Borderline personality traits and empathy as predictors of moral decision-making in trolley problems and variants

BackgroundThe present study demonstrated a causal effect of participants’ perspectives on moral decision-making by using Trolley problems and variants. Furthermore, we investigated whether empathy and borderline personality traits (BDL traits) significantly predicted participants’ choices. We used a classical Trolley problem (a causing harm scenario) and an everyday trolley-like problem (a causing inconvenience scenario). MethodsSubjects voluntarily participated in our study (N = 427, women: 54%), fulfilled BDL traits and empathy questionnaires, and randomly completed the two types of Trolley problems, presenting both three perspectives. ResultsWe provided strong evidence that participants’ perspectives on trolley problems and variants caused significant changes in their moral decision-making. Additionally, affective empathy and BDL traits significantly predicted participants’ decisions of the causing inconvenience scenario, while only BDL traits predicted choices in the causing harm scenario. ConclusionsThis study addressed several originalities by providing new experimental materials, causal results, and the significant influence of BDL traits and affective empathy on moral decision-making. These findings raised fundamental questions that are developed in the discussion.

Small-scale utilitarianism: High acceptance of utilitarian solutions to Trolley Problems among a horticultural population in Nicaragua

Researchers often use moral dilemmas to investigate the specific factors that influence participants’ judgments of the appropriateness of different actions. A common construction of such a dilemma is the Trolley Problem, which pits an obvious utilitarian solution against a common deontological dictum to not do harm to others. Cross-cultural studies have validated the robustness of numerous contextual biases, such as judging utilitarian decisions more negatively if they require contact with other individuals (contact bias), they force others to serve as a means to an end (means bias), and if they require direct action rather than inaction (omission bias). However, such cross-cultural research is largely limited to studies of industrialized, nation-state populations. Previous research has suggested that the more intimate community relationships that characterize small-scale populations might lead to important differences, such as an absence of an omission bias. Here we contribute to this literature by investigating perceptions of Trolley Problem solutions among a Mayangna/Miskito community, a small-scale indigenous population in Nicaragua. Compared to previously sampled populations, the Mayangna/Miskito participants report higher levels of acceptance of utilitarian solutions and do not exhibit an omission bias. We also examine the justifications participants offered to explore how Mayangna/Miskito culture might influence moral judgments.

Learning tractable probabilistic models for moral responsibility and blame

Moral responsibility is a major concern in autonomous systems, with applications ranging from self-driving cars to kidney exchanges. Although there have been recent attempts to formalise responsibility and blame, among similar notions, the problem of learning within these formalisms has been unaddressed. From the viewpoint of such systems, the urgent questions are: (a) How can models of moral scenarios and blameworthiness be extracted and learnt automatically from data? (b) How can judgements be computed effectively and efficiently, given the split-second decision points faced by some systems? By building on constrained tractable probabilistic learning, we propose and implement a hybrid (between data-driven and rule-based methods) learning framework for inducing models of such scenarios automatically from data and reasoning tractably from them. We report on experiments that compare our system with human judgement in three illustrative domains: lung cancer staging, teamwork management, and trolley problems.

Beyond Moral Dilemmas: The Role of Reasoning in Five Categories of Utilitarian Judgment

Over the past two decades, the study of moral reasoning has been heavily influenced by Joshua Greene’s dual-process model of moral judgment, according to which deontological judgments are typically supported by intuitive, automatic processes while utilitarian judgments are typically supported by reflective, conscious processes. However, most of the evidence gathered in support of this model comes from the study of people’s judgments about sacrificial dilemmas, such as Trolley Problems. To which extent does this model generalize to other debates in which deontological and utilitarian judgments conflict, such as the existence of harmless moral violations, the difference between actions and omissions, the extent of our duty to help others, and the good justification for punishment? To find out, we conducted a series of five studies on the role of reflection in these kinds of moral conundrums. In Study 1, participants were asked to answer under cognitive load. In Study 2, participants had to answer under a strict time constraint. In Studies 3 to 5, we sought to promote reflection through exposure to counter-intuitive reasoning problems or direct instruction. Overall, our results offer strong support to the extension of Greene’s dual-process model to moral debates on the existence of harmless violations and partial support to its extension to moral debates on the extent of our duty to help others.

No Correlation Between Ethical Judgment in Trolley Dilemmas and Vaccine Scenarios for Nurse Specialist Students

We tested whether responses to trolley problems by nurse specialist students correlated with their responses to hypothetical vaccine problems, as a follow-up to a similar study on ethics committees. No statistically significant correlation was found between the trolley and vaccination scores. These results confirmed and strengthened the finding of a very weak correlation (possibly zero), and the point estimate was even lower than for the ethics committees. Hence, the nurse specialists’ responses to the trolley problems cannot be used to indicate any direction for their responses to the vaccine problems, although there is a common core issue of sacrificing some for many. The respondents reported a relatively high willingness to push one man in front of a trolley to save five. They also reported a high willingness to act in trolley dilemmas compared with vaccination dilemmas, although the dimensions of risk–reward ratios and consent heavily favored the latter.

What Does Matter?

The trolley problem and cognate hypotheticals have played an outsized role in nonconsequentialist thought over the past fifty years. Taking Parfit’s On What Matters as a jumping-off point, the chapter argues that the features common to trolley problems—focusing only on determinate consequences, ignoring consequences to off-stage actors, reliance on secondary features unrelated to the tragic choices themselves, and treating the epistemic viewpoint of actors as an exogenous, morally neutral fact—suppress the fact that most of the choices we face are tragic, in the sense that they force a tradeoff between the fundamental interests of different people.