Are moral choices rational? Nope.
Imagine a walnut. You are allergic to them, and have two bags of nuts: one has walnuts, the other has macadamias. A recipe you’re following calls for a bag of unspecified nuts. Would you use the walnuts?
Imagine a runaway train. Out of control and unstoppable, it and its five passengers are about to plummet off of an unfinished bridge and into the canyon below. You can stop it by throwing a lever that redirects the train onto another intact track, but the train would kill the worker standing on the track. Would you throw the lever?
Imagine a speeding car on a cliffside road. It’s about to corner too quickly, and doing so would sent it and its five passengers off of the cliff. You are a thin man standing next to a much larger fellow who hasn’t noticed the car and its imminent doom. To save the passengers, you could push the other man in front of the car, slowing the driver and saving his family (you are too thin to sacrifice yourself). Would you push the fat guy?
The former is a nonmoral problem, the second is an impersonal moral problem, and the latter is a personal moral problem. For most, nonmoral problems like the walnut ‘dilemma’ engender utilitarian decisions; that is, the chooser will consider the benefits of each choice and select the one with a more ‘useful’ outcome. Therefore, the average human will use macadamia nuts in the recipe and not kill themselves. Impersonal moral problems offer circumstances and outcomes thereto that the chooser is directly detached from. In the train problem, all you must do is throw a lever to save five people but kill one, and in this case most people will, again, select the utilitarian decision. Decisions that conclude personal moral dilemmas defy the utilitarian pattern and conventional wisdom.
They’re emotional; when people consider personal moral choices, their brains use several regions that relate to emotional reactions including the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), located in the frontal lobe at the bottom of the cerebrum. The vmPFC is the brain region associated with fear, risk, and decision making, and its development helps explain the emotional volatility of decisions that younger people make. The amygdala is a region deep within the temporal lobe of each cerebral hemisphere, is primarily responsible for anger and violent emotional reactions, and develops before the vmPFC does. Someone with a mature brain will react to an angering situation angrily and perhaps violently, which the vmPFC most often inhibits potentially violent behavior by considering the negative consequences of their actions. Hence more irrational, less controlled emotional reactions in younger people. The vmPFC functions similarly in the personal moral dilemma. It causes the chooser to consider the consequences of pushing the fat man, namely, directly killing someone, which is an upsetting idea. Other emotional centers in the brain process the hypothetical murder and elicit upset or repulsed reactions. As a result, people who consider the speeding car problem more often favor letting the five die to killing one.
The same process produces the same reaction in most people if they were to consider incest. When presented with a scenario wherein two relatives have sex but without the possibility of having children, the principal argument against the act is simply “Yuck!” I contend that moral arguments are actually no more than appeals to emotion; every moral criticism of crime, incest, religion, etc., succeeds or fails because of the audience’s emotional association with their concept of the issue. If there is no emotional association, the moral judgement won’t hold water; if theirs contradicts the speaker’s, then no effect; and if theirs matches the speaker’s, then the argument will succeed. Emotions guide personal moral choices, and so the less someone cares for, is interested in, or can empathize with a scenario, the more utilitarian their final judgement becomes, as seen in the train problem (of course, if the lever-thrower had some past experience with throwing levers and letting people die, they may have already formed some emotional association that would then guide their choice–at that point, though, it wouldn’t be an impersonal dilemma). In other words, the more important the issue is to the chooser (value and interest/emotion have a directly proportional relationship), the more likely they are to ignore the utilitarian perception and favor the emotional. The question “what feels better?” most often trumps “what has the best outcome?”
-Andrew Speers
