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• W190458034 abstract "A Double Causal Contrast Theory of Moral Intuitions in Trolley Dilemmas Michael R. Waldmann (michael.waldmann@bio.uni-goettingen.de) Alex Wiegmann (Alex.Wiegmann@psych.uni-goettingen.de) Department of Psychology, University of Gottingen, Gosslerstr. 14, 37073 Gottingen, Germany ical theories of moral intuitions. Some have derided this research as trolleyology because of the artificiality of the task. It is certainly true that most people never will be in a situation that mimics the trolley problem. However, we would like to defend this paradigm as a valuable tool to study the cognitive basis of moral intuitions. People care about how society should deal with violent death, severe illness, terrorism, or emergency, even though they may never be involved in a dilemma involving these events. Nevertheless, these intuitions influence how our society and law functions. Thus, it is important to understand the me- chanisms that underlie people’s moral intuitions. Abstract In trolley dilemmas a train is about to kill several victims who could be saved if instead a different victim is harmed. A number of theories have been proposed which assume that permissibility judgments in these harm-based moral dilemmas are mediated by an analysis of the underlying causal structure. For example, it has been postulated that it is permissible to harm people as a side effect but not as a means. We have de- veloped a different causal theory which claims that moral judgments are influenced by two contrasts, the global contrast between the number of victims in the presence and absence of the act, and an additional local contrast that compares the fates of the morally relevant target (i.e., threats, victims) of the proposed intervention in the presence versus absence of the act. This double causal contrast theory explains intuitions in various types of trolley dilemmas better than its competi- tors. Threat vs. Victim Interventions Keywords: moral reasoning; trolley dilemmas; causal reason- ing; doctrine of double effect Introduction Trolley dilemmas have become the drosophila for testing alternative philosophical and psychological theories of mor- al judgments in harm-based moral dilemmas (see Kamm, 2007). In the philosopher’s Judith Thomson’s (1986) ver- sion of the trolley dilemma, a situation is described in which a trolley whose brakes fail is about to run over five work- men who work on the tracks. However, the trolley could be redirected by a bystander on a side track where only one worker would be killed (bystander problem). Is it morally permissible for the bystander to throw the switch or is it better not to act and let fate run its course? Most people seem to have the intuition that throwing the switch is moral- ly required or at least permissible. However, the intuitions change in another of Thomson’s (1986) examples, in which the train could be stopped by throwing a fat person from a footbridge on the tracks, thus stopping the train with his body (footbridge dilemma). Most people find this act outra- geous, even though again one person is sacrificed to save five. For philosophical theories these two intuitions present a puzzle. The intuitions in the bystander dilemma seem to be in line with utilitarian or consequentialist theories that focus on the favorable outcome of the act in contrast to not acting (1 vs. 5 dead people). However, the footbridge dilemma yields the same outcomes. The intuitions in this dilemma seem to be more consistent with non-consequentialist rea- soning, which focuses on the impermissibility of the act of killing a person. Not only in philosophy but also in psychology the trolley dilemmas have attracted interest as test cases for psycholog- From a psychological point of view, the philosophical com- parisons between bystander and footbridge trolley versions are flawed because of the various confounds. The footbridge dilemma differs in a number of relevant features from the bystander problem, including the act (re-directing a train vs. pushing a person), the physical distance between agent and victim, the directness, and the saliency of the death, or the degree of intentionality (see also Greene et al., 2009; Waldmann & Dieterich, 2007, for evidence). Unfortunately, in the early research on trolley dilemmas psychologists have often adopted close variants of Thomson’s (1986) versions, which makes it hard to interpret the results of these studies (Greene et al., 2001; Mikhail, 2007). In our own research we have therefore tried to create variants of trolley dilem- mas, which are better controlled so that some of the already well known factors affecting moral intuitions (e.g., distance, violence of act) are kept constant (Waldmann & Dieterich, 2007). We will first present a new, better controlled experi- ment which highlights the structural differences between different variants of trolley dilemmas. This experiment will serve as the base example for presenting competing theories, which then will be tested in additional experiments. General Procedure Unless otherwise noted all experiments were run in groups (including seminars and lectures) with students from the University of Gottingen, Germany. Partic- ipants came from various fields, but we excluded philoso- phy and economics to avoid prior exposure to relevant phi- losophical positions. Subjects were handed booklets in which they were told that they are going to read about a situation which mentions two options of an agent in the story. All dilemmas used a format in which a fictitious agent in a remote control room of a train company is presented with two alternatives with outcomes, which lie in the future. The outcomes were clearly stated and characterized as cer-" @default.
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• W190458034 title "A Double Causal Contrast Theory of Moral Intuitions in Trolley Dilemmas" @default.
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