Authors: Paul Bloom
If this younger man were a grown stranger, the woman’s actions would be seen as saintly or insane. But this description summarizes a typical relationship between mother and
son. In some regards, knowing that the woman is his mother makes her sacrifice all the more impressive, because now we can add additional considerations—if he’s not adopted, she kept him inside her body for nine months, suffering pain, nausea, and exhaustion. Then she gave birth, an act that is terribly painful and physically risky. She might then have fed him from her own body for months or years afterward.
The point of this story, told by Alison Gopnik in
The Philosophical Baby
, is that family is special. Knowing that they are
mother and son changes how we think of the woman’s actions. If she were indifferent toward her child, unwilling to make these sacrifices, treating him just as she would a stranger, many people would judge her to be immoral, repellently so. We feel the same, though perhaps to a lesser degree, when the parent is a father instead of a mother.
Our best theories of adult moral psychology have little to say about these sorts of judgments. Most research in the field, including my own, focuses on how people make sense of, judge, and respond to the actions of unrelated strangers. We have little to say about how people think about interactions between parent and child, brother and sister, and other closely related individuals. It is typical that the index of the
Moral Psychology Handbook
, a collection of essays by the top scholars in the field, has no entries for “mother,” “son,” or “family.”
I think this is a mistake. To understand our moral natures, we need to appreciate the special status of certain close relationships. This requires liberating ourselves from certain philosophical assumptions and taking seriously
what we can learn from both the study of evolution and the study of babies.
T
HE
relationship between moral psychology and moral philosophy is intimate. Moral philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, David Hume, and, of course, Adam Smith could be seen as the founders of contemporary moral psychology. Many of the contemporary leading figures in the field—the researchers whose work I have been discussing in this book—have had some philosophical training. And, as we shall see, the theories and methods and even the experimental stimuli of moral psychology often come directly from moral philosophy.
It is not moral philosophy in general, however, that influences how we do our work, but rather a particular strand of moral philosophy—one that focuses primarily on the question of which actions are morally obligatory, which are optional, and which are forbidden.
Philosophers in this area are split into two main camps:
consequentialists
(who judge actions on the basis of their outcomes, such as whether they increase the sum of human happiness) and
deontologists
(who propose that certain broader principles should be respected, even if they lead to worse consequences).
Consequentialists might argue that torturing a person, even an innocent person, would be the right thing to do if it led to overall better consequences—if it caused more overall pleasure than pain, or saved more lives than it ended, or led to a greater proportion of individuals achieving their goals than not. (I’m being vague here, because consequentialists
don’t always agree about which sorts of consequences matter.) In contrast, some deontologists will insist that torture is always wrong because it violates certain absolute principles, such as a restriction against violating a person’s intrinsic dignity. For such a deontologist, torturing someone would be wrong even if it saved a million innocent people.
Moral philosophers often proceed by thinking up complex and unnatural moral dilemmas and using their intuitions about these problems to refine their theories. This is similar to what some psychologists do, but the difference is that the psychologists are interested in people’s beliefs about what’s right and wrong, while the philosophers are interested in what’s
really
right and wrong. Moral intuitions are sometimes contradictory: we might think X is morally good and Y is morally bad, even though X and Y are identical scenarios described in different ways. A psychologist can stop there, accepting this inconsistency as an interesting fact about the human mind. A philosopher cannot.
At the same time, though, an adequate moral philosophy can’t depart too far from our commonsense intuitions. One wouldn’t take seriously a moral theory that said that torturing babies for fun was a good thing to do. Such a conclusion would be so unrelated to what we naturally think of as right and wrong that it wouldn’t be a moral theory at all. The working moral philosopher resolves this tension by engaging in what John Rawls described as
“reflective equilibrium”—going back and forth between general principles and specific cases, ultimately coming to a point where a theory captures certain intuitions but rejects others. As a
result, moral theories do end up making counterintuitive claims. There are deontologists such as Kant, who tell us that lying is always wrong (Always wrong? Even if the Nazis are at the door, asking if there are Jews in the attic? Yes!) and utilitarians such as Bentham, who say that it’s perfectly fine to torture and kill a baby if this action increases the sum total of the world’s happiness by even a smidgen (A baby? An innocent little baby? Yes!).
