Is it okay to sacrifice one person to save many? How you answer depends on where you’re from.
Is it okay to sacrifice one person to save many? How you answer depends on where you’re from.
Is it okay to sacrifice one person to save many? How you answer depends on where you’re from.
By Sigal Samuel
January 24, 2020
Summary
The study found that participants from Eastern countries like China or Japan were less inclined to support sacrificing someone in trolley problems than participants from Western countries like the United States.
The study found that relational mobility was a strong predictor of the tendency to support sacrificing one person, even after controlling for religiosity, individualism, and GDP. If you live in a society with high relational mobility, like the US, you've got lots of options for finding new friends, so it's not such a big deal if your current friends ditch you.
"People in low relational mobility societies may be less likely to express and even hold attitudes that send a negative social signal. Endorsing sacrifice in the trolley problem is just such an attitude," the study says, adding that the pressure of living in these societies might make certain ideas "Morally unthinkable."
The study shows that our beliefs about what's moral are, at least to some degree, products of our cultural context.
Intriguingly, the study also shows that there are some universals in human morality.
"Trolley problems result from trying to apply abstract rules to practical reasoning and require us to distance ourselves from all the potential victims," said Philip Ivanhoe, director of the Sungkyun Institute for Confucian Studies and East Asian Philosophy, who was not involved in the study.
The authors of the study suggest that low relational mobility may be playing a greater role, as it causes people to "Experience greater pressure against holding opinions that mark them as untrustworthy." They cite the findings of another psychologist, Molly Crockett at Yale University, who has shown that we're much more inclined to trust - and therefore want to befriend, date, or marry - people who reject sacrifices for the greater good.
The study has important limitations, but also important implications Despite its impressively large dataset, this study has a number of significant limitations.
In the meantime, the study has important implications for how we understand our moral decisions.
"Sacrificial dilemmas provide a useful tool to study and understand how the public wants driverless cars to distribute unavoidable risk on the road," Awad said.
Reference
Samuel, S. (2020, January 24). Is it okay to sacrifice one person to save many? How you answer depends on where you're from. Retrieved January 30, 2020, from https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/1/24/21078196/morality-ethics-culture-universal-subjective