Authors: Paul Bloom
Trolley intuitions can be manipulated in other ways that don’t fit any philosophical theory.
One clever study looked at effects of cues as to the race of the characters. Is it right to choose to sacrifice an individual named Tyrone Payton to save a hundred members of the New York Philharmonic? Is it right to choose to sacrifice Chip Ellsworth III to save a hundred members of the Harlem Jazz Orchestra? Conservatives were even-handed, but liberals were not; they were more likely to kill a white person to save a hundred black people than vice versa—even though, when asked, they explicitly claimed that race shouldn’t be a factor.
In another study, people were given trolley problems after seeing a humorous clip from
Saturday Night Live.
This made them more likely to endorse pushing the large man in front of the train.
There are many scholars who are uncomfortable with how bizarre and contrived trolley problems can be. The philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah observes that
the dense trolley literature “makes the Talmud look like Cliff Notes.” But there is little doubt that they have proven to be powerful tools for exploring the structure of our intuitions.
As Greene puts it, trolley problems might be the
fruit flies of the moral mind.
P
HILOSOPHICAL
examples and psychological experiments rarely involve intuitions about family members. But it turns out that moral philosophers do use trolley and trolleylike problems to address moral problems that pertain to intimate relationships. Indeed, when philosopher Philippa Foot introduced the trolley problem in 1967, it was intended to explore the morality of
abortion
, looking at cases in which the death of the fetus results from actions taken to save the life of the mother. The general idea here is that we can think more clearly about these controversial and emotionally fraught cases if we translate them into simplified dilemmas involving strangers.
The scenario with Bob’s Bugatti might also tell us something about family. It is used to make the case that we should care more about the fates of distant strangers. Now, even for a consequentialist like Peter Singer, some selfish preference makes sense, since the most efficient system is often one in which everyone takes care of himself and those close to him first.
Adam Smith makes this point well: “Every man is, no doubt, by nature, first and principally recommended to his own care; and as he is fitter to take care of himself than of any other person, it is fit and right that it should be so.” Just as the instruction for using oxygen masks in airplane emergencies (you first, then your children) is the best system for ensuring that everyone survives, a system where we
give ourselves and our own families priority might be the best way to maximize happiness for all.
But Singer’s point is that there are limits—the resources we give to ourselves and those we love are far too great. It is a moral mistake, he argues, to lavish our children with luxuries in order to make them just a bit happier when the same resources could be used to save the lives of strangers. The Bugatti trolley example is intended as a stark illustration of why this is the case.
This is one way to do moral philosophy. One develops general and abstract principles—perhaps very simple ones, as in consequentialism—by thinking about examples with strangers, and then one extends these principles to family and friends. A philosopher might also argue that it is the interactions between strangers that are the interesting ones. We need, after all, to know how to deal with the billions of individuals who share the world with us. Indeed, if it’s true that our natural moral sensibilities are nonexistent or blunted when it comes to faraway people, this is precisely where philosophy might need to step in. Intimate relationships can take care of themselves.
But this is the wrong way to do moral psychology. From the standpoint of looking at human nature and human interactions, it makes no sense to start with strangers and view family and friends as a special case. That goes against everything we know about how morality evolved in the species and develops in the individual.
Imagine that we could start again, without taking moral
philosophy as a foundation. If we build our moral psychology from evolutionary biology and developmental psychology instead of philosophy, things begin to look very different.
Evolution first.
The natural history of morality began with small groups of people in families and tribes, not a world in which we regularly interact with thousands of strangers. Think of summer camp in the middle of nowhere, not midtown Manhattan. Our social instincts, therefore, evolved to help us deal with people we see frequently, not to guide our interactions with anonymous strangers. Because we engaged in continued and repeated interactions with other members of our group, those individuals who helped others, were gratified by the help of others, and were motivated to punish or shun those who behaved badly would have out-reproduced those without these sentiments, and this explains why our minds now work as they do. The logic of natural selection further dictates that our altruistic and moralizing impulses should be discriminating—there is a strong reproductive benefit to being biased to favor friends and family over strangers, and one would expect this to be incorporated as part of an innate moral sense.
Now, there is no consensus as to the precise evolutionary origins of our moral instincts and moral understanding. Some claim that our moral sense follows directly from the benefits of cooperative behavior, especially among related individuals.
Others argue for a two-stage account in which initial moral instincts are established, and then a dedicated system for the acquisition of moral norms emerges as society
gets larger. There are also
debates over whether group selection—natural selection at the level of communities—plays a role in the origin of morality. There is particular controversy, as we’ve seen, over the evolutionary origins of our impulse to punish cheaters, free riders, and other bad apples. Did our punitive nature evolve because groups that include members who punish do better than those that don’t (a group selection account), or did it evolve because punishers are attractive to others and therefore are more likely to survive and reproduce (an individual selection account)? Or is punishment of third parties an accidental spillover of a more narrow proclivity toward revenge (a view that I proposed in
chapter 3
)? All of these are open questions, presumably to be resolved through the tools of evolutionary modeling, cultural and physical anthropology, and experimental research with humans and other animals.
But not everything is up for grabs. All evolutionary accounts of the origins of morality emphasize the importance of community, friendship, and especially kinship. This was appreciated in
Darwin’s own speculation about the origin of our moral capacities: “Any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts,
the parental and filial instincts being here included
, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man.”
