Would You Kill the Fat Man (19 page)

The related thought is that ascribing ideas, choices and motives, desires and prejudices, to the brain is some sort of category error. Ryle was influenced by Wittgenstein, and many critics of neuroscience are themselves Wittgensteinians. The Wittgensteinian critique of neuroscience is that psychological attributes cannot be ascribed to brains; they can only be ascribed to human beings. The mind, they say, is not identical to the brain. I can be confused (in two minds) about whether to turn the trolley. My brain is not confused. I can recoil at the thought of using physical force to kill a fat man. My brain cannot be aghast at such a prospect. I can calculate that it is better to lose one life rather than five: it makes no sense to say my brain does this calculation. Of course, if my brain didn’t function, I wouldn’t function, but that’s not to say that I am identical to my brain. A train wouldn’t function without an engine, but the train is not identical to the engine.
²²

But for the most part the neuroskeptics are throwing feather darts at straw men. On the whole, when neuroscientists talk about the brain being confused, or aghast, they are speaking metaphorically.
²³
The neuroskeptic then charges the neuroscientist with another error. The neuroskeptic says that behavior is best understood not by peering into a brain, but by situating a person in the environment. But this too is a feeble missile. For only the crassest scientist claims that brain activity is the single or the best explanation for human behavior and conscious states, or that it’s any substitute at all for other types of explanation. It is indeed silly to say that a description of being
in love, or an explanation for a person’s political ideology, could be located in a particular area of the brain. Love and politics can’t be reduced to some sort of chemical commotion. A brain is situated in a body. And people belong to cultures and societies. An answer to why a person voted Democrat or Republican cannot be confined to an account of the neural pinball at work between the ears.

Nonetheless, being in love and having a particular political ideology are impossible without the brain, and neuroscientists are now discovering fascinating correlations between some acts, beliefs, and feelings and neurological activity, evidence that can’t be dismissed. As we’ve seen, an injury to the ventro-medial prefrontal cortex can alter moral judgment. We also now understand that the prefrontal cortex is involved in inhibition—and if it is eroded by, say, dementia, sufferers might end up “shoplifting in front of store managers, removing their clothes in public, running stop signs, breaking out in song at inappropriate times, eating food scraps found in public trash cans….”
²⁴
Equally, neuroscientists are discovering more about the chemicals that drive abnormal and destructive behavior, like addiction, be it to food, gambling, sex, or shopping. The neurotransmitter, dopamine, is a key player here. There have been many tragic cases of sufferers with Parkinson’s disease being treated with dopaminergic medications and then being unable to control their impulses, costing them their savings, careers, and marriages.

This raises the intriguing possibility that we ourselves could begin to tamper with the brain to alter our moral outlook—and thus alter our judgments in the trolley cases….

CHAPTER 14

Bionic Trolley

You do look glum! What you need is a gramme of soma.

—Aldous Huxley,
Brave New World

The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.

—Ernest Hemingway

IF JEREMY BENTHAM RULED the world he would encourage the toppling of fat men over footbridges, where this sacrifice was necessary for the greater good. But ordinary folk can’t bring themselves to push the fat man. Ordinary folk don’t believe that their primary obligation is to maximize happiness; they believe that there are constraints on their behavior, such as a prohibition on harming innocent individuals. Even if they were persuaded by Jeremy Bentham, and did push the fat man, they’d probably feel terrible remorse afterward: perhaps they’d suffer flashbacks and nightmares. Bentham would no doubt regard any guilt or regret as irrational. But humans aren’t always in control of their emotions. Striving to be utilitarian might have the perverse effect of making us unhappy.

Fortunately, help from the laboratory is now at hand. Scientists are learning more and more about how memory works. The hippocampus (the size of a little finger and so-called because it loosely resembles a sea horse) is the area of the brain that is thought to cement memory, arranging and ordering beliefs and images. The almond-shaped amygdala signals to the hippocampus which memories it is important to store. The more intense the emotional arousal in the amygdala, the more likely a memory is to be retained.

