Trolleyology
The Options
Consider, for example, the following conundrum (case 1), first proposed by the philosopher Philippa Foot:
A railway trolley is hurtling down a track. In its path are five people who are trapped on the line and cannot escape. Fortunately, you can flip a switch that will divert the trolley down a fork in the track away from the five people—but at a price. There is another person trapped down that fork, and the trolley will kill them instead. Should you hit the switch?
Most of us experience little difficulty when deciding what to do in this situation. Though the prospect of flipping the switch isn’t exactly a nice one, the utilitarian option—killing just one person instead of five—represents the “least worst choice.” Right?
Now consider the following variation (case 2), proposed by the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson:
As before, a railway trolley is speeding out of control down a track toward five people. But this time, you are standing behind a very large stranger on a footbridge above the tracks. The only way to save the five people is to heave the stranger over. He will fall to a certain death. But his considerable girth will block the trolley, saving five lives. Should you push him?
Consider, for example, the following conundrum (case 1), first proposed by the philosopher Philippa Foot:
A railway trolley is hurtling down a track. In its path are five people who are trapped on the line and cannot escape. Fortunately, you can flip a switch that will divert the trolley down a fork in the track away from the five people—but at a price. There is another person trapped down that fork, and the trolley will kill them instead. Should you hit the switch?
Most of us experience little difficulty when deciding what to do in this situation. Though the prospect of flipping the switch isn’t exactly a nice one, the utilitarian option—killing just one person instead of five—represents the “least worst choice.” Right?
Now consider the following variation (case 2), proposed by the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson:
As before, a railway trolley is speeding out of control down a track toward five people. But this time, you are standing behind a very large stranger on a footbridge above the tracks. The only way to save the five people is to heave the stranger over. He will fall to a certain death. But his considerable girth will block the trolley, saving five lives. Should you push him?
What is comes down to...
Here, you might say we’re faced with a “real” dilemma. Although the score in lives is precisely the same as in the first example (five to one), playing the game makes us a little more circumspect and jittery. But why? Greene believes he has the answer—and that it’s got to do with different climatic regions in the brain.
Case 1, he proposes, is what we might call an impersonal moral dilemma. It involves those areas of the brain, the prefrontal cortex and posterior parietal cortex (in particular, the anterior paracingulate cortex, the temporal pole, and the superior temporal sulcus), principally implicated in our objective experience of cold empathy: in reasoning and rational thought.
Case 2, on the other hand, is what we might call a personal moral dilemma. It hammers on the door of the brain’s emotion center, known as the amygdala—the circuit of hot empathy.
Just like most normal members of the population, psychopaths make pretty short work of the dilemma presented in case 1. They flip the switch, and the train branches accordingly, killing just the one person instead of five. However—and this is where the plot thickens—quite unlike normal people, they also make pretty short work of case 2. Psychopaths, without batting an eye, are perfectly happy to chuck the fat guy over the side, if that’s how the cookie crumbles.
To compound matters further, this difference in behavior is mirrored, rather distinctly, in the brain. The pattern of neural activation in both psychopaths and normal people is pretty well matched on the presentation of impersonal moral dilemmas—but dramatically diverges when things start to get a bit more personal.
Imagine that I was to pop you into an fMRI machine* and then present you with the two dilemmas. What would I observe as you went about negotiating their mischievous moral minefields? Well, around the time that the nature of the dilemma crossed the border from impersonal to personal, I would see your amygdala and related brain circuits—your medial orbitofrontal cortex, for example—light up like a pinball machine. I would witness the moment, in other words, when emotion puts its money in the slot.
But in a psychopath, I would see only darkness. The cavernous neural casino would be boarded up and derelict. And the crossing from impersonal to personal would pass without any incident.
