Introduction
The eighteenth century philosopher David Hume believed that intuition and emotion drive decision-making. In his mind, our actions are not controlled by reason; rather, our feelings push us down certain paths. He proposed that individuals display virtue because the right thing to do evokes pleasure, not because reason helps us calculate morality. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato held the opposite opinion: reason controls our emotions, which he separated into the “moral emotions” and more basic, instinctive ones. The former includes indignation about a moral wrong and empathy while the latter includes passion and hunger.
Evidently, these famous philosophers and many more expressed differing views about whether moral decision-making is fueled by intuition and emotion or reason. However, as is the case with any issue we tackle on this blog, it is important to look at the drivers of moral decision-making from a both/and rather than either/or perspective and ask ourselves, “What is the interplay between emotion and reason?” rather than “Which is the true basis of our moral decisions?”
How Neuroscience Helps Us Study Moral Decision-Making
You may be familiar with the case study of Phineas Gage. While he was working at a railroad, Gage’s skull was pierced by an iron pipe when an accidental explosion occurred. Gage seemed to have maintained his attention, memory, and speech abilities. However, due to brain damage to the frontal cortex, his personality changed radically, for he lost the ethical values and understanding of social norms he previously possessed. This study demonstrates the importance of neurological processes in developing moral decisions that align with our principles. Thus, neuroscience and cognitive psychology are relevant tools in exploring how we respond to moral dilemmas.
A Dual Process Theory
Joshua Greene, who studies moral psychology from a neuroscientific lens through his application of fMRI brain scanning, stated that individuals use emotion and intuition to deal with moral dilemmas that feel personal. As evidence, there was neural activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an emotion-related brain area, when individuals faced moral dilemmas with personal consequences. In contrast, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a reason-related brain area, experienced heightened activity when individuals were presented with impersonal dilemmas.
According to Greene, you can approach moral dilemmas from a rational or emotional lens, for although you can sometimes employ reason, other times, you feel instinctively that an action is right or wrong without knowing how to explain your emotion. While the emotional approach to moral dilemmas is a more rapid process that occurs in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the rational approach is slower and more conscious than instinctive, and it occurs in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman has called this view of moral decision-making a dual process theory, which he discusses in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow.
The Trolley vs. Footbridge Scenario
The following common moral dilemmas display that your level of personal attachment to the victims of your moral decision affects the emotionality it evokes. Think about how you would respond to these scenarios, and reflect on how much emotion arises from each decision.
In the trolley scenario, you are near the train tracks and see that a trolley is approaching five individuals. If it hits them, they will die immediately. If you pull a lever on the train tracks, you can cause the trolley to change course and thus save the five people, but one individual on the other track will be killed. Would you save five people by killing one?
In the footbridge scenario, you are on a footbridge over the train tracks and again spot a trolley headed toward five people. You can save the five by pushing an individual off the footbridge to obstruct the vehicle. The moral question remains the same: would you save five people by killing one? However, most individuals ponder the footbridge scenario for longer because it is a personal moral dilemma; you would be directly harming another’s body and thus be directly contradicting a moral value. In contrast, the trolley scenario is an impersonal moral dilemma because the lever creates a level of separation between you and the murder.
A Historical Connection
Whether or not you believe in the moral righteousness of pulling a lever to intentionally kill one individual, I am sure you can see the dangers of impersonal moral dilemmas; they can prevent you from recognizing the consequences of and feeling the guilt warranted by a harmful act. The effect of German industrialization on the Nazis’ methods for Jewish extermination is a tragic example of how separating yourself from a moral wrong can make it bearable to execute.
Auschwitz-Birkenau
After constructing the original Auschwitz camp in 1940 to cleanse Europe of all Jews, the Nazis built their largest killing center nearby in October of the following year: Auschwitz II, also called Auschwitz-Birkenau. The process of murdering Jews at this death camp was akin to an industrial production line. After Jews arrived, they were forced to stand in line as a Nazi, sometimes a Nazi doctor, selected which were suited for labor and which would be murdered. This process mirrored quality control; just as workers discard defective manufactured goods, the Nazis annihilated undesirable prisoners.
Jews selected for extermination were forced into gas chambers and, once dead, were cremated in large machinery such as furnaces and ovens, which were originally invented during the Industrial Revolution. Even the poison gas that filled the gas chambers was a technical innovation sparked by industrialization. From the outside, the only sign of these horrific murders was the smoke that exited through the camp’s chimney, which made the building resemble “an ordinary factory” in the words of a Sonderkommandos member (a Jewish prisoner who was kept alive to help the Nazis murder other prisoners until they, too, were killed and replaced).
Industrial workers felt a less intimate connection with the goods they produced than preindustrial craftspeople, for they were minor parts of long production lines and worked with machinery rather than their hands. Likewise, the Nazis who worked at these death camps felt far removed from the killings; it was not the pull of their triggers that murdered victims but rather the poison gas and crematoria. Thus, they were more willing to participate in this system of industrialized murder than mass shootings. In that way, industrialization was one of the necessary precursors to the Holocaust.
Employing Reason
Although impersonal situations make employing rationality easier by reducing sentimentality, even emotionless tasks can be difficult to reason through. Thus, what factors other than minimized personal attachment allow us to practice effective logical reasoning in our lives? The results of the Wason Selection Task provide insight into this question. Participants are given four cards, each with a letter, number, and/or color. Then, they have to decide which two cards should be flipped to test the validity of a claim about the cards. For instance, the prompt that corresponded to the image below was if an even number is on one side of the card, then the other side is blue. During this study, participants employed a rational approach, but only around 4% correctly answered whether the claim was true or false without flipping cards that were irrelevant to determining the claim’s accuracy.
As the second part of the study, participants received four different cards: one with the word “beer,” one with the word “coke,” one with a number below 21, and one with a number above 21, the age at which you can legally drink in the United States. Each card represented a bar attendee, whose age was on one side of the card and whose drink was on the other. The rule presented to participants was that if an individual is drinking beer, then they are older than 21. In other words, participants had to determine whether if a card said “beer” on one side, its other side was always a number above 21. Around 72% of participants picked the correct cards to deduce the validity of this statement, a large improvement that suggests that individuals are better at reasoning through a decision with which they are familiar or that they have experienced.
Conclusion
We all encounter moral dilemmas in our lives, from firing a kind but struggling employee to rescuing an individual trapped in a fire, a decision that is somehow both life-saving and life-threatening. Turbulent emotions can overpower reason, and, conversely, a level of separation from the victim of moral wrong can harden your empathy and other moral emotions. Thus, we must ensure that we balance emotion and reason through our moral decisions.
Sources
- https://www.themantic-education.com/ibpsych/2016/10/27/moral-dilemmas-the-trolley-and-the-footbridge/#
- https://blogs.iu.edu/sciu/2024/05/27/moral-decision-making/
- https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/auschwitz
- https://ethics.org.au/the-role-of-emotions-in-ethics-according-to-six-big-thinkers/
- Feature image: https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/b682vm/moral_decisions_are_influenced_more_by_our/?rdt=48365