Some of the most influential examples in modern philosophy concern runaway trains.
The philosopher Peter Unger offers a scenario in which Bob is the proud owner of a rare, beautiful, and expensive car, a Bugatti. And then something terrible happens.
One day when Bob is out for a drive, he parks his Bugatti near the end of a railway siding and goes for a walk up the track. As he does so, he sees that a runaway train, with no one aboard, is running down the railway track. Looking farther down the track, he sees the small figure of a child very likely to be killed by the runaway train. He can’t stop the train and the child is too far away to warn of the danger, but he can throw a switch that will divert the train down the siding where his Bugatti is parked. Then nobody will be killed—but the train will destroy his Bugatti. Thinking of his joy in owning the car and the financial security it represents, Bob decides not to throw the switch. The child is killed. For many years to come, Bob enjoys owning his Bugatti and the financial security it represents.
As we’ve discussed earlier, Peter Singer offers a variant on this example: Bob is walking by a lake and sees a child drowning in shallow water. Bob could easily wade in and pull the child out, but this will ruin his shoes, which are quite expensive. So Bob walks on, letting the child drown.
These scenarios are constructed so that it’s clear that Bob did something wrong through his failure to act. But now consider other failures to act. The world contains many dying children, and Bob can save some of them by giving to charity. He can save a life for far less than the price of a Bugatti or even of a pair of Italian loafers. Unger and Singer argue that Bob’s choice not to sacrifice his car or his fancy shoes in order to save the child is really no different from Bob choosing to buy the car and the fancy shoes in the first place instead of going to
www.oxfam.org
and using the money to save children’s lives. So while it’s tempting to think that when Bob finds himself in these situations he is an unlucky man, forced to choose whether to sacrifice something of great value or let another person die, it turns out that anybody who is living a comfortable life is continually faced with this very dilemma.
Now, you could point to all sorts of differences here. One is that when Bob fails to throw the switch or wade into the water, he is condemning a specific child to death; when Bob fails to send money to charity, the effects are less discrete. Another is that, in these examples, Bob is the only one who can help; when it comes to charity, Bob is one of many. But Singer and Unger argue that such differences are morally irrelevant. We have different intuitions about X and Y, but
X and Y are, in relevant regards, identical. If they are right, this should worry us as moral beings. If failing to give to charity is equivalent to watching a child drown, we need to seriously rethink how we live our lives.
T
HERE
is another runaway train case—more precisely,
a runaway trolley case—that has been hugely influential in moral psychology. In one scenario (the “switch” scenario), a trolley is running out of control down a track. In its path are five people who have been tied to the track. You could throw a switch, which would lead the trolley down a different track. Unfortunately, there is a single person tied to that track and this would kill him. Should you throw the switch or do nothing?
In the second scenario (the “bridge” scenario), a trolley is running out of control down a track. In its path are five people who have been tied to the track. You are standing on a bridge above the track, next to a large stranger. The only way to stop the trolley is to shove the man off the bridge and into the trolley’s path, killing him but saving the five. (It won’t help to jump yourself; you’re too small to stop the trolley.) Should you push the man or do nothing?
The outcome is identical in both situations—both throwing the switch and pushing the man would save five people and kill one. But
most people intuitively feel that these cases are different: it is right to throw the switch and wrong to push the man. Apparently, then, we are not natural consequentialists; there is more to the morality of an act than its outcome.
