7/7/2007

I’m Not As Moral As My Fellow Man

Uncle AndrewUncle Andrew
Filed under: @ 11:01 am

This will come as a surprise to few. 😉

Today’s This American Life had an amazing story, actually excerpted from a longer piece on the amazing NPR program Radio Lab. The article dealt with an old thought experiment about morality generally known as the “Trolley Problem”. Basically it goes like this:

You are standing by a railroad track where you can see a group of five men working. A trolley is rapidly approaching, but the workers are facing the wrong way and do not notice the trolley. You cannot warn or contact the men in any way, but you could pull a lever that will divert the trolley to another track where a single man is working. The five will be saved if you use the lever to kill the one. Do you do it?

Almost universally the answer to this question is “yes”. But then another factor is added:

You are standing on a bridge above a railroad track where you can see a group of five men working. A trolley is rapidly approaching, but the workers are facing the wrong way and do not notice the trolley. You cannot warn or contact the men in any way, but there is another man standing beside you on the bridge. By pushing him off the bridge into the path of the trolley, you would save the five workers below by killing the man standing beside you. Do you do it?

Almost universally the answer is “no”.

The gist of the story was that the part of the brain that decides it’s okay to kill a man by pulling a lever in order to save five more is entirely different from the part of the brain that decides that it’s not okay to kill a man by pushing him off a bridge to achieve the same end. It’s fascinating, really, but the thing that really stuck with me was this: unlike the vast majority of respondents, I do not see any moral difference between these two acts. This does not mean that I would actually be able to do either; I simply wouldn’t know until I was in the situation. There are other factors involved as well. Would I go to jail for murder? Would I have to face a grieving widow or anguished family and friends? In the world of the experiment, am I absolutely, unshakably certain that committing the act would save the five men in question? But assuming that my act would be anonymous and 100% effective, my answer would be yes; I would push the man to his death. My concerns about the act have to do with the consequences to myself, not the basic moral question regarding the taking of a human life.

I am curious how this jibes with the moral tendencies of my friends and family, those people whose opinions I tend to value most and whose behavior I am most likely to want to try to emulate. Am I really the aberration, the moral cipher that my answer would suggest? Or do others in my circle feel as I do?

So speak up, folks: how about you? Would push the man off the bridge?

23 Responses to “I’m Not As Moral As My Fellow Man”

  1. Gavin Says:

    I have a different take on the question. I can’t think of any possible scenario where I could see all this happening and not be able to warn the 5 guys. It’s just too twisted a “what if” for me too answer seriously. “But what if you had to answer it?” you ask. In both cases I would simply walk away because the fifth man is standing around doing nothing (Union rules) and it’s his fault if they get hit.

    Me? Sociopath? Naw…

  2. Uncle Andrew Says:

    Well, that was a real Captain Kirk “Wrath of Khan” Kobayashi Maru kind of answer…. 😛

    It’s not a “possible” scenario, dweeb: it’s a thought experiment. Answer the damn question. ❗

  3. Dalek Says:

    I’m sorry, but I can’t envision any kind of setup under the laws of Earth physics that would 100% guaran-damn-tee that by pushing a guy off of a bridge, I would be saving those other five guys, no possibility for error. So no, I wouldn’t do it.

    To take the question a little deeper, though, the hypothetical situations (lever or bridge) seem to me to be asking the question: “Five men look like they’re going to die in an accident that you had nothing to do with. You might possibly change the outcome of that accident and save those five lives by actively choosing to kill another human being. Would you deliberately kill to prevent that accident?” And for me, I’m thinking that the answer would be no, I wouldn’t choose to kill. I certainly wouldn’t push some stranger off a bridge on the off-chance that it would save the other five. And I wouldn’t pull that lever without screaming at the other dude to get the heck out of the way first.

    So I’m with Gavin, I guess – Kobayashi Maru all the way. 😉 But the fact that you’re hypothetically willing to cause the death of one person to 100% guarantee saving the lives of five people (and not screw up your own life) isn’t the decision of a moral cypher, Roo. Neither is the act of asking the question, the better to understand and discuss morality. :mrgreen:

  4. Uncle Andrew Says:

    You people are so aggravating. You do not get to choose whether you can warn the men on the tracks. You do not get to choose whether the five guys on the tracks below will or will not die depending on your actions: if you fail to push the one man off the bridge they will die; if you push him off, they will not. You are the only thing standing between certain death for one person or certain death for five. It’s not a real-life scenario, okay? It’s a completely hypothetical, non-real-world situation with a very simple set of rules, and everyone is sidestepping them with a bunch of unnecessary sophistry.

