Moral Animals
I took up Rayne's challenge and participated in the Harvard moral intuition study [warning: spoilers to follow], discovering that if I were suddenly a train driver forced to choose between crashing into one completely random, abstract stranger and five completely random, abstract strangers, the situation-ethics doctrine of "the greater good" or at least the "lesser evil" would kick in, and I'd probably choose to run over the one rather than the five.
That's how it seems in the comfort of my room, in any case. Who knows what would happen in real life. Panic responses are not always predictable.
I enjoyed the quiz, but it didn't allow me to brood as much as I'd hoped. The scenarios, to my eye, were way too generalized, free of the complicating factors which introduce bias and subjectivity into real-life moral dilemmas. I'd be surprised if there's a great deal of discrepancy in the results; my hunch is that the study will prove that most people respond more or less the same way to various hypothetical, abstract situations. I think we are moral beings; we have an innate need for a concept of "the good" and for acting morally. We also have an innate attraction towards chucking the whole kit-and-caboodle out the window.
The quiz did make me think about situations in which people might choose to aim the speeding train at the five people rather than the one. What if the one person's a close relative who you love? What if you're Ayn Rand and the one person is a creative genius who you know to be on the verge of inventing a new energy supply for the nation? What if you're a Maoist and the five people are bourgeois parasites, the one person a long-suffering peasant -- he's carrying a shovel over his stooped shoulder, and he can't hear the train because years of exploitative labor have rendered him deaf. What if you're a Bosnian Muslim whose teenage brother was murdered at Srebrenica and the five people are Radovan Karadzic, General Mladic and their buddies? What if it's five neo-Nazis who you know to be the perpetrators of an unpunished hate crime that resulted in the death of small children?
More I think about it, in fact, seems to me that serious ethical problems investigate conditions in which it may or may not be permissible to run over the five for the sake of the one.
This test is rigged!
1:40:31 PM 
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