In order to study how our minds form moral judgments, psychologists often use moral dilemmas based on the now famous philosophical thought experiments involving runaway trolleys. In one such dilemma, people are asked to imagine that a runaway trolley is about to kill five workers but that this can be prevented if one were to push a large person off a footbridge. This person will die, but by blocking the runaway trolley, the lives of the five workers will be saved.
When participants in an experiment judge that we should sacrifice the large person in order to save a greater number, they are usually said to be making a "utilitarian" judgment because they seem to echo the utilitarian idea that our moral decision should only focus on the consequences.
A growing body of research has investigated the processes that lead to such "utilitarian" judgments and the factors that can influence them. A number of studies have suggested that judgments rejecting such sacrifices are based in more emotional processing than judgments endorsing them. More disturbingly, "utilitarian" judgments were found to be associated with anti-social traits such as psychopathy — both at a sub-clinical and clinical level. This result has led one major newspaperopens in new window to conclude that "goodness has nothing to do" with utilitarianism, and that "utilitarians are not nice people".
But such a tie between utilitarianism and antisocial traits is more than a little surprising when one considers the historical origins and influence of utilitarianism. Developed in 18th century Britain, utilitarianism is a philosophical theory grounded in the core idea that we should always act in the way that would impartially maximize the well-being of everyone on the planet, whether friend or stranger, near or far, human or animal.
This is a simple but revolutionary idea. Utilitarians like Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Peter Singer have played a critical role in "expanding the moral circle" and making morality more inclusive by fighting against sexism, racism, and "speciesism", passionately arguing for political and sexual liberty, and making influential efforts to eradicate poverty in developing countries.
In the last few years, a new movement of "Effective Altruism" has arisen, inspired by Peter Singer's utilitarian-based advocacy of self-sacrifice in the name of global charity. How can we square such an impartial ideal of self-sacrifice and charitable giving to distant strangers and with the idea of utilitarians as antisocial, even psychopathic?
In a paper recently published in Psychological Review, Kahane, Everett and colleagues (2017) resolve this puzzle by suggesting a new two-dimensional model of utilitarian psychology. According to a 2D model, utilitarian decision-making involves two psychological dissociable and independently important aspects.
The first, impartial beneficence, reflects the extent to which individuals endorse the impartial promotion of everyone's welfare without regard to distance or personal ties. The second, instrumental harm, reflects the extent to which people regard harm to innocent people as a morally acceptable means to achieving a greater good.
The widespread use of "sacrificial" moral dilemmas to study utilitarian psychology has yielded such puzzling and even contradictory findings because it focuses almost exclusively on the negative side of utilitarian decision-making. So, while psychopaths may be more willing to push someone off a footbridge to save five others, it would be surprising if these same psychopaths signed up to join an Effective Altruism Club or showed care for the plight of strangers in the developing world.
In other words, the sacrificial dilemmas paradigm ignores or downplays the positive, impartial and altruistic core of a utilitarian approach to ethics.
Kahane, Everett and colleagues argue that by distinguishing these two dimensions of utilitarianism it is possible to reach a more nuanced and accurate picture of the psychological sources of a utilitarian approach to ethics.
Drawing both on philosophical input and on statistical techniques, the authors develop a new scale measuring individual differences in utilitarianism in the general population and validate this scale using samples of both ordinary people and expert moral philosophers. They show that these two dimensions of utilitarianism — impartial beneficence and instrumental harm — are not merely distinct theoretically, but also are separate dimensions of moral cognition, each exhibiting a distinctive psychological profile.
For example, empathic concern, identification with the whole of humanity, and concern for future generations were positively associated with impartial beneficence but negatively associated with instrumental harm; and while instrumental harm was associated with sub-clinical psychopathy, impartial beneficence was associated with higher religiosity.
The findings of Kahane, Everett and colleagues challenge the widely held assumption that utilitarian decision-making is a unitary psychological phenomenon in the general population. By conceiving of proto-utilitarian psychology as comprised of two distinction dimensions, we can explain the psychological sources of utilitarianism, shed new light on the widespread opposition to utilitarianism, and open up new directions for future research.
Overall, the authors conclude that trolley dilemmas can at best tell us only half of the story about the psychology of utilitarianism — and, arguably, the less important half.
Citation
- Kahane, G., Everett, J. A. C., Earp, B. D., Caviola, L., Faber, N. S., Crockett, M. J., & Savulescu, J. (2018). Beyond sacrificial harm: A two-dimensional model of utilitarian psychology. Psychological Review, 125(2), 131–164. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/rev0000093
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