    If anyone has an answer that does not involve completely bypassing the rules set forward in the thought experiment, please feel free to chime in.

  5. Gavin Says:

    Well, if you put it that way… then I don’t kill the one guy, video tape the whole train wreck, and make a fortune selling the footage to the news and on endless reruns of Max X or one of those “watch how bad this guy gets nailed” shows. 😈

  6. Uncle Andrew Says:

    This just in: I hate you. 👿

  7. Valerie Says:

    I see your point. One death vs five deaths. The math works out the same in either case. What would I do in a situation like that? I’d probably dither over it until it was too late.

  8. Dylan Says:

    New scenario: By pressing “F4” you guarantee that you will get non-“Kobayashi Maru” type answers to your survey. But doing so will forever ban those that tend to give those answers from commenting ever-again.

    Do you push F4?

  9. Uncle Andrew Says:

    I see your point. One death vs five deaths. The math works out the same in either case. What would I do in a situation like that? I’d probably dither over it until it was too late.

    Thank God, the first truly on-topic answer! And an honest one, at that. In all honesty, I probably would dither as well; just can’t know until you’re there. But from a hypothetical standpoint, I don’t see why pushing the guy off the bridge is morally any different from pulling the lever, and for some reason that makes me different from the majority of people who are asked this question. Still don’t know what this means about me as a person.

    New scenario: By pressing “F4″ you guarantee that you will get non-”Kobayashi Maru” type answers to your survey. But doing so will forever ban those that tend to give those answers from commenting ever-again.

    Do you push F4?

    Dunno; ask me when I get a few more responses. 😀

  10. fisherbear Says:

    What, all of a sudden you’re rewriting the question so that you get to dither? If you can dither, I can doubt the accuracy of my profoundly untrained stranger-throwing skills! 😛

    You wrote the rules, guy. You’re ON the bridge. You SEE the train. You KNOW the body count (but nothing about the moral qualities of the actors – you just have to hope that you’re not throwing a brain surgeon under the wheels to save a gaggle of oil company lobbyists.) You gots to CHOOSE!

    I toss the guy, thereby demonstrating that I’m not quite misanthropic enough to believe that the net value of the average human life is negative. 5 > 1, easy peasy.

    Of course, the real question isn’t HOW you resolve the moral dilemma, it’s HOW QUICKLY. Because there’s this guy standing next to you, and there are five people on the tracks below you, and all he has to do to save four lives…

  11. Uncle Andrew Says:

    I toss the guy, thereby demonstrating that I’m not quite misanthropic enough to believe that the net value of the average human life is negative. 5 > 1, easy peasy.

    Me too. So what makes us different from the majority of people presented with this question? I’d love to hook us both up to an imager and see whether the part of the brain that’s supposed to fire at the thought of throwing the man from the bridge does so with us. Are we chemically/biologically devoid of some level of compassion? I also would <em>love</em> to delve into the question of whether there is any statistical correlation between those who say they would pitch the guy over and those who say they do not–and do not intend–to have children. On some level, I suspect that either

    a) people who are willing to be so hands-on about the destruction of another human being might be afraid that they would smother a squealing infant just to get some shut-eye (and yet are compassionate enough to think this is not the greatest idea and therefore refuse to put themselves at risk of doing same), or
    b) my brain is trying to do its part to cull people like me from the gene pool.

