Authors: Paul Bloom
As an analogy, consider the psychology of number. Humans and other creatures are prewired with some understanding of mathematics. But, as the psychologist Karen Wynn has argued, our initial foundations are incomplete: in particular, there is
no dedicated brain system for reasoning about zero. It was a relatively recent discovery that zero is a number, and children find this idea difficult to grasp. Coming to see strangers as falling into the moral domain is as much a human accomplishment as coming to appreciate that zero is a number.
Now, the suffering of a stranger might well trigger empathy. To witness someone in distress—a child attacked by a pack of dogs, say, screaming in agony—is unpleasant, even if you have never seen the person before. Even babies find it painful to witness another in pain, as do creatures such as monkeys and rats. But as we saw earlier, empathy is not compassion. It doesn’t necessarily lead to the desire to help. Adults who live in small-scale societies respond to strangers with hatred and disgust, and toddlers get highly anxious when they encounter strangers; they experience fear, not fondness. And while we do see all sorts of spontaneous
kindness by babies and young children—soothing, sharing, helping, and the like—these are directed toward family and friends.
Of course, many adults transcend our initial indifference toward strangers, just we now appreciate that zero is a number. But this is because of how we were raised and the societies in which we live; we did not start off that way.
T
HE
categories of kin, in-group, and stranger are porous. Much moral persuasion aims to shift people from one category to another. Those who are intent on fomenting genocide will try to persuade others that those individuals who might have previously been thought of as part of their in-group (the Jewish Germans in Germany of the 1940s, say, or the Tutsi in Rwanda of the 1990s) are actually strangers. Those who wish to motivate kindness toward distant people will work toward a shift in the opposite direction, using pictures and stories and personal details so that these individuals will feel less like strangers and more like members of our in-group, and numerous studies have found that
we really are more likely to help others when we see their faces and hear their names.
The metaphor of kinship is powerful as well: if one wants to strengthen the bonds of a group, one way to do so is describe it as a family or brotherhood or sisterhood. Many societies have a system of “fictive kin,” where genetically unrelated individuals are talked about, and presumably thought of, as blood relatives. Where I was raised in Montreal, my neighbors and other friends of my parents
were described as aunts and uncles, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out who was my real kin.
Fictive kinship doesn’t have to be imposed from above. The writer
Rachel Aviv reports on the lives of homeless gay teenagers living on the streets of New York and observes that they form elaborate fictive families. Roles such as mother and father are determined not by age but by knowledge and by the ability and willingness to serve as a mentor. These relationships become extended and complex. Aviv describes how one homeless boy, Ryan, became a father, and when the children he mentored went on to mentor others, he became a grandfather: “ ‘The beauty of the gay family is that you can walk into Union Square and you have an in—you’re not alone,’ he said. ‘I can go up to a stranger and ask who his gay mother is. And it’s like, Oh my God, I’m your uncle!’ He added, ‘A lot of us lost our biological families, so the gay family fills the void.’ ”
Philosophers often miss the importance of these bonds.
William Godwin, a committed utilitarian (and the father of Mary Shelley, author of
Frankenstein
), once asked his readers to imagine that we could rescue only one person from a fire—an illustrious archbishop whose work brings pleasure and insight to thousands, or the archbishop’s valet, who happens to be our father. Godwin concluded that the right answer is to leave Dad behind. But for many of us, this solution doesn’t strike us as moral; it seems appalling.
As Adam Smith observed, “The man who should feel no more for the death or distress of his own father, or son, than for those of any other man’s father or son, would appear neither a
good son nor a good father. Such unnatural indifference, far from exciting our applause, would incur our highest disapprobation.”
I
WANT
to end by returning to the trolley problem. Most people say that you should throw the switch to save five people at the expense of one. One standard interpretation of this response is that we are moral consequentialists along the lines of Bentham and Mill. In the absence of emotional distractions, our judgments about right and wrong are based on how the world will be affected if one acts or doesn’t act. Since five deaths are worse than one death, the choice is clear.
