The Myth of Choice_ Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits - Kent Greenfield [23]
But I can say this about the trolley problem: there is a difference between what the final answer should be and how people should arrive at it. In other words, while I cannot know the ultimate right answer, I know how people should feel about the problem. Someone who saw the trolley coming and made the push-or-not-to-push decision in a cold, utilitarian way without feeling a certain way about it would not seem to be acting humanely. It certainly would not strike me as the best kind of decision making.
Contrast this view with the traditional view of economists, who have long based their predictions on the so-called “rational actor” theory of human behavior. Humans are assumed to make choices based on a cost-benefit analysis, maximizing their own utility (basically a word that means “pleasure,” broadly defined) as best they can. This theory has been extremely influential, and not only in economics. The rational actor assumption has been used to craft rules in criminal law, corporate law, and family law. The problem is that it takes as its touchstone an extremely narrow view of human rationality.
Anyone living in the real world understands that people make decisions for reasons other than their own pleasure. To be fully human is to act with spite, compassion, confusion, love. Economists may not understand this, but the rest of us do.
In fact, scientists performed a study of people who had suffered brain aneurysms or tumors to their ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the area discussed above that helps people empathize with others.15 As it turns out, people who had suffered such injuries tended to make decisions with less compassion and with more utilitarian “rationality.” The scientists asked the subjects questions like the runaway trolley problem. Those with the injuries were twice as likely as those with undamaged brains to push someone in front of the train. The brain damage, the scientists hypothesized, “put a finger on the brain’s conscious, cost-benefit scale weighing moral dilemmas.” Those without proper brain function in that area ended up making decisions with a more “utilitarian cost-benefit analysis.” The bottom line: a certain kind of brain injury makes its victims think like economists.
For the rest of us, to be a good thinker and a decent choice maker depends not only on the analytical and reflexive parts of our brains but also on our emotional abilities.
4.
In 1966, the nation was stunned by the news of a sniper in the clock tower at the University of Texas at Austin. The sniper, who turned out to be a twenty-five-year-old former Marine by the name of Charles Whitman, killed fourteen people and wounded thirty-two before he was killed by police. It was later discovered that Whitman had killed both his mother and his wife the night before. It was the deadliest campus shooting in the United States until the murders at Virginia Tech forty-one years later. Whitman left behind a letter, asking that an autopsy be performed on his body, hoping it would explain his increasing headaches and “unusual and irrational thoughts.”16 He wondered why he could not stop himself from doing what he was preparing to do, writing, “I don’t really understand myself these days.” He asked that his life insurance proceeds, if still valid, go to medical research “to prevent further tragedies of this type.” When the autopsy was performed, doctors found that a tumor in his brain was putting pressure on his amygdala, one of the structures that regulate emotions.
Should this revelation affect how we think about Whitman’s guilt? He certainly understood what he was doing, knew it was wrong, and nevertheless planned his rampage with care and sophistication. Sounds like the embodiment of evil. But perhaps his