The Myth of Choice_ Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits - Kent Greenfield [22]
The reason Anthony Hopkins’s Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs is one of the most unnerving villains in the history of film is that he was so calculating. His murders were not haphazard, reflexive acts. They were artfully planned and executed down to the “fava beans and a nice Chianti” that accompanied his meal of a victim’s liver.12
Our implicit understanding of how brains work explains why Hannibal Lecter strikes us as chillingly evil while it’s easy to feel sympathy for Raelyn Balfour. A jury didn’t hold her criminally responsible for her bad decision in part because the jurors felt that what she did was less than completely rational or intentional. This fits with our sense that responsibility follows intentionality.
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But there is more to good choices than making sure the more highly evolved portions of our brains, such as the prefrontal cortex, are doing the work. Hannibal Lecter is über-rational, and he is an excellent decision maker in a technical, amoral sense. But he does not have the “correct” emotion about what he does, so he seems inhuman and cold. Even excellent analysis alone isn’t enough; our emotions have to be working well too in order for our decisions to count as well-made.
Brain scientists tell us that emotions are governed by a number of areas of the brain. One of these areas is called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a primitive part of the cortex that seems to have evolved to help humans navigate social interactions. The area has connections to deeper, reflexive regions like the brain stem, which transmits physical sensations of attraction or discomfort, and the amygdala, an almond-shaped bundle of neural tissue that helps process emotional reactions and create memories of emotions. Scientists hypothesize that the ventromedial area probably evolved to help early humans make moral decisions about others in small kin groups—to spare a group member’s life after a fight, for example.13 As human interactions became more complex, the brain’s structures evolved to parse more complex ethical dilemmas. But the ventromedial area continues to insist on an ancient, emotional respect for the life of another human being.
This emotional insistence does not always make sense as a matter of costs and benefits, even though it may seem right to most of us in other ways. Take, for example, the famous “trolley car problem.”14 Imagine that you see a trolley hurdling down its track, out of control. It is about to run over five people who cannot be warned in time. (I know it’s an unlikely scenario, but I didn’t come up with it. Philosophers make their livings by inventing hypotheticals to isolate moral questions.) You can throw a switch to divert the train onto a spur, where it will kill only one person. Do you throw the switch? Most people would, since saving five people is worth the cost of one.
Now imagine that instead of waiting next to a switch you are standing on an overpass, and the only way to stop the trolley is to push a large person standing next to you off the bridge and onto the track. (The question assumes you’re smaller than the pushee, so sacrificing yourself will not stop the train.) Do you push? The cost-benefit analysis is the same as in the first example, but most people see a difference and say no. The difference has to do with your emotional connection with what is being done. Pushing someone off a bridge is more viscerally disturbing than throwing a switch, even if the result is morally identical.
We cannot say with certainty that our decision not to push someone off the bridge to save five others is the best one. That evaluation turns on a host of philosophical, ethical, and religious considerations on which people can reasonably disagree. On the one hand, perhaps our refusal to push amounts to moral squeamishness,