Atheist Mind, Humanist Heart

by Lex Bayer

  An area of societal ethics we haven’t yet explicitly discussed is how inclusive a society should be. How should we weigh the preferences of the many against the preferences of the few? We’ll discuss this in the next chapter.

  the ninth Non-commandment

  These discussions about individual and societal ethics help us to better understand why we try to preserve good ethics among the members of society. If those around us behave ethically and predictably, we’re in a better position to maximize our own happiness. It’s beneficial to us when society preserves and protects a way of life that’s conducive to our own contentment. That’s why we often reinforce ethical values when we see others straying by chastising or publicly shaming them. As discussed in the game theory example, by reprimanding people who stray, we reinforce the message that cooperation is in everyone’s long-term interests. If we all actively work to maintain a society where people behave ethically, we each derive benefits from that society. So it’s not only reasonable to be a good person, it’s also reasonable to work to create an ethical society.

  We can add the notion of collectively promoting ethics within society to our list of Ten Non-commandments:

  I.

  The world is real, and our desire to understand the world is the basis for belief.

  II.

  We can perceive the world only through our human senses.

  III.

  We use rational thought and language as tools for understanding the world.

  IV.

  All truth is proportional to the evidence.

  V.

  There is no God.

  VI.

  We all strive to live a happy life. We pursue things that make us happy and avoid things that do not.

  VII.

  There is no universal moral truth. Our experiences and preferences shape our sense of how to behave.

  VIII.

  We act morally when the happiness of others makes us happy.

  IX.

  We benefit from living in, and supporting, an ethical society.

  11

  Putting Ethical Beliefs to the Test

  A good head and a good heart are always a formidable combination.

  —Nelson Mandela

  A railway trolley has lost its brakes and is hurtling down the railroad tracks. In its path, five people are sitting on the track, tied up and unable to move. The trolley can’t be stopped, and the people can’t be moved in time.

  You are standing next to a junction lever that can send the trolley onto a side track before it hits the people. But wait! There’s one person sitting on that side track, eating his lunch. If you do nothing, the trolley will kill five people. If you pull the lever, you will switch the trolley off its current path onto a new path that will result in the death of one person.

  What would you do?

  The Trolley Problem, from an Objective Moral Perspective

  The “trolley problem” is a classic scenario used by philosophers to test ethical concepts.1 Most people would say it’s a no-brainer—pull the lever and save the five people at the expense of one. This is a utilitarian perspective that seeks the greatest good for the greatest number.

  Now let’s change the scenario. To save the five people, rather than just pulling a lever, you need to physically push a person in front of the trolley to stop it from reaching them. Despite the seeming equivalence in result—one person dies and five are saved—here conventional moral wisdom tends to favor not pushing a person in front of a trolley and allowing the five people to die by inaction, rather than actively murdering one person.

  Yet, that scenario makes most people deeply uncomfortable, even if they agree with the argument. This moral struggle occurs because people are confronted with a clash of competing principles. For an ethicist who believes in universal moral truth, every action inherently has a morally “correct” way to behave. Pushing a person in front of a trolley conflicts with the absolutist moral view that deliberately killing another individual is morally wrong.

  Similarly, there’s an absolute moral view that says that saving a person’s life is morally right. Even though, in this scenario, the action of pushing a person in front of the train is motivated by the desire to save five other lives, it’s mentally challenging to compare two absolutes because it’s logically impossible.2 An absolute principle to not murder an innocent is weighed against an absolute principle to save innocent lives.

  The result is an ethical paradox, because absolute principles cannot be negotiated. So doing nothing, which removes the clash of the two absolutes altogether, tends to be the popular choice, even though it results in the maximum loss of life.

  The Trolley Problem, from a Subjective Moral Perspective

  By comparison, how would a belief in subjective morality influence your behavior in these trolley problem scenarios? First, you would accept that your actions aren’t dictated by a moral absolute. Rather, the choice whether or not to pull the lever is based on your own moral preferences. These include a complex mix of personal experiences and projections of the consequences. Will saving five lives console you from the loss of one life? What does the law say you should do? Could you sleep well at night knowing that you pushed another person in front of a trolley, remembering the look on his face, the sound of his voice crying out?

  You’ll notice that the trolley description is deliberately devoid of specific personal details. There are people on the track, but not particular people. Yet these details may ultimately affect a person’s decisions. The details are what allow for subjectivity.

  Does the one person appear to be especially worthy of saving?

  Is it my mother?

  Is it a friend?

  Is it the president of the United States (and did I vote for him or her)?

  Will someone see me push the person in front of the train? What would that person think, and what could the consequences be for me?

  These are the details that can heavily influence our thinking about how an action or inaction is likely to affect our life-happiness. It would certainly be comforting to answer whether pulling the lever was just right or wrong, like a math problem.

