TRAIN OF THOUGHT: MORAL DILEMMAS EXERCISE OUR EMOTIONS
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f five people are trapped on a railway track and a train is approaching, is it morally right to divert the train onto another track where there is only one person? Most people would say yes. Would it be right
to push a person onto the track
to prevent the train from hitting
the other five? The different responses puzzle philosophers, because the principle - sacrifice one life to save five - is the same in both cases. We do not know how the brain handles moral dilemmas. However, magnetic resonance images are providing some insights into moral decision-making. |
The different responses
puzzle philosophers, because the principle - sacrifice
one life to save five - is the same in
both cases. We do not know how the brain
handles moral dilemmas. However, magnetic
resonance images are providing some insights
into moral decision-making.
Magnetic resonance images
now show that our brains process the two
dilemmas cited above in fundamentally
different ways, using brain regions
responsible for emotion only in the second
situation. It appears that when people make
moral decisions, emotional responses play as
much of a role as logical analyses.
In a fascinating experiment
conducted at Princeton University in New
Jersey, psychologists observed that when study
participants made moral decisions about
situations that have a personal element, such
as throwing people off a sinking lifeboat,
activity soared in four parts of the brain
involved in processing emotion. Meanwhile, it
sank in three regions associated with working
memory, which stores and processes information
in the short term. The reverse happened when
subjects judged less personal moral dilemmas,
such as keeping the money found in a lost
wallet, or considered questions that were not
moral issues, such as whether to travel by bus
or train in a given situation.
In the past, many
researchers regarded moral reasoning as a
purely analytical process, and deemed emotion
as something that gets in the way of reason
but the findings of the research brings
emotion firmly into the process of reasoning
itself.
Perhaps the most crucial
finding of the study was that people took
significantly longer to conclude that it was
appropriate to push a person in front of the
train than to decide it was inappropriate. The
people who said it was appropriate had to
fight their emotions, so they were more
hesitant, indicating that emotion isn’t just
incidental, but really exerts a force on
people’s judgements.
The investigators
emphasized that the study makes no judgment
about what decisions are moral, but rather
describes how people arrive at a particular
decision. It may not necessarily be the right
decision. They suggest that there could be
good reasons to trust our gut responses and
that emotions may well be important
adaptations rather than irrational responses.