A recent paper (July 2011) published in Cognition, titled

The mismeasure of morals: Antisocial personality traits predict utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas
Abstract:
Researchers have recently argued that utilitarianism is the appropriate framework by which to evaluate moral judgment, and that individuals who endorse non-utilitarian solutions to moral dilemmas (involving active vs. passive harm) are committing an error. We report a study in which participants responded to a battery of personality assessments and a set of dilemmas that pit utilitarian and non-utilitarian options against each other. Participants who indicated greater endorsement of utilitarian solutions had higher scores on measures of Psychopathy, machiavellianism, and life meaninglessness. These results question the widely-used methods by which lay moral judgments are evaluated, as these approaches lead to the counterintuitive conclusion that those individuals who are least prone to moral errors also possess a set of psychological characteristics that many would consider prototypically immoral.

link: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar ... 7711001351
pdf: http://leeds-faculty.colorado.edu/mcgra ... o.2011.pdf

Thoughts?

This is an example of good data-collection with a poorly-worded abstract.

I think their main statement is this: "Our study illustrates that the widely adopted use of sacrificial dilemmas in the study of moral judgment fails to distinguish between people who are motivated to endorse utilitarian moral choices because of underlying emotional deficits (such as those captured by our measures of psy- chopathy and Machiavellianism) and those who endorse it out of genuine concern for the welfare of others and a considered belief that utilitarianism is the optimal way of achieving the goals of morality" (Bartels & Pizarro, 2011, p. 157). I would have to say that their statement on page 157 is warranted from their data, but the statement in the abstract is easy to misinterpret. The implication from page 157 is that it would be nice to add another part to these morality tests to see if people are responding from "considered belief" or from a gut-reaction. I would also like to see that.

The abstract sounds like they are questioning the choice of utilitarianism as the normative (proper) way to respond to ethical dilemmas, which their data does not address (and they state that explicitly on the next page, despite returning to that conclusion in the last two paragraphs).

The end of the article is where they break from the data and argue against utilitarianism as a normative (proper) standard of ethical decision-making. I wonder if the following statement leads to the disagreement between Bartels and Pizarro and those who defend the utilitarian norm: (after talking about slightly-psychopathic people who might exhibit more noble qualities when they are faced with an unlikely event that allows them to act for the greater good...) "Nonetheless the relative infrequency of such events would seem, at the very least, to undermine the validity of using these measures as a metric for optimal moral judgment in everyday life" (Bartels & Pizarro, 2011, p. 158).

The main body of the article indicates that the authors understand the data the way that I do, then we diverge at the quote above. Maybe the authors are arguing one of the following:
(a) from a biological or evolutionary viewpoint, it is the psychopathic traits that are our concern and that the total effect of these traits should determine whether we should call utilitarian philosophy normatively correct (are they therefore implying that we must become psychopaths to become utilitarian?), or
(b) mainstream researchers are observing a "marginal case" that does not apply to daily life, and we therefore need to apply (scientifically unsubstantiable) virtues/moral laws/religion as a basis for morality to fix every-day morality (and this would imply that they have evidence that utilitarian philosophy is worse than their deontology in daily life).

Here is how I see it: philosophy, to the extent that it does influence behavior (which might be very little according to Haidt, 2001), is relevant when people direct their behavior from conscious, moral reasoning. Even if only 1% of the people act from their conscious moral reasoning process instead of animal-instincts, the outcome of killing fewer people is empirically observable and preferred when evaluated within the domain of objectively measurable evidence. Observing that people who score high on antisocial scales also respond a certain way on ethical scores does not impact the preferability of the final outcome of killing fewer people.

What seems unusual to me is the author's apparent interest in abandoning utilitarianism even though about the only substantial difference between utilitarianism and typical deontology occurs at the outer margins that they studied--and I don't think they denied the value of killing fewer people! In other words, utilitarianism is better in the rare case that they studied, and they still want to reject it to adopt something that is "no better" as a daily rule, thereby resulting in worse outcomes when the rare case does occur!

I (and my fellow empiricists) might be thinking of empirical outcomes, such as fewer dead bodies. I suspect that we differ in our focus on "outcomes in the moral problem exclusively" versus the "outcomes of the traits that drive behavior," and I suspect that we differ in our acceptance of extrasomatic moral truths. I don't think people need to become psychopaths to be utilitarian, although maybe Bartels and Pizarro can test that. I don't see any psychopaths in this forum.

If anything that I say here is accurate, then maybe the authors should qualify that they don't like the process that some people use to get to the empirically observable outcome of fewer dead bodies and explain why that is the case.

