The Moral Sense

Steven Pinker has an article in this week's New York Times Magazine that is pretty fascinating. I have read most of Pinker's book How The Mind Works, and enjoyed it.

Among many other ideas Pinker considers is the mechanism by which the mind makes moralistic calculations. Consider, for example:

On your morning walk, you see a trolley car hurtling down the track, the conductor slumped over the controls. In the path of the trolley are five men working on the track, oblivious to the danger. You are standing at a fork in the track and can pull a lever that will divert the trolley onto a spur, saving the five men. Unfortunately, the trolley would then run over a single worker who is laboring on the spur. Is it permissible to throw the switch, killing one man to save five? Almost everyone says “yes."

Consider now a different scene. You are on a bridge overlooking the tracks and have spotted the runaway trolley bearing down on the five workers. Now the only way to stop the trolley is to throw a heavy object in its path. And the only heavy object within reach is a fat man standing next to you. Should you throw the man off the bridge? Both dilemmas present you with the option of sacrificing one life to save five, and so, by the utilitarian standard of what would result in the greatest good for the greatest number, the two dilemmas are morally equivalent. But most people don’t see it that way: though they would pull the switch in the first dilemma, they would not heave the fat man in the second. When pressed for a reason, they can’t come up with anything coherent, though moral philosophers haven’t had an easy time coming up with a relevant difference, either.

We had this debate in ethics this fall. I don't imagine our wisdom-contribution was particularly revolutionary. But it seems that recent research explains how we make up our mind in this situation, and it has to do with an instinctual "revulsion to manhandling an innocent person." There are different regions of the brain involved in the two separate moral questions, which is evidence that moral behavior is based at least partly on biology, not just culture and values.

It's a long article, but I think it's worth the read. Here are Will Wilkinson's thoughts on it.