The Brain Book - The moral brain


	The Moral Brain RITA CARTER This article first appeared in . . . . . IMAGINE THIS: you are paddling a canoe along a jungle river when you spot a group of crocodiles gliding swiftly through the water with deadly intent. Happily for you, they are not heading in your direction – their sights are set firmly on a family of swimmers at the water’s edge. If nothing is done the crocs will soon have all five of them for dinner. By driving your canoe into the crocodiles you could send them off in a different direction, but this would put the hungry reptiles directly on course to a sixth swimmer. So what should you do? Allow things to take their course, and allow five to die? Or intervene and reduce the toll to one? Thought experiment enthusiasts might recognise this scenario as an exotic version of the famous “runaway train” dilemma, in which five pedestrians are about to be mown down unless you, the bystander, throw a switch which will divert the train to a track where just one reckless track-walker will be killed. Over the last three years some quarter of a million people have responded to the train dilemma via a web-based survey posted by evolutionary psychologist Marc Hauser and his colleagues at the Harvard Cognitive Evolution Laboratory. The vast majority of respondents – some 90% – say they would flip the switch . The Harvard researchers invented the crocodile-canoe variation to help establish whether this moral judgement is learned or “hard-wired” into our brains. They used it on the Canu Indians, a tribe whose world is so different from that of the Internet sample that they wouldn’t know a train if one…er…..hit them. Despite the vast cultural difference between the two groups, however, they both judged the situation in almost exactly the same way, supporting the idea that moral decision-making is more instinctive than conditioned. Instinctive judgements, by definition, are not arrived at rationally, so this may explain why many of our moral presumptions are nonsense. Most people, for example, think it is worse to attain a given end by actively harming someone, than to achieve the same end by omitting to prevent the harm occurring. Another thought experiment illustrates the point: Scenario one is this: Six-month-old Jimmy is all that stands between his Wicked Uncle Sidney and a large inheritance. So Sid has volunteered to baby-sit his nephew with the intention of doing him in. Come bath time he plans to hold the baby under the water, then claim that the drowning happened when he momentarily left the room. Jimmy’s Mum places the baby in the bath before she leaves the house, then hands over to Sidney who enters the bathroom and duly murders the child. In scenario two Sid enters the bathroom full of evil intent but then sees that little Jimmy has tipped himself upside down and is about to drown anyway. Sidney could scoop him out and save his life or he could do nothing. He decides to do nothing. When people are asked to measure out blame in each case, they invariably rate Sid’s active drowning of Jimmy as more morally reprehensible than his omission to save him. Yet in both cases Sidney’s intention – to bring about the death of Jimmy – is identical, and so are the consequences. These are the factors that people consciously think matter, yet their judgement does not reflect this. Using thought experiments like these, Hauser has determined that our moral judgements are based on three largely “hidden” principles: One – as shown by the Sidney/Jimmy scenario – is that harm caused by positive action is morally worse than equivalent harm caused by omission. The second is that doing harm in order to achieve a goal is worse than knowingly allowing harm to be done in pursuit of the goal. To illustrate this Hauser uses another version of the runaway train theme. The train is again on course to run over five people, but you can divert it. Instead of sending it off in another direction, though, this diversion takes the train on to a loop which rejoins the main track before it reaches the hitchhikers. There would be no point in sending it this way, except that there happens to be a very fat man walking along the tracks on the loop so if you do the train would hit the fat man and his weight would bring it to a halt. Five people would thus be saved, and one killed. This is very similar to the “basic” runaway train experiment, but whereas in that the one who was killed was a “side effect” of preventing the others’ death, in this case he is the means by which the train is stopped. It seems like a subtle difference – so subtle, in fact, that most of us don’t see it unless it is spelt out. Yet unconsciously it makes a lot of difference: whereas 90% think its ok to allow the man to be killed, only about half of us agree that it is ok to kill him in order to save others. The third principle is that doing harm by using physical contact is worse than harm done at arm’s length. If people are asked if it is ok to use the fat man to stop the train by actually pushing him into its path, the number who say yes drops right down to 11%, even though – for the fat man the distinction is really quite academic. Thought experiments may seem like a game but these ones have serious implications because the way that we judge right or wrong determines our whole system of crime and punishment. Speeding a person’s demise, for example, is legal if it involves not doing something that would prolong life, but (in most places) illegal if involves actively doing something to bring about death. Killing civilians in a war is a criminal act, but when the deaths are called “collateral damage” they are treated as merely regrettable. By exposing these intuitive, nonsensical, judgements runaway trains, hungry crocodiles and wicked Uncles may yet help to make our world a fairer place. To take the Harvard Moral Sense Test click here © Rita Carter 19XX/2007 - ritacarter.co.uk