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I’m not sure whether an interactive, online logic textbook counts as an open-access philosophy book, but for those who might…
For a slightly more positive assessment, JS Mill: “The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when an…
These seem like sensible, measured comments. But I do have a question about (1). You ask: “Is the value of…
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A couple of broader comments, having had a little time to reflect: 1) I agree that the “pile of truths”…
…it's utilitarians. Take that, Joshua Greene (and Nietzsche)!
(Thanks to Neil McArthur for the pointer.)
On a serious note, what do readers make of these studies?
Brian, I don't get your "and Nietzsche" comment. I'd have thought that Nietzsche wouldn't be at all surprised to find that those who are prepared to act in pursuit of impartial happiness are exactly the sort of people who aren't animated by a warm, passionate love of life.
BL COMMENT: The Greene paper uses a Nietzsche quote as a springboard, and N. certainly thought Kantianism represented a kind of psycho-pathology. There was no love lost between Nietzsche and utilitarianism, but he didn't think it was a psycho-pathology, just an English peculiarity. "Warm, passionate love of life" is pop psychology, not Nietzsche!
The claims in question here seem to focus on a (very?) simple version of utilitarianism. The claims in question arguably may not apply to "sophisticated" forms of consequentialism (to use one of Peter Railton's terms).
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For any interested readers, I (briefly) sketch the grounds of an argument for an application of sophisticated consequentialism in the terms of one of Thomas Nagel's wonderful arguments for nonconsequentialism at this link:
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http://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2010/11/26/just-bleed-all-over-the-airport-its-safer/#comment-27833
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I have not yet read the Cognition publication (just the short Economist piece). I hope readers/students/colleagues will not mind a possible change of view after I study the Cognition publication carefully. Perhaps others can point out any relevant differences (regarding simple versions of utilitarianism and sophisticated versions of consequentialism in this publication).
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I think this study in particular is quite fatally flawed methodologically. Note that all of the thought experiments that they ask students about are Trolley-like problems, in which there is a decision between active versus passive harm – killing one person to save five. So, the Utilitarian outcome in all of these is the choice to actively harm someone. And then we are supposed to be surprised to find a correlation between people that make a choice to kill are also likely to score highly on psychopathy and other anti-social traits that either favor or are neutral towards active harms. We don't know whether people are choosing the 'Utilitarian' outcome, or choosing the 'I like killing people' outcome. It would be a much better study if there were other questions that yielded Utilitarian possibilities, but in realms that don't involve killing people. Like how to distribute resources. The trolley problem, and thought experiments like it, reduce Utilitarianism, which is a quite well-developed general ethical theory, to whether or not you mind pushing people in front of trains. This is just unfounded character attacks on Utilitarians with a veneer of science.
"Utilitarians, this suggests, may add to the sum of human happiness, but they are not very happy people themselves." How is this pathological? Perhaps those people are just sincerely agent-neutral and do not value their own happiness above that of others. In fact, why not view them as self-sacrificing moral heroes instead of Machiavellian misanthropes? I don't get it.
I'm astounded that only 10% of people switch in the trolley cases. After all, one needn't actually be a utilitarian (or even a consequentialist) to agree with switching. So the group of people picking the 'switch' outcome in the trolley cases doesn't just pick out utilitarians…
What is the argument/evidence that those who make what seem to be utilitarian judgments about fantasy trolleys are themselves utilitarians, or even consequentialists?
As far as I know it has never been established that trolley-judgments predict trolley-behavior (e.g., people who approve of shoving the fat man are more likely to do so given the chance). Sans evidence that judgments in fictional moral dilemmas relate reliably to actions in actual moral dilemmas, I can't see why, when moral behavior is the real quarry, researchers keep fussing over patterns in judgment (aside from the relative ease of giving surveys to undergrads vs. forcing undergrads to kill one another).
And for the actual scholars: were Bentham and Mill hot on consequentialist judgments qua opinions or judgments qua precursors to real deeds?
Personally, I was much more surprised to see scientists claiming that people who are distracted from deliberating are more likely to make a "utilitarian" choices than those who think about it or make an immediate decision:
The major flaw in this study is that the detected property is not a good measure of the target property. The target property is how ‘utilitarian’ someone is (I’m not even sure if it makes sense to measure this, but let’s grant it). The detected property is whether someone gives a utilitarian or non-utilitarian answer to a small number of related moral dilemmas. However, as has already been pointed out, the dilemmas used cover only a small range of moral output and responses to them could easily be tracking factors other than utilitarian/non-utilitarian tendencies (for example, a subject with psychopathic tendencies might ‘sacrifice’ the innocent bystander simply because they like the idea of being directly involved in someone’s death). Indeed, it is possible for someone to give the utilitarian answer to all the cases used in the experiment and yet be less utilitarian overall than someone else who gives a non-utilitarian answer to all the cases.
The following consideration especially brings this out. As well as requiring you to commit actions that are considered callous and unjust by commonsense morality, utilitarianism also requires you to commit actions that are considered extremely praiseworthy and altruistic by commonsense morality. A consistent utilitarian is just as willing to lay down her own life to save five as to sacrifice an innocent’s life to save five. Yet, the experimenters apparently didn’t include any trolley cases where the utilitarian would be required to self-sacrifice. Would they have got the same correlation if they included these cases?
To better measure the target property, the experimenters need to use a much broader range of moral dilemmas that admit of utilitarian and non-utilitarian answers. This should include: cases involving self-sacrifice, cases involving a choice between family/friends and strangers, cases where the stakes are much less than death (e.g. telling a lie, distributing resources), case involving indirect contact with others, cases that only involve a failure to prevent harm, cases where there is a bad motive, and so on.
I agree with the concerns expressed above. Here's one way of putting it:
As a cartoon, imagine that you have a group of respondents who don't really think ethically about the dilemmas at all and just think it's funny to tell the prof to push the fat man, and suppose that psychopathic personality types are overrepresented in that group. Then you get the Bartels and Pizarro results, but there's no relationship with consequentialist thinking.
P.S.: Josh Rust and I have a study in draft that examines ethics professors self-reported behavior and in some cases directly measured behavior, which we related to those professors' self-reported attraction to deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics. Measures included vegetarianism, charitable donation, voting in public elections, and several other issues. As far as we could tell, all three groups behaved about the same. To the extent there was a difference, it tended to be for virtue ethicists to self-report slightly less moral behavior on a couple measures.
We also saw no difference comparing metaethicists vs normative ethicists vs applied ethicists.
The draft is available here:
http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/EthSelfRep.htm
About the title of the post: the Greene paper doesn't accuse people who rely on their emotions in moral dilemmas of being pathological. His argument seems to be that deontologist judgments are driven by emotions, which (even many deontologists agree) are irrelevant and unreliable for making the specified moral decisions. Greene's not saying that being emotional is blatantly a bad thing, therefore, deontology is wrong.
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