This distinction between hot and cold empathy, the kind of empathy that we “feel” when observing others, and the steely emotional calculus that allows us to gauge, coolly and dispassionately, what another person might be thinking, should be music to the ears of theorists such as Reid Meloy and Kent Bailey. Sure, psychopaths may well be deficient in the former variety, the touchy-feely type. But when it comes to the latter commodity, the kind that codes for “understanding” rather than “feeling”; the kind that enables abstract, nerveless prediction, as opposed to personal identification; the kind that relies on symbolic processing instead of affective symbiosis—the cognitive skill set possessed by expert hunters and cold readers, not just in the natural environment, but in the human arena, too—then psychopaths are in a league of their own. They fly even better on one empathy engine than on two—which is, of course, just one of the reasons why they make such good persuaders. If you know where the buttons are and don’t feel the heat when you push them, then chances are you’re going to hit the jackpot.
Daniel Bartels at Columbia University and David Pizarro at Cornell couldn’t agree more—and they’ve got documentary evidence to prove it. Studies have shown that approximately 90 percent of people would refuse to push the stranger off the bridge, even though they know that if they could just overcome their natural moral squeamishness, the body count would be one-fifth as high. That, of course, leaves 10 percent unaccounted for: a less morally hygienic minority who, when push quite literally comes to shove, have little or no compunction about holding another person’s life in the balance. But who is this unscrupulous minority? Who is this 10 percent?
To find out, Bartels and Pizarro presented the trolley problem to more than two hundred students, and got them to indicate on a four-point scale how much they were in favor of shoving the fat guy over the side—how “utilitarian” they were. Then, alongside the trolleyological question, the students also responded to a series of personality items specifically designed to measure resting psychopathy levels. These included statements such as “I like to see fistfights” and “The best way to handle people is to tell them what they want to hear” (agree/disagree on a scale of one to ten).
Could the two constructs—psychopathy and utilitarianism—possibly be linked? Bartels and Pizarro wondered. The answer was a resounding yes. Their analysis revealed a significant correlation between a utilitarian approach to the trolley problem (push the fat guy off the bridge) and a predominantly psychopathic personality style. Which, as far as Robin Dunbar’s prediction goes, is pretty much on the money. But which, as far as the traditional take on utilitarianism goes, is somewhat problematic. In the grand scheme of things, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, the two nineteenth-century British philosophers credited with formalizing the theory of utilitarianism, are generally thought of as good guys.
“The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation,” Bentham once famously articulated.
Yet dig a little deeper and a trickier, quirkier, murkier picture emerges—one of ruthless selectivity and treacherous moral riptides. Crafting that legislation, for example, excavating those morals, will inevitably necessitate riding roughshod over someone else’s interests. Some group or cause, through the simple lottery of numbers, has to bite the bullet for the sake of the “greater good.” But who has got the balls to pull the trigger? Bartels and Pizarro may well have found a pattern in the lab. But what about in everyday life? Is this where the psychopath really comes into his own?
(The Wisdom of Psychopaths by Kevin Dutton)
Here, you might say we’re faced with a “real” dilemma. Although the score in lives is precisely the same as in the first example (five to one), playing the game makes us a little more circumspect and jittery. But why? Greene believes he has the answer—and that it’s got to do with different climatic regions in the brain.
Case 1, he proposes, is what we might call an impersonal moral dilemma. It involves those areas of the brain, the prefrontal cortex and posterior parietal cortex (in particular, the anterior paracingulate cortex, the temporal pole, and the superior temporal sulcus), principally implicated in our objective experience of cold empathy: in reasoning and rational thought.
Case 2, on the other hand, is what we might call a personal moral dilemma. It hammers on the door of the brain’s emotion center, known as the amygdala—the circuit of hot empathy.
Just like most normal members of the population, psychopaths make pretty short work of the dilemma presented in case 1. They flip the switch, and the train branches accordingly, killing just the one person instead of five. However—and this is where the plot thickens—quite unlike normal people, they also make pretty short work of case 2. Psychopaths, without batting an eye, are perfectly happy to chuck the fat guy over the side, if that’s how the cookie crumbles.
