You know, I've never bought the anticipated v. intended distinction based on how people react to the trolley switch versus pushing the fat man onto the tracks problem. The difference seems to me to be completely explained by the fact that throwing the switch, seems intuitively as if it would certainly have the expected result, while pushing the fat man in front of the train seems very chancy as a way of derailing it. I think people distinguish between the situations on the basis of their beliefs as to the certainty of the practical outcome, rather than any abstract moral difference.
And now my moral intuition is sore.
I am the fat man, and I say fuck 'em, all five.
Actually I agree with LB's point in 1. The odds against the fat man satisfactorily stopping the trolly aren't worth taking. I've never been able to see this as a vaild moral conundrum at all. Perhaps if I could, I'd have supported the invasion of a certain country in western Asia.
Many people cannot articulate the foreseen/intended distinction, Dr. Hauser says, a sign that it is being made at inaccessible levels of the mind.
Yes they fucking can, and no, it's fucking not. This isn't the damn Meno.
Trolley problems are pretty much the reason I don't do ethics.
1/8- I'm not well-versed in the literature, but surely this is just one (famous) hypo used to illustrate the point, and the experiments have been run with other hypos not vulnerable to this particular critique? It's an obvious potential flaw, and it's not like it would be that hard to tweak the hypo a little to fix it. So I would assume that these theories are based on a more robust body of research -- many different questions, probing these intuitions from many different angles-- that, taken as a whole, obviates your point. But perhaps I am being too optimistic about the sophistication of the research.
Oh, there's many versions. (And yes, you just explain 'the fat man will definitely stop the train, but he'll die.' ) There's versions where the one person is bound to the track, there's versions where the five people on the track are innocent schoolboys who were told it was safe to play on the track, there's versions where there's one person and one small rare flowers, there's versions where the person on the track had to crawl over a sign that said 'runaway trolley, don't go on the tracks.'
I don't know, not being a philosophy type. But whenever I see this sort of thought experiment described in conversation, there seem to be obvious practical differences that explain the different reactions. Real philosophers may know the good trolley experiments.
The artificial silliness of a lot of philosophical hypotheticals shouldn't be important, since they're merely illustrative, but to me it is. My feeling now is that back on the veldt, the proto-humans immediately killed anyone proposing silly hypotheticals, but that a false Judeo-Christian morality has forced us to suppress our innate judgements even though they are valid.
Philosophical hypotheticals also almost always assume perfect knowledge of a kind never attainable in any real world situations. I have never understand the value of moral principles which are derived from, and only applicable in, imaginary worlds.
There are lots of vivid real-world dilemmas to talk about, but philosophers feel that reality would only confuse things. Wartime dilemmas involving civilians are one example. Medical dilemmas (for example in epidemics) are another.
The article didn't deal with the fact that the modern world requires us to suppress some of our innate moral responses: revenge killing, honor killing, and wife-beating are three of them. Killing the enemy men and raping their women is probably another. It seems to have selected only the innate ethics which coincides, more or less, with contemporary ethics.
And once more: "Thou shalt not kill" has never been an absolute rule anywhere, in any civilization or culture. In many civilizations and cultures, killing the enemy is not just allowed, but obligatory, and enmity is not ethically justified. You just kill the descendants of the people who killed your ancestors whenever you get the chance, and make chances to do so whenever you can.
11: Yeah. I'm guessing that reactions to the problem are colored by people being unable to fully believe the conditions.
The article is pretty bad. Probably the science is better. I hope. (Ev biologists also have explanations of altruism.)
there's versions where there's one person and one small rare flowers,
This freaks me out. There isn't unanimity on whether to save the person or a freaking flower?
But it's a rare flower, LB.
10: Moral philosophers seem to insist on silly hypotheticals. I haven't seen any realistiuc hypotheticals, though I suppose that I haven't looked far enough. But the ethicists seem to me like people reading war comics in the middle of a war, compeltely unaware that a war is going on right outside their windows.
Here's a synopsis of ethics for beginners.
I've also heard one where the choice is between a dumb fat person and a truckload of delicious lamb chops.
I'm sure everyone's read it, but just as those homosexuals won't stop sucking my cock, I can't help linking this Fafblog! post.
This is why chemistry is more satisfying than philosophy. Fuck hypotheticals, what happens when we try this?
Sometimes "this" = KABOOM!, but that's part of the fun.
