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On the one hand, purely mathematically, five lives are more valuable than one. At the same time, most of us will intuitively agree that killing innocents is wrong in any situation. Scientists decided to find out how we act in situations of moral choice and what this says about us.
A group of American and British psychologists decided to test the hypothesis that such a tendency to “inflexible” moral beliefs is built into us evolutionarily and we instinctively tend to trust people with strong moral principles.
Scientists conducted 9 experiments, in which a total of more than 2400 people took part. Participants were asked what they would do in situations of moral choice, in particular, whether they would be willing to commit “evil” to prevent even more evil (for example, deliberately killing an innocent person to stop an unruly tram that is about to run over several people, or finish off a wounded comrade stuck in a trap so that he is not captured by enemies who will torture him).
The researchers then assessed how much the participants trusted each other. To do this, they were offered to lend money to each other. It turned out that those who refused to sacrifice the lives of innocents during the thought experiment were most willing to lend money (participants knew each other’s answers). There was less trust in those who eventually agreed to sacrifice the life of one to save many, but made this decision with difficulty and after much hesitation. And finally, the least trustworthy were those participants who easily and quickly made the most “rational” decision – the one that formally led to the least casualties.
It is noteworthy that in some scenarios it was possible to take into account the opinion of the potential victims themselves (for example, a wounded soldier could beg not to kill him or, on the contrary, ask him to be killed in order to avoid torture in captivity). In these cases, the most trusted participants were those who listened to the wishes of the “victims”, no matter what those wishes were.
David Edmonds
“Would you kill a fat man?”
Imagine: you are standing on a bridge over the railway tracks, along which an uncontrolled trolley rushes.
“This helps explain why we like people who follow “intuitive” moral rules more – it’s not that they follow the letter of the law, but that they respect the wishes of other people,” says one of the authors of the study, Professor David Pizarro from Cornell University (USA).
“We are talking about the differences between the two moral and ethical models. The first of these is the consequentialist ethic that we should strive to bring the greatest possible good to the maximum number of people, even if it means doing some evil, such as killing one person to save five. If we follow a deontological ethic, for which it is important to observe rules and obligations, then killing an innocent person is always immoral, even if it formally does more good (saves more lives). “By default” people usually follow exactly deontological ethics, and it seems that it is precisely this that is “natural” for us, but why? Psychologists have argued that the reason is in our “irrational” emotional reactions, but our research shows another reason – popularity in society. If the majority of people choose to do business and maintain relationships with those who adhere to strong moral principles, then it becomes profitable to adhere to these principles, and over time they will be extended to an increasing part of the population. This is logical because any of us would feel uneasy if we imagine our friend or partner calmly calculating benefits and costs, considering whether we are worth sacrificing for the greater good, ”says study co-author Jim Everett (Jim Everett) from Oxford University (UK).
Подробнее см. J. Everett et al. «Inference of Trustworthiness From Intuitive Moral Judgments», Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, April 2016.