  But subjective morality doesn’t give us a simple answer—it instead helps us examine our own choices and motives for acting. The better you can think through the options and outcomes of your actions, and the better you can understand your own happiness preferences, the more likely you’ll be satisfied with your actions.

  Of course all of this individual preference doesn’t take place in a vacuum. A system of subjective morality maximizes a person’s life-happiness within a society that seeks to do the same. So subjective morals are more concerned with the outcomes of events and the consequences of such events as they relate to oneself rather than absolute moral principles. Someone who believes in subjective morality wants to live a happy life and so cares deeply about how events unfold and the consequences such events could have on his or her personal life.

  By the same token, a subjective ethicist might be concerned with different ethical concerns than an objective ethicist. She might worry about the enormous psychological damage and sleepless nights that she’ll experience from pushing an innocent in front of the trolley. Or she might be concerned that if she tries to push the other person onto the tracks, that person might resist, and both of them could potentially end up on the tracks in front of the trolley. To avoid any chance of such an outcome, a subjective ethicist might favor doing nothing to avoid the chance of personal harm, psychological or physical. She might also prefer to do not
hing to avoid being judged unfavorably by others if they learned that the person who stopped the train was actually pushed in front of it.

  That’s not to say that inaction is always the favored choice of a subjective moral viewpoint. The subjective nature of these choices means that another person with different subjective moral views might favor saving five lives because of the happiness he or she expects to derive from saving more people—especially if he or she knows the survivors.

  If this seems implausible, imagine for a moment that the five people imperiled on the trolley tracks include your mother, father, brother, and child. Suddenly it’s easier to understand why you might choose to push a stranger in front of the trolley. Meanwhile, another person might choose to sacrifice himself to save both the stranger and the five people. This example shows how one person might analyze the situation and arrive at a different subjective moral decision than that of another person who is being equally thoughtful.

  The subjective element of a person’s moral preferences does highlight that most of us will tend to favor people we know and love over strangers. We would look at the trolley track example very differently if we were told that our mothers were imperiled on the train tracks. Similarly, it would be reasonable to expect that a father who sees two children drowning would save his own child first rather than a child he doesn’t know. This seems reasonable because intuitively most of us realize that we care much more for people with whom we have existing relationships than we do for strangers.

  Through the lens of subjective morality, this attitude seems perfectly reasonable since we expect to derive more happiness from relationships with people with whom we expect to have repeated interactions. Unfortunately, as we all know, this attitude can be taken to extremes in the case of cronyism and nepotism, as well as tribalism and the sad tendency to dehumanize anyone who is different from us.

  A subjective perspective doesn’t mean there’s no reason to care for others unless we have a relationship with them. As we’ve already discussed, “identification with others” and “enlightened self-interest” can lead us to feel happy when helping others, even if we expect to get nothing tangible in return other than our own satisfaction.

  For example, MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell has established a charity called the K.I.N.D. fund (Kids In Need of Desks)3 that provides desks to needy kids in Africa and employs African craftsmen to build those desks. Thousands of American viewers choose to donate money to this charity. Clearly they do so because they derive a sense of happiness from the knowledge that they are helping to improve the school experience of hundreds of African children, even though they are unlikely to personally meet any of the children they are assisting.

  Still, on the spectrum of how well we treat other people, we will almost always favor those with whom we have longer-term meaningful relationships. Research as far back as the work of Charles Darwin has shown that we are generally motivated to care more strongly for our families and our close social groups.4 The circle of caring then radiates outward to include people in our surrounding communities, states, and countries.5

  Why is this? Why don’t we treat everyone exactly the same? It’s simple: we invest more energy in relationships that have a higher likelihood of benefiting us than others from which we expect to benefit less. While the ideal of treating every person as if he or she were identical might at first seem an appealing aspiration, it falls apart when we consider real-world practicalities. Parents would be terrible in that role if they neglected their own children’s needs to tend to the needs of strangers.

  The simple empirical observation is that treating everyone exactly equally is not how we are incentivized to behave by our preference for happiness and the nature of our relationships with other people. Because we depend on some people more than others, they matter more to us, and because others depend on us more than they depend on others, we matter more to them. In the great scheme of things, this isn’t a flaw but an evolved feature of the human mind.

  The parent-child relationship, the spousal relationship, the caretaker relationship—all are examples of situations and relationships that require us to treat the other person in the relationship (the child, the spouse, the sick person) differently from strangers.

  A List of Ethical Questions

  To move away from the general case and delve into more practical questions about the subjective moral perspective, we need an individual to examine. Once again, we, the authors, have volunteered. This time we will use Lex as the subject and John as the questioner.

