I have begun to visit the trail behind my house with
religious devotion. It switchbacks up a sundrunk slope, mostly melted out from
the snow, and tops out at a cliff overlooking the valley where I live. I go
because it’s spring, and the smell of thawing soil and sweetening ponderosa
bark calls me outside. I go because, for a short time at least, I can feel the
fingers of sun kneading my neck and shoulder muscles, releasing knots of worry
for my family, my friends, my community, as the novel coronavirus licks through
our people like wildfire. The first flowers are out. White flickers of spring
beauty scatter the ground, and yellow pinches of something I can’t name. The
first green grass threads between orange fallen needles. Snowflakes bluster
from a few clouds in the otherwise blue sky. Things are beautiful; things are
terrible. Cognitive dissonance has become my forever feeling.
Three weeks and approximately two lifetimes ago, I went to Rock Springs, Wyoming to meet some migrants. The pilgrims in question were mule deer, a whole herd of ‘em, who trek each spring from the sere sagebrush valley where they winter to alpine summer pastures, devouring fresh green-up as they wander. Along the way they navigate a litany of obstacles, both natural and human-made: They swim lakes and ford rivers, climb mountains and traverse deserts, squeeze under barbed-wire fences and pick their way through oil-and-gas fields and, most terrifying of all, dash across highways. And all of it, I should add, while pregnant with twins.
To get to Rock Springs, of course, required a substantial migration of my own, entailing two planes and a rental car, a carbon-binging annihilation of space and time that would have seemed like genuine magic to my not-too-distant ancestors. Less than a month later, travel now seems an extravagance, not to mention an unconscionable public health danger. A few months hence and we may all end up like the survivors in Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel’s dystopia about the aftermath of a pandemic, incredulous at the notion that those rusting steel cigars called airplanes ever leapt from the ground.
The age of unfettered human mobility, now on hiatus, has come at the expense of most other organisms. Animals as small as mice and as large as elephants are losing their ability to freely bestride the landscape, their worlds ever more circumscribed by the frenetic movements of a single overweening ape. It’s logical enough, then, to assume that a dramatic deescalation of human movement will permit other critters to reclaim some ground. Okay, the viral stories about the Venice swans were feel-good hokum, but I don’t doubt that far-ranging animals like those Wyoming deer will find a more accommodating migrationscape this spring.
This post first appeared March 27, 2015. It’s not irrelevant March 25, 2020.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A trolley carrying five school children is headed for a cliff. You happen to be standing at the switch, and you could save their lives by diverting the trolley to another track. But there he is – an innocent fat man, picking daisies on that second track, oblivious to the rolling thunder (potentially) hurtling his way. Divert the trolley, and you save the kids and kill a person. Do nothing, and you have killed no one but five children are dead. Which is the greater moral good?
This kind of thought experiment is known as a sacrificial dilemma, and it’s useful for teaching college freshmen about moral philosophy. What you maybe shouldn’t do is ask a guy on the street to answer these questions in an fMRI machine, and then use his answers to draw grand conclusions about the neurophysiological correlates of moral reasoning. But that’s exactly what some neuroscientists are doing. The trouble is, their growing body of research is built on a philosophical house of cards: sacrificial dilemmas are turning out to be exactly the opposite of what we thought they were. Guy Kahane wants to divert this trolley before it drives off a cliff.
Kahane, deputy director of Oxford’s Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, has never been a big fan of the sacrificial dilemma. The main problem, he says, is that it has been misapplied to situations it was never intended for.
Philosophically, the sacrificial dilemma has a narrow purpose. Your choice supposedly illuminates whether you fall into one of two camps on moral reasoning: choose to hypothetically end a life to save a few more, and yours is described as utilitarian judgment. Reject it, and you are said to be making non-utilitarian (“deontological”) judgments. Roughly translated, the utilitarian is concerned primarily with outcomes, while the deontologist has a morally absolute point of view that holds that you couldn’t even tell a lie to save someone’s life, because it’s wrong to tell a lie (Kant being the most extreme member of this camp). But when I say “roughly translated” I really mean roughly: to be truly understood on their own merits, these terms need the full battery of philosophical context.
