The Vexing Mental Tug-of-War Called Morality

[ksmith]

An interesting article about the possible roles that logic and instinct play in moral decision-making.

You arrive at the hill early, eager to cheer the cyclists racing past. the sun is bright, the people on both sides of the road are in high spirits, and speculation about the race passes through the crowd in waves. A hot dog vendor has positioned his cart up the hill, and the aroma of simmering meat wafts by, summoning your best memories of summer. Suddenly shouts erupt. The racers are approaching. You lean forward and see a blur of colors at the summit. Then you notice something wrong. The hot dog vendor has stepped away to make change, and someone has jostled his cart off its moorings. It is rolling downhill toward the road, gathering speed, and poised to kill dozens of cyclists unless someone shoves the cart across the road—but that would kill three spectators instead. What should one do?

Read and find out what some people thought….

Mirrored from Kristine Smith.

Comments

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

I agree that the constructs are artificially constrained, but I think they purposely set up the only options to be two unpleasant extremes. I personally don't see how the endless shadings and variability of response could be tracked and quantified, but I confess that I don't know enough about brain research to know this for sure.

[e-moon60.livejournal.com]

I'm not convinced that presenting moral dilemmas as binary is useful--either for understanding how people make decisions, or as a teaching tool in ethics. Too many people already see situations as binary and do not look for a third or fourth alternative, and presenting them as binary simply reinforces that approach.

The binary approach was/is actively harmful in research and the subsequent practice of therapy for the developmentally delayed. I fought this with Michael--the ease of coding responses as "good/bad" rather than looking at the response and taking the time to figure out what it said about the neuro pathways available to the child. At the time (and still in some texts and I'm sure some clinics) there's this idea that one response/behavior is "OK" and everything else is "not OK" and that's all you need to know. Just keep pushing the kid to give the OK response.

I realize I have a biased position because--in developmental psychology, including the consideration of ethical development--I've seen a lot of stupidity resulting from binary thinking. It's easy to come up with experiments that way, and easy to score them...but it's not reality.