Brain Damage and the Trolley Problem

A recent study in Nature finds that damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (#3 on pic below) affects moral judgments in life-and-death situations.  And the test they used to figure this out is none other than the beloved Trolley Problem.  Read about it in this New York Times article as well as on this Nature website.

(Thanks to Stephen Schmid via Alan White for the NY Times link.)

Comments

[John Fischer]

I can't wait to read this stuff. I wonder if the contention is that brain damage leads to a preoccupation with the Trolley Problem??

[Alan]

John, I think my students would heartily agree that their professor is excellent evidence for your thesis--especially if you expand the preoccupation to spacetime diagrams of deterministic and indeterministic events!

Please do follow the link to the Nature page that Neal generously provides. On that page there is a cute picture of a trolley bearing down on an unsuspecting sacrificial lamb, and if you look carefully you also see a link below the picture to the full question set used--which is quite an extensive one.

[John Fischer]

Surely the cute picture can't compare to the wonderful cartoons provided by my graduate students for my essay, "Thoughts on the Trolley Problem," in Fischer and Ravizza, eds., *Ethics: Problems and Principles*. (One of those cartoonists has become a well-known philosopher--Andrew Light at the University of Washington.)

Question: what is a more reliable indicator of insanity: fascination with the Trolley Problem, or preoccupation with the Frankfurt-type Cases? (Here again over-determination rears its ugly head...)

[Clayton]

Which utilitarian will be the first to argue that there is an obligation to damage your ventromedial prefrontal cortex? Maybe someone should start a pool.