So what do philosophers mean by utilitarianism? It means that you’re the kind of person who, as John Stuart Mill prescribed, is generally, genuinely concerned with the greater good. That you are capable of “transcend[ing] [y]our narrow, natural sympathies … to promote the greater good of humanity as a whole, or even the good of all sentient beings”. It’s an algorithmic way of seeing the world in which all your actions must aggressively maximise the good.
That’s a demanding moral framework! Let’s separate it from what I’ll refer to from now on as “scarequotes utilitarianism”, embodied by the reaction of “what, just kill the fat guy.”
Over time the distinction between the two has been been flattened because of inappropriate overuse of these sacrificial dilemmas. As a result we’ve begun to assume that “what, just kill the fat guy” is shorthand for an entire moral compass tuned to the kind of “God’s-eye” concern for the greater good that defines utilitarian ethics. And so, in addition to being “complex, far-fetched, and convoluted”, Kahane says, sacrificial dilemmas have been misunderstood and misapplied.
But while it’s absurd to use them to pigeonhole average Joe non-philosophers into the utilitarian/deontological boxes, could sacrificial dilemmas still offer some small glimmer of insight into the average person’s real-world moral reasoning? For example, might a person who answers “just kill the fat guy” — while not also believing, in true utilitarian fashion, that she should maximise welfare by donating 90 percent of her money to distant strangers — be more likely to agree that she should give to charity?
To find out, Kahane teamed up with some other Oxford philosophers, including Brian Earp, Jim Everett and Julian Savulescu. They designed a series of experiments to examine exactly how well the answer you give to the sacrificial dilemmas maps to your larger moral framework.
The results, published in January in the journal Cognition, were not encouraging.
Not only does a “utilitarian” response (“just kill the fat guy”) not actual reflect a utilitarian outlook, it may actually be driven by broad antisocial tendencies, such as lowered empathy and a reduced aversion to causing someone harm. Which makes a kind of sense: in the real world, given the choice between two kinds of harm, most people wouldn’t be able to cost it up quite so coldly. In fact, respondents who “killed the fat guy” also scored high on a question that asked them to assess how likely they would be to actually, in real life, kill the fat guy (and other sacrificial dilemmas, like the one where you must smother a crying baby to save a group of hiding refugees). They similarly aced the psychopath test (featuring statements like “success is based on survival of the fittest; I am not concerned about the losers”) and flunked the empathy test (“When I see someone being taken advantage of, I feel kind of protective towards them”). As you might expect, “scarequote utilitarians” scored low on “concern for the greater good”. Taken together, the results of their experiments caused the authors to conclude that answering in the “utilitarian” fashion may reflect the inner workings of a broadly amoral mind.
So why should anyone care about this apart from some philosophers breathing pretty thin air? Because in recent years, psychologists and neuroscientists have seized on these sacrificial dilemmas as a tool of choice for understanding how the brain deals with moral choices:
In the current literature, when subjects judge that it is acceptable to sacrifice one person to save a greater number, this is classified as a utilitarian judgment, and thought to reflect a utilitarian cost–benefit analysis, which is argued by some to be uniquely based in deliberative processes (Cushman, Young, & Greene, 2010), and even in a distinctive neural subsystem (Greene, 2008; Greene et al., 2004).
Neuroscientists have spent over a decade amassing research based on these types of thought experiments. In 2001, in one of the first neuroimaging studies of moral cognition, subjects in an fMRI were posed these dilemmas to draw deep conclusions about the neurophysical correlates of morality. It got a lot of attention. That attention led other researchers to follow suit with more studies. “Once a body of research grows around a paradigm, it is easier to build on it than to come up with a new experimental design,” Kahane wrote. “Soon everyone is using this paradigm, just because everyone else is.”
