Bugs in Our Morality Modules

I have been reading lately about how some basic moral judgments seem to be “hard wired” in our brains. It makes sense that some behaviors and attitudes would be more conducive to living in social groups than others and that these would be favored by both natural and sexual selection. If a moral judgment is innate, it is not necessarily superior. It turns out that our moral reasoning module is flawed and inconsistent.

I tried a couple of experiments on some of my conspecifics to see if they made moral judgments similar to the subjects of the experimenters I had been reading about. I asked them to imagine that a trolley was out of control and was bound to kill five track workers unless they turned a switch and diverted it, in which case it would kill only one person. Everyone agreed that it would be morally right to turn the switch, and some even argued that there was a moral duty to act. Then I asked them to imagine that they were chief of staff at a hospital where five patients faced immediate death unless they received transplants of various organs. Would it be morally permissible to kill one healthy person and distribute his organs to save the five patients? Of course not, my subjects protested.

I asked them what was different about the two scenarios. They hemmed and hawed. One declared that the transplant scenario was uncertain, that there was a chance the patients would die anyway. If it were completely certain to save lives, presumably it would be okay to harvest organs over the objections of the owner.

The second scenario I asked them to imagine involved their waking up to find that another human being had been attached to them and was sharing their kidneys. He was a famous concert pianist who would die unless he got to use their kidneys for nine months. There was some risk of injury or death to them from the process, but such complications were rare. Would it be right to demand that the pianist be detached? Everyone agreed that it would be. Would it be right to demand that he be detached if they had initially volunteered for the process but changed their minds after a couple of months? Not so much according to my conspecifics.

The parallels to abortion were not lost on my subjects, but they generally likened it to the scenario with the volunteer. If a woman had been impregnated involuntarily, however, that would be a different matter for some. For others, who framed the issue in terms of the “right to life”, the voluntariness did not seem to matter. What about the pianist’s right to life? The hard-core right to lifers could not reconcile their views.

It happens every day that morally equivalent scenarios are treated differently. If I deliver an explosive device to a target via an automobile, I am a murderous car bomber. If I deliver it via a missile, I am a heroic service member. This is true even if the targets are identical. If I rob you of your money through thinly veiled threats of violence and spend it on tennis lessons, I am a criminal. If I compel you by governmental process to pay for tennis lessons in your community, I am a public-spirited community leader. If I shoot a hundred thousand innocent people in the head in order to terrorize their government into submission, I am a mass murder and a terrorist. If I kill them all at once with a nuke, that’s okay. If I am a soldier or a policeman, I am justified in killing an entire household in order to avoid the most miniscule risk to myself, but if I am a pregnant woman I must accept even greater risks associated with pregnancy and childbirth rather than terminate the pregnancy.

We’re apparently hard wired to get it wrong much of the time. We are way too susceptible to moral trickery.