At my URL I have something about Gintis' attempt to use sociobiology as a tool for understanding "economic rationality". I think he does a good job.
Kin selection is not an explanation for altruism because the thing it explains is emphatically non-altruistic on the level of abstraction it's explaining it. Are you thinking of something else?
I forget the technical name, and I misdescribed the case, but the basic idea is that if you ask people to consider moving the trolley onto a) one person or b) one person plus a small rare flower or similarly 'tiny good', most people don't see that there's a difference. Yet most people would count the flower as a good. So it's basically a counterexample to consequentialism made in a different way.
(By the way, why it might be an interesting line of inquiry: if people generally have non-consequentialist moral intuitions, and you present a consequentialist policy, you might not be able to convince people to vote for you.)
The thing is, I buy that just saying "oh yes, the fat man will stop the train" might not work for a lot of people, even if they say they accept it. But my point is that other hypos are easy to construct that lose this problem. They might have other problems of their own, but as long as the problems are different, if you construct a lot of different hypos and look at the results of them all you ought to be able to get around your particular objection, no?
[Retracted set of long hypos about rescuing fat kids stuck in the crocodile pen at the zoo.]
What, you don't think they're worth saving?
Cala, I'm stupid but how is that a counterexample to consequentialism? If the survival of two people trumps the the survival of one, why doesn't it also trump the survival if one person and an orchid, only by not quite so much? the flower is a good, but a fairly trivial one.
Yeah, this is one of those areas where I'm not exactly certain what philosophers do all day. I don't actually understand what the reaction of the average person to the hypothetical has to do with figuring out the moral import of it (that is, it can't be that 'moral' means 'what the average person thinks is moral') and I'm also not clear if real philosophers do studies, like psychology studies, of how average people actually react to these hypotheticals, or if they just claim to know how they would react if they were asked.
I'm generally mystified by the whole endeavor. But it sounds like a fun way to spend a career.
27: I don't know what consequentialism is, but I think the relevant hypo is 'one person on track one, and one person and one flower on track two', and Cala said that people resist netting the two people out against each other and making the decision based on the flower. (Which, I suppose, leaves them indifferent.)
I'm inclined to think that both are equally objectionable.
My first reaction was pretty much the same as LB's and OFE's.
Objections:
1. What do you mean, "intuition?" That seems like a term intended to connote a deeper level of rootedness than what we're really probing, which are social norms.
2. What does moral theory (as opposed to rhetoric, or anthropology, or political consultantism) care about our social norms anyway? Sometimes this kind of theorizing seems like just an appeal to nature (and a specious one at that).
3. The hypotheticals are stupid.
OK, I am stupid. I'm also pretty much a consequentialist, which I understand is regarded as a serious character flaw these days. Knowing nothing else about the people, the flower gets the pass. Nonsense on stilts, isn't it?
I wonder if part of it has to do with, what I might call direct agency. In german it would be the "unmittelbare ursache?"
If I throw the switch, death is an outcome,but it is not by my hand, directly. If I throw the guy off the bridge, it is by my hand. (And yes, I can see all the holes in that, but we're talking about natural languages right?)
Being a bomber pilot is morally easier for some than being an infantryman, and for him using the nightsights is morally easier than using the knife.
I'll be prepared to drop this line of thought instantly.
The signature line of 30 may be the first-ever example of autopwnage.
(I try not to sound as cranky about analytic philosophy as Emerson, but that's only because I'm still trying to score chicks.)
33 describes my understanding of what all these hypotheticals are supposed to demonstrate.
So why do we need the hypotheticals? I guess Im too dumb.
35: If you're only trying to score with chicks who are analytical philosophers, I suggest you stop being so picky.
I think that hypotheticals do make a pretty good case against consequentialism, since the unrealistic assumptions of the hypotheticals are the same as the unrealistic assumptions of consequentialism, which only works when 1.) that you are facing a small number of alternatives, 2.) that the consequences of the alternatives are knowable, 3.) that there's a way of summing and comparing up the utilities of the two consequences, and 4.) that the calculations in 2 and 3 can be done quickly enough to make a decision possible.
Only a small number of choices meet conditions 1-4, and most of them are morally uninteresting and unproblematic routine choices. Where ethics actual has some useful application is in different circumstances than these.
As a way of investigating actual attitudes, these hypotheticals may have some value, but there's the problem of plausibility. Many people, including me, would have a problem answering one of those questionnaires, for example because I don't believe that that kind of knowledge is realistically possible.