It wouldn’t be the first time neuroscience has stepped in it. In recent years, serious flaws in big studies’ design and reporting — the “dark patch” of the psychopath’s brain, the dead salmon whose brain appeared under an MRI scanner to spark to life when shown pictures of certain people — have led to questions about whether this discipline has much to add to science at all. This latest reliance on philosophical thought experiments is just asking for more trouble.
But this isn’t to say any investigation of what happens in the brains of people considering moral dilemmas is useless. Kahane just thinks we should jettison the useless sacrificial dilemmas and find something genuinely distinctive of utilitarian moral thinking. In a paper published in Social Neuroscience he recommends we drop the sacrificial dilemma — which is better at identifying B-school psychopaths than it is at identifying morality. Instead, we need to find new ways to suss out a person’s ability to “transcend our narrow focus on ourselves and those near and dear to us, and to extend our circle of concern to everyone, however geographically, temporally or even biologically distant.” Then neuroscientists can have at it with the brain mapping.
That might even give us a real moral compass for the 21st century. If you’re reading LWON, chances are you’re in the privileged position of being fairly insulated from climate change; your country will probably put adaptive measures in place to make sure you and your children never suffer. But climate change will devastate other parts of the world and kill people you’ve never met and their children. The US and their allies are drone bombing places you’ve never heard of. Your smartphone was made, and will be disassembled, in places you’ve never visited and don’t care about, and they’re polluted as hell. How do we start to make a better world? Not by defining morality in the scientific literature as a calculating numbers game.
A team of neuroscientists is on a trolley headed for a cliff. A lone philosopher stands at the switch…
Correction, 8 April 2015: post was updated to reflect the contribution of Jim Everett
As my friend wrote to me the other day: “We are all living dogs’ lives now. They shelter in place every day, except for brief walks. They have no idea what will happen tomorrow.”
The afternoon Seattle schools closed, I sat at my desk, pretending to work as if our society weren’t being turned upside down. When I looked outside, I saw a gaggle of girls in private school uniforms. This is normal; I often see kids on my street walking home from school and to one another’s houses, or riding their bikes around in an orderly fashion. But it was not a normal day and there was a distinct snow day energy. The girls had found a grocery cart — the nearest grocery store is a mile away, so your guess is as good as mine — and were pushing each other down the sidewalk. AIYIYIYIYIYI! they screamed. They seemed to be the kind of good kids who had never broken the rules, and their excitement was palpable. But their cart-pushing technique was still cautious, all little nudges forward. Perhaps in a few weeks’ time, I thought, they’ll be a bit more feral; perhaps they’ll shove with reckless abandon.
That was in the early days of coronavirus. Now all libraries, bars, restaurants, gyms, museums, and gathering spaces are closed, too. My partner, like millions of people, has been laid off, albeit hopefully temporarily. We are stressed and sad. Usually, my reaction to those emotions is to plan — but that’s another thing we cannot do. It is both a curse and a privilege to have more time than ever; if my partner could get another job, he would, but no one is hiring. Meanwhile, our friends who work in healthcare or in grocery stores and our friends with children are busier than ever. But in our home, we’re asking ourselves: who are we with less work, when capitalism has loosened its grip on our days? Who are we when the culture of side hustles and monetizing your hobbies and Doing The Most is impossible? What will we do with our time?
I started a puzzle.
I watched a hummingbird float straight up into the air, weightless, the impossible way UFOs do in those grainy eye-witness videos.
I startled a robin in a bush and it startled me back.
I noticed the buds on a camellia bush and made a mental note to come back in a few days.
I ran around the lake.
I ran around the lake again.
I called my mom, then my dad. I called my mother-in-law, my sister-in-law, my high school friends, my college friends, my writer friends. Everyone has a story; everyone is unsure. The one refrain I’m hearing is that we are glad to have community. We are grateful to have each other.
I am constantly writing. Texts, emails, slack messages, tweets, blog posts, journal entries, news pieces. I can’t stop. At first I wondered if this was still capitalism at work — that the cult of productivity has sunk itself so deeply into me that I can’t stop producing even when I don’t have to. But the writing I’m doing feels like it’s coming from some other place, wherever it was that I used to go as a child writing fanfiction or in my diary. It’s reflexive; it’s the only way I’m processing what’s happening.