To compound matters further, this difference in behavior is mirrored, rather distinctly, in the brain. The pattern of neural activation in both psychopaths and normal people is pretty well matched on the presentation of impersonal moral dilemmas—but dramatically diverges when things start to get a bit more personal.
Imagine that I was to pop you into an fMRI machine* and then present you with the two dilemmas. What would I observe as you went about negotiating their mischievous moral minefields? Well, around the time that the nature of the dilemma crossed the border from impersonal to personal, I would see your amygdala and related brain circuits—your medial orbitofrontal cortex, for example—light up like a pinball machine. I would witness the moment, in other words, when emotion puts its money in the slot.
But in a psychopath, I would see only darkness. The cavernous neural casino would be boarded up and derelict. And the crossing from impersonal to personal would pass without any incident.
This distinction between hot and cold empathy, the kind of empathy that we “feel” when observing others, and the steely emotional calculus that allows us to gauge, coolly and dispassionately, what another person might be thinking, should be music to the ears of theorists such as Reid Meloy and Kent Bailey. Sure, psychopaths may well be deficient in the former variety, the touchy-feely type. But when it comes to the latter commodity, the kind that codes for “understanding” rather than “feeling”; the kind that enables abstract, nerveless prediction, as opposed to personal identification; the kind that relies on symbolic processing instead of affective symbiosis—the cognitive skill set possessed by expert hunters and cold readers, not just in the natural environment, but in the human arena, too—then psychopaths are in a league of their own. They fly even better on one empathy engine than on two—which is, of course, just one of the reasons why they make such good persuaders. If you know where the buttons are and don’t feel the heat when you push them, then chances are you’re going to hit the jackpot.
Daniel Bartels at Columbia University and David Pizarro at Cornell couldn’t agree more—and they’ve got documentary evidence to prove it. Studies have shown that approximately 90 percent of people would refuse to push the stranger off the bridge, even though they know that if they could just overcome their natural moral squeamishness, the body count would be one-fifth as high. That, of course, leaves 10 percent unaccounted for: a less morally hygienic minority who, when push quite literally comes to shove, have little or no compunction about holding another person’s life in the balance. But who is this unscrupulous minority? Who is this 10 percent?
To find out, Bartels and Pizarro presented the trolley problem to more than two hundred students, and got them to indicate on a four-point scale how much they were in favor of shoving the fat guy over the side—how “utilitarian” they were. Then, alongside the trolleyological question, the students also responded to a series of personality items specifically designed to measure resting psychopathy levels. These included statements such as “I like to see fistfights” and “The best way to handle people is to tell them what they want to hear” (agree/disagree on a scale of one to ten).
Could the two constructs—psychopathy and utilitarianism—possibly be linked? Bartels and Pizarro wondered. The answer was a resounding yes. Their analysis revealed a significant correlation between a utilitarian approach to the trolley problem (push the fat guy off the bridge) and a predominantly psychopathic personality style. Which, as far as Robin Dunbar’s prediction goes, is pretty much on the money. But which, as far as the traditional take on utilitarianism goes, is somewhat problematic. In the grand scheme of things, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, the two nineteenth-century British philosophers credited with formalizing the theory of utilitarianism, are generally thought of as good guys.
“The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation,” Bentham once famously articulated.
Yet dig a little deeper and a trickier, quirkier, murkier picture emerges—one of ruthless selectivity and treacherous moral riptides. Crafting that legislation, for example, excavating those morals, will inevitably necessitate riding roughshod over someone else’s interests. Some group or cause, through the simple lottery of numbers, has to bite the bullet for the sake of the “greater good.” But who has got the balls to pull the trigger? Bartels and Pizarro may well have found a pattern in the lab. But what about in everyday life? Is this where the psychopath really comes into his own?
(The Wisdom of Psychopaths by Kevin Dutton)