My friend Emily alerted me to this video by her daughter-in-law, Rebecca Saxe, head of the Saxe laboratory at MIT.
The key finding that I want to discuss is that there is a region in the brain that helps us to make moral judgments based on inferences on what another person is thinking. Moreover, Saxe's research suggests that that capacity is not always present, but requires maturation of the brain. A child of 5 will generally have an idea of intention, but it is not until children reach the age of seven that they attach moral culpability to bad intentions (in the absence of bad outcomes).
Consider these two situations:
- You have a switch which controls the track on which a trolley car will run. If you put it in one position, five people in a stalled car down one line will die. If however, you switch it to the other position you will save those five, but another person on the second track will die.
- You are standing on a bridge over a trolley line. A trolley is approaching from around a bend. There is a car stalled on the tracks just down the line from you and the five occupants will die if the trolley hits the car. There is a man standing on the bridge next to you. If you toss him off the bridge in front of the trolley, it will stop the trolley and the people in the car will be saved.
Forgetting that there are other options (such as jumping off the bridge yourself to save the five people), most people will say in the first example that you should put the switch in the position that will save the most people. On the other hand, in the second example, they will say that you should not kill one person to save five.
I assume that the difference results from the way that the brain works. We have evolved as social animals, and apparently our brains have evolved to avoid killing a member of the group to save others, and that choice is built in the genes and matures with the maturation of the brain.
On the other hand, it seems that an emotionless actor (Mr. Spock on Star Trek) would always chose to save five people rather than one person.
I suspect that our moral thinking often (always) comes back to "what feels right". But should we make public policy on the basis of "what feels right" or what is more logical?
Here are two videos that you should watch in sequence in which Dr. Saxe describes the work in her laboratory:
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