My Planner Pad, usually an indispensable part of my life, sits neglected off to the side of my desk.
I don’t wear real pants any more.
Through video chat, I saw my friend drinking a La Croix, and felt a pang of longing for this thing they had that I didn’t. Then I watched that want disappear when I realized I would need to leave my house for it.
Our hair grows longer every day.
I’ve cooked paneer, fried rice, black beans and veggie quesadillas, orzo with feta and olives. I’ve forgotten what tater tots taste like and I don’t even miss them.
My dog lays out in the sun for an hour every day, and when she comes back inside, I smell her belly.
I rode my bike through the woods and passed a mom and dad grinning ear to ear, hiding behind a tree as their child counted down from 10 for hide and seek.
As this stretches on for the months to come, in what other ways will we become more wild? Who do we want to be on the other side of this?
“It was nothing to just sit on the phone for an hour, wrapped up in those long curly cords,” writes my friend. “An hour-long phone conversation was totally normal. In my teenage years, I could just sit on the phone all night long.”
That’s a comforting image, isn’t it — my friend but younger, curled up with the phone. We’d been emailing about, of course, the pandemic, social distancing, self-isolating. My Twitter feed occasionally takes a break from curves, numbers, reports, and wild emotions to notice that it’s spending unprecedented time on the phone having conversations, among what must be millions and billions of identical conversations, everybody checking in and being checked in with: you ok? need anything? what are you doing?
I’m always impressed by how intensely we need to know what’s going on over there across the street, or down the road in another town, or across the country, or on the other side of the planet: I was just thinking about you, how’s it going, or as Sally who lives in foreign lands writes, “Roll call!”
Hands go up for questions at the end of a talk and someone asks, “What gives you hope?”
I say the usual, believing the future to be long, all sorts of twists and turns in the plot.
No, not that. Too weak. Too…hopeless. I’ve got to go home and think about this.
So, here’s what gives me hope. Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in southern Arizona shares 30 miles of border with Sonora, Mexico. All wilderness and monument regulations have been waved by Congress so that construction of the border wall will not be impeded. Sacred hilltops, sites of native O’odham history and legend, are being bladed and blasted. Saguaros hundreds of years old have been photographed toppled as the wall nears Organ Pipe. A bunch of bad news, but wait for it.
In the near-border town of Ajo, Arizona, with its colonial plaza and rings of palm trees, I was recently keynote speaker for the 6th Annual Tri-National Sonoran Desert Symposium*. While there, I shared dinner with a few biological interns from Organ Pipe who said that for three months they’d been working almost frantically ahead of bulldozers transplanting every cactus, from towering saguaros to tiny pin cushions, for 30 miles. What they couldn’t move, they reduced to cuttings which they took back to the monument nursery. They collected bags of seeds from grasses and devil’s claw, a ground hugging hook plant. One rare milkweed was found, its single seed pod gathered. As the wall comes, they are saving everything they can.
Touch is how we show our most loved people our care. A medium beyond words to say, I hear you; I’m here for you. One of the cruelest things about this highly contagious virus now sweeping the world is that it steals this language from us when we most need it. Our breath, our hands have become mediums of transmission. With touch now a threat, we must avoid our neighbors, our coworkers, our friends, our families, in an effort protect our most vulnerable and the healthcare system tasked with treating them. If there are people you’re missing as we come together by staying apart, I hope these remotely deliverable touches are useful to you for telling them so. Make screenshots of what you like and share as widely as you wish.
Well, the freezer and pantry are PACKED! I have enough frozen spinach and canned beans to last me into the next century. Time to settle in for the long haul!
2:00 p.m.
I could swear I bought way more coffee than this.
4 p.m.
Heading to 7-11 for stringcheese and Snocaps.*
5 p.m. What do you mean Snocaps aren’t a thing anymore? Stopping by the Super-Plex candy counter. This is a candy emergency!
Day 1