Trolleyology in Oklahoma

Phiippa Foot was an Oxford philosopher, who just happened to be the granddaughter of Grover Cleveland. She was famous for the Trolley Problem, a conundrum of moral philosophy. In short five people are tied to a train track. If you simply divert the train to another track only one person will be killed. There is also the attendant Footbridge Problem whereby a fat man is standing on a footbridge. If you push him onto the tracks, his heft will stall the train. What’s interesting is that the question is both utilitarian and moral. Most people would say it’s always better to save five rather than one. Immanuel Kant might not have agreed since he believed that there was a categorical imperative which defined what was right or wrong. In a review of Would You Kill the Fat Man:? The Trolley Problem and What Your Answer Tells Us About Right and Wrong by David Edmonds ( “How Do We Know What’s Moral?” The New York Review of Books, 4/24/14), Cass R. Sunstein uses the term  “trolleyology" to categorize for these kinds of ruminations. But even though Sunstein employs trolleyological thinking when he remarks, “imagine that capital punishment actually deters murder, so that with every execution, we can save two innocent lives, or three, or a dozen," the recent botched execution of Clayton D. Lockett in Oklahoma gives pause to those who would go with a strictly utilitarian view. It’s something that was also dramatized in Stanley Milgram’s famous obedience experiment at Yale. It might sound like it’s easy to push a fat man off a bridge to save five others, but when you are the one who has to do it, you will or won’t feel some degree of hesitation. Another Yale researcher, Joshua Greene has recently complicated the ethical aspects of the problem by performing brain scans of people as they contemplate it, as a way of testing the emotions that underline a simply rational choice (“Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?  The Uncertain Biological Basis of Morality," Robert Wright, The Atlantic, 10/29/14). Usually the Trolley problem is illustrated without any consideration of the character of those who would or would not be saved. However, by adding this consideration as Sunstein does in his essay/review, trolleyology can be used as an argument for or against capital punishment. Ostensibly you execute a murderer to send a message and prevent further murders. But as is evident in the recent case of the Lockett execution, it’s not so simple. Once you open up the doors of vengeance and say that the ends justify the means, you unleash the prospect of a Pandora’s Box of dehumanizing action, amongst them tortures like the waterboarding of alleged suspects. You take an action predicated on a certain level of expediency. But where does it lead?

Stanley Milgram in Oklahoma

Oklahoma State Penitentiary

The Oklahoma Department of Corrections should have been part of Stanley Milgram’s famed experiment at Yale. If you remember Milgram, a professor of psychology was testing obedience to authority (“Behavorial Study of Obedience, The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, l961). The experiment was started three months after the trial of Adolf Eichmann, who had famously insisted he was simply following orders. So in order to test the level of potential for inhumanity that lies in all of us, Milgram enlisted participants who sat behind a glass wall. The subjects of the experiment were then asked to apply varying levels of electric current to another participant. The subjects were told to increase the level of current whether those receiving the shocks seemed to be suffering or not. Some just continued to follow orders while others refused to participate. The experiment was actually more complicated since the shocks were also constructed as part of punishment/reward scenario that mimicked some of the work done by another famous psychologist, the Harvard behaviorist B.F. Skinner. But no mind the recent botched execution was uncannily reminiscent of the original Milgram experiment though the stakes were somewhat higher in that after 43 minutes of torment at the hands of those who were following orders, Clayton D. Lockett, the condemned man succumbed to a heart attack. The fact that Lockett had shot and buried the victim of his crime while she was still living might prove a solace to some. But then again those who saw the smoke from the crematoriums at Auschwitz and elsewhere and who had read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion might easily have said to themselves, “they had it coming to them all along. “

Zero Degrees of Empathy

Photo: Jason Merritt/Getty Images

Simon Baron-Cohen, the developmental psychopathologist, is the cousin of Sacha Baron Cohen. It’s not really fair and perhaps even cruel to bring up this relationship when trying to seriously consider his ideas. But since his latest book Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty, deals with cruel, insensitive and at times life denying behavior, it seems appropriate to indulge the sadistic impulse to associate him with a world renowned clown. As Andrew Scull points out in his recent review (“Blood Flow,” TLS, 2/17/12), Cohen tries to create a statistical model for empathy. Zero-Negatives which are typed as Zero-Negative Type B, Zero-Negative Type P or Zero-Negative Type N are borderlines, psychopaths and narcissists. Summarizing Cohen’s thesis Scull goes on to explain, “The Zero-Negatives are in varying ways highly dangerous individuals…the differences in their ‘empathy circuits’ are largely features of their brains; their ventromedial frontal cortex and their orbitofrontal cortex are under-active, while their ventral striatum and their amygdala are over-active.” Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment in relationship to authority still is one of the most dramatic illustrations of objectification by which not just Zero-Negatives but all of us reveal the propensity to excuse the suffering others. But Scull is critical of the neat little statistical universe which Cohen has created with its questionaires and EQ’s or empathy quotients. In terms of using fMRI’s and other brain measuring devices he points out that “Despite important advances in neuroscience, we are very far indeed from being able to connect even very simple human actions to the underlying structure and functioning of people’s brains.” Six Degrees of Separation was a play by John Guare about human connectivity. If nothing else, Cohen’s book, with its pithy title, points to a performance gene shared with his famous cousin.