Consider the following situation. You are on a bridge and observe five pedestrians walking along train tracks. Situated above and well away from them to their rear, they do not spot you as you observe them. You, however, see them and also a trolley car that is rushing down the tracks toward them. A terrible accident is about to befall the five when it occurs to you that if you pull a switch next to you, the trolley car will be diverted along another track.
Unfortunately, this will merely lessen the resulting carnage, as there is also another individual walking along that track, too. Thus, set before you is a classic utilitarian moral dilemma. Do you pull the switch and so kill one in order to save five, or do you do nothing and let nature – meaning the oncoming trolley car – kill the five people you initially observed. In nearly every survey result of this posed question people quickly decide, in overwhelming numbers, to pull the switch.
Now, however, consider another so-called trolley problem. Instead of pulling a switch and diverting the trolley toward the poor, solitary pedestrian walking along the alternative track, there is no alternative track. Instead, the runaway trolley car is barreling down a single track toward the five, and the only potential obstacle between them and their doom is a fat man standing alongside you on the bridge. If you push him over his weight will be enough to stop the trolley in its track, allowing you to once again save the five pedestrians as in the above example.
When asked whether they would kill the fat man, survey results in turn report the exact opposite results of the first scenario – nearly no one would push the fat man to his death in order to save the original five pedestrians. In other words, when asked to make the same choice – kill one in order to save five – people respond near uniformly and instantly. Most would sacrifice the one in the first example, and nearly no one would do so in the second.
Furthermore, when pressed to explain why they made the decision they did, people tend to give vague, logically inconsistent answers to explain their actions. This is especially the case when slight variations to the moral quandary posed above are used to eliminate such factors as the physicality or remoteness of sacrificing the one for the five. People still answer quickly and near uniformly, but they are hard pressed to give a coherent explanation as to why.
These problems, collectively known as ‘trolley problems,’ form the core of a new empirical science of morality that aims to explain why we make the moral and ethical choices that we do.
It is, in other words, an attempt by scientists not to answer the age old question of what we ‘ought’ to do, but rather to explain the ‘why’ behind how we actually behave in practice when actually faced with resolving moral dilemmas. It is a fascinating field.
In addition to the finding that most people answer the same way, another principle discovery of this research is that most people, when posed such questions, provide a solution quickly – nearly instantaneously.
Indeed, response times are so fast that respondents just intuitively ‘know’ which answer is the ‘correct’ one long before their conscious reasoning could possibly puzzle out a logical justification as to why it is ok to kill one to save five in one scenario but not the other. This is true even for respondents such as legal experts, religious clergy, and morality philosophers, who might be expected to have a ready supply of answers to just these type of problems.
The implication is that solving ethical problems of this sort is innate and thus, to some extent at least, an evolved characteristic of human psychology. Since ethical behavior toward others forms the foundation upon which cooperative behavior rests, it should perhaps come as no surprise that, as a social primate, deep within our skulls we have been equipped by nature to solve these basic problems of social living.
Indeed, further experiments along these lines show that genetic relatedness of those we are asked to sacrifice also plays a big role, with a single family member far less likely to be sacrificed than nearly any number of complete strangers.
What’s more, when researchers get away from simple trolley problems – which are admittedly basic – and begin to ask more complex questions about social taboos and public policy, results get more interesting.
Here, rather than answering uniformly one way or the other, respondents tend to sort into one of two camps. The first puts an emphasis on group cohesion, protection, and purity – answering in the negative, for instance, as to whether they would try a disgusting-looking new food or have sexual relations with a complete stranger – while the second batch of respondents puts less emphasis on these factors and as a consequence tends to be more open to novelty, difference, and diversity.
If you think this sounds like the difference between someone who tends to be conservative and someone who tends to be liberal, you’re right.
Work by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and others on moral intuition and reasoning indicates that just as there are five innate taste receptors, there exist in the brain different moral modules that allow people to judge and act upon complex ethical questions.
Presently, Haidt and his colleagues think that there are six such moral nodes that guide us and boil down all ethical actions to considerations of care vs. harm, fairness vs. cheating, liberty vs. oppression, loyalty vs. betrayal, authority vs. subversion, and sanctity vs. degradation.
Curiously, what Haidt has found is that this model works exceedingly well in explaining political differences. Self-identified liberals, for instance, tend to emphasize – or have a taste for – the care, fairness and liberty aspects of a choice, whereas conservatives tend to value – or again, have a taste for – all aspects equally.
These results in turn jibe with other findings from the field of political psychology that have demonstrated that individual predisposition toward one political ideology or another has a large, genetic component that is inherited. Like our personalities, it would seem then that our politics is something that is at least in part passed down to us by virtue of our genetic inheritance.
Thus, a conclusion that seems to be emerging from this new field of scientific morality is that the basic components of our moral-decision calculus are evolved traits – a finding reinforced by research on primates.