Am I the only person who liked the article?
33: That seems like a psychological rather than a moral distinction to me -- that is, it would probably be much easier for me to kill someone by pushing a button that would electrocute them in another room somewhere rather than by sticking a knife in them, but I can't see it making a difference as to whether it was right or wrong to kill them. I think you might be right about why people react differently to the different hypos, but I don't think that moral philosophers should be all that interested in that sort of difference.
The distinction in the trolley problem makes perfect sense to me, especially after criminal law, where there was a lot of making of fine disctinctions between people's mental state in committing a crime. The disctinction in the trolley hypo seems to me to be the difference between "knowing" killing (where you flip to the sidetrack) and "intentional" killing (where you throw the fat man), out of the four mental states of intended, knowing, reckless, and whatever the fourth one is that I can't remember from the Model Penal Code.
So, we seem to have enshrined this distinction in our criminal law. I think that's significant.
35: I saw a guy score once using Descartes' distinction between primary and secondary qualities as his bait. The girl was enthralled. I saw another guy score by explaining the right way to sequence a series of financial transactions in order to get the maximum benefits under tax law.
I can't swear that they actually scored, but things seemed to be going very, very well. (The second case isn't really too surprising, of course. For the ladies tax law is like flowers, chocolate, and lovable brown-eyed dogs.)
m. leblanc may be picturing the face of somebody she knows on the fat man's head.
IM IN UR GRAY LAYDEE
PROBIN YR MORAL INTUITIONS
44 should probably have some kind of winking punctuation attached to it, or not have been posted at all. I plead illness.
41: hmmm
But the hypothetical situation presented is about how to choose quickly between alternatives that all lead to an outcome known to be bad. Unless one really does "believe" that there is some methodology for measuring "badness" (flower/persons life; five people/one person;) then the solution must be psychological. Which is my reading of the evobabble in anycase.
What intrigues me here is that he supposition of the existence of a ranking seems to suggest that the distinction between good and bad can be blurred.
Tell me, ist there anyprovision in these games for a refusal to act? And if so is such a refusal moral, immoral or amoral?
I think that this kind of argument is more relevant to law than to ethics, since law has to find answers to everything that comes along, by hook or by crook. But "hard cases make bad law" -- one of my favorite sayings.
No pleading necessary. 'Twas mildly funny.
34: How so? I have often misspelled my own pseudonym. Usually it's "Bosroniangirl."
I'm kind of with Austro. I'd prefer to do nothing.
43: That would be Locke's distinction between primary and secondary qualities.
9: I agree. And Gettier hypotheticals are the reason I hated epistemology.
51 -- I meant because you typed "p" in place of "o", as in the classic, perhaps mythical USENET thread where the adjective "pwned" was invented.
I'd prefer to do nothing
What and let the children die? Cold-blooded killer.
42: I'm going to embarrass myself here -- I haven't done criminal law much at all since law school -- but isn't the distinction between knowing and intentional commission of a crime only very rarely relevant? I'm trying to think of a situation where that would make a difference, and I'm not getting one.
The second paragraph of 39 describes a large portion of my impatience with philosophy (and economics, for that matter). It seems so needlessly artificial.
The article says it well: Nevertheless, researchers’ idea of a good hypothesis is one that generates interesting and testable predictions.
The world is full of difficult and interesting problems, and yet the mechanism of academia seems to reinforce the value of studying one very narrow kind. It's like watching doctors be encouraged to study the preferred ways of lightening freckles. Not a terrible use of time, but terribly frustrating to an outsider living in a world with malaria and AIDS.
54: You know, you actually might be right. I do remember that we spent a lot of time teasing out the disctinction, but I don't know that it makes a lot of difference for penalty's sake. Although it might in certan jurisdictions. Murder and manslaughter laws are all over the place.
Yeah, I keep on threatening to write a big post on "Why I hate federalism" and then not doing it, but variable criminal laws from one state to the next is one of the things that makes me cranky.
57 betrays the dark side of LB's atheism.
But LB! What about the laboratory of democracy! Vote with your feet! (gag)
You're going to make me cry, LB. Basic rights should be guaranteed by the federal government, but after that, let a thousand flowers bloom!
Vote with your feet!
LB and m. may have to vote with their feet, thanks to the inequities of biology, but some of us have better options.
