Aspies For Freedom

13:07 22 March 2007
NewScientist.com news service [article originally from Nature magazine]
Roxanne Khamsi
Mr Spock, the fictional Vulcan famously logical and lacking in emotion, sacrificed himself for his comrades in the movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan with the following words to Captain Kirk: "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one…"

Now, revealing new research shows that people with damage to a key emotion-processing region of the brain also make moral decisions based on the greater good of the community, unclouded by concerns over harming an individual.

It is the first study to demonstrate how emotion impacts moral judgement and sheds light on why people often act out of respect for an individual rather than choosing to act in a more logical, utilitarian way. The findings could cause a rethink in how society determines a "moral good", and challenge the 18th-century philosophies of Immanuel Kant and David Hume.

Antonio Damasio at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, US, and colleagues recruited 30 people for their experiment. Six of the subjects had suffered damage to a region in the front of the brain known as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC), which regulates emotions. The participants had this brain injury as a result of an aneurism or tumour growth in the VMPC region.

Twelve participants in the study had damage to other parts of the brain but not the VMPC. And the remaining 12 subjects had no brain injury whatsoever.

"Utilitarian" action
The researchers presented participants with various scenarios (scroll to the bottom for several examples) and asked them to make decisions based on the information provided. Some of the situations involved moral decision-making. For example, subjects had to say whether they would throw a person in front of a train if doing so would stop the train from barrelling into five workmen, killing all five.

In such a situation, most people would find it morally unacceptable to push someone to his or her death – even if doing so would save the lives of others. And this was the reaction of the healthy participants or those that had injury to brain regions excluding the VMPC. But people with damage to the VMPC showed a willingness to take this type of "utilitarian" action.

"You have one group that is ready to endorse what we would regard as an overly utilitarian judgment and the other far less" willing to do so, explains Damasio. He notes that the patients with VMPC damage generally made the same decisions as their control counterparts when it came to non-moral scenarios.

Subtle scenarios
Notably, people with VMPC damage were just as likely as their counterparts to endorse "impersonal" moral decisions that involved indirectly putting strangers at risk for the greater good. These impersonal moral scenarios involved, for example, encouraging the use of a vaccine that would protect the public but cause an adverse reaction in a few individuals.

These results suggest that emotions play a crucial role in moral decisions involving personal contact – but not in moral judgments involving distant, indirect impacts on other people. "What's beautiful to me is how subtly different the situations are," says Marc Hauser at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, one of the researchers involved.

The finding that some moral judgments involve emotions while others do not supports the supposedly diametrically opposed thinking of philosophers Immanuel Kant and David Hume.

"It means both Kant and Hume are right. Philosophers will have a fit because they like to choose sides," says Frans de Waal at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, US. Hume believed that people could be motivated to make proper moral decisions based on their sympathy for others. Kant, meanwhile, warned that moral judgments might be corrupted by emotions.

Personal dignity
Philip Kitcher, who teaches philosophy at Columbia University in New York, US, notes that the study of brain damaged individuals presents a unique challenge to Kant's philosophy. While Kant cautioned against the corruptive influence of emotions, he also argued that individuals have personal dignity, which must be respected.

Yet in the new study, subjects who had impaired emotion processing due to VPMC damage showed the least concern for individual dignity in the personal moral dilemmas that involved directly harming another person to save others. This provides strong biological evidence that emotions enable us to respect individual dignity, says Kitcher.

"Emotions are an anchor for our moral systems. If you remove that anchor you can end up anywhere," says de Waal.

Examples of scenarios used in the experiment:

Non-Moral Scenario: Investment Offer

You are at home one day when the mail arrives. You receive a letter from a reputable corporation that provides financial services. They have invited you to invest in a mutual fund, beginning with an initial investment of one thousand dollars.

As it happens, you are familiar with this particular mutual fund. It has not performed very well over the past few years, and, based on what you know, there is no reason to think that it will perform any better in the future.

Would you invest a thousand dollars in this mutual fund in order to make money?

Impersonal Moral Scenario: Standard Trolley

You are at the wheel of a runaway trolley quickly approaching a fork in the tracks. On the tracks extending to the left is a group of five railway workmen. On the tracks extending to the right is a single railway workman.

If you do nothing the trolley will proceed to the left, causing the deaths of the five workmen. The only way to avoid the deaths of these workmen is to hit a switch on your dashboard that will cause the trolley to proceed to the right, causing the death of the single workman.