    Of course, the real question isn’t HOW you resolve the moral dilemma, it’s HOW QUICKLY. Because there’s this guy standing next to you, and there are five people on the tracks below you, and all he has to do to save four lives…

    Ha ha, good point! Which of course brings up at least two whole other potential thought experiments right there, and if you think I’m starting another of these topics any time soon you got another think coming. 😯

  12. Dalek Says:

    You said: “I don’t see why pushing the guy off the bridge is morally any different from pulling the lever…” Well, I hinted at a difference in my previous, but evidently it got lost in the Maru-rage. 😉

    I suspect the difference for most folks is that pulling a lever is a mechanical action – you never have to touch the guy you’re about to off (leaving aside the question of the greater good, the needs of the many outweighing, etc., etc.). You can rationalize it more easily because you’re never physically interacting with the soon-to-be-trainkill. It’s at one remove, and I suspect that remove is critical. In the push-the-guy scenario, you ARE getting your hands dirty. It’s not a simple tug of a lever; it’s a lay-your-hands-on-another-living-being-and-cause-death. You would FEEL that person, alive, and you would probably feel their panic and terror as they were shoved off-balance and started to plummet to their doom. Plus there’s always the subconscious fear that, thought-experiment aside, the person about to take the long fall might flail about, desperately trying to prevent said fall, and wind up taking YOU along for the ride. 😉

    For a lot of people, that physical interaction makes a lot of difference. Lots of folks prefer the comfort of meat just shows up at the grocery store, already cleaned and sliced and cold, and not think about (much less have to deal with) killing the chicken/cow/fish/whatever, not to mention the gutting, plucking, skinning, etc.. And only part of that is the convenience factor. Last time I checked, the majority answer to the question “would you become a vegetarian if you had to raise or catch your own meat?” was that if they had to kill their own food, they’d go vegetarian. I suspect there’s a lot of the same vibe going on with your lever-versus-push issue. 💡

    So do I get out of Roo-annoyance-jail now? :mr green:

  13. Uncle Andrew Says:

    You said: “I don’t see why pushing the guy off the bridge is morally any different from pulling the lever…” Well, I hinted at a difference in my previous, but evidently it got lost in the Maru-rage.

    See, I didn’t get that from your first reply. You wrote that you wouldn’t push the guy off the bridge to possibly save the other five, then you wrote that I wasn’t morally bankrupt for saying that I would push him off the bridge to 100% guarantee saving the lives of the others. You never specifically mentioned yourself in the context of the surety of the consequences.

    For a lot of people, that physical interaction makes a lot of difference.

    I think you’re absolutely right about that. That seems to be the whole basis for the idea that this moral decision is based on an impulse that comes from deep within our social-ape makeup, and not from our lofty forebrain-powered moral center. And just so we’re all clear on it, I in no way think I’m a better or more evolved person for bucking this particular trend. Particularly since, barring a truly amazing and cosmically unlikely set of circumstances, I will never get to actually test my true reaction to this scenario….for which I am very grateful.

    So do I get out of Roo-annoyance-jail now?

    Dalek, you have a bottomless Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card with me. 🙂

  14. Uncle Andrew Says:

    What, all of a sudden you’re rewriting the question so that you get to dither? If you can dither, I can doubt the accuracy of my profoundly untrained stranger-throwing skills!

    Forgot to touch on this one: for all intents and purposes, a dither counts as a “no”. But that’s in “real life”, which this scenario is anything but. I can intellectualize all I want about booting some poor schlub to his grisly death, quoting Spock all the way, but that doesn’t say I could actually do anything but curl up into a ball and cry if this shit were actually to go down…. 😮

  15. fisherbear Says:

    Nah. It’s easy for me because it’s a math question, not a moral dilemma. I’m guaranteed perfect aim, perfect information about the outcome of the stranger toss, and perfect ignorance about the individuals involved (much like the perfect ignorance that the party on the tracks has about the train.) My projectile isn’t armed, doesn’t run and doesn’t throw me first. There’s nothing left but the relation between 5 and 1. 5n > n iff n > 0, so if humans are worth more (on average) alive than dead, throw the stranger. QED, turn in your blue books, there will be beer at the Hub after section.

    The answer’s easy in large part because the question is too abstract to be interesting. I could make up a story about the projectile to make him an empathetic subject (you have to grab him! you can hear him scream!) but it’s just as easy to invent one about the people on the tracks (five people under a train means an awful lot of blood! Their wives will stand around the corpses, wailing and tearing their hair as their families are doomed to destitution! Think of the children!)

