Would You Kill the Fat Man (14 page)

Interestingly, too, showing Fat Man prior to Spur makes people far less likely to endorse turning the trolley in Spur. The ordering affects not just non-philosophers but those with PhDs in philosophy too. And we can play around with responses to moral dilemmas in other ways. Responses will vary according to whether questions are put in the third person—”Would it be wrong for
Philippa
to turn the trolley?”—or first—”Would it be wrong for
you
to turn the trolley?”

All of which leaves us with the problem of which intuitions to take seriously. How do we decide whether showing Spur first has sensitized and improved our intuitions about Spur, or coarsened and distorted them? If we want a good look at a stick, we know not to immerse it half in water: for that will make it seem bent even when it’s not. If we want a good look at the colors in a painting, we need to observe the work of art in a room that’s well lit. What equivalent account can be given of intuitions? How do we know that we’re seeing a moral problem under ideal conditions—that we’re seeing them, as it were, well lit?

That’s a puzzle for which philosophers have not yet provided a satisfactory answer. But playing around with the wording and the ordering does not eliminate the gap in response between Fat Man and Spur. The gap can be narrowed, but only to a degree. In whatever form the problem is presented, the majority still think it right to turn the train in Spur and wrong to kill the Fat Man. And that gap, with only minor variations, exists among all groups of people, in all cultures.

This has led to a new hypothesis. The trolley problems may illustrate that human morality is innate—and that, for example, the Doctrine of Double Effect, first expounded nearly a millennium ago by Saint Thomas Aquinas, is hardwired into us.

CHAPTER 11

Dudley’s Choice and the Moral Instinct

Among so many inhuman and bizarre cults, among this prodigious diversity of morals and characters, you will find everywhere the same ideas of justice and decency, everywhere the same notions of good and bad.

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau

IN TOKYO, BLOWING YOUR NOSE loudly in public is considered the height of vulgarity. From culture to culture, practices of burping, belching, farting, spitting, body-scratching, bottom-wiping, lip-smacking, bowing, shaking hands, holding hands, food chewing, soup slurping, nail-biting, tooth-picking, and kissing vary widely. In parts of France, a couple of friends might greet each other with two cheek pecks: in some suburbs of Paris, four has become the norm—four more than is perhaps advisable in Riyadh.

Etiquette and manners encompass innumerable aspects of life: table manners, body language, dress code, facial hair, tipping and haggling, styles of exchanging gifts, ways to address friends and strangers. Those applying for British citizenship are
supposed to know that in the pub people take turns buying a round of drinks.

It’s tricky to demarcate a firm boundary between etiquette and morality. For a westerner (at least for this westerner), watching men in parts of Asia (hardly ever women) shut one nostril while snorting mucus out of the other still elicits a degree of visceral disgust. But this feeling is compatible with holding the belief that there is no right way, no objectively correct means, of maintaining nasal hygiene. The notion of blowing your nose into a handkerchief and stuffing it in your pocket seems revolting to some people. Different cultures have different practices. But what practice counts as etiquette and what morality? A Londoner and a Parisian would regard the difference in how they greet members of the opposite sex—two kisses or three—as one of etiquette. A Saudi imam might believe public kissing is not merely revolting, but immoral.

Morality is taken more seriously than manners and is usually thought to imply a universal quality.
¹
Those who oppose female circumcision, or female genital mutilation, as it’s come to be called, hold that it’s immoral wherever it takes place, even if the practice in some parts of the world is widespread. However, although, when we make a moral statement we intend its universal application, it appears self-evident that moral practices, like practices of etiquette, vary widely. Abortion carries less stigma in Denmark than in Malta; the average inhabitant of Texas is pro capital punishment, many more people from Maine oppose it; homosexuality is seen as perfectly legitimate by most people in San Francisco, yet an abomination by many in Kampala.

Perhaps all the stranger then, that some academics claim that humans have an innate, universal moral sense: and to bolster this claim, they cite evidence from trolleyology.

Born Moral

How is it that we recognize that the sentence “runaway trolleys that are stationary smell morbidly” is a grammatical sentence, though nonsense, but “stationary smell are runaway trolleys that morbid” is not?

Noam Chomsky made his academic reputation through his pioneering work in linguistics in the 1950s and ’60s. He asserted that the language instinct was innate. “Colourless green ideas sleep furiously” is a grammatical sentence. It’s a well-formed sentence in syntactical terms. “Furiously sleep ideas green colourless” is not. We have an instinctive grasp for what’s grammatically permissible in language and what isn’t.

What struck Chomsky was that normal children acquire language remarkably easily, following rules that they are often not explicitly taught. Not only do they rapidly learn to distinguish grammatical from nongrammatical sentences, but they soon grasp other vital skills of the language user, such as the ability to identify contradictions or ambiguities. From a finite set of words and phrases they are able to construct an infinite number of sentences. None of this would be possible, argued Chomsky, unless we were somehow programmed to speak a language.

This program, or recipe, must be of a very general kind. A baby born in Guangzhou will grow up to speak Cantonese, a baby born in Budapest will learn Hungarian, and a baby born in Glasgow will speak English (though in an accent impenetrable to some fellow citizens). On the face of it, Chinese, Hungarian, and English have little in common. Nonetheless, said Chomsky, all these languages must share some kind of common structure.

Once children can speak a language, they develop strong and reliable and rapid instincts for what is linguistically kosher and what isn’t. Strangely, however, language users cannot always justify their intuitions. They seem to follow rules subconsciously. Take the following example: most native English speakers would not say, “The black, terrifying, large trolley was out of control.” That sounds a bit wrong, linguistically off-key. They would be more likely to say, instead, “The terrifying, large, black trolley was out of control.” But why is the latter word order the correct one? Most people would struggle to give an instant response. In fact, they’d probably struggle to give an accurate response even given time to reflect on the matter.
²
The rules we’ve somehow absorbed are Byzantine. In “Colourless green ideas sleep furiously,” we must know that “adjective, adjective, noun, verb, adverb” is a pattern that works, whereas its opposite, “adverb, verb, noun, adjective, adjective” does not.

