A moral instinct?

'Consider this moral dilemma: A runaway trolley is about to kill a schoolteacher. You can divert the trolley onto a sidetrack, but the trolley would trip a switch sending a signal to a class of 6-year-olds, giving them permission to name a teddy bear Muhammad. Is it permissible to pull the lever?' :D

It may be the case, for example, that manipulating different emotions, or focusing people's attention on particular information in the dilemmas, can result in patterns of behavior similar to (or perhaps even clearer) the one Greene et al. observed in their study.

My prediction: Research Ethics Committees will hamper any really valuable experiments before they get going.

As a layman on the subject, I always thought that biological evolution was driven by by those in the male population that had the most opportunities to plant semen, and those in the female population that were most likely to be semen recipients. Aggressive selfish males coupled with supplicant females would have the most babies. Thus guaranteeing an inscrutable mess of moral tendencies.

I think the US military came up with the most brilliant moral coaxer when it came up with the term "collateral damage". In one fell swoop our nation state "community" had a verbal pacifier for the moral repugnance of throwing large numbers of innocent fat men off bridges during wartime.

In the two trolley examples, the choices are not morally equivalent. In the first, my choice is between letting five men die or taking an action that would kill only one. In the second I actually have three choices: allowing the five men to die, killing the fat man by throwing him off the bridge, or jumping off the bridge myself.

This third choice is not considered in the article, but I believe it is why throwing the fat man off the bridge is repugnant. What right would I have to decide that another person's life is less valuable than my own?

The reason why jumping off yourself is not presented as an option is the same reason why the man is presented as fat: it is presumed that the subject doesn't have enough mass to stop the train even if they jumped off, and only a sufficiently massive person could suffice.

My thoughts on the experiment: pushing the man off is guaranteed to harm him, but redirecting the train only harms someone if it works. I suspect we also are strongly disinclined to permit harming others as a means of bringing about a desired goal. Killing the man to stop the train is perceived differently than killing a man as a byproduct of redirecting the train.

I didn't buy into the explanation that we are averse to manhandling as why it's hard for us to throw the fat man onto the rails.
It would be just as hard to shoot him and let him fall on the rails.
I think it's the feeling that the trolley is the killer in the first case, and we just prevented it from killing more people, and that we are the killers in the second case.

Let us just analyze the last part of Steven Pinker's writing on "our greatest global challenge: the threat of human-induced climate change". Is it an efficient solution, as he seems to suggest that "Man will become better when you show him what he is like"?
Do we have enough time for such an evidently slow and partial change that may result from by simply "showing"?

Don't strong and persistent universal forces (genetic and cultural) exist in each human being that obstruct the realization of a rational solution of the problem of global warming even if had one? How about conflicting interests of nations, or groups of people in general? How about the exponentially increasing population in some large parts of the world?

I have difficulties with Steven Pinker's analysis both of (i) the results of the web-based moral sense test (which I took early on, from the website of edge.org, I believe) and (ii) the British School teacher/Muhammad teddy bear story. But, before I get to that, I must first state that I have great admiration for the intellectual power of Steven Pinker's multi-disciplinary research. I hae read many of his articles on the 'edge' website, may be the Santa Fe Institute's website, maybe also Metanexus, plus I have bought and read one book by him.

To come back to my two pionts of criticism. I have my moral sense test results some place, but I don't have the time to look for them. I was very pleased that, despite being an Economist-cum-Mathematician trained in Game Theory and John Rawls' Theory of Justice, the moral sense test did not show me as a neurotic utilitarian, my empathy quotient being significantly above the average for females (I am male, Muslim, of Indian origin). I don't recall the initial test asking for reasons why one might be ready to divert the trolly car but one may not be ready to throw the fat man off the bridge (maybe subsequent versions did). The immediate reason why I would not throw the fat man off the bridge is that it means certain death for him as a direct result of my action, whereas the diversion of the train MIGHT cause an innocent person's death , but only indirectly as a result of my action. Furthermore, I have capitalised MIGHT because, whatever anybody says about the NARRATIVE, the test subject conducts the though experiment by putting himself in a real life situation, and his intuitive reasoning is that something might still occur between the time of his diversion of the trolley car and the moment it reacges the point where the innocent person is standing that might yet save him. That miniscule margin for a miracle does not seem to exist for the fat man thrown from the bridge. I think most respondents would have given the same reason for their choice had they been prodded sufficiently firmly but gently.

As to the Sudanese protestors, I don't believe that even Steven Pinker really believes that they wanted the British teacher to be put to death, any more than he believes that the stupid American politician who briefly contemplated running for the Presidency really believed that the US administration should really contemplate bombing Mecca and Medina, or that the neocon priest (I canot lose my time rememebring such idiots' names) really meant that Hugo Chvez should be cold-bloodely assassinated.

I still have a lot of respect for steven Pinker, but I must say that I am quite dispointed about his narrative of the Sudanese protestors' utterances. Naom Chomsky would be far less charitable than me at reading Pinker's analysis of that incident.

DON'T get me started on those motherfucking trolley-car problems.

It's a good article. One annoyance with this genre lately is the Greene and Haidt soapbox. I don't mind reading wholesale speculation but Greene has an annoying tendency to present his metaethics as if it's part of his findings. I don't have anything bad to say about Haidt but there are a lot of people working on this topic from different angles and somehow those two always show up in every popular or review article promoting the other.

Outside his area of research, Pinker seems to do everything by the seat of pants, as if he were the first one ever to think about a topic.

A lot of his article is generic pop journalism. Much of it is the old, old perception that moral judgments are not utilitarian and sometimes are counterutilitarian, with a hint that they're just atavistic wirings of the brain (or else "subjective". Thus he labels moral judgments or reactions as simple illusions. This is old hat.

He also seems to get on some personal hobby horses, as when he highlights anti-smoking crusaders and global warming crusaders as examples of irrational moralizers. (Oddly, irrational religionists discouraged smoking decades before secular America did so. Secular America liked smoking, and the tobacco industry flooded the zone with pro-smoking messages. The scientific facts have been clear for half a century or more.)

This is probably a good first article for someone to read, because a lot of interesting points are touched on, but if it's the last thing they read they'll end up more confused than they started.

Fascinating article and replies. For what it's worth, there is a free, non-profit educational web site that has several full interviews with Dr. Norman Borlaug -- who is featured in the original article -- about his work in agriculture. Go to http://www.livinghistoryfarm.org and click on the "Media Resouces" for video podcasts of his interviews. Or go to the "Farming in the 50s-60s" section and click on the "Crops" subsection to see longer articles about the history and debate about the Green Revolution. Again, it's totally free and non-profit.