  We are in no way claiming that Lex’s views represent a correct moral perspective. Rather, they are Lex’s subjective views based on his specific individual experiences, intellect, and encounters with life. We are mostly interested in showcasing the process around his thinking, and seeing how subjective ethics can be applied.

  John: Let’s start with a pretty basic moral question. Lex, do you believe it is wrong to murder someone?

  Lex: Yes, like the vast, vast majority of people in the world, I regard murder as immoral. Let me put it another way: I don’t think I’d get any happiness from the act of murder. In fact, I’m certain it would cause me psychological discomfort.

  John: Why do you think that?

  Lex: Well, empathy, for one thing. I value my own life tremendously, and that makes me feel how strongly others value their own lives. There’s also self-interest involved. If murder became acceptable or commonplace, someone would be more likely to kill me, and I’m opposed to that.

  John: So does your empathy apply only to humans, or do you believe that killing animals for human consumption is immoral?

  Lex: It’s an interesting question. I do get happiness from eating meat, and I suppose that joy is more valuable to me than the joy I’d feel from saving the life of a cow. I must admit that even saying that out loud makes me uncomfortable. I had a lot of pets growing up, and I certainly saw them as something more valuable than a meal and do feel empathy toward animals. On the other hand, we also had a lot of Sunday afternoon barbecues, and I enjoy meat . . .

  John: So where do you come out on this issue then?

  Lex: Ultimately, my preference is to continue to eat meat. I would prefer that animals used for food be treated humanely while they are alive though, so that their suffering is limited to their death. In other words, I don’t derive any happiness from the unnecessary suffering of animals prior to being slaughtered. I also choose to eat beef more sparingly because of the effects it might have on my health. I have high cholesterol.

  John: Back to people for a minute. Do you believe in sentencing people to death if they have committed murder?

  Lex: You mean if they are accused of committing murder. That’s part of the problem. But even if someone behaved reprehensibly, I don’t expect to get any personal joy from the destruction of that human’s life. I’ve heard a lot of very thoughtful arguments against capital punishment, and as a result I consider it unethical to murder even a murderer.

  Even more alarming, the condemned aren’t always guilty. There are many cases of wrongful convictions. In the United States, DNA evidence has allowed the exoneration of eighteen death row inmates since 1989.6 So the small pain I feel in paying a portion of my tax dollars to imprison murderers is less than the larger pain I feel from the knowledge that our society sometimes accidentally kills innocent people.

  John: You talk a lot about your preferences and pursuing happiness. Were the Boston Marathon bombers7 behaving ethically if they were following their preferences?

  Lex: Well, first of all the question assumes a false premise. We didn’t say that pursuing one’s happiness is moral, just that people do, in fact, pursue their happiness. Life-happiness is our main motivation. Morality, on the other hand, is about how much happiness one gets from the happiness of others. The Boston Marathon bombers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, were most likely following their happiness preferences, which va
lued the advancement of their cause—a deeply misguided form of Islam—ahead of the lives of those affected. But by no means does that equate with morality.

  I read about statements one of the brothers wrote on the inside of the dry-docked boat in which he was hiding. They reflect his motivations. He wrote things like, “We Muslims are one body. you hurt one, you hurt us all,” and, “Now I don’t like killing innocent people it is forbidden in Islam but due to [unintelligible] it is allowed.”8 That second phrase could be appended to many of the most heinous acts of immorality in human history, and the justification is indeed often unintelligible to others.

  Acting morally (as we describe in our eighth non-commandment) means deriving happiness from the happiness of others. Clearly the brothers were prepared to inflict pain on others and so acted in an immoral way.

  John: How should we think about their motivations then and why they were prepared to harm so many bystanders?

  Lex: A system of subjective ethics lets us understand why people like these brothers can end up doing such terrible things. A person’s life-happiness preferences can deviate from those held by most people, and a person’s conjectures about outcomes can be quite misguided. That’s why our society goes to great lengths to outlaw such acts and try to prevent them. The brothers’ actions grossly violated basic moral standards commonly accepted across the world to not commit acts of terrorism—the indiscriminate murder of innocent civilians for political or ideological gain.

  John: How would you try to convince people like this that their actions are wrong?

  Lex: If I had been able to confront the brothers before they acted, I would have tried to reason with them. I would have explained why the bombings would not be in their own self-interest nor in the long-term interest of their cause. I would have walked them through all the possible ramifications of their actions, including the high likelihood that they would be caught or killed. I would have tried to convince them that their worldview—not Islam itself but their view that violence is justified in the name of Islam—is not conducive to creating life-happiness for themselves and the society they live in. I would have attempted to convince them that their extremist Islamic beliefs were in error, and no evidence exists to suggest they would find paradise in heaven. But some people are not willing to listen, and I fear this would be the case in this instance.