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

[e-moon60.livejournal.com]

The problem I see with all these constructed experiments is that they're patently artificial--binary situations, where you have to do A or B. Most real-life situations offer more than one alternative (and quickly exceed the processing power of any part of the brain.) When you look at similar real-life situations, you see that real people have met them in multiple ways. Academics studying human behavior love to set up binary situations--they're easier to analyze--but they're not realistic. (For instance, in the "crying baby" problem...there are other solutions which people have used--putting the baby to breast, for instance, or giving it a sugar-coated pacifier or finger to suck on.) The situations are often so artificial that I find them unbelievable to start with (I don't get along well with this kind of testing and I then annoy the administrators.) For instance, that train/trolley...I know that it has so much inertia at its speed that one person on the tracks won't keep it from hitting the others. Even if it derailed, it wouldn't stop sliding that way in time. To stop a train with someone on the tracks from hitting people a few yards down the tracks, you'd have to throw someone on the tracks a mile or more up-track. In which case you have time to grab those people on the tracks and get them up on the platform.

Also, the attempt to peel away "emotional" from "rational" problem-solving is--given our wet-ware--not possible in real life emergencies. (It can be done by conditioning for some behaviors, but not for decision-making. Some but not all EMS personnel can override their "instinctive" emotional reactions to certain gory injuries and go on to treat the person...but this is not the same as making a decision to kill or not kill someone to save someone else.) In another psych experiment, where subjects were choosing strategies to maximize profit in a gambling situation, subjects with impaired emotion (via injury or mental illness) did worse. Even when they could intellectually describe a better strategy, they used a faulty one.

And another thing..."greater good" can be defined in so many ways that it's not a useful concept without definition specific to the circumstances. Take the "train" example. If you consider throwing the man off the platform under the train to be saving the five people farther down the track...(or the alternative of throwing the switch to the train goes on another track and kills one) and define the five people as "greater good", that's one thing. But is that the greater good? Is a society in which people routinely sacrifice someone else for the possible benefit of others a society in which respect for human life will endure? Now if the person who realizes that a body on the tracks might stop the train and throws himself/herself onto the tracks, that I think would be much more likely to increase respect for human life, even if the attempt were unsucessful.

I think not, taking a close look at our society...where the willingness to sacrifice someone else (not oneself) exists but has not been shown to increase respect for all human life (certainly not the ones sacrificed.) The *social* effect of decisions is one of the things hard-wired into all social animals: both for survival within the group and for the group's survival. Altruism--self-sacrifice--can be shown to have sound evolutionary utility. Other-sacrifice is questionable at best.

[bemused-leftist.livejournal.com]

I suppose the point is that this is a job for instinct, not abstraction?

How sure can you be of the speed of the approaching cyclists vs the speed of the cart, and that pushing it would kill exactly three other people? How do you know that those three people won't see it coming and get out of the way? Etc.

Only physical reflex stuff -- 'rightbrain' stuff -- can integrate those factors fast enough. And herd instinct is right there in that rightbrain to supervise the decision. (And make sure you don't step on your own baby while rushing to help strangers.)

Okay, off to the article....

[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.