Jan Freeman writes The Word column for Ideas.
Joshua Glenn is a Boston-based writer, editor, and multimedia
producer.
Christopher Shea writes the Critical Faculties column for Ideas.
 Send the Brainiac bloggers a
comment on a post.
  Week of:
November 11
Week of:
November 4
Week of:
October 28
Week of:
October 21
Week of:
October 14
Week of:
October 7
Mind the gap
Shop talk What he learned in the newsroom Mr. Boffo lays an eggcorn Curse of the mummy's tummy More in Word Watch  |
« The viral campaign | Main | Morality games, continued » Wednesday, March 21, 2007More fun with moral philosophy!Speaking of ethics and its attendant and never-ending debates, The Valve takes note of a Peter Singer article in the Guardian about new research using old thought experiments to investigate the neural basis of moral decision-making. Two thought experiments: 1) You are standing by a railroad track when you notice that a trolley, with no one aboard, is heading for a group of five people. They will all be killed if it continues on its current track. The only thing you can do to prevent these five deaths is to throw a switch that will divert the trolley on to a side track, where it will kill only one person. What do you do, Batman? Most people say "Just do it." 2) This time, you are standing on a footbridge above the track. You cannot divert the trolley. You consider jumping off the bridge, in front of the trolley, thus sacrificing yourself to save the people in danger, but you realise you are too light to stop the trolley. Standing next to you is a very large stranger. The only way you can prevent the trolley from killing five people is by pushing this stranger off the bridge into the path of the trolley. He will be killed, but you will save the other five. Most people say "No can do." The Valve writer doesn't appear to realize that these so-called trolley problems and others like them have a long history in philosophy. (I'm sufficiently geeky to find them really fun to talk about, if anyone wants to.) He also makes a hash of Singer's article, whose subject is a new experiment using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) that "found that people asked to make a moral judgment about 'personal' violations, like pushing the stranger off the footbridge, showed increased activity in areas of the brain associated with emotions." More annoying evidence that will be used to say neural circuitry explains all. But Singer believes that this study should only "make us more sceptical about relying on our intuitions." We just get emotional sometimes when we're about to kill people. Nothing a philosopher can't fix. Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:57 PM
|
