The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically

by Peter Singer

In a study of the role of emotion in moral decision making, subjects were presented with so-called trolley problem dilemmas in which, for example, a runaway trolley is heading for a tunnel in which there are five people, and it will kill them all unless you divert it down a sidetrack, in which case only one person will be killed. In a variant, the only way to stop the five being killed is to push a heavy stranger off a footbridge. He will be killed, but his body is heavy enough to stop the trolley and save the five. In three different experiments, those who made consistently utilitarian judgments were found to have lower levels of empathic concern than those who made nonutilitarian judgments. Empathic concern is, as we have seen, one aspect of emotional empathy. Other aspects of empathy, including personal distress and perspective taking, did not vary between those who made consistently utilitarian judgments and those who did not. Neither did demographic or cultural differences, including age, gender, education, and religiosity.12