References

Bartles, D. M. & Pizarro, D. A. (2011). The mismeasure of morals: Antisocial personality traits predict utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas. Cognition, 121, 154–161. DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2011.05.010 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar ... 7711001351

Haidt, J. (2001). The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment. Psychological Review, 108.(4), 814–834 DOI: 10.1037//0033-295X. 108.4.814

There's a discussion of it on LW here:

http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/78 ... ilitarian/

A perhaps more interesting result quoted there is this:

"Recently, consistent with the view that rational individuals are more likely to endorse utilitarianism (e.g., Greene et al., 2001), a variety of researchers have shown that individuals with higher working memory capacity and those who are more deliberative thinkers are, indeed, more likely to approve of utilitarian solutions (Bartels, 2008; Feltz & Cokely, 2008; Moore, Clark, & Kane, 2008)."

Is it only me the pdf-link doesn't work for?

Jesper Östman wrote:Is it only me the pdf-link doesn't work for?

If you are accessing it from a university that has rights to it, then the PDF link to ScienceDirect will work.

Ah works now on Chrome, didn't work on my Firefox earlier for some reason.

I don't think we need to get all that defensive about this sort of study. Studies over the coming decades will continue to prove what we already knew about utilitarians. We're an intelligent bunch. We're more likely introverted / antisocial / schizoid / asperger's. We're economists or mathematicians more often than we're sociologists. We're sceptical. We're open to new experiences, and especially new ideas. We're fairly rational and fairly unemotional.

It's a strange constellation of positive and negative character traits. I'd trust introverted and calculating people to make my ethical decisions. Others would trust social emotional types. This doesn't prove utilitarianism right or wrong but it's interesting, to me at least.

If such is the case, so what? Is the study trying to encourage an ad hominem fallacy? I.e. "utilitarians are wrong because they're introverted / antisocial / schizoid / have Asperger's".

Antisocial personality traits predict mathematical brilliance, too. Perhaps mathematical brilliance predicts utilitarian response

True, Arepo. Also this:
Schizoid personality traits predict mathematical brilliance, perhaps all of maths is false.

In seriousness, utilitarians do take a more mathematical approach to ethics than usual. That's part of the conflict with contractualists. They believe ethics fits more in sociology than in science it seems.

Richard linked me to this. My response was the following:

Participants who indicated greater endorsement of utilitarian solutions had higher scores on measures of Psychopathy, machiavellianism, and life meaninglessness.

I think a large part of it might be explained by a certain amount of 'emotionlessness' being a common feature of all four. If we were empathic with every person's suffering/joy, we'd have a mental breakdown. Most people deal with this by drastically restricting the circle of people they feel empathy for; utilitarians tend to deal with this by generally trying not to get emotional. That's my theory anyway.

LadyMorgana wrote:If we were empathic with every person's suffering/joy, we'd have a mental breakdown. Most people deal with this by drastically restricting the circle of people they feel empathy for;

Alas, that's exactly right. The human motivational system isn't built for handling large numbers....

LM:

The studies found a strong correlation between the "utilitarian choice" and low Agreeableness in the big5 scale, which is also strongly correlated to psychopathy. Agreeableness is as close you come to empathy in the big5-scale (although elements of trust etc are also incorporated).

Furthermore, eg Joshua Greene's model of people's reactions to fat-man cases is precisely that in ordinary people an emotional (empathic) response prohibits them from pushing the fat man whereas in psychopaths this doesn't happen since the emotional response is lacking.

I just mentioned, in a thread I started, another study that showed similar findings.

Mike Retriever wrote:If such is the case, so what? Is the study trying to encourage an ad hominem fallacy? I.e. "utilitarians are wrong because they're introverted / antisocial / schizoid / have Asperger's".

Do you think a world where everyone is anti-social/uncaring (none of this has anything to do with being introverted) would be a better place than a world were people were loving, kind, soft hearted etc.? If utilitarians are as this article described, how on Earth are they going to convince people to consider utilitarianism as a basis for moral decision making? Why do they even want to, 'right' or not, who wants to be a cold, unfeeling dick who can torture their grandmother to prevent 100 people from ever again experiencing a mild toothache and go eat some puppy burgers afterward?

I'm convinced that if they factored out the idea that the pleasure/pain of separate people can be aggregated, which treats people as numbers rather than persons, the study would have very different results. Maybe not but I wish people were more aware of non-aggregative, agent-neutral, hedonistic consequentialism as an ethical theory.

The idea of utilitarianism being 'logical' is pointless because ethics is a value based/emotional concern, logic is just something we apply to our emotionally based concerns. It doesn't matter if utilitarianism is right, it would be better (according to utilitarianism) to live in a world of deontologists if the widespread adoption of deontology had better consequences that the promotion of utilitarianism did.