In the 1990s, one of Chomsky’s graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, John Mikhail, wondered whether the linguistic model could be transposed to morality—and set about testing parallels with examples from trolleyology.

If there was a strong parallel, then children might be expected to have the same intuitions about the trolley cases as adults. And this is exactly what Mikhail found. He follows the psychologist Jonathan Haidt in describing children as “intuitive lawyers,” although for Mikhail, a legal scholar, this is a positive description, while for Haidt it is a term of gentle mockery.
³
Kids make startlingly sophisticated moral judgments that mirror not just adult morality, but complex legal systems. Three- and four-year-olds use the idea of intentionality to distinguish two acts that have the same consequences: the person
who mistakenly bumps into a man, causing him to tumble over the footbridge, and the person who deliberately does so. The law, and ordinary morality, make the same distinction. Four- and five-year-olds recognize a far more complex distinction, again similar to a legal distinction—between a mistake of fact and a mistake of law. Thus, a trolley driver might run over a bundle, assuming it’s just leaves, and not realizing it’s a man. This might be a mistake of fact, and offered as an excuse. If there were a good reason for this mistake to have occurred, this reason would certainly be considered relevant in assessing the driver’s guilt. But if the trolley driver explains that he was perfectly aware of the man on the track but mistakenly believed it was permissible to flatten people with vehicles, well that’s an error of law, and hardly an excuse.

The moral hardwiring, so the thesis goes, operates at a very abstract level, just as language does. Our rules do not have specific content (like, “do not insult your mother-in-law”), and there will be some local variations in morality, just as there are among languages. A universal law in language might be that a grammatical sentence contains a subject, verb, and object—but the order in which these appear differs from language to language: German speakers put the verb at the end of a sentence. Likewise, there will be some differences in morality from culture to culture. One study, carried out in India, examined the role of social and cultural expectations in trolley judgments. When the agent was of the scholarly (Brahmin) caste, participants disapproved of him pushing someone to save five lives; they were much more likely to approve if the pusher came from the warrior (Kshatriya) caste. Nonetheless, the claim is that the deep abstract rules (like, “do not intentionally harm the innocent”) are universal.

Working with Mikhail, Marc Hauser, a (then) Harvard researcher in the same field, found, in another parallel with language, that moral intuitions were almost instantaneous and predictable over any number of unique cases—cases subjects had not previously confronted. What’s more, if people were quizzed about why they held the intuitions they did, they often found them difficult to explain or justify. They would say things like, “I have no idea why I’ve changed my mind,” or “I don’t understand why this case seems different from the earlier one.” Or they might be self-deprecatory, and somewhat embarrassed: “I know I’m not being rational, but these cases seem to me to be unalike.” When justifications did emerge, they could vary wildly. Hauser writes: “This incapacity to generate an appropriate explanation is not restricted to the young or uneducated, but rather includes educated adults, males and females, with or without a background in moral philosophy or religion.”
⁴
There were appeals to God, to emotions, to hunches, to rules (don’t kill!), to consequences (five saved better than one saved), and, Hauser reports, one blunt rationalization: “shit happens.”

By tweaking variables from the original trolley case, Mikhail and his co-researchers were able to extract elements of what Mikhail believes may be our innate morality. Here are two of his examples. All his cases involve a train out of control and about to kill five people.

MARK AND INTENTIONAL HOMICIDE

There is a man on the side track. Mark can throw [a] switch, killing him; or he can refrain from doing this, letting the five men die. Mark then recognizes that the man on the side track is someone whom he hates with a passion. “I don’t give a damn about saving those five men,” Mark thinks to himself, “but this is my chance to kill that bastard.” Is it morally permissible for Mark to throw the switch?

WALTER AND THE COLLAPSED BRIDGE

Walter is standing next to a switch, which he can throw, that will collapse a footbridge overlooking the tracks into the path of the train, thereby preventing it from killing the men. There is a man standing on the footbridge. Walter can throw the switch, killing him; or he can refrain from doing this, letting the five die. Is it morally permissible for Walter to throw the switch?
⁵

When Mikhail put these cases to his subjects, a substantial majority found it unacceptable for Mark to throw the switch, but permissible for Walter. With a slight variation from the original Spur and Fat Man scenarios, Mikhail had turned the intuitions around. He elicited quite different intuitions by changing facts about people’s intentions. And it’s easy to imagine how modifying other factors might influence intuitions too. Suppose in Spur:

• THE FIVE PEOPLE on the track were suffering from some dreadful disease and were going to die soon anyway, while the person on the spur was a child. Or

• WE DISCOVERED that the one man on the spur had unjustly and against his will been tied onto the track by five fascist bullies who had later become trapped on the main line only after crossing the rails in pursuit of another hapless victim? Or

• THE FIVE WERE strangers, but the one was your daughter. Or

• THE MAN ON THE SPUR was Einstein (or Stalin!), while the other five were ordinary Joes and Joannas like you and me.

Most of the scenarios in the trolley literature tend to exclude personal information about the individuals whose lives are at risk—including any wrongs they may have committed or any specific rights and entitlements they can or cannot appeal to. They are not even supplied with a name, let alone more substantial biographical details. But a more sophisticated picture of our moral grammar could encompass many more variables and a rich account of how they interact.

A nineteenth-century story of a digested British cabin boy illuminates a particularly interesting nuance in our moral grammar, while an Italian polymath helps put this tale into context.