Would you hit the switch in order to avoid the deaths of the five workmen?

Personal Moral Scenario: Submarine

You are the captain of a military submarine travelling underneath a large iceberg. An onboard explosion has caused you to lose most of your oxygen supply and has injured one of your crew who is quickly losing blood. The injured crew member is going to die from his wounds no matter what happens.

The remaining oxygen is not sufficient for the entire crew to make it to the surface. The only way to save the other crew members is to shoot dead the injured crew member so that there will be just enough oxygen for the rest of the crew to survive.

Would you kill the fatally injured crew member in order to save the lives of the remaining crew members?

Personal Moral Scenario: Infection

Someone you know has AIDS and plans to infect others, some of whom will die. Your only options are to let it happen or to kill the person.

Do you pull the trigger?

Journal reference: Nature (DOI: 10.1038/nature05631)

Related Articles
Interview: How we tell right from wrong
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?i...325937.100
07 March 2007
Lack of sleep may impact upon moral judgement
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn11285
01 March 2007
The animal roots of human morality
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?i...225731.800
14 October 2006
Weblinks
Antonio Damasio, University of Southern California
http://www.usc.edu/schools/college/facul...08328.html
Nature
http://www.nature.com/nature/index.html

Lol Dog's brain, that's exactly what they mean... it's all philosophical which is right. The moral highground and what is good for the many is often at odds and both are the right and wrong answer at the same time.

In the end though I'd make much the same decisions as you seem to - conciouss decisions that save the many even if it requires you take responsibility for your own actions.

Yeah, that's why it's such a strange mess morality, legality and the greater good.

I can understand the logic, the one guy YOU chose to die previously was safe, it was your decision that he was to die instead of the 5 other guys. So the burden of guilt passes to you, whereas previously it would have been whoever failed to maintain the brakes on the trolley, not to mention the anguish of the family of the guy who died knowing that if you hadn't intervened he'd still be alive.

But through inaction, you allowed 5 people to die who could've been saved, 5 families who will now have lost family members and 5 times the anguish. But because you didn't intervene the blood isn't on your hands and you are supposedly able to sleep at night knowing it's not your fault, and someone else will take the blame...

I dunno - the law these days is TOO rigid, it rewards people for minding their own buisnes and punishes people who try and play hero. (It was something they taught on the first aid course - if you administer first aid to someone you had better be 100% certain what you are doing, because if they die and it's found you did something wrong you are liable and could be put before a court. I mean, what kind of a world is that where you get jailed for trying save someone's life?)

Well that's exactly what I'd argue, voluntary inaction requires as much thought as voluntary action. But in court it's hard to prove inaction, as it could be you were frozen with fear/indecision/doing something else and failed to notice/didn't realise the gravity of the situation til it was too late.

Whereas taking the action is harder to deny (Though you could tell the court you thought the other track was empty and didn't see the other guy til it was too late)

But, for practical purposes, yeah it is messed up that inaction is the recommended path even when it costs lives.

I'd argue against killing the policeman right off the bat without trying all other avenues, he is a pawn of the same unlawful government. He has recieved his orders and has chosen to follow the orders he was given instead of doing "morally the right thing", most likely because he risked being killed or jailed himself by the government. (Trying stand up to a government is usually a futile gesture, one person crushed beneath the weight of a government won't sway anyone into action no matter how wrong it was)

If he discovered you hiding the jew then you'll probably want to arrest you as well, and then it's up to you what you do... diplomacy, bribery, lie through your teeth, try subdue him non-lethally... killing is last ditch in that situation.

Sometimes the only choices you have are "wrong" and "more wrong"... But a lot of the time, with a bit of thought, there's a third choice. I'm a firm believer in looking for the third choice; not to do so is to give up and let something bad happen. The two presented options are only a last resort.

Mmm... But just because people say "yes" in such a HYPOTHETICAL situation, it does not make them morally void or psychopaths. The other question is, how many of those who answered "yes" in these hypothetical situations would ACTUALLY do so if presented with these circumstances for real? Personally I reckon that if killing one guilty man would definitely save many in the future, then yeah. Let's get him. But how can you tell?

