The first picture is a typical trolley dilemma. You are a bystander standing next to a railway. You find that there are five people being tied tothe railway and a train out of control is hurtling down the track. You know that if the train crash into these five people, they will definitely die. However, suddenly, you find that there is another track that the train can be turned to and there is only one man tied to that track. You can simply pull a lever beside you to turn the train. Will you pull that lever? And the second picture is one of the alternations of the traditional trolley dilemma, the footbridge dilemma. All things being equal, except that you are standing on a bridge with an extremely fat guy and there are no other tracks. The only thing you can do to prevent the train from crashing into these five people is to push the fat guy down and therefore stop the train. Nevertheless, the fat guy will definitely die. Will you push that fat man down?
These scenarios are considered as dilemmas because they both involve choices that would ultimately lead to some undesirable, even disturbing consequences – the death of people. Furthermore, after the request of making these decisions, you should also offer both others and yourself some reasonable explanations or reasons for why you think making a particular decision would be, in some way, a better choice. Therefore, these dilemmas have really offered us a great view towards morality. Through these dilemmas, we are trying to decode the very process of how we reach our final moral judgments and we have constructed theories in hope that they would help us to reach a better, more thorough understanding of it.
Facing the traditional trolley dilemma, most people have chosen to pull the lever and let the train kill 1 person instead of 5. The main reason behind is generally a utilitarian consideration that 5 people’s lives would be more valuable, or somehow more important, more worthy than 1 person’s life. However, in facing the footbridge dilemma, most people have inclined to the choice of not pushing the fat man down. Although pushing the fat man down also satisfy the reason they have offered just now, they do not follow this reason anymore.
Why do people make different choices in these scenarios? What is the underlying difference between them that causes this dramatic turn in people’s judgments? In this paper, I would like to suggest that the underlying factor in this case is actually our emotions. It is the emotional factor involving in the second scenario that leads people to alter their choice. Furthermore, I would argue that our emotions actually play a role much more decisive than our moral reasoning in this process of moral judgment.
For a long time in history, philosophers argued that we make moral distinctions and moral judgments based on reason. However, David Hume, in his book A Treatise of Human Nature, argues that our reason alone cannot be the motive to the will, but rather is the “slave of the passions”. He suggests that reason can only help us to determine facts and effects. For example, reason helps us to determine the fact that coffee is a kind of liquid. Also, reason helps us to determine that the effect of drinking coffee is to be awake for a certain amount of time. However, this is as far as reason goes. Knowing the fact and effect does not motivate us to conduct any actions, say drinking this cup of coffee. In order for us to act in a certain way, there must be a passion that provides the impulse for us to do that, which includes our emotions, feelings and desires. Since moral distinctions can cause people to conduct actions, they must include the factor of passion to enable these actions. Therefore, following these premises, it is logically valid that the moral distinctions cannot be only derived from reason itself. Every intentional action is an immediate product of the passion. But, where does the passion come from? According to Hume, it comes from sympathy.
In Hume’s terms, sympathy is not a kind of feeling. Instead, it is a psychological mechanism that enables us to receive by communication the sentiments of another. The process of sympathizing has two different stages: cognitive and affective. For the cognitive stage, we observe the “external signs” or “expressions” of the others (e.g. shouting, the facial expressions and body movements) and infer their states of the mind. These expressions are the effects of their passions and they act as means for us to infer their causes. And we are thus informed, in idea, of the presence of passions in their minds. However, “a mere idea wou’d never alone be able to affect us”. There comes the affective stage that helps us to convert this idea into an impression or the passion itself. It is through this process that we are able to really feel and experience the sentiments of another.