Consider now development. Humans are the mama’s boys of the biosphere. We have the longest childhoods of any creature—an extended period of serious vulnerability—which leads to special bonds between parents and children.
This might help us understand why our social and moral lives are so intricate compared to those of other creatures.
In particular, some scholars see this early period as critical; they see
altruism as emerging from the care we give to our helpless offspring. This theory is supported by an unusual piece of evidence: the multiple roles of the hormone
oxytocin
, which is released during labor to facilitate contractions and during stimulation of the nipples to facilitate the flow of milk. But while oxytocin has evolved for its role in maternal care, it has broader effects. When oxytocin is in your system, you feel calm and mellow and friendly; in economics games,
people dosed with the hormone become more trusting and more generous. And those individuals who have alleles that make them more receptive to oxytocin tend to be
more empathetic and less susceptible to stress. Accordingly, oxytocin has been called “the love hormone,” “the cuddle chemical,” “the milk of human kindness,” and the “moral molecule.”
There is a lot more to morality, of course, than warm feelings. Oxytocin can’t explain why we send money to distant strangers or get outraged at those who harm others. Indeed,
the response that oxytocin generates is itself morally complex: it makes us nicer to those close to us but might increase our parochial biases; one study found that snorting oxytocin makes you more positive toward your own group but also more willing to derogate members of other groups.
Still, it is a neat finding that the same molecule involved in childbirth and breastfeeding is implicated in sex and
kindness. This supports the idea that some of our moral sentiments have their origin in the relationship between mother and child.
N
OT
everyone who studies moral psychology focuses on abstract philosophical cases. The anthropologist Richard Shweder developed one of the most influential alternatives to the standard view, proposing
a trinity of moral foundations. There is an ethics of
autonomy
, which focuses on individual rights and freedoms. This is the dominant moral foundation for most Westerners, and certainly most Western philosophers; it’s the sort of morality that makes you think up trolley problems. But there is also an ethics of
communit
y, which focuses on notions including respect, duty, hierarchy, and patriotism, and an ethics of
divinit
y, which focuses on pollution and purity, sanctity and sacred order.
This theory has been extended and developed by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who argues that we possess
a sextuplet of distinct moral foundations—care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation, and liberty/oppression. These are evolved universals, but they admit of variation, like dials on an equalizer, and can be set in unique ways. For instance, Haidt argues that political liberals emphasize care/harm and fairness/cheating but deemphasize the other foundations, while political conservatives care about all of them equally. This is why, for example, conservatives care more than liberals do about respect for the national flag (as this
is associated with loyalty), children’s obedience toward parents (authority), and chastity (sanctity).
I’m sympathetic to these approaches, but they don’t go far enough, in my view, in acknowledging the special status of family and friends. My own cartography of our moral lives is different. It takes as a starting point the sorts of individuals that our moral judgments and sentiments apply to.
First, there are
kin.
We care for close blood relatives and feel outraged at those who might harm them. Kindness to kin is the original form of morality and emerges directly through natural selection; since relatives share genes, it means that kindness to kin is, in a very real way, kindness to oneself. While other species have bonds of kinship, humans take this further—we moralize these bonds. We not only have strong ties between parent and child, for instance, but also feel that others
should
have such bonds; we disapprove of parents who are indifferent to their children’s fate. Some moral principles also apply specially to kin, such as certain prohibitions on sexual relationships, discussed in the previous chapter.
A second category includes those individuals who are part of our community or tribe. Call this the
in-group.
As with kin, the moral notions here relate to harm and helping, care and obligation. Our sentiments toward in-group members have evolved as adaptations to group living, existing because of the mutual benefit that arises when individuals within a group cooperate with one another.
Some of these sentiments extend to the protection of the group as a whole, such as respect for those who uphold the
values of the community and hatred of heretics and apostates. Loyalty is a virtue;
betrayal is a sin—and a very serious one. It was treachery, and not lust or anger, that earned sinners a place in Dante’s ninth, deepest, circle of hell.
Loyalty toward the in-group can clash with loyalty toward kin. Dante himself viewed the betrayal of one’s kin as less severe than betrayal of one’s friends or political party. Cain, who killed his brother Abel, is punished less than Antenor, who opened the gates of Troy to Greek invaders. The worst sinner of all, for Dante, was the betrayer of Christ, Judas Iscariot.
Here Dante was following scripture. Religious texts, not surprisingly, insist that the religious in-group is more important than kin.
In the Gospels, Christ is explicit that he is there to replace the family, not support it: “I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother.… And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.”
One sees the same preference in the Hebrew Bible, which states: “If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which
is
as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, ‘Let us go and serve other gods’ … thou shalt surely kill him,” and then explains why: “because he hath sought to thrust thee away from the LORD thy God.”
The third category is that of
strangers
—those individuals whom we do not interact with regularly and who are
not thought of as part of our group. While the force that drives the evolution of morality toward kin is genetic overlap, and the force that drives morality toward the in-group is the logic of mutual benefit, the force that drives morality toward strangers is … nothing. We are capable of judging the actions of strangers as good and bad, but we have no natural altruism toward them, no innate desire to be kind to them.