Some philosophers believe that the difference between pushing the man and throwing the switch is captured by a principle known as
the Doctrine of Double Effect, or DDE. The DDE, which is often attributed to the Catholic philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas, posits a critical moral difference between killing or harming someone as an unintended consequence of causing a greater good to occur (which can be morally permissible) and intentionally causing a death or harm in order to bring about a greater good (which is not permissible).
For example, according to the DDE, it might be permissible to bomb an enemy military base with the knowledge that the bombs will cause the death of some innocents who work at the base. This could be done with the goal of destroying the base, ending the war quickly, and saving millions of lives. The innocents are “collateral damage,” like the man in the switch case. But if the bombing were done with the goal of killing the innocent people and thereby intimidating the population into surrendering (again, ending the war quickly, saving millions of lives), this would not be morally permissible under the DDE, because the innocents would be dying to bring about a greater good, like the man in the bridge case. Even though the ultimate goal in the two cases is the same (to win the war), and even though the same number of people die, still, according to the DDE, the second act is worse than the first. In the second case, the deaths of innocents is a means to an end, while in the first case, it is a regrettable by-product.
Psychologists first got into the domain of trolley problems
with
the work of the psychologist Lewis Petrinovich and his colleagues in the 1990s. They gave university students different scenarios, including “lifeboat problems”—there are six people on a lifeboat that can hold only five: Would you throw one into the water to drown, and, if so, how do you decide which one?—and trolley problems, using the “switch” version. Subjects were asked whether they would throw the switch if the individual on the sidetrack were a member of the American Nazi Party. What if he were the world’s best violist? What if he were a gorilla?
Then, in his doctoral research, the philosopher and legal scholar
John Mikhail did a series of studies comparing intuitions about different “switch” and “bridge” scenarios. Soon afterward, in 2001, the neuroscientist Joshua Greene and his colleagues published
a paper in
Science
that used brain-imaging techniques to explore how people reason about trolley and trolleylike situations. Greene’s paper was the tipping point, inspiring
a wave of trolley-problem research by psychologists, neuroscientists, and anthropologists. By now, Web-based surveys have assessed the intuitions of hundreds of thousands of people from different countries and cultures, and variants of trolley problems have been presented to people living in hunter-gatherer societies, to psychopaths, and to patients suffering from various sorts of brain damage. It turns out that
all neurologically normal people, not just trained philosophers, draw a moral distinction between the switch case and the bridge case.
Even three-year-olds presented with a modified version of the trolley scenarios (using Lego people) will tend to
say that throwing the switch is the right thing to do, while pushing the man isn’t.
Some scholars see these findings as an indication that humans possess
a universal moral faculty analogous to the universal grammar outlined by the linguist Noam Chomsky—one that is partially innate and universal and that includes subtle and abstract principles. There do seem to be some interesting parallels here. Just as much as our linguistic knowledge is unconscious (every English speaker knows that something is wrong with the sentence “John seems sleeping,” but only experts can articulate the principle underlying this gut feeling), many of our moral intuitions are due to factors that lie outside our conscious awareness.
But, as Izzat Jarudi and I have argued,
language and morality differ quite sharply in some regards. Most of all, linguistic knowledge is distinct from emotion. You might be disgusted or outraged by what somebody says, but the principles that make sense of sentences are entirely cold-blooded. Your eyes do not well with tears as you unconsciously determine the structural geometry of a verb phrase. By contrast, moral judgments are linked to emotions such as compassion and shame and outrage.
The importance of emotion is evident in the bridge version of the trolley scenario.
Greene and his colleagues find that people are more willing to use the man as an instrument to stop the runaway train if, instead of shoving him, they can throw a switch that opens a trapdoor that makes
him fall onto the track. This shouldn’t make a difference from the standpoint of the DDE—in both cases, killing the man is a means to an end—but it makes a psychological difference. Greene argues that this is because the thought of touching the man, of laying your hands on him and
shoving
, gives rise to a powerful emotional response, much more than the thought of just throwing a switch, and this is why most people see this act as morally wrong.