But there is an alternative interpretation. Perhaps our intuition in the switch case isn’t driven by moral considerations at all. After all, the individuals in this case are anonymous and abstract; they are strangers. As Richard Shweder argues, then,
we might treat the dilemma as little more than a math problem: Which is less, one or five? The majority who answer that the right act is to switch the trolley are reasoning in the same way that they would if asked whether to destroy one object or five objects. Actually, this experiment has been done:
if you establish a trolley scenario with teacups at the ends of the tracks instead of people, participants also tend to throw the switch and destroy one teacup rather than five.
This proposal differs from the view that people are being moral consequentialists, and it does so in a way that’s testable, as there are differences between moral and nonmoral
judgments. For example, I don’t like raisins. But this is a preference, not a moral attitude, so I don’t care whether other people like raisins and don’t think raisin eaters should be punished. I wouldn’t feel guilty if I ate a raisin, and I don’t admire others who abstain. My raisin shunning has none of the signatures of a moral judgment. I also don’t like baby killing. This is a moral attitude, though, so all of these implications
do
follow. I believe other people shouldn’t kill babies and that baby-killers should be punished. I would feel guilty if I killed a baby myself and would admire someone who stopped another person from killing a baby.
I think that our intuition about the switch case is more like raisin eating than baby killing. People might agree that it’s the “right thing” to throw the switch, but this is an abstract intellectual decision, not a moral one, and hence there is little disapproval of those who fail to throw the switch and little desire to punish them, and so on. After all, we don’t blame people who choose to allow strangers to die in the real world by not giving enough to charity, so it would be strange if we blamed them for allowing strangers to die in the trolley problem by choosing not to kill someone.
Also, it’s not clear that we always do make a moral distinction between the death of five strangers and the death of one stranger. Yes, people care about number when forced to choose between five and one. But without this sort of explicit contrast, the numbers hardly matter.
One study asked one group of subjects to donate money to develop a drug that would save the life of a single sick child and asked another group to donate money to develop a drug that
would save the lives of eight sick children. The two groups offered the same amount.
This insensitivity holds for higher numbers as well. Imagine you were to read about the severe drought crisis in West Africa. Would it make a difference to you if you read that 80,000 people might die … or 400,000 … or 1.6 million? If you believed that 1.6 million people were at risk would you be twenty times more concerned than if you believed that there were 80,000? Twice as concerned? Most likely, the number would have no effect at all.
From this perspective, the typical response in the switch case reflects indifference, not morality. This helps us understand a set of otherwise mysterious findings.
Individuals with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex often develop a blunting of emotions, similar to psychopaths, and they tend to advocate the pushing of the man in the bridge case more often than normal people. That is, they treat the bridge case just like the switch case. College students with borderline psychopathic traits do the same. These findings are often cited—with a bit of glee at
tweaking the consequentialists—as evidence that the bad guys and the brain-damaged are striving for the greatest good for the greatest number, just like Bentham and Mill!
The alternative, though, is that these individuals are not reasoning morally at all. Lacking normal empathetic responses, they think of the bridge case in the same way that normal individuals look at the switch case, as yet another math problem. Since one is less than five, they say: Push.
Most of the rest of us don’t think it’s right to push in
the bridge case, though. The person is still a stranger, but a stranger in the flesh, and it no longer seems justified to kill the one to save five.
I agree with Joshua Greene that this situation elicits a strong emotional response; pushing someone to his death feels unpleasant—it feels
wrong
—in a way that throwing a switch doesn’t. But the question remains as to why this is so. Why does it bother us to harm someone up close and personal?
One possibility is that we’ve evolved a specific aversion to assaulting another individual without some sort of provocation. Putting aside morality, such an act, even directed toward a stranger, is extraordinarily dangerous. You might fail and get killed yourself. Or you might succeed, in which case you have to contend with your victim’s family and friends, who will be out for your blood. So such an aversion makes adaptive sense. Alternatively, this emotional response might emerge as a result of how we are raised as children; it might be shaped by the punishments and disapproval of the adults around us when we try to inflict harm on those around us.
