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People Become More Utilitarian When They Face Moral Dilemmas In Virtual Reality
First time accepted submitter vrml writes "Critical situations in which participant's actions lead to the death of (virtual) humans have been employed in a study of moral dilemmas which just appeared in the Social Neuroscience journal. The experiment shows that participants' behavior becomes more utilitarian (that is, they tend to minimize the number of persons killed) when they have to take a decision in Virtual Reality rather than the more traditional settings used in Moral Psychology which ask participants to read text descriptions of the critical situations. A video with some of the VR moral dilemmas is available, as is the paper."
So, we're assuming that all participants considered the death of (virtual) humans to be a bad thing?
Until you're faced with the choice of saving your sister versus five anonymous others.
Utilitarianism is false, because no human being can know how to globally maximize the good. They just believe they do, and then use "the end justifies the means" to commit atrocities.
Our quirky affective behavior is arguably an optimal heuristic in a world where you only have a peep-hole view of the global state of things. For example, in those trolley dilemma you're _told_ that the trolley is random. But we're hard wired to believe that nothing is random, which means you have to fight a belief that the trolley was purposefully sent to kill those five individuals. Maybe the lone individual would save the world. In any event, maintenance of the status quo (letting the five get killed) is, again, arguably an optimal behavior when there is insufficient information to justify doing something else.
He is not only a witness if he KNOWS that he had the power to prevent the five deaths at the cost of one other. Inaction is also an action by itself.
Yes, and that ultimately leads to the "next level" of utilitarian dilemmas. What if you're a doctor, with five terminal patients who all need different organs. In walks a healthy person who is (miraculously) compatible with all of them.
Should you kill the healthy person, harvest the organs, and save the five terminal patients? (For the sake of argument, we assume that the procedures involved have a high chance of success, so you'll definitely save a number of people by killing one.)
Many people who say we should flip the switch in the trolley problem think it's wrong to murder someone to harvest their organ and ensure the same outcome. Why is "inaction" appropriate for the doctor, but not in the case of the trolley?
(I'm not saying I have the right answers -- but once you start down the philosophical path of utilitarian hypotheticals, there's a whole world of wacko and bizarre situations waiting to challenge just about anyone's moral principles. I can't wait until the "I was kidnapped and forced to keep a famous violinist alive" scenarios come up!)