I came across a fascinating piece of work a week ago, a paper by philosopher and neuroscientist, Joshua Greene, who studies moral judgement.
The dilemmas he is known for are these:
The switch dilemma: A runaway trolley is hurtling down the tracks toward five people who will be killed if it proceeds on its present course. You can save these five people by diverting the trolley onto a different set of tracks, one that has only one person on it, but if you do this that person will be killed. Is it morally permissible to turn the trolley and thus prevent five deaths at the cost of one? Most people say "Yes."
Then we have the footbridge dilemma: Once again, the trolley is headed for five people. You are standing next to a large man on a footbridge spanning the tracks. The only way to save the five people is to push this man off the footbridge and into the path of the trolley. Is that morally permissible? Most people say "No."
These two cases create a puzzle for moral philosophers: What makes it okay to sacrifice one person to save five others in the switch case but not in the footbridge case? There is also a psychological puzzle here: How does everyone know (or "know") that it's okay to turn the trolley but not okay to push the man off the footbridge?
Having read a little more of Greene's paper and having pondered this for some days now I am still not sure there is an answer. The best I can come up with is that we are programmed to care more about people we have contact with than people we don't. This makes evolutionary sense because it bonds us to our "tribe" and helps us to make difficult decisions when we are facing conflicting situations.
From a business point of view this is an interesting concept. Firstly, we sometimes wonder why colleagues have made "poor" decisions when the right answer was so clear to us. Yet, when you understand how moral dilemmas are resolved it is easier to see why someone chose to protect themselves or their team mates even at the risk of the whole business.
Secondly, it shows how powerful human contact, even fleeting human contact, is...how much we respond to interactions with other people. There may be more earth shattering insights from Greene's work (you can read more here) but for me I feel affirmed. Today Portsmouth City Council has banned its employees from using facebook during working hours. I am not in favour of such bans as I think, in a healthy organisational culture, people can be trusted to do their best work and whether they are looking at facebook during the day becomes irrelevant. However, one reason to encourage real human contact as opposed to virtual human contact is that we actually need to be with people. Greene's example shows the power of face-to-face contact, even fleeting face-to-face contact.
Email, online communities, even blogging open us up to the wider world and that has huge advantages. But we are programmed for a world where we know a small group of people intimately. Our brains respond in a primal way to moral dilemmas which is one of the reasons we feel overwhelmed by the moral problems facing our civilisation today. They are simply too complex for the human brain to morally judge. And when we ignore the person sitting next to us in favour of a stranger sitting at a computer thousands of miles away, we also ignore our human needs.
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