Wednesday, March 28, 2007
More problems with trolley problems
It's surprising how many people are currently worried about what to do about runaway trolleys which threaten to run over a group of otherwise anonymous people. Hot on the heels of a study which seemed to show that sleep deprivation promoted consequentialist reactions to moral dilemmas comes a study which seems to indicate that patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VPMC) are similarly more likely to opt for promoting the 'greatest good for the greatest number' even in so-called 'Personal Moral Scenarios'. (I gave some examples of what these are in an earlier post.)
A report of the study (involving, it has to be said, only 30 subjects) appeared in brief on the New Scientist Website and it appears to use very similar scenarios to the sleep deprivation study. The New Scientist report makes some excessively grand claims about how these findings might offer a radical challenge to ethical philosophy, but there is probably something interesting going on.
I have no idea quite what the VPMC does, exactly, but I bet that it is more complicated than just being involved in 'the emotions'. Precisely what an emotion is, for a start, would be a good question to ask, and it certainly does not follow from this experiment that we need to go for any kind of dualist moral psychology, with on one side the rational calculating faculty and on the other the affective emotional faculty. True, when wondering whether to push someone on to a train line to prevent a greater loss of life further down the tracks, there are all sorts of considerations which we might take into account. Some are rightly concerned with the numbers of people involved in each alternative; others are to do with a personal feeling of responsibility; yet more are to do with fear or excitement or panic. In fact, there is a very good case for the view that all these scenarios seriously misrepresent what it would be like to face any such dilemma in reality. We certainly wouldn't be faced solely with a bare set of propositions, designed by the experimenter to point towards the single variable subject to the testing. Rather, it would be a complicated situation affected by all sorts of factors to do with one's current disposition, the way the surroundings are and are perceived and so on.
In short, scenarios like those touted by this kind of test seem to me not really to offer any significant information about ethical thinking 'in the wild'. While they are useful ways of illustrating particular ethical theoretical views, our reactions to them are hardly indicative of our likely behaviour. It is common, for example, for a student to tell me that they would 'obviously' choose to divert a trolley to kill one person rather than five. I have no idea whether that is true and, I imagine, nor do they. Are they really able to imagine what it would be like to be faced with such a situation? I can't.
People still interested in exploring this kind of thought-experiment might like to ponder the following teaser, by Michael F. Patton jr.:On Twin Earth, a brain in a vat is at the wheel of a runaway trolley. There are only two options that the brain can take: the right side of the fork in the track or the left side of the fork. There is no way in sight of derailing or stopping the trolley and the brain is aware of this, for the brain knows trolleys. The brain is causally hooked up to the trolley such that the brain can determine the course which the trolley will take.
On the right side of the track there is a single railroad worker, Jones, who will definitely be killed if the brain steers the trolley to the right. If the railman on the right lives, he will go on to kill five men for the sake of killing them, but in doing so will inadvertently save the lives of thirty orphans (one of the five men he will kill is planning to destroy a bridge that the orphans' bus will be crossing later that night). One of the orphans that will be killed would have grown up to become a tyrant who would make good utilitarian men do bad things. Another of the orphans would grow up to become G.E.M. Anscombe, while a third would invent the pop-top can.
There's an explanation of the example here. There is a variation on the example here.
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Choppa's response:
Very briefly, I think the whole issue of "ethical" choices is weird and unreal. So many of us are removed from any opportunity of making real decisions in our lives, of the kind that leave a taste of blood in your mouth. No wonder adrenalin is sought as a substitute for blood that's more readily available - anger, cheating, humiliation, extreme display behaviour, substitute slaughter by proxy or fiction, etc.
The big social decisions, like mutiny vs conformity, are particularly repressed.
In the post-Alexander Greek world, Epicurus rejected Democritus's determinism for freedom at all levels of being - atomic to social interaction. But he remained locked in the subjective experience of the individual, with ataraxy, a cheerful tranquillity:
[...] sapias! vina liques et spatio breuias his goal - something for the happy enlightened few against a backdrop of war, slavery, disease, natural disasters, and (as in Horace's poem) the wintry pounding of the Tyrrhenian Sea on the sharp rocky shore. Lucretius, Roman that he was, had a more missionary, proselytizing, engineering approach than Epicurus, using fiery rhetoric as his instrument. But his social intension was concealed beneath his loyalty to his master regarding the goal of individual emancipation from the corrosive terror of ignorance and the superstitious bonds of organized religion.
spem longam reseces. dum loquimur fugerit inuida
aetas. carpe diem! quam minimum credula postero.
So instead of foisting weird conundrums onto unprepared and unwilling objects - a kind of philosophical rape with little wisdom and less love - why not ask people if they have ever in their lives actually taken a real decision - life-changing, if not life-or-death? And then discussing it with them and comparing with the questioner's personal experience.
She finishes off:
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Choppa's response:
FUD - "fear, uncertainty, doubt"
Always works - with kids ("what's daddy going to do now?"), spouses ("lovely dress", "where'd the money come from?"), employees ("good work", "afraid you're just not a team player") etc etc.
The smiling, reptilian, unpredictably violent mafia boss (Little Napoleon in Some Like It Hot).
RD Laing describes the pathology well in "The Divided Self". Mixed messages, double binds and so on.
More relevant to political thuggery is Trotsky's analysis of Stalin and Stalinism, for instance in The Revolution Betrayed:
Here it becomes clear what the mass social base for the political regime of Stalinism was - a broad and diffuse crowd of privileged union and party bureaucrats. The minimal cultural level and maximal insecurity of these people defies belief, of course. Similar traits characterized the social base of imperial thuggery, except that that comprised a broad and diffuse crowd of slave-owning landowners, top military brass and moneylenders.
Of course, the Roman thugs already had slaves and rule by clout, although they had to disembowel the old body of the republic to achieve completely arbitrary rule by force. The Stalinist gangs had real trouble creating slavery and arbitrary rule. The emperors had the wind of history in their sails, the Stalinists didn't - just the putrescent gases of a much more powerful capitalist world market.
Orwell caught the gloomy atmosphere of oppression very well in 1984, as did Huxley the showbiz aspects of it in Brave New World. What the German and perhaps the Russian postmortems on Stalinism will produce will hopefully take us a bit nearer the limits of dystopia. A pre-post-mortem so to speak was Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita (useful brief intro on Wikipedia). Farewell to Lenin, the Stasi Museum(s) and so on, like a French novel I recently read about Brecht and the Stasi (La Maîtresse de Brecht. (Brecht’s Mistress) by Jacques-Pierre Amette), highlight the BANALITY of what was going on. Suburban totalitarianism. The Nazi ethos without Ragnarök/Götterdämmerung. Carpet-slipper sadism at the dawn of a new day instead of the fiery end of a dying epoch.
Plenty of contradictions of the most titanic kind. Plenty to hate and spew bile over - and... yet...
Almost twenty years on the ordinary people of the old Eastern Bloc are still not at ease with their new system, and don't feel at home in it. And the shreds of the old Doris Day/Bing Crosby optimism of the Free World are lying in stinking piles around our ankles like the melted rubber of overinflated balloons.
Eppur si muove, I think Galileo would mutter about world history today. No stasis, despite the best efforts of the Stasi and the States.