Probably both

It's been a few weeks. Time for me to write about a Democracy In America post!

One today's posts was about the classic utilitarian thought experiment known as the 'trolley dilemma.' A couple of Columbia psychologists recently published an interesting study regarding this dilemma. The dilemma goes about like this:

"There are five railway workmen in the path of a runaway carriage. The men will surely be killed unless the subject of the experiment, a bystander in the story, does something. The subject (of the study) is told he is on a bridge over the tracks. Next to him is a big, heavy stranger. The subject is informed that his own body would be too light to stop the train, but that if he pushes the stranger onto the tracks, the stranger’s large body will stop the train and save the five lives. That, unfortunately, would kill the stranger."

The notion of this scenario is that it exposes the chief difficulty of utilitarianism: its greatest-good moral calculus dictates that you should push the fat guy onto the tracks, but our guts tell us otherwise. The Columbia shrinks tested their subjects for signs of psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and low valuation of human life before exposing them to this dilemma.

It turns out that only a handful (10%) of folks would push the fat guy. Unsurprisingly, most of them show signs of psychopathy, Machiavellian thinking, or something else of the same unappealing sort. "Utilitarians may add to the sum of human happiness, but they are not very happy people themselves," the Economist writer summarizes.


He goes on to discuss the implications of this study for electoral politics. We like to elect folks that are warm and personable, but really we should be voting for politicians with an icy, lizard-like disregard for individual lives (which, as the writer points out, we often do anyway).

For me, this study also brings up an objection I have to systematized moral philosophy in general. Every coherent system of ethics I've ever come across is vulnerable to trolley dilemma-style objections—hypothetical situations in which the tenets of the system require the actor to do something that no sane person would choose.

Perhaps this is because systematic ethical codes don't reflect the way people generally think about morality. Ultimately, our determinations about right and wrong are heavily contingent upon emotion. Ethical philosophy doesn't make many allowances for feeling, and so it often fails to accurately describe that which we consider 'right.' Whether that's philosophy's failing or humanity's failing is up for debate.