Basic rights should be guaranteed by the federal government
Down with local handgun bans damnit.
Yeah, I keep on threatening to write a big post on "Why I hate federalism" and then not doing it, but variable criminal laws from one state to the next is one of the things that makes me cranky.
If we don't capture a House in either '06 or '08, and the Presidency in '08, you'll learn to love it.
I don't think the states have the practical power to protect us from federal fuckups.
Since the age-of-consent laws have been pretty much standardized state-to-state, federalism has lost its charm for me. 16-17-18, b-o-o-o-ring. I can remember when it went as low as 12. I was hoping to see it raised to 23 (to cover Monica). But no. No fun no more.
Many people cannot articulate the foreseen/intended distinction, Dr. Hauser says, a sign that it is being made at inaccessible levels of the mind. This inability challenges the general belief that moral behavior is learned. For if people cannot articulate the foreseen/intended distinction, how can they teach it?
This bullshit is way worse than the stupidity of the hypotheticals, people. See that thing over there? Do you know what it's called? No? Well then, you obviously aren't aware that you see it, are you? You must have been born with some innate, deep recognition of widgets.
There are still fun discrepancies -- I'd have to look around for the story, but if I remember it correctly a NYC cop was having sex with a 17 year old girl (legal in NYS) and then traveled with her to somewhere out west and took some naked pictures of her, for personal, non-commercial use. Then they got married. Then he was convicted of statutory rape or child pron or something based on the age of consent in California or Oregon or somewhere, and eventually ended up on probation with a court order prohibiting him from seeing his wife (as I recall the story, there was no allegation of wrongdoing other than the age issue).
While the guy sounded like a sleazebag, the whole story was ridiculous, and not in a good way.
67: Did you just call the argument of Plato's Meno assinine? I'm scandalized!
A lot of Plato's stuff is asinine, viewed from the perspective of someone who takes literature seriously.
I don't have a problem with a lot of these hypotheticals.
They're only perniciously problematic if you buy into the idea that you are learning something substantive about the world rather than engaging in a form of 'conceptual analysis'.*
Analysing the ways in which we employ particular conceptual distinctions; or discovering that the boundaries of the set of cases in which we'd employ a particular concept are fuzzy or vague; or even discovering that we don't really have any principled distinction in play at all in some set of circumstances; these are all fairly useful tools when answering philosophical questions but they're just tools rather than an end in themselves. You don't have to be a hard-core ordinary language philosopher to buy into that.
Analysing when people are prepared to call certain acts 'wrong' and when they are not is a useful thing to do as long as you don't come to believe that in so doing you've discovered which acts are wrong.**
Contra Emerson, I don't think employing hypothetical cases is always pernicious. It often is pernicious but it needn't be.***
* Kripike, Putnam and all their philosophical offspring can piss off...
** Leaving aside those people who would argue for the position that there's nothing more to being wrong than being called wrong...
** Saying that, in my own doctoral research I don't think I actually employ any hypotheticals of that type. Real world examples, only.
A lot of Plato's stuff is asinine, viewed from the perspective of someone who takes literature seriously.
I can't talk to you anymore, B.
70: A lot of literature is asinine, viewed from the perspective of someone who takes Plato's stuff seriously.
71: I don't think the hypotheticals actually become pernicious until they evolve into their own cottage industry within philosophy, as the trolley problems and the Gettier cases have.
re: 76
Yeah. When the generation of new hypotheticals becomes an end in itself.
In fairness, the Gettier industry and to some extent the trolley industry have fallen on hard times. The philosophere: self-correcting!
71 gets it right. The trolley problem doesn't apply to everyday ethical situations. It's not supposed to. You can divide ethics into three rough categories: the part of ethics that wonders about what 'the good' comprises (metaethics), the part of ethics that wonders what standards we should use to evaluate actions (normative ethics), and the part of ethics that argues about which actions are permissible (applied ethics.)
The categories are of course somewhat fuzzy, and they all depend upon each other. But that's not terribly important for our purposes. What's important in the case of the trolley problem is that it's not intended to mimic a real-world debate. It's an example from normative ethics, where the debate is about the principles themselves. Do we analyze an action based only on its results? Do we analyze it based on a set of rules? Does it matter to us how a set of results come about?
