitt and Frances Kamm, they have also used rescue situations in their thought experiments. But comparatively little has been done on actual rescue situations, apart from certain parts of medical ethics I think.

Alan Saunders: And there isn't an academic field of firefighting ethics, is there?

Per Sandin: No, there isn't. And the reason I believe is that - or one of the reasons is that firefighting is a significantly less professionalised activity than medicine is. Firefighters, or at least until recently, have not received extensive formal training, and among firefighters the tradition has usually been that physical fitness has been of top priority, and compared with doctors and also nurses, they have comparatively short training and so on. So I think the lack of a professional tradition is one of the reasons why this has not been discussed so much in the academic literature.

Alan Saunders: Well there are a couple of other differences which we should probably address. One is that firefighters don't care just for people, they care also for property, the environment, and other valuable items that are not directly related to the wellbeing of individuals.

Per Sandin: Yes, and firefighters also have to make decisions whether they should risk their own lives in order to save some piece of salvageable property, and obviously even though Safety First for your own personnel is a pretty well established norm in firefighting, you cannot put out a fire in a building without any risk to yourself. So there are weighing issues involved that are not present in medicine. In medicine you are supposed to care for life and limb of people and nothing else really.

Alan Saunders: Well yes, only obviously there is an important ethical difference arising here from the fact that firefighters face a risk of death or injury and probably the first issue here is the weighing of the firefighters' risks to themselves against risks to others. Firefighters expose themselves to great risks in order to improve the chances of saving others, don't they?

Per Sandin: Yes they do. Obviously medical personnel also expose themselves to risks. There are several cases of violence from patients, especially in psychiatry. And also the risk of course of contamination from syringes and contagious diseases. But there seems to be in my opinion, a qualitative difference. It's that firefighters have to relate to the fact that they might killed immediately, which is I believe something different than most doctors do in their ordinary course of work.

Alan Saunders: Let's look at respect for autonomy. Now in medical ethics, this is about such matters as the patient's freedom to refuse treatment; the right to informed consent, physicians' obligations to disclose information, the patient's right to privacy, and so on. It's not obvious that these have much connection with firefighting.

Per Sandin: Perhaps the reason bushfires in Australia might produce a different light on this, because some people actually want to stay in their houses or at their property, despite given the opportunity of being evacuated, and that raises the question which I hadn't pondered before, whether people could be forcibly evacuated, or whether they should be, and that's a very difficult problem I think. So I think in some situations the question of autonomy is raised more than in most standard firefighting situations, and I think that could occur in disasters where massive evacuation is called for.

Alan Saunders: Now let's come on to another of these principles, these four principles: non-maleficence. It's the obligation not to inflict harm on others. This seems rather clearly relevant for firefighting ethics, doesn't it?

Per Sandin: Yes, certainly, because much of what firefighters do is pretty dangerous. They drive heavy vehicles through traffic and thereby expose other people to risks, and many of the intervention firefighters do, using hydraulic cutters or so, can be very dangerous.

Alan Saunders: Though I suppose the question here is, whether the firefighter's duty of beneficence derives from a duty which we all might have, to rescue somebody. Is the firefighter rescuing a child from a burning building, in the same sort of position as the passer-by who happens to find herself or himself in a position to do the same sort of thing?

Per Sandin: In a sense, yes of course, but there are also significant differences between those cases. For instance, firefighters who are in their line of work, usually are quite well aware of what risks they are facing and how to manage them, and they are more in the situation of risk than one of uncertainty, to use the language of decision theory. Risk is something where you are aware of, or at least roughly aware of the probabilities of what the harms are. While you as a passer-by, I mean if I pass a house where there are flames coming out of the window and I see someone there, I don't really know what would happen to the house. Will it overturn in flames in just a few seconds, or do you have some time to rescue the person? So that's a significant difference I think.

Alan Saunders: We've talked a little about triage, the prioritising of those who need to be helped, based on the severity of their situation. Can we define what constitutes a just triage?

Per Sandin: There are different views of that, two extremes really. One is utilitarian triage, basically, save the greatest number, save as many lives as possible. And the other alternative, the other extreme is utilitarian triage, and according to that idea, everyone should be given equal chances to be saved, even if that means saving a smaller number of lives that it would possible to save. The following example has been discussed:

Suppose that we are the crew of a rescue ship, and we hear on our wireless that there are two ships sinking in our vicinity and we can only save the passengers of one ship. And on one ship we know that there are ten people, and on the other ship we know that there are a thousand people. What ship should be saved? Well, according to the utilitarian triage principle, obviously we should aim for the ship with a thousand people on board, in order to save the greatest number, to save as many lives as possible. But you could also argue that we should flip a coin between those two ships, because if we go for the ship where there are thousand people, we would obviously give the people on the ship with ten people, no chance at all, and that would be unfair, some people argue. So one possible position would be that we should flip a coin between those two ships, in order to give everyone an equal chance of being saved.

Alan Saunders: It's not clear though that the, as it were, putting the moral onus on a coin, really gets you off the hook, does it?

Per Sandin: No, you could also imagine mixed versions of the solution of course, that we should give the people on the ship with ten people, some chance of being saved. Personally I would opt for saving the greatest number, but that is because of my general consequentialist outlook I think.

Alan Saunders: Per Sandin, thank you very much for joining us.

Per Sandin: Thank you.

Alan Saunders: Per Sandin, Research Fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics. Per's from the Department of Philosophy and the History of Technology at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

That's it for the show today. It's produced by Kyla Slaven. Charlie McCune is our sound engineer, and I'm Alan Saunders. Hope you can join me again next week.