I don't think that someone making emotional decisions--such as not pulling a switch that would kill one person, and thus letting five die--is necessarily a psychopath, or "morally void". They are simply compelled by their emotions to make an illogical decision. These same emotions would, in most cases, lead them towards logical choices; but in the extreme scenario, the usefulness of emotions breaks down. The fact that these extreme scenarios do not often occur in reality makes emotional decision-making a viable and "user-friendly" system for those who do not depend on logic.

I noticed this fascinating article myself independently. Does any brain expert here know if the brain damage in the study's subjects is comparable to autistic brain differences?

Isn't it interesting that Spock mentioned in the article is a fictional character that is often cited as an example of an aspie fictional character, and the philosopher Kant (mentioned) has been identified as an aspie (Fitzgerald 2005), and the philospher who I believe was famous for being a utilitarian philospher, Jeremy Bentham, has also been identified as an aspie (Lucas & Sheeran 2006).

I think I recall that the "Yes" answer to the trolley-car moral dilemma was in the past regarded by psychologists as being the "correct" answer before this study showed that brain damage makes one more likely to give "Yes" as the answer. I'm certain that I've seen this question used before in psychology research. It's the same scenario that us autistics have seen over and over again: any tendency or behaviour that is not the norm or that is associated with autism is
automatically judged by the intelligentsia to be bad or wrong or incorrect or abnormal.

Did you notice how some people scrambled to defend the answers given by the normal controls, just because the normals are "human" and normal? The idea that sacrificing one person to save more than one person shows a lack of respect for individual dignity is rot. The scenarios have nothing to do with dignity, and 5 individuals are worth more that 1 individual. I'd like to take this opportunity to say that I have always detested that Frans de Waal. I hate his opinions. I don't read his books.

I find that my life is full of tricky moral dilemmas. Christians ask themselves "What would Christ do in this situation?" I'm an atheist aspie so I ask myself "What would Spock do in this situation?"


References

Fitzgerald, Michael (2005) The genesis of artistic creativity: Asperger’s syndrome and the arts. Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Lucas, Philip and Anne Sheeran (2006) Asperger’s syndrome and the eccentricity and genius of Jeremy Bentham. Journal of Bentham Studies Number 8
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/Bentham-Project/jou...ergers.pdf

There's no need to kill the person. Only him/her from the waist/neck and down.

But that's GBH. (How is that, from a moral perspective, any better than murder?)

It's a lot better than murder. Not being able to walk may be a disability... but it's not "a fate worse than death". 'Course, if you could stop him in a nonviolent way, that would be a lot better.

But I guess picking ANY third option at all isn't within the spirit of the question, which essentially asks you to choose between two evil things--often a lesser evil by action, and a greater evil by inaction. Either way, you'll be responsible for something evil... One choice is attractive because you can persuade yourself you aren't responsible for it; the other is attractive because it results in less evil...

But if you think about it, you're not responsible for the evil that occurs, even if you choose to act, because you didn't cause the original situation. The one to blame is the one who put you into that dilemma in the first place. (In natural-disaster variants, nobody caused it... meaning nobody's responsible, other than entropy anyway.)

(Go to any D&D message boards... check out the Paladin's Dilemma posts... They're covering the same ground there as we are. Except, in our examples, there's neither an involved deity nor a Dungeon Master to tweak things so that they end up in a cinematic fashion!)

In the investment example, I would find it easy not to invest the $1000 as I already would know it wasn't a good risk. Investment companies are hardly likely to send anyone an offer saying they are doing badly!

In the Trolley dilemma, I would yell a warning to all the men before I reached the fork. That would give them an opportunity to jump off the tracks before the car I was on hit them.

With the severely injured man on the submarine, the principle of triage would apply. He would be allowed to die but not actively killed. I would hope though that somebody could at least comfort him in his last moments.

With the aids dilemma, I don't think it would be up to me to shoot this person. How would I know they had aids unless they told me. Otherwise, it is just hearsay and gossip and could be incorrect. If they were a friend or family member, I would implore them to tell any prospective partner that they had aids but ultimately, it would be their decision and their responsibility to tell them.

I've always been baffled by the Vulcan/Human, Kirk/Spock, needs of the many/needs of the one dialectic. It seems like it has less to do with emotion versus logic and more to do with scale. On some level, we all start off with a set of moral "axioms" and apply logic to deduce consequences for how to conduct ourselves. But where do our initial assumptions come from? Clearly, from emotions. Spock and Kirk merely start from slightly different axiom sets.