Sympathizing is possible in a sense that we all human beings, regardless of the tiny differences, are similar in bodily structure, in the sentiments that we can possess and process, in perception, in cognition and so on. This resemblance, or contiguity in Hume’s word, is the very condition for us to share and transfer these sentiments. Obviously, it is relatively difficult for us to share the sentiment of a cow. At the same time, the variations of the degree of resemblance also affects the vivacity of the passions we finally experience and feel. If two people are alike in several aspects, they are more likely to sympathize with each other. According to Hume, “we sympathize more with persons close to us in space or time”. Furthermore, “our sympathy is more intense when directed towards persons related to us, especially by blood”.
Following Hume’s moral theory, we can see the distinctions between the traditional trolley dilemma and the footbridge dilemma and start to make sense of the different moral decisions people make. I would like to differentiate them from the degree of directness and the degree of contiguity.
Firstly, in the traditional dilemma, instead of directly pushing the man down the bridge and causing him to die, people pull a lever and lead the train to crash into the man on the railway. When people are directly pushing the man, they are more likely to feel the “gut feelings”, to experience moral anxiety, to link this behavior to the one of murdering, directly causing huge amount of pain to the others. Therefore, this directness will probably lead to a higher degree of emotional arousal, which will in turn cause these people to make the final judgment of not pushing the fat man. Secondly, the sympathetic transmission of sentiments can also vary in effectiveness. Referring to the concept of contiguity mentioned before, the decision makers are actually more likely to have a better sympathetic transmission of sentiments with the fat man comparing to the man far away tied on the railway because he is closer to the decision maker in space. The most significant distinction between these two scenarios is that the state of that man is different. In the traditional case, the man is in the same state as the five people are, tied on the railway and unable to move, already involving in this emergency. However, the fat man in the second scenario is different. He is on the bridge and originally not involved in this emergency. We can recognize that in this case, the fat man and the decision maker have in some sense a higher degree of contiguity or resemblance. They are alike in a way that they are both free on the bridge, not originally involved in the emergency, and the fat man can actually push the decision maker down in reverse, ideally speaking. Therefore, what we can observe is that this variability of contiguity may lead to different degrees of sympathy, different degrees of impulse, and different degrees of the strength of the motives of people’s actions.
If we want to further suggest the role of sentiment or emotions in our moral judgments, we can imagine the cases which include our family members or best friends, which I would call PERSONAL CASES, on the axis of personal vs. impersonal. PERSONAL can be understood as becoming more related to the situation. And, as suggested previously, Hume himself argues that our sympathy is more intense when directed towards our families. We can further divide the dilemmas into four:
1) traditional/impersonal
When the six people are all strangers, as suggested previously, people on average choose to sacrifice the one person to save five people.
2) traditional/personal
When interchanging the one person in the traditional dilemma with a family member of the decision maker, more people will struggle about whether they should sacrifice their family members to save the lives of five strangers. At this point, there is a higher degree of anxiety and emotional arousal comparing to 1).
3) footbridge/impersonal
When asking people whether they will push the fat man down or not, most people answer that they will not. This is possibly because they have higher degree of resemblance and contiguity with the fat man. Directly pushing the fat man toward death is closely connected to murder.
4) footbridge/personal
When interchanging the fat man in the footbridge dilemma with a family member of the decision maker, people will experience even higher degree of anxiety and “gut feelings”. The idea of directly killing a family member by hand is extremely unacceptable for most people, even though this action might save five strangers’ lives.
If the judgments are only based on reason, then whoever the person is, the decision should always be pulling the lever or pushing the fat man. However, people facing the personal cases are more likely to save their families and mates instead of the strangers. The reason is possibly because the personal cases can induce higher degree of emotional arousal.
In sum, we can reasonably conclude that our emotions or sentiments play a role in our decision making process. And, following Hume’s idea, it is also reasonable to infer that they actually have a more decisive power comparing to the one reason has. In interpreting the different decisions people make in these two dilemmas, reconsidering the role of emotions is possibly the most satisfying way of making sense of them.
Bibliography
Hume, David (ed.) (1738). A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning Into Moral Subjects. Oxford University Press.
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