You'll kill that fat man | Shi Wu
David edmonds is one of Wittgenstein's best-selling poker authors. His other works include Rousseau's dog and Bobby Fischer going to war. At the same time, he is also one of the founders of the best-selling magazine Mystery of Philosophy. He holds a doctorate in philosophy and is also a senior researcher at the Uxiluo Center for Practical Ethics in Oxford University.
Starting with the famous tram problem in philosophy, this book introduces the research results of philosophers and scientists on the bifurcation dilemma and its variants in the past half century, so as to explore people's moral intuition in the face of ethical dilemma and explore the laws that human beings follow in moral judgment.
The death of a crazy tram and a fictional "fat man" constitutes a philosophical problem, which has fascinated many philosophers for half a century. They want to know: Is there a law in people's moral judgment? Is there a standard for right or wrong? See how philosophers and scientists find the answer.
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Before we start talking about this book, we need to imagine two scenarios.
The first scene: you are standing beside a railway, five people are tied to the tracks, and a tram with broken brakes is coming at high speed. You have a switch at hand. You can pull the switch to let the tram drive into another fork. But there is another person tied to another fork in the road, and that person will die because of it. You must make a quick decision: do you want to flip the switch? The BBC conducted a large-scale online survey, and most people chose to flip the switch. Five people were saved, and one person was dying.
The second scene: it's still a tram with broken brakes, and the oncoming people are five people tied to the tracks. You are standing on the overpass above the railway track, and there is a big "fat man" next to you. As long as you push him off the overpass, the tram will stop and five people on the tracks will be saved. The survey found that this time, 90% people chose not to push the fat man.
These two scenes are very similar, both caused by an out-of-control tram, but people give completely different answers. This tram scene was originally a philosophical proposition put forward by a philosopher in 1967. Half a century later, it still makes us feel so entangled that it even developed a philosophical branch of "Tram Science" to find out whether our moral intuition has any principles to follow.
Moral tolerance refers to people's acceptance of various behaviors and opinions related to morality. For example, people have zero moral tolerance for murder, which is totally unacceptable. Regarding moral tolerance, there are two most mainstream and widely accepted principles: one is the principle of double results, and the other is the principle of utilitarianism.
When our brains form judgments about real problems, they often react intuitively at the first time, instead of thinking about theoretical problems. This makes us think: how does our intuition make judgments? Is this intuition reliable? Obey any rules?
Philosophers modify some variables in the streetcar scene, design many thought experiments, test people's intuitive reactions, find differences and summarize moral laws. For example, when introducing the tram scene to the experimental participants, we use different wording, or change the order of introduction, or change the fork of the train into a turntable, or give different identities to the people tied to the rails ... Every change, the experimental participants will have different reactions. It is difficult for philosophers to sum up a universal law about moral intuition. But the real world is much more complicated than the tram scene. A famous "cannibalism at sea" gave philosophers some enlightenment.
1884, a British merchant ship was killed in a storm at sea. Four people got into the lifeboat, including the captain, a waiter aged 17, and two other adult men. They only ate very little food and drank their own urine for two weeks, and they were starving. The captain suggested that four people draw lots, and whoever wins will be killed for dinner. But they found that the waiter was unconscious and dying because of drinking seawater, so the captain simply killed the waiter. Four days later, they ate the waiter's body and were rescued when a ship arrived. After returning to land, the captain was sentenced to six months in prison for murder.
The cruel and complicated reality makes philosophers feel that the world is not that simple. They put forward an idea: Maybe there is a state of "pareto efficient" in moral law.
"pareto efficient" is an economic concept, which means that in the process of resource allocation, if some people are to live better, others will be worse. This state is called "pareto efficient" and vice versa. In this story, the captain killed the dying waiter, making himself and two others better off, but he was sentenced to six months' imprisonment for murder, and finally his situation became worse, following the "pareto efficient" rule.
Psychologists have done many experiments on trams. Experimental evidence shows that human beings are not rational animals, but are engaged in a tug-of-war between rationality and sensibility. But what is certain is that people's behavior is very easily influenced by the environment. If a person has just experienced a small good thing, such as finding a dollar on the road, he will be more willing to help others. Therefore, scientists believe that instead of making great efforts to change a person's personality and expect to improve his moral level, it is better to make our environment more friendly.
Science has proved that the function of the prefrontal lobe (probably above the middle of the forehead) is closely related to people's emotions. Therefore, neuroscientists go to study people with damaged prefrontal cortex to see if their emotional reactions are different. As a result, they found that when faced with the scene of the fat man, they felt less emotional contradictions, and the proportion of people who advocated pushing the fat man off the bridge to death was twice that of normal people. This shows that there is a relationship between human brain and human ethical behavior.
Evolutionary biologists are also studying people's moral behavior. Studies have found that people's loyalty to their partners is related to oxytocin secretion in the body. If both husband and wife inhale oxytocin at the same time, they will be more loyal to each other and their relationship will be more harmonious. In the experiment of tram science, scientists found that people with relatively high serotonin content in their bodies have lower utilitarian tendency, and fewer people advocate pushing fat people to death.