A subway train is hurtling down the tracks, and there are five people in the tunnel ahead with no means of escape. The train can’t stop in time, and the five people in the tunnel will die. But you can switch the train onto a different track so that it will spare the five people in the tunnel. The only problem is that one person on the alternate line will die if you switch tracks. Do you throw the switch?
The above scenario is a classic example of a morality problem. In life, we rarely have the option of choosing between right and wrong. Instead, we must choose between wrong and less wrong. Is it wrong to do nothing and let five people die? Is it less wrong to take action and deliberately kill one person to save five others?
How Do We Decide?
We like to think we make decisions like this based on logical deduction, but we don’t. Odds are you had an instinctual reaction to that hypothetical situation. A gut feeling about what you would or would not do. Would you allow five people to die by doing nothing and giving fate a free hand? Or would you take action to kill one person?
The dilemma is vexing — not because of the math, it is easy to see that one death is better than five. But do you see it as permissible to take action that will result in one death even if that death saves five others?
The answer was yes, according to 89% of people. Marc Hauser studied 5,000 subjects in 120 countries by presenting them with the train scenario above and two other moral dilemmas. He found that what people considered morally acceptable was consistent across culture, gender, age, ethnicity, education, and religious affiliation.[1] Based on his results, Dr. Hauser was able to delineate a set of moral principles people shared. Principles like,
It is less morally acceptable to intentionally cause harm than to allow harm to come to someone.
It is less morally permissible to invent a new way to cause harm than to cause harm with an existing threat.
It is less morally justifiable to directly hurt someone than to harm them indirectly.
Despite agreeing on these moral principles, the vast majority of subjects could not articulate the rules they used to judge the appropriate actions in these scenarios. Additional research has suggested that not delineating the principles we use in judging moral actions is the norm. It appears that we do not engage in moral reasoning at all. Instead, we rely on our intuition to tell us what to do. Then we work backward to construct a rational explanation for our intuition.[2]
Is Moral Intuition Wrong?
That does not mean that our moral intuition is wrong. It does mean that we need to view all the carefully constructed rationalizations for morality with a skeptical eye. As logical as they may sound, what underlies them all is an intuition — a feeling — about what is more right or less wrong.
I think it is safe to say that the majority of people see abortion as wrong. That’s not the issue. The issue is which do they see as more wrong, end an unborn child’s life, or take away a woman’s right to decide what to do with her own body? How you choose to answer that question depends on how you value each option. And how you decide that comes from your intuition. It is a gut feeling. You know that because people say things like, “I just know in my heart that it’s wrong.”
The Danger
Intuition comes first; then, we fabricate a reasonable explanation for a decision we reached without the use of reason. This does not mean that moral intuition is wrong. It does mean that we need to look at all those carefully crafted explanations a little more skeptically. We need to keep in mind that the explanations given are not the real reason people believe. Instead, it’s a post hoc rationalization for a gut-level feeling. And those rationalizations have led people astray.
Slavery, genocide, repression of women, religious wars, the internment of minorities, and many other crimes against humanity have benefited from eloquent and reasonable-sounding explanations. Those rationalizations have misled entire populations of otherwise moral peoples into reprehensible actions. The worst part is that people carried out those actions believing they were acting out of logical necessity. This prompted Hannah Arendt to refer to “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” architect Adolf Eichmann’s methodical actions in the genocide of Jews as the “banality of evil.”
How to Make Better Moral Decisions
So how can we make better moral decisions? The first step is to recognize that we rarely have a choice between right and wrong. Instead, we must choose between wrong and less wrong. For example, killing someone is wrong. But killing one person may be less wrong if the goal is to save the lives of five other people. Absolute rules about right and wrong are rarely accurate when we look at the situation in its broader context. As another example, is it acceptable for a physician to prescribe a dose of pain medication if the doctor knows it will shorten the recipient’s life? If the patient in question is suffering from a terminal illness, it may be less wrong to medicate them than to do nothing and leave them in agony.
- Give more weight to known harm than to theoretical injury. We can’t say how things will turn out. The world is a complicated place, and predictions are riddled with errors due to our imperfect understanding. In light of that, it is vital to apply greater weight to known harms than to theoretical ones. An argument against the physician administering medication that would promote comfort but shorten life is that a new treatment may become available if the patient lived longer. That treatment is a theoretical benefit, but real harm is occurring today, and that actual harm is what should drive the decision.
- If you find yourself in a situation with a clear right and wrong answer, it may be time to step back and make sure you see the whole picture. Moral choices should be hard. If the correct answer seems obvious to you, it may be because you are not considering all the information. Take the time to become better informed on the issue. More than that, make an effort to look for information that contradicts your opinion. The naturalist Charles Darwin carried a notebook with him and wrote down every argument against his evolutionary theory. That allowed him to think through his idea in more detail and made a much more compelling document when he published, The Origin Species.
- Try to think of a person or group of people who will at risk of injury from your decision. In any moral judgment, there will be winners and losers. Be sure you are looking for the people that your decision will harm as well as those it will help. We can’t make the right decision if we do not know who is at risk. Worst of all, failing to recognize those we may harm dehumanizes them. And when we dehumanize others, we run the risk of making immoral decisions and becoming a monster.
- It may take a little looking to identify those who at risk. Sometimes those who will be harmed are not as visible as those that will be helped. Other times it is because one group has been deliberately marginalized. The worst example of this was the genocide of the jew under the Nazis. The Nazi plan involved denying the jews access to the media to not make their plight known. Interning the Jews in ghettos kept them out of sight and thus out of mind for the average German citizen. This plan systematically dehumanized an entire group of human beings and led to an atrocious crime.
- Make your decisions to do what is best for the majority of people. In the runaway train case, the most benefit is sacrificing one life to save the other five. But what if the one is the quarterback for your favorite football team and the other five are players on a rival team? There is a temptation to leave the train on course. Resist this temptation to value some people and denigrate others. The correct choice is the one that brings the most good to the most people and not just good to your people.
- Avoid the temptation to do nothing. Given that we can never be sure we are making the moral choice, there is a temptation to do nothing. Failure to act can be as immoral as taking the wrong action. You have a moral responsibility to try. Yes, you will do so imperfectly, but you can’t use that as an excuse to abdicate your responsibility. As the Irish statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke put it, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
Conclusion
Accept the challenge — brave the moral grey area. Weigh the balance to find the less wrong solution, and then take action. You can’t ever know for sure what is right and wrong, but you have a moral responsibility to do your best.
[1] Marc Hauser et al., “A Dissociation Between Moral Judgments and Justifications,” Mind and Language 22 (2007): 1–21.
[2] Jonathan Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment,” Psychological Review 108 (2001): 814–834.
