Seeking a fine balance

If you pose the question 'are you a moral person?' the most common answer you will get is 'Yes, of course!' We all think we are more moral than the next person. But are we? Or is this just our moral superiority speaking?

If you posed the question “are you a moral person?” to nearly anybody on earth — be it an insurgent in a remote corner of the world, a person who stole a loaf of bread to feed their family, or someone who abandoned their family to find spiritual peace — you will, in all probability, be met with a wholehearted “yes”. Flip the coin though, and you will find a sizeable chunk of people who will be equally convinced that each of these people is acting immorally in one way or another.

Take ourselves, for instance. It goes without saying that we all think we are more moral than other people are. This is the “self-enhancement effect”, and it holds true for several parameters. Humans tend to rate themselves more highly than other people not just on factors like intelligence and friendliness, but also, and terribly ironically, on modesty.

A question of moral superiority

A study conducted by Ben Tappin and Ryan McKay at the University of London showed something even more interesting — people tend to be most irrational with respect to their moral superiority, compared to when they are rating themselves on other characteristics. Something about morality seems to unleash the unreasonable within us. Why this is so is anybody’s guess, but the answer probably lies in the fact that our sense of morality deeply ties into how we view ourselves as human beings.

Believing ourselves to be more moral than other people is problematic for more than one reason — the first, and most obvious, is that it is irrational to believe so, and can cause us to look down upon people who act differently than we do, either due to circumstance or by choice. Second, and perhaps even more troubling, is that believing oneself to be morally superior leads to a phenomenon known as moral licensing. This is when somebody acts morally and then relaxes their own moral standards and allows themselves to act unethically in other circumstances.

This moral licensing plays out in our lives in small ways every day. I might feel less guilty indulging in a big serving of chocolate cake post-dinner if I ate a salad for lunch. I might also feel justified liberally using environmentally unfriendly paper towels to clean my kitchen simply because I drive an electric car.

Aside from personal transgressions, moral licensing also plays out in ways that are more harmful to society. Studies have found, for instance, that people who tended to disagree with blatantly sexist statements were later more likely to select a man considered ‘stereotypically male’ for a job. “I’m definitely not a sexist person,” they might think, while not examining their own behaviour carefully enough and subconsciously licensing themselves to act in a clearly sexist manner.

The infamous trolley problem

Let us zoom out a little bit now and ask ourselves how we decide what is wrong and what is right in a particular situation. There are certain situations where the answers are clear. It is wrong to kill a person, for instance. But is it really, under all circumstances? Even the law says it is permissible to use deadly force against a person under certain conditions, such as when it is done in self-defense.

And what about situations in which killing one person would save the lives of five others? “The trolley problem” might be an overused example but bear with me. Say a train is hurtling towards an area of the track where five workers are working. You have the opportunity to pull a lever and change the track of the train such that only one worker working on the other side is killed. Would you pull the lever? Indeed, would it be morally permissible for you to do so?

If you were someone who adhered to utilitarian ethics very strongly, you would pull the lever and kill that one worker, saving five others, because you would believe in the tenet “the right thing to do is what causes the greatest good to the greatest number.” On the other hand, if you were to take the deontological (rule-based ethical) standpoint, you would believe that some acts cannot be justified, no matter what the ends were. In this case then, intentionally pulling the lever would count as an act of murder, irrespective of the fact that five people were saved at the end of it.

Most of us exist somewhere on the spectrum between utilitarianism and deontology. For instance, a person, no matter how utilitarian, would find it impossible to kill their own child to save 10 people.

The footbridge problem

There is a variation of the trolley problem that would most likely make even the strictest utilitarian queasy. Imagine the same situation of five workers who are not aware that there is a train speeding towards them. However, in this case, you are standing on a footbridge above the tracks, behind a very large person. If this person is pushed onto the tracks, they will die instantly but this will stop the train from killing the other five people. Would you push the person onto the tracks?

While many people would be comfortable pulling the lever in the first instance of the trolley problem, they would not feel right pushing a large person to their death in the footbridge instance.

The essential difference between these two situations is simply that the second one feels more personal. When people are posed with the footbridge problem within an fMRI scanner that tells scientists which regions of their brain are active while performing a particular task, their amygdala lights up. The amygdala is a tiny region of the brain that is involved with the experiencing of emotions.

It is entirely understandable, given the personal nature of the footbridge problem, that a person’s amygdala would be involved while thinking about it. It is harder to think rationally or in a calculated manner when we are more personally involved in the death of a person, even if a number of lives are saved in the process. But put a psychopath into the scanner and pose the same footbridge problem to them, and the picture is very different.

The amygdala does not light up at all. Similar results are found when you show psychopaths pictures of people suffering. It does not seem to induce in them the same emotional reaction that is seen in most other people.

What is even more interesting is that there are several situations in which we intentionally put some distance between ourselves and difficult ethical situations. Take for instance someone who supports the death penalty. It is very likely that such a person would feel deeply uncomfortable if he or she is actualy asked to hang a criminal to death. Being a few steps removed from such a situation is probably what helps some of us be so confident that punishing a person by death is a passable way to carry out justice.

The origins of human morality

Many of our moral intuitions are not that different from those of other primates. Evolutionary biologists have proposed that somehow during the course of evolution, mammalian brains changed so as to allow for the caring of others, particularly offspring. A frog might lay its eggs and leave its offspring to fend for itself. But this is not the case for a species like mammals, where a significant amount of time is invested in caring for infants. This might explain why most humans are deeply uncomfortable with the idea of a person causing harm to one’s own kin.

Neuroscientists and researchers working on the origins of morality have also argued that many of our inherent moral behaviours have been shaped by the fact that we evolved in hunter-gatherer societies. In these small societies, humans had a very real incentive to be good, given that any transgressions would be noticed and lead to them being ostracised. The net result of this ostracising and lowering of social status would also cause a reduction in the likelihood of them having offspring to pass their genes on to.

How morals change

As thinking beings, the morals and values that we hold dear keep morphing and evolving. Each of us remembers — and possibly shudders thinking about — a time when our morals were different from those we hold now. If personal morality is so fluid, it would be unsurprising that societal morality is far from rigid too.

Several factors dictate how our morals as a society change, including factors as simple as intellectual reasoning. Socio-cultural factors, including age, gender, and the society that a person belongs to, also have more of an impact on our moral values than we realise.

People from Western cultures, for instance, tend to be more utilitarian than those from Eastern cultures. Men tend to be more utilitarian than women, across both cultures. And as we grow older, we tend to make moral judgements that are more deontological.

We often encounter situations where people do things we think are immoral, and we immediately jump to the conclusion that “I would never do such a thing”. The thing is, it is close to impossible to know for sure what we may or may not do when faced with a particular situation. Understanding that people’s circumstances play a crucial role in how they act has the potential to make us kinder, a more empathetic lot.

As the world grows increasingly globalised and people have more opportunities to interact with people from unfamiliar cultures, it is likely that there will be a period of flux where the morals of one group would clash with another.

It would be worth keeping in mind that our morals, far from being set in stone, are constantly changing and that engaging with a group or a person whose morals fall on a different area in the morality scale has the potential to make us critically examine our own biases.

The author is a neuroscience PhD turned science writer who is fascinated by the workings of the brain and how we can ‘rewire’ it to our advantage.

The Mind’s Eye is a bi-monthly column that explores neuroscience in everyday life.