    As for the second part… I chose between carnivory and oblivion a LONG time ago, and the critters lost. I’d rather buy my muscle tissue at the supermarket than clean it myself, but that’s because I’m lazy. 🙂 If I were hungry enough and the local Yuppietown was out for the duration, the transition from Holocene theropod to stir fry would be no problem at all. I do make practical distinctins among protein sources, but they’re not absolutes: if I were REALLY hungry, the oil company lobbyists had better watch their back. All I’d have to do would be to find a railroad track with five guys on it, and voila*! Pressed pork…

    * Too lazy to figure out whether or not Roo’s HTML filter allows named characters. In honor of my undergrad philo classes, I hereby announce my latest invention: the “thought diacritic.” It isn’t there, but if it were…

  16. Uncle Andrew Says:

    The answer’s easy in large part because the question is too abstract to be interesting.

    I wonder if that’s the difference: that some people aren’t capable of assigning arbitrary stories to the people in the scenario, and are therefore less likely to empathize with them.

    I do make practical distinctins among protein sources, but they’re not absolutes: if I were REALLY hungry, the oil company lobbyists had better watch their back. All I’d have to do would be to find a railroad track with five guys on it, and voila*! Pressed pork…

    Will, you are the first person I have met that has agreed with me on that subject….out loud, anyway. 🙂

    *As for named characters: WordPress uses XHTML, so you should be able to use pretty much the full suite of named characters. Go nuts!

  17. Dalek Says:

    Glad to hear about the get-out-of-Jail-free card! :mrgreen: Me, I too chose a long time ago: carnivore/omnivore, oh yeah. Being lazy, it’s nice that I don’t have to catch and clean it myself, but I would if I had to; protein is good, and I’m much more likely to be successful at catching fish and game than I am to be able to grow sufficient amounts of soy beans or whatever, at least in this climate. Although I might draw the line at oil company lobbyists – I mean, talk about critters that live in toxic environments… 😉

    But getting back to the original subject: I suspect you’re on to something when you postulate the assigning of stories as influencing the outcomes of the scenarios. If you can abstract the question sufficiently, then yeah, the 5 is greater than 1 choice is a no-brainer. If you can’t abstract it enough and/or start assigning story (personhood?) to the folks in question, the “lay hands on someone and actually kill them” squickifier is going to come into play, even when the answer remains “five is greater than one”.

  18. Gavin Says:

    What if the one is a woman? Does that change your answer? What if she’s a Mom with a child standing next to her? Does that make the ‘how’ you kill her less relevant than the ‘if’ you kill her? If you exchange the word ‘man’ in the original question with the word ‘terrorist’ does that change your answer, ( is 5 dead now better than one dead )?

  19. Uncle Andrew Says:

    Ooo, good ones! The answer to your question, for me, is “no”, it does not matter if it is a woman or a man. However, the tenets of the thought experiment do not leave room for questions of the consequences beyond the initial act, i.e., no wailing loved ones, orphaned children, Presidential Medals of Honor, etc. The question is only about the gut reaction to the idea of laying your hands on a person and throwing them off the bridge so that 5 others will (not “may”, will) live, and how that compares to your gut reaction to pulling a lever to accomplish the same thing. And once again, it seems I am probably in the minority. Even though in real life I almost certainly couldn’t do any of these things, my initial response to the scenario differs from the vast majority of those asked. No idea why.

  20. Tony Lenzer Says:

    Andrew: you are your father’s son. Stop dithering, push the poor sucker off the bridge; save 5, and get away quickly before the cops arrive.

  21. Uncle Andrew Says:

    Wow, Dad, you can be pretty cold when you think it’s necessary. Good on ya! Nice to see where I get it from. 🙂

  22. Steve Says:

    I notice nobody here has offered to jump into the path of the trolley, thus effectively martyring themselves while saving 6 people….

    Sadly, my gut response to the dillema was “I’d wait until the trolley had mowed the 5 guys down, *then* I’d push the guy next to me off the bridge. In all the fracas, they wouldn’t make a specific inquiry about him, so I’d get away with murder scott-free! W00t!”

    Right about now Andrew, you’re probably remembering why you had my IP address blocked. 🙂

  23. Uncle Andrew Says:

    Right about now Andrew, you’re probably remembering why you had my IP address blocked.

    Yeah, maybe I was misremembering what kind of attack I had been seeing from your netblock…. 😀

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