Why the crazy examples? It's because the real world is complicated. If I say, "Does Michael Schiavo have the right to terminate his wife's life?", meaning to get at a question about killing vs. letting die, I'm going to first have to answer tons of questions about his rights, terminations, pain, hospitals, etc. Simplify the example to reduce the background noise that interferes with evaluating the principle. You're absolutely right that it doesn't lead to immediate real-world solutions. But that's not the point of the debate.
Not that it can't have real world applications eventually. Pretty sure we recognize a distinction between murder and manslaughter, between refusing treatment and suicide.
Now you might think it's a waste of time to go around about principles when there's practical good to be done. Fair enough. But don't accuse the philosopher of thinking he's solved practical problems when he hasn't; most of the ethicists doing trolley problems aren't doing anything more than trying to tease out intuitions. (And how much intuitions should be weighted is another set of problems.)
Sorry, this sort of 'omg! philosophy is teh useless!' thing really bothers me. About as much as it bothers a literature prof when someone says 'Omg, litterchur is so boring, and I can already read, like, I don't want to analyze it. Analyzing is stupid.' Or 'Scientists always change their minds, so creationism is too as good as science.'
omg, cala just hits things with bats. Philosophy is teh painful.
Philosophy is all about the badass.
75: Well, duh.
72: You've already banned me from the republic once, Ogged. This on again/off again stuff is getting boring.
Wittgenstein said that these hypothetical cases were worse than useless for making inferences about moral principles and he was right.
Not that it can't have real world applications eventually. Pretty sure we recognize a distinction between murder and manslaughter, between refusing treatment and suicide.
Is there evidence either of those distinctions is an outgrowth of the work of ethics philosophers? (Serious non-snarky question.)
On the other hand, Wittgenstein also said "milk me sugar."
I think there is quite good evidence to the contrary.
87 to 85. Although I wish it were to 86.
Not sure. There's a lot of overlap between law and philosophy, though. Not *quite* the same skill set, but very close.
Just war theory is pretty much philosophy, though. Too bad no one took that seriously back in 2003.
One criticism of hypothetical metaethics is that it's become like tic-tac-toe, a game which cannot be won by either side. Whatever opening move anyone takes on a particular concrete question, their adversary will always have a countermove. The adversary can either show that the move is metaethically not well grounded (by offering refutations of emotivism, deonticism, the various sorts of utilitarianism, etc.) Or he can analyze a verbal justification of a given judgement within the given metaethics and show that it leads to some sort of contradiction or unacceptable reductio: "So you would kill the innocent little baby?"
Theoretically ethics progresses the way math does, by developing and proving new ideas superior to the earlier ideas. Except that it doesn't. Math is also formal and picky, but most of math is ultimately agreed-upon by everyone in the field. I don't think that there's been a progressive convergence in ethical philosophy; some of the few agreed-upon ethical principles are merely already-existing non-philosophical truisms ("Murder is wrong"), and some are transient agreements within the profession at a given time.
Other formalized, scientized fields have practical payoffs in the real world. Does ethics? In a concrete ethical situation does a trained ethicist have something special to contribute? David Velleman says no, and I agree, but Velleman thinks that this is not a problem, and I disagree with that.
The one thing that a trained ethicist will have is a skill at ethical quibbling. There probably already philosophers out there as expert witness hired guns, some working for the defense and some for the prosecution, cranking out whichever arguments their clients need. And any sharp freshman phil major can make his nice mom look like an idiot.
90- Yeah, just war theory is pretty much philosophy, but almost any course of action can be attributed to some strain of philosophy, no? Machiavellian, Hobbesian, on and on. The question is not whether the act is consistent with some set of philosophical ideas, the question is whether anyone consults with the philosophers before acting.
(Not that I'm not actually in the 'philosophy is useless' camp.)
I'm behind the thread, but sort of want to bring things back to the earlier "Hypotheticals, what are they good for?" discussion. I wanted to do this because no one uses the phrase "intuition pump" in the comments, and that's what they're good for.
On preview: When I left to go run, everyone was on a "study of ethics is teh suxx"-jag, Cala and McG seem to have now adequately defended it, so I'm not sure who my intended audience for this comment is.