Evolution, as usual, is to be congratulated for coming up with a thoroughly pragmatic arrangement. We forget most things that have happened to us. But if we’re attacked by a stranger in the street, we need to ensure that we remember this menacing episode: we don’t want to find ourselves in a similarly perilous situation again. Sometimes such an episode causes an overreaction: the emotional impact of what we experience is so intense that it blows a memory fuse. This seems to be what occurs with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), a condition long taken seriously by the military. PTSD sufferers are constantly reminded of the harrowing event. Their memories might be triggered, say, by the bang of an exhaust pipe (sounding like an explosion of a shell) as well as by more tenuous links to the traumatic episode. A soldier who witnessed a friend shot in a trench might have a panic attack on seeing a muddy field.

Some time ago, researchers found out that if within a few hours of a disturbing episode, subjects took propranolol, a beta-blocker, they were less likely to develop PTSD. More recent studies show that propranolol can assist even those who have suffered PTSD for years. Memory specialists use an analogy to explain the drug’s impact. Imagine that you order a book in a library. The book is collected from the stacks. If you read it by
an open window with the sun streaming in, the book will become slightly bleached. When you hand the book back, what gets stored is a fainter copy. Propranolol operates like aggressive bleaching sunlight. If subjects with PTSD are prompted to conjure up the unwelcome recurring memory while being injected with the drug, then the memory is restacked in the brain in a weakened state.

So in theory, even if we were squeamish about pushing the fat man, drugs might soon be available to allow us to emasculate the memory of doing so. But there may be a more direct way to influence our approach to the trolley problem—a pill not to dull the trauma, but to modify our values.

The Moral Dispensary

Science will soon offer up a giddying smorgasbord of enhancement possibilities: physical enhancement, cognitive enhancement, mood enhancement. Some drugs are already available. For decades, cheating athletes have turned to chemical/biological performance boosters to improve a range of physical skills—and such drugs and medical interventions are becoming increasingly targeted and sophisticated. The same is true for cognitive enhancement. Coffee drinkers have long known about the restorative qualities of caffeine. But as neuroscientists discover more about how we learn languages, read music, identify patterns, focus on tasks, memorize facts, and multiply numbers, so there will inevitably be pills designed for ever more specific functions.

The idea of mood enhancement pills smacks of a
Brave New World
. In Aldous Huxley’s futuristic novel (published in 1932), soma keeps everyone in a state of subdued contentment.
The reader feels that the hallucinogen is an agent of control, and makes the lives of those who consume it inauthentic and divorced from reality. Yet beer drinkers have long known about the swift and impressive impact of lager and ale on mood and inhibition, and drugs like Prozac, prescribed for depression, have become so ubiquitous in parts of the developed world that there’s barely any social stigma attached to their use.

Even more contentious than mood-changing, however, is moral “improvement.” The influence of parents, in particular, but also friends, teachers, and society more widely, remains the most effective lever on attitudes and behavior. That will not always necessarily be the case. Our knowledge of the chemical and biological underpinnings involved in our ethical evaluations is nascent but rapidly progressing. We’re beginning to understand the role and impact of natural chemicals such as oxytocin, testosterone, vasopressin, serotonin, and dopamine. By tampering with the quantities absorbed in the human body, psychologists, doctors, and philosophers are discovering how these chemicals alter behavior, how they change attitudes toward risk, toward negotiation, bargaining, and cooperation, toward impulse control and reward gratification. Even toward breeding and sex.

If you want to learn about the birds and the bees, one useful place to start is the prairie vole. These rodents, with their stout bodies and hairy tails, are not the most alluring creatures, at least seen through human eyes. But, fortunately for the survival of their species, the male and female prairie voles find each other more fetching. Indeed, once they’ve identified a mate, they remain in apparently blissful union, sexually faithful, for the duration of their short lives.