Like us, our ape and monkey cousins have been found to exhibit complex social behavior that looks much like human ethics and morality. In one famous experiment, monkeys that were given differing rewards for the same amount of work exhibited a penchant for fairness and moral outrage over being cheated that any human would recognize and empathize with.
So if all this is true, and our moral predispositions are programmed from birth, while at the same time our tendency to be either a conservative or a liberal is also largely based on traits inherited from our parents, why do human societies exhibit so many differences when it comes to ethics and morality?
Here there are two responses, with the first being the most simple: societies, even wildly different ones, are not so different than might appear at first glance. All cultures have rules that govern how well they treat strangers, divide up resources among group members, or to what degree the individual is subsumed by the group. The difference, argues advocates of this new moral science, is in degree, not in kind.
Second, and more complexly, genes and the predisposition to moral traits they represent do not exist in a vacuum. Rather, as with all other human traits like height, intelligence, and immune-system strength, our moral traits are selected against a natural environment that is a crucial determinant of evolutionary success, and it would seem that genes, environment, and culture interact in terribly powerful ways. To see how, imagine two tribes with the same distribution of moral traits and predispositions in each, but with each facing a radically different environment.
In the first, nature is cruel and life is hard. Food is scarce, powerful predators lurk everywhere, and neighboring tribes are aggressive. In this situation it seems likely that more ‘liberal’ traits will be selected against for the simple reason that taking risks by being open to new experiences is a dangerous proposition, as it could quickly get you killed – thus ending your ability to pass those ‘liberal’ genes to your progeny.
Genes and culture interact in this tough environment to reinforce one another in feedback loops that, in turn, create a very ‘conservative’ society with a large number of conservative personality types in it.
In the second, the situation is the reverse. Food is abundant, group members face no predators, and neighboring tribes are friendly. In this situation a ‘conservative’ attitude to life can limit opportunities one has to discover new sources of food, raw materials, or even friends and mating opportunities with the opposite sex. In this case, a mental attitude that ‘battens down the hatches’ is actually a hindrance when it comes to reproductive success, and ‘conservative’ individuals and groups will suffer accordingly. As in the case of the conservative society, genes and culture interact via self-reinforcing feedback loops to create, in this case, a very ‘liberal’ society that is filled with ‘liberal’ personality types.
Since nature tends to oscillate over time in terms of whether conditions are tough or pleasant, it makes sense that these two basic attitudes toward how we feel about morality and the organization of social life should persist over time in societies around the world. After all, a society that was always consistently conservative would quickly find itself too stodgy to take advantage of benign conditions when they emerged, while societies that were always liberal might be too unstable to weather conditions when times get rough. A healthy mix thus gives the group the flexibility it needs to survive all conditions, not merely just the bad or the good.
Is there, however, any evidence of this? Experiments using what’s known as the ‘ultimatum’ game – a set up where a pot of resources to be divided between two test subjects is divided by one subject, known as the proposer, and is either accepted or rejected, in which case both get nothing, by the other subject, known as the disposer – indicates that just such a relationship between environmental conditions and attitudes toward things like fairness exists.
What’s more, decades-long survey research projects that quiz people around the world on their attitudes toward a whole host of moral and ethical questions points pretty conclusively to the idea that wealth, physical security, and generally benign conditions leads individuals and their societies to emphasize individual liberty over group solidarity, moral acceptance of difference and diversity, and a whole host of other, well, generally ‘liberal’ attributes and attitudes.
So what does all this mean? While this new science does little to tell us what we should do when presented with any particular moral dilemma, it does indicate that human beings nonetheless reason about these things in a similar way. Where we differ, we do so for reasons that are both partly genetic – as in the case of the individual ‘taste’ for a certain type of morality or social organization – as well as environmental – as is the case in differing attitudes toward things like sex and religion that exist between the world’s different cultures. There is, therefore, a method to our particular madness.
What’s more, this research holds out the optimistic hope that as humanity grows richer and people grow ever more physically secure in their person and property, there might in fact be something of a global convergence on attitudes that could broadly be defined as liberal.
Indeed, the diverse cultures of the West have already seen this process play out over time. For non-Western cultures this doesn’t mean Westernization per se if foreordained – China will not become America – but rather that liberalization along lines set down by each society in nonetheless likely. Here Japan, which is both liberal but nonetheless culturally distinct, is a good model of how this might play out elsewhere.
All this didn’t happen overnight, of course, but it shows that deeply illiberal societies – like those found in Dark Ages Europe – can nonetheless transform their moral universe in deeply profound ways given enough change over time.
With science now suggesting that human beings as a whole share similar sets of evolved moral and ethical predispositions, attitudes, and reasoning, it seems clear that a natural corollary to this finding is that, at the aggregate level, when faced with similar conditions, different societies will naturally follow a similar trajectory. So while our journeys may all differ, in the end, it seems we might just all be evolving in the same direction.