I agree Penelope. Although some interpretations of dual process theories of morality is that rationality is needed to override emotion-based moral judgments, not everyone subscribes to that. Detaching moral judgment from compassion typically has disastrous consequences, such as witch burning. Incidentally, Sophie's Choice is one of the moral dilemmas used in current psychological and neuroscience studies of moral judgment.

denisecummins wrote: Although some interpretations of dual process theories of morality is that rationality is needed to override emotion-based moral judgments, not everyone subscribes to that.

Well, I have encountered this dilemma before. We need to have a foot in both worlds don't we?

I was once accused of being 'so heavenly minded that I was no earthly good'. And I understand that. Fortunately, the person who accused me, was a person for whom I had the utmost respect, so I attempted to deal with the problem.

Some people come into our lives as blessings, and some come into our lives as lessons.

I agree, but have always wondered why lessons have to be painful. Or maybe we just try to lesson the pain by chalking up the experience as a lesson. I guess the blessings could be lessons as well, just pleasant ones!

i was doing some looking around to see who got the trolley heading for coventry and came across this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cofRWpRhD6I

small world

this one is really telling

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9D5oOtzn ... re=related

another side of the story

http://www.winstonchurchill.org/learn/m ... entry-burn

FYI, the trolley problem was first proposed by philosopher Phillipa Foot in 1967: The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect in Virtues and Vices (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978)(originally appeared in the Oxford Review, Number 5, 1967.)

fascinating

Foot's original formulation of the problem ran as follows:[1]

Suppose that a judge or magistrate is faced with rioters demanding that a culprit be found for a certain crime and threatening otherwise to take their own bloody revenge on a particular section of the community. The real culprit being unknown, the judge sees himself as able to prevent the bloodshed only by framing some innocent person and having him executed.

when i read

the judge sees himself as able to prevent the bloodshed only by framing some innocent person and having him executed.

i couldnt help but be reminded of the verse in the bible that says

John 11:50
Nor consider that it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not.



truly an absurd predicament!

literalism as always is the enemy, when i am confronted with the trolley problem i immediately want to find out why these fools are standing on the track, and who is responsible for this ridiculous scenario in the first place.

whether the five die or not, whether the 500 odd in coventry die or not we simply are dwarfed by the millions or rather billions that are the victims of the cosmic trolley pusher.

well no doubt we'll all wake up from this nightmare anon and think, thank god it was just a horrible nightmare. unless of course we lost dear ones in coventry. in which case some will be hoping i am the fat man and will take great delight in pushing me in front of the trolley.... and who can blame them!

BTW:

the trolleys are coming! the trolleys are coming!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxLry57s ... ults_video

those who do not understand trolley's are doomed to be run over by them.

but boy howdy auto-cat it takes education.

Here's the full quote from Foot (1967): Suppose that a judge or magistrate is faced with rioters
demanding that a culprit be found for a certain crime and threatening otherwise to take their own bloody
revenge on a particular section of the community. The real culprit being unknown, the judge sees himself
as able to prevent the bloodshed only by framing some innocent person and having him executed. Beside
this example is placed another in which a pilot whose aeroplane is about to crash is deciding whether to
steer from a more to a less inhabited area. To make the parallel as close as possible it may rather be
supposed that he is the driver of a runaway tram which he can only steer from one narrow track on to
another; five men are working on one track and one man on the other; anyone on the track he enters is
bound to be killed.

Judy Jarvis Thompson posed the "fat man" trolley problem in 1985 as follows:

As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by dropping a heavy weight in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you – your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track, killing him to save five. Should you proceed?

Thomson, J.J. (1985). The Trolley Problem, Yale Law Journal, 94, 1395–1415.

Is the fat man a nobel prize winner, with the five others being convicted child molesters? Many of the moral quandaries are good intuition pumps to uncover how we operate, but are usually too idealistic. In real life, there would be a host of factors with varying degrees of value attributed, both positive and negative. We do "value-math" pretty fast in real life, but armchair quarterbacking the same situations lacks the detail that makes it realistic.

Experiments are better, if controlled correctly. The experiment where people deliver shocks to subjects for answering incorrectly comes to mind. Where the voltage is incrementally increased until it's deadly. The shock was fake, but people still delivered it. I wonder if those who favor the value of 'authority' would on average deliver a higher maximum shock. Don't conservatives value 'authority' more than liberals?

Good point! Foot and Jarvis were philosophers. They didn't do experiments. But experimental psychologists and neuroscientists have indeed explored exactly the kinds of questions you are raising for the reasons you describe.

Characteristics of the victim do indeed matter. For example, if the victim is a child (even a terminally ill one), people are less likely to endorse switching the trolley to the single victim's track. In a parallel scenario, toxic and fatal fumes must be redirected away from a hospital room where five patients are recovering to a room where one is recovering. Like the standard trolley problem, about 65%-75% of people agree to redirect, but if the single recovering patient is a friend of theirs, the rate drops to about 35%. In a set of studies by Petrinovich, O'Neill, & Jorgensen (1993), they found that people valued humans over non-human animals (Speciesism), Abhorrent Political Philosophy (e.g., Nazism), Inclusive Fitness (kin over strangers), Social Contract (e.g., victim is a railroad worker) and Number of Individuals.

In another study by Cikara and colleagues (2010), people were more willing to endorse sacrificing victims who were elderly, disabled, homeless, or drug addicted than victims who were students, wealthy, professionals. Given that the participants were Princeton students, the authors concluded that this was evidence not just of social valuation but of in-group bias. They also did fMRI scanning while the students made these judgments and found that areas associated with decision-making and conflict resolution were more likely to be recruited when evaluating whether to sacrifice "high value, in-group" individuals.

Given that the participants were Princeton students, the authors concluded that this was evidence not just of social valuation but of in-group bias.

From the little info you've provided, it seems their conclusion is unjustified. It would require another study using a different set of participants, to see if their sacrificial candidates correlate to their own positions. Would elderly folk still sacrifice elderly folk? Something tells me they would. Would poor folk sacrifice other poor folk, or would they be less influenced by relative positions on the income spectrum? I'd be most interested to see what the drug addicts would do.

Characteristics of the victim do indeed matter. For example, if the victim is a child (even a terminally ill one), people are less likely to endorse switching the trolley to the single victim's track. In a parallel scenario, toxic and fatal fumes must be redirected away from a hospital room where five patients are recovering to a room where one is recovering. Like the standard trolley problem, about 65%-75% of people agree to redirect, but if the single recovering patient is a friend of theirs, the rate drops to about 35%.

Such a study shows that there are factors that influence such a decision, but in reality I think there are a tremendous amount. Many of them so minor that they can't be studied, which poses a problem for this type of speculation. Placing value on a person so that you may decide how to act towards them is likely an undecipherable algorithm within our heads. We pull from a lifetime of experience for each valuation.

It could be that we favor one person over the next due to similarities to one of our siblings(even if we don't consciously make the connection). Perhaps the male we mean to sacrifice has an abundance of testosterone, which is shown to make other males more aggressive. Perhaps we were recently dumped by a mate, and have a slightly negative disposition towards the opposite sex for a brief time. Perhaps we're simply in a bad mood, where we're at a point halfway between cigarette breaks and needing a release.

Each of these minor influences could be enough to tip one persons decision to one side or the other. Even with an army of controls in place during experiments, some influences would still leak through.