If we were empathic with every person's suffering/joy, we'd have a mental breakdown. Most people deal with this by drastically restricting the circle of people they feel empathy for;

I don't think that's true, if by 'empathy' you mean a concern for the distress of others and not literally feeling what other people feel. The very nature of empathy is discriminatory (according to another study that showed that people display stronger ethnic favoritism when injected with the 'love hormone' oxytocin), humans, as social animals, have an innate need to belong to distinct groups, I think this is why we even have families.

Ubuntu wrote:Do you think a world where everyone is anti-social/uncaring (none of this has anything to do with being introverted) would be a better place than a world were people were loving, kind, soft hearted etc.? If utilitarians are as this article described, how on Earth are they going to convince people to consider utilitarianism as a basis for moral decision making? Why do they even want to, 'right' or not, who wants to be a cold, unfeeling dick who can torture their grandmother to prevent 100 people from ever again experiencing a mild toothache and go eat some puppy burgers afterward?

Do you think that love, the type of love you are defending, the kind and soft-heartening one, is a more relevant moral ingredient than satisfaction? So what about people who don't have love in their lives, are they less morally relevant or less moral agents than people who do? What if the love you defend is the one that a mother would use as a moral reason to raise a child of his own, whereas a utilitarian with no such love would use the same amount of resources the mother used to raise five kids in developing countries, each causing same net felicific benefit as the child of the mother? Wouldn't you say that love, in that case, is an obstacle towards doing good?

If you see more bad than good in utilitarianism, you aren't understanding its principles. A utilitarian wouldn't eat puppy burgers, in fact the utilitarian thing to do is to be vegetarian or vegan; but if he did eat puppy burgers he would have a good reason for it. A utilitarian wouldn't torture people, but if he did he would have a good reason for it.

The idea of utilitarianism being logical is not pointless, it means that it is consistent with the rules of logic, that it is not contradictory, a quality that many other ethical theories lack, for example by saying that killing is bad but proceeding to kill.

If the widespread adoption of deontological ethics had better consequences than the widespread adoption of utilitarianism, the promotion of deontological ethics would be better, however I don't see any reason why that should be the case, I think it's highly unlikely and absurd. It's like promoting eating fish so that people will eat vegetables.

Do you think that love, the type of love you are defending, the kind and soft-heartening one, is a more relevant moral ingredient than satisfaction? So what about people who don't have love in their lives, are they less morally relevant or less moral agents than people who do? What if the love you defend is the one that a mother would use as a moral reason to raise a child of his own, whereas a utilitarian with no such love would use the same amount of resources the mother used to raise five kids in developing countries, each causing same net felicific benefit as the child of the mother? Wouldn't you say that love, in that case, is an obstacle towards doing good?

There are many acts, done out of love, that I would consider to be either unethical or morally neutral (and not all decisions that are based in some kind of affection or respect are 'good intentioned' if their objective is not to increase the happiness/minimize the distress of other people) and since I don't think that there are higher and lower forms of pleasure, I don't view the pleasure of a snake (I'm assuming snakes don't feel love since they don't raise their young or live in groups) as being intrinsically less worth promoting than the happiness of human parents when their children say their first words, give them a hug etc. but even if love isn't (intrinsically) more morally relevant than any other kind of pleasure, empathy, which is a form of love, should still be considered the basis of hedonistic utilitarianism because there is no non-emotional reason why you should care about the happiness or suffering of other beings, no decision is 'logical' in and of itself, I can't even logically show that pleasure has intrinsic value, I can only argue that if pleasure has intrinsic value, and most honest people will admit that it does, then on what basis can autonomy, preference actualization, knowledge etc. also have intrinsic value if these things share no common properties with pleasure? I only care about the distress of the rape victim because I have a point of reference (my own distress) as to why I should consider it to be bad but it's not 'logical' to care about her pain anymore than I would my own. For me to care about her emotional state of mind, I have to recognize that, on some basic level, she is just like me, a sentient being, and her feelings are identical in value to my own, this isn't a 'logical' recognition, it's an emotional one. I may not feel the kind of personal love for her that people feel for their friends and family members but someone who's incapable of feeling empathy or some kind of pro-social feeling has no incentive to adopt hedonistic utilitarianism. If HU isn't compatible with empathy then there's no point in promoting it since empathy is the only reason why you would want to adopt HU.

We can't logically establish that killing is bad, to claim that killing is bad, we have to refer to our own emotional aversion to suffering or desire for pleasure and neither is 'logical' or 'illogical'. There's no logical reason to promote good or minimize bad even if we can logically establish that X is bad. We can only say that, if our objective is to preserve life, then shooting someone with a gun would not be logical (assuming it wasn't for the greater good) but only as far as promoting our emotionally based objective of preserving life is concerned, not in and of itself.

And anyways, even if love isn't (intrinsically) more morally relevant than any other kind of pleasure, feeling love for and a connection to others is what makes humans, as pack animals, happier than anything else.