ARE TROLLEY DILEMMA JUDGEMENT MECHANISMS EVOLUTION ARY ADAPTATIONS? Lara Pourabdolrahim Seresht Ardebili Dissertation at the Graduate School of Systemic Neurosciences Ludwig‐Maximilians‐Universität München