In any case, it’s not merely that we are reluctant to kill strangers; as we’ll see in the next chapter,
we are often nice to strangers, particularly those whom we can visualize as distinct individuals. If you tell subjects that a little girl needs a drug to live, and show a picture of her and tell the subjects her name,
now
they give more to create that drug—actually, they give quite a bit more than they would give to save the lives of eight children whose names and faces they don’t know. If I were walking through the woods near my
house and saw a child drowning in the lake, I would quickly wade in to save her, even if it ruined my shoes. And I’m sure I would throw a switch to divert a runaway train from killing a child, even if it meant the destruction of my precious car (not a Bugatti, in my case, but a 2005 Toyota RAV4).
But we shouldn’t be too smug about our moral powers. I read every day about the suffering of strangers in faraway lands, and I know I can improve their lives, but I rarely make the effort. When I’m in a big city, I often find myself in the position of the Good Samaritan in the tale from the Gospels, passing someone slumped on the side of a road, probably sick, hungry, plainly in need of assistance. If the person were my
kin
—my sister, my father, my cousin—I would rush over to help; if he or she were in my
in-group
—my neighbor, a colleague from my university, someone I play poker with—I would also help. But it’s always a stranger, so I usually turn away and keep walking. Most likely, you do the same.
7
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OW TO
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OOD
It would be naive to deny that many seemingly altruistic acts are done out of self-interest. A lot of charity goes not to the most needy or most worthy but to projects that the givers themselves benefit from, as when wealthy parents give millions to elite universities in the hopes of getting their children accepted. Also, as the sociologist Thorstein Veblen observed,
charitable giving is the perfect way to advertise one’s wealth and status.
It’s also a good way to attract sexual and romantic partners; it hardly hurts to be seen as generous and caring.
Still, people do help others in ways that don’t benefit themselves, and some of this is perfectly anonymous. The Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram is best known for his studies on obedience in which he brought people into his laboratory and found that many of them would follow instructions to administer a deadly electric shock to a stranger. But Milgram was also interested in kindness,
and in 1965, he did an experiment in which
he scattered stamped, addressed letters all over New Haven, dropping them onto sidewalks and placing them in telephone booths and other public places. Most letters arrived at their destinations, which means that the good people of New Haven had picked them up and put them into mailboxes—simple acts of kindness that could never be reciprocated. This kindness is selective: Milgram found that the letters tended to be delivered if they had a name on the front—“Walter Carnap”—but not if they were addressed to “Friends of the Nazi Party.”
Our goodness is evident in other ways as well. Most societies no longer punish people by mutilating them—
Thomas Jefferson’s proposal that a woman should be punished for polygamy by “cutting thro’ the cartilage of her nose a hole of one half inch diameter at the least” would not be adopted now. Attitudes about the family have changed—in many countries it is no longer lawful for men to rape their wives or for parents to beat their children. Some people are so concerned about the fate of nonhuman animals that they deprive themselves of delicious foods such as veal scaloppine and comfortable clothing such as fur coats. Many believe in rights such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion and believe that it is wrong to keep others as slaves or to discriminate on the basis of race.
Some see our goodness as evidence for divine intervention. The biologist Francis Collins has proposed that this sort of enlightened morality cannot be explained by biological evolution and has concluded that a benevolent God
must have inserted a moral code into us. The social commentator Dinesh D’Souza concludes that “high altruism”—goodness toward nonrelatives, bearing no conceivable genetic or material reward—is, in the words of C. S. Lewis, best explained by “the voice of God within our souls.” And in 1869, the co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, observed that humanity has transcended evolution in many regards, including in our “higher moral faculties,” and he concluded that there must be some superior intelligence shaping the development of our species.