Peter Singer: Should we trust our moral intuitions
Marc Hauser the “Moral Sense Test”: put trolley switch/footbridge in English, Spanish, and Chinese
People responded consistently despite differences in nationality, ethnicity, etc
Joshua Green: using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) to examine what happens in people’s brains when they make intuitive moral judgments
“Personal” violation, like the footbridge -> goes to areas of brain associated with emotions
“Impersonal” violation, like the switch -> no
A minority of subjects who did consider that it would be right to push the stranger off the footbridge took longer to reach this judgment
Why?
Primate ancestors living in small groups, in which personal hitting is harmful -> we developed immediate, emotionally based intuitive responses to the infliction of personal violence on others; the switch scenario is too recent, thus we haven’t developed an evolutionary response
Greene’s work helps us understand where our moral intuitions come from. But the fact that our moral intuitions are universal and part of our human nature does not mean that they are right. On the contrary, these findings should make us more skeptical about relying on our intuitions.
There is, after all, no ethical significance in the fact that one method of harming others has existed for most of our evolutionary history, and the other is relatively new. Blowing up people with bombs is no better than clubbing them to death. And surely the death of one person is a lesser tragedy than the death of five, no matter how that death is brought about. So we should think for ourselves, not just listen to our intuitions.
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