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Syndicate. March 2007.: Peter Singer. Should We Trust Our Moral Intuitions? Peter Singer. Project

"Unusual research has raised new #uestions about the role of intuitive responses in ethical reasoning" philosopher $oshua %reene studied how people respond to a set of imaginary dilemmas. In one dilemma, you are standing by a railroad trac& when a trolley is about to &ill five people.

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71 views2 pages

Syndicate. March 2007.: Peter Singer. Should We Trust Our Moral Intuitions? Peter Singer. Project

"Unusual research has raised new #uestions about the role of intuitive responses in ethical reasoning" philosopher $oshua %reene studied how people respond to a set of imaginary dilemmas. In one dilemma, you are standing by a railroad trac& when a trolley is about to &ill five people.

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Peter Singer. Should We Trust Our Moral Intuitions? Peter Singer. Should We Trust Our Moral Intuitions?

Project Syndicate. March 2007.


When we condemn the behavior of a politician, celebrity, or friend, we often end up appealing to our moral intuitions. It just feels wrong! we say. But where do these intuitive judgments come from !re they reliable moral guides "ecently, some unusual research has raised new #uestions about the role of intuitive responses in ethical reasoning. $oshua %reene, a philosophy graduate now wor&ing in psychology who has recently moved from 'rinceton (niversity to )arvard, studied how people respond to a set of imaginary dilemmas. In one dilemma, you are standing by a railroad trac& when you notice that a trolley, with no one aboard, is heading for a group of five people. *hey will all be &illed if the trolley continues on its current trac&. *he only thing you can do to prevent these five deaths is to throw a switch that will divert the trolley onto a side trac&, where it will &ill only one person. When as&ed what you should do in these circumstances, most people say that you should divert the trolley onto the side trac&, thus saving a net four lives. In another dilemma, the trolley, as before, is about to &ill five people. *his time, however, you are not standing near the trac&, but on a footbridge above the trac&. +ou cannot divert the trolley. +ou consider jumping off the bridge, in front of the trolley, thus sacrificing yourself to save the five people in danger, but you reali,e that you are far too light to stop the trolley. -tanding ne.t to you, however, is a very large stranger. *he only way you can prevent the trolley from &illing five people is by pushing this large stranger off the footbridge, in front of the trolley. If you push the stranger off, he will be &illed, but you will save the other five. When as&ed what you should do in these circumstances, most people say that it would be wrong to push the stranger. *his judgment is not limited to particular cultures. /arc )auser, at )arvard (niversity, has put similar dilemmas on the web in what he calls a /oral -ense *est, available in 0nglish, -panish, and 1hinese 2 http344moral.wjh.harvard.edu 5. !fter receiving tens of thousands of responses, he finds remar&able consistency despite differences in nationality, ethnicity, religion, age, and se.. 'hilosophers have pu,,led about how to justify our intuitions in these situations, given that in both cases, the choice seems to be between saving five lives at the cost of ta&ing one life. %reene, however, was more concerned to understand why we have the intuitions, so he used functional /agnetic "esonance Imaging, or f/"I, to e.amine what happens in people6s brains when they ma&e these moral judgments. %reene found that people as&ed to ma&e a moral judgment about personal violations, li&e pushing the stranger off the footbridge, showed increased activity in areas of the brain associated with the emotions. *his was not the case with people as&ed to ma&e judgments about relatively impersonal violations li&e throwing a switch. /oreover, the minority of subjects who did consider that it would be right to push the stranger off

the footbridge too& longer to reach this judgment than those who said that doing so would be wrong. Why would our judgments, and our emotions, vary in this way 7or most of our evolutionary history, human beings 8 and our primate ancestors 8 have lived in small groups, in which violence could be inflicted only in an up9close and personal way, by hitting, pushing, strangling, or using a stic& or stone as a club. *o deal with such situations, we developed immediate, emotionally based intuitive responses to the infliction of personal violence on others. *he thought of pushing the stranger off the footbridge elicits these responses. :n the other hand, it is only in the last couple of centuries 8 not long enough to have any evolutionary significance 8 that we have been able to harm anyone by throwing a switch that diverts a train. )ence the thought of doing it does not elicit the same emotional response as pushing someone off a bridge. %reene6s wor& helps us understand where our moral intuitions come from. But the fact that our moral intuitions are universal and part of our human nature does not mean that they are right. :n the contrary, these findings should ma&e us more s&eptical about relying on our intuitions. *here is, after all, no ethical significance in the fact that one method of harming others has e.isted for most of our evolutionary history, and the other is relatively new. Blowing up people with bombs is no better than clubbing them to death. !nd surely the death of one person is a lesser tragedy than the death of five, no matter how that death is brought about. -o we should thin& for ourselves, not just listen to our intuitions.

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