I found the contention that children have "an innate sense of fairness that starts to unfold at age 4" to be naïve. [I would say "stunningly naïve", but that would be trite.] By age four, one's parents have usually started to drum into one's brain things like "share your toys", "take one cookie and give your brother the other cookie", "don't hit your baby sister", and "don't bogart that joint". Encouraging empathic behaviours - and discouraging solipsism - are pretty much parenting givens unless one wishes to raise a budding sociopath. Given that the concept of "fairness" depends partly on self-interest ["If A is entitled to X, I am entitled to X"] and more significantly on empathy, on putting oneself into A's place, were it innate, we wouldn't have to remind children to share, convince them of the essential benefits of quid pro quo, or teach them to entertain the feelings of others when considering the outcome of their actions.
On a tangential note, I wonder if Dr Hauser has ever pondered the social disintegration of the Ik, a people for whom extreme deprivation led to the sort of aggressive individualism that trumps social morality.
Or all those cases of kids raised by wolves or wild dogs. Test their moral intuitions if you want to know whether this stuff is innate.
(I know, I know, we can't experiment on them without consent because they're human beings. But still.)
DominEditrix, didn't the specialists tell you that the behavior of your little monsters is not to be used as a source of valid instances for use in ethical argumentation?
In Gintis evoutionary-economic ethics, one primary ethical instinct is "punishing defectors". In a healthy social context this can work favorably to enforce cooperation, but in an unhealthy context you probably lose the cooperation and keep the punishment.
The ethical instincts are an incoherent mess of impulses, not an Edenic origin of wonderfulness. People are so happy to link ethics and biology that they haven't looked terribly closely at the ethics they've found.
"Intuition pump" or no, ethics still seems to get bogged down in refinements of hypotheticals, and still doesn't seem to have made much contribution to actual real-world ethical behavior and choice. In what way has academic ethics contributed to improving real-world ethics, in the way that physics has contributed to engineering? There should be some kind of payoff for all that refined thinking.
The theory of ethical innateness used by Gintis and others is two-step: step one is an innate capacity for living in a social group, and a very primitive ethics; step two is actual socialization into an actual group. It's like the innate capacity for language.
on putting oneself into A's place
I thought I read a fairly rigorous study where young children across a very wide cultural spectrum could do this, and autistics (for some definition on the autistic spectrum) could not, but can't remember details.
One of the diagnostic criteria for autism is an absence of pretend play, and the theory is that playing pretend is linked to the ability to 'put yourself in someone else's shoes.'
97: Work by academic ethicists (Singer, Regan) has been very influential in the animal rights movement.
That's not an uncontroversial payoff, but it's a payoff.
And to narrow the field down to "philosophical thought experiments," I suspect Judith Jarvis Thomson's violinist thought experiment has changed a few minds about abortion. (Again, not uncontroversial.)
And then, of course, we have those who have figured out the surface behaviours that allow them to survive in their particular society, but for whom those behaviours are no more than a coat of brown paint over the green monkey fur. [Anybody been watching Dexter besides me and B-Wo's mom?]
I must confess that the first thing that comes to mind in pondering the train problem is a fleeting thought that the occasional natural culling of the gene pool probably isn't a bad idea. And it seems quite unfair to tamper with the dice. [Does anyone ever ask whether the lone walker on the sidetrack is walking there because he thought to check the train route?] And I would push a button to kill a thousand people I don't know in order to save one I cared about. But I would probably walk away from Omelas.
101: Not a persuasive example for me at all, but it does show that academic ethics has had a non-null effect.
I think that "lifeboat ethics" has also tended to encourage people to be be a little more hard-hearted and ruthless than they might otherwise have been, since it presumes murder and asks people to choose the victims rationally. But again, not really the kind of thing I would hope for.
I'm a little late to the discussion, but some of you might be interested in Joshua Greene's research. He's performed fMRIs of people thinking through moral dilemmas and found that both emotional and "cognitive" (meaning problem-solving and abstract reasoning) areas of the brain are involved and often push towards different responses. (article here [pdf])
The data also showed that emotional responses push people to disapprove of "personal" moral violations (such as pushing the fat man to his death--throwing a switch to turn the trolley is considered impersonal), while cognitive responses push toward utilitarian judgments. Dilemmas that generally took longer to answer (do you smother your crying baby to prevent enemy soldiers from finding and killing you and the other people hiding with you?) employed areas of the brain associated with response conflict, and again, utilitarian responses were correlated with greater high-level cognitive function.
I'm not really sure where I'm going with this. It just strikes me as more interesting than the stuff described in the article. And it gets to Emerson's point in 13 about suppressing our immediate moral instincts, so there's that.