The prairie vole has a near cousin, the meadow vole. The male meadow vole differs in one particular: he is highly promiscuous, a bit of a love rat. It transpires that when the prairie vole mates, a hormone called vasopressin is released, and the cells that respond to the vasopressin—the receptors—are located in the pleasure areas of the brain. The mating partner of the prairie vole is a cause of the pleasure, and thus a bond between the pair is formed. With meadow moles, however, the receptors are in a different part of the brain, so mating doesn’t produce the same compulsion to pair. But by introducing a single new gene, one that influences vasopressin receptors, scientists managed to convert male meadow voles into loyal lovers.

When it comes to love and sex, humans and voles seem to have a lot in common. A study of Swedish twin brothers found that differences in the way that the hormone vasopressin was absorbed correlated strongly with how well each man fared in marriage, assessed by levels of infidelity and divorce. It is not overly fanciful to imagine that one day we may demand that our partners be tested for the hormone, or farther into the future, even use gene therapy to foster sexual fidelity.

That’s sex. Can we also modify attitudes to another intractable divider of society: race? Propranolol, the beta-blocker discussed above, has a variety of curious effects over and above its impact on memory. There’s a test anybody can take, the Implicit Attitude Test, in which certain words, nice words (such as peace, laughter, pleasure) and nasty words (evil, failure, hurt) have to be attached to black and white faces. Most people want to believe they’re not racist and are likely to find their results disconcerting. The IAT shows that we carry around with us varying degrees of subconscious racial bias: we’re quicker to
associate nasty words with black faces than with white. And black people themselves tend to exhibit the same bias. But if we’re given propranolol before taking the test, much of the implicit bias disappears.
¹

Changing ethical behavior and judgment with chemicals is no longer an option restricted to the world of sci-fi novelists. And how people react to the trolley scenarios when taking them has proved a useful indicator of whether and how certain chemicals can transform their moral convictions. The impact of propranolol on judgments in trolley scenarios is still unclear.
²
But experimentalists have modified various hormones and in so doing altered responses: for example, one study adjusted levels of serotonin in the body. It found that increasing levels of serotonin made people less utilitarian, less willing to push the fat man.

But the trolley problem is not the only test available to scientists wanting to determine how they can modulate our morality. Another involves the division of a fistful of dollars.

The Ultimatum Game

The Pullman Strike in the United States in the nineteenth century is typical of many strikes. It was colossally expensive for the Pullman Company and a disaster for the union and its members. The strike cost the railroads alone nearly around $4.5 million in lost revenue and another $700,000 in expenses. The 100,000 striking employees lost wages worth an estimated $1.4 million.

The phrase “win-win,” which derives from Game Theory, has entered popular parlance. The phrase “lose-lose-lose” has
not. But lose-lose-lose was the Pullman outcome: it’s often the outcome of strikes. Companies lose. Workers lose. Invariably, the public loses too. It might be regarded as irrational for unions to pursue an approach that makes them worse off. Well, maybe so, at least under one definition of rationality. But in such matters humans are not always rational creatures—as an experiment in a basement in Queen Square at London University has investigated.

Picture the scene. There are two apparently thirsty men. Let’s call them Harry and Olly. Harry and Olly have never met. They are offered a beaker of water to share. The first man, Harry, divides the water into two glasses. Into his glass he pours three-quarters of the beaker: into Olly’s glass he decants the remaining quarter. Olly looks a little annoyed. But he’s been given a choice. He can drink the amount Harry’s offered him or he can reject it. If he rejects it, neither man gets anything to drink.

Olly has spent the past hour attached to a saline drip: his head aches a little, his mouth is dry, and any water is better than no water. But he looks at Harry’s almost full glass of cool refreshment, then at his own measly amount, and he shakes his head: he’ll be damned if he’ll allow Harry to take almost all the drink for himself.