[Edit - I found an article about the moral questions, link added at the bottom.]
I've had some folks find this blog after a search on "apostasy". Interesting. Interesting that they found me, even though I had purposely misspelled it to foil searches. Half of them clicked on the comment link, but then didn't comment. More interesting. What's that about?
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Back in May I mentioned a study being done by some folks at Harvard, about moral choices. Yesterday a researcher in the study was taking about it on NPR. They mentioned in particular the "trolley" questions. (Since a representative of the study talked about the questions on the radio, I guess I can here.)
The questions go something like this (from my memory, notoriously defective. Note that you have to accept the premise and predicted outcome exactly as stated):
- There are five men working on a trolley track. There is a runaway trolley hurtling down the track toward them. The men do not see the trolley coming. If the trolley hits them, they will all be killed. You are standing near a lever that will switch the trolley to a different track, where only one man is working. If you pull the lever, that one man will be hit and killed, but the other five will be saved. Do you pull the lever?
- There are five men working on a trolley track. There is a runaway trolley hurtling down the track toward them. The men do not see the trolley coming. If the trolley hits them, they will all be killed. You are standing on an elevated walkway over the tracks. There is a very large man, a stranger, standing on the walkway next to you. If you give him a very small push, he will fall to the tracks and be killed by the trolley, but he will derail the trolley and the other five will be saved. Do you push him?
The guy on the radio said that almost everyone answered these two question the same way, regardless of age, gender, nationality, or religion. Something like 80ish% answered "No" to the second question. I'm pretty certain he said that everyone answered "Yes" to the first. I'm pretty certain of that, because it surprised me.
I took the test in May. Very recently I was directly invited by Harvard to take it again. I did. The researcher's statement that everyone said "Yes" to the first question surprised me because I twice answered "No" to both questions.
So either they threw out answers they didn't like, or he is inaccurate when he said "everyone". (Perhaps 99.9999% is "everyone"?)
The researchers did brain scans on some people answering the questions. They noted that even though those two particular questions seem very similar, different areas of the brain lit up when people considered them. The theory of the researchers is that pushing the man is seen as murder, and that there is an inborn human resistance to murder, so as soon as the mind recognizes it as murder, the decision is shunted to the "no no no" part of the brain.
He kinda lost me there. Pulling a lever to send a trolley into a man is not murder? Isn't it the same as pulling a trigger? Or pushing someone in front of a train? If there's an inborn resistance to murder even to save others, where do wars come from? How do you make a soldier?
I'm sorry, but it occurs to me that some people may have felt a bit guilty about their first answer, and backed off on the second to say "Oh, now, I'm not THAT bad!" There was probably also a reluctance to actually touch the man in the second question. Touching him is to know him to some degree.
It sounds to me like the researchers started out with a theory and then set out to prove it.
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So, what was my thinking when I answered "No"? Simple, really. Knowing nothing about any of them, I don't think I have the right to decide that those five men are more valuable than that one man. And that's pretty much all that went into my decision. Mere numbers don't mean a lot to me. There's a measure of acceptance of fate in there, too. What is to happen, will. There is purpose in everything. I might even have a sudden overwhelming urge to pull the lever, figuring that if I weren't meant to, it would break.
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Later edit - An article about the moral questions is at http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~jgreene/GreeneWJH/Greene-Haidt-TiCS-02.pdf. See the box on the third page down. The statements made in the box are different from what I remember of the NPR interview. Perhaps he was trying to simplify, and make it sound more interesting.
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2 comments:
I think the difference is that in the first one, you have reasonable and immediate power. After all, you're controlling the lever.
In the second one, if you push the man onto the tracks, you have used unreasonable power and turned that man into an object. (A dead object...)
I said no to both of these because both times I thought, there's not enough information here to know if there's another way to avoid the deaths of anyone.
PS - Food fights should be illegal after you reach the age of majority. But a good hosing down should clean up everything...
"there's not enough information here to know if there's another way to avoid the deaths of anyone." That was part of the instructions, to use only the information in the question, that things will happen exactly as stated, and not to consider any other outside possibilities.
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