TO KILL OR SEE KILLED

Anthony James Kiss saw what he thought was a woman in danger and ran down the suspected attacker with his car. She says he did the right thing. Moral psychology — and the criminal justice system — are struggling to decide if they agree. If it is in our po

Would you take a life to save a life? Don’t think, please. Act. Would you take a life to save a life? You need to choose — now. You approach the intersection at approximately 4 a. m. You’ve been to a show. You’ve had a few drinks. You’re driving home.

What if you weren’t sure? What if you couldn’t know?

Red light. You scan the quiet street. There’s a bus shelter up ahead. Outside, a woman looks at her phone. A man looms nearby.

If you act, you might kill someone. If you don’t, you might let someone die. But you can’t know, you won’t know, until after you act.

In an instant, he attacks. He knocks her to the ground. He kicks her. She gets up. Is that a knife? She’s screaming now. She’s running into the road.

What you do next will change your life. It will change several lives. In an instant, you have to decide.

On June 7, 2017, Anthony James Kiss made his choice. He accelerated into a west Toronto i ntersection and struck and killed Dario Romero as he ran across Eglinton Avenue. Police eventually charged Kiss with manslaughter and i mpaired driving causing death for his decision. his legal case continues to drag on; a lawyer appeared in court on his behalf last week.

But as much as this a matter of law, the story of Kiss and Romero is also a profoundly philosophical one. “In some ways, this case touches on literally everything I’ ve ever studied,” says Fiery Cushman, an assistant professor of moral psychology at Harvard University.

It touches on core questions of what it means to be good, on how, and how quickly, we can make moral choices and on what it means to choose between competing wrongs.

It’s important to note that the full story of what happened that morning has never been tested in court. Kiss told his side in an interview with the Toronto Star last summer. He told the paper he saw Romero attack a woman at a bus stop and then chase her, wielding a knife, into the street. He hit the gas and hit Romero, he said, because he thought the woman’s life was in danger. He didn’t feel like he had any other choice.

The woman herself, a housekeeper named Alicia Aquino, backed up that story in a separate interview. She confirmed that Romero, a total stranger, attacked her without warning and tried to stab her. She called Kiss her “angel” and believes he saved her life.

Romero’s family, meanwhile, has described him as a loving and generous father who had struggled with mental illness. They don’t believe he deserved to die.

Kiss admitted to the Star that he’d been drinking that night; he had several beers at a metal show. But he denied that he was truly impaired. He also fled the scene. Instead of stopping and waiting for the police, he drove away and was arrested on his way home to Wasaga Beach, north of the city.

At its root, Cushman believes, the question here is this: When is someone permitted to intervene — in a potentially lethal way — against someone apparently attempting harm against another? Most philosophers and ordinary people tend to agree that such action can be permitted, Cushman said. But the details matter.

“There’s at least two really tough things about this,” Cushman said. For one, “philosophers are really comfortable taking for granted complete knowledge and certainty about a situation.” But in real life, in Kiss’s case definitely, that knowledge isn’t there. Kiss thought Aquino was at risk. But there was no way he could know for sure before being forced to act.

That he turned out to be right, at least according to Aquino, means we now look at the situation one way. But what if he’d been wrong? “Imagine what an enormous difference it would make in this case if what had really been happening was a bunch of high school students had been filming a ‘make-it-yourself ’ horror movie and across the street hidden was someone with a camera,” Cushman said. Everything might have looked exactly the same to Kiss. He would have had the exact same amount of time to make his choice, but he almost certainly would have been judged for that choice, morally at least, in a completely different way.

Cushman calls t hat i dea ‘ moral luck’ — the question of whether things outside of your control, things that are due to chance, should make a difference in how you’re morally evaluated. The most famous example of that phenomenon in the psychological literature can be thought of as the parable of the two drinkers. In that case, two friends go out. They both get drunk. They both drive home. They both fall asleep at the wheel. One friend drives his car into a bush and hurts no one. The other veers onto a lawn and kills a child.

Only luck separates those two outcomes. But they are viewed, by the law and by society, as dramatically different after the fact. “In Massachusetts, you’d be getting a ticket and maybe a point off your licence. I’d be getting two and a half to 15 years in prison,” Cushman said.

The principle applies, from the opposite angle, in Kiss’s case. Last Tuesday, the Crown dropped the most serious charges against him, including manslaughter. A prosecutor told the court he had no reasonable chance of obtaining a conviction on those counts. But if Kiss had been wrong, if he’d misread the situation, it’s hard to imagine the Crown making that call.

That said, Kiss still faces a host of serious charges — including impaired driving, dangerous driving and failing to remain at the scene of an accident. And no matter how justified he was, he still killed another man.

How much we can and should be willing to risk for strangers is one of the foundational questions of moral philosophy. It remains a point of tremendous contention to this day.

“If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance,” Peter Singer, the Australian philosopher, wrote in 1972, “we ought, morally, to do it.”

The example Singer cites is of a child drowning in a shallow pool. If the only cost to you is some muddy clothes, of course you should rescue the child. But what if the costs are higher? Should you risk your own life to save the child? What about your livelihood? Or your own family? Where should the line be?

In her 2015 book, Stranger’s Drowning, Larissa MacFarquhar profiled people who had effectively ignored that line in their own lives. They each went to extreme ends to help others, sacrificing themselves and their own families along the way.

In each case, MacFarquhar explored the profound disquiet such acts of extreme altruism can provoke in the rest of us. We believe in sacrifice, she demonstrated, but deep sacrifice makes us deeply uncomfortable; we don’t like to be reminded that goodness sometimes comes with enormous cost.

Kiss is due back in court in December. Last week, a Crown prosecutor said he should know then if the case will go to trial or be resolved, likely through a plea.

But the legal system can’t settle the underlying tension here. Anthony Kiss took a life to save a life. That’s what he believed he was doing at the time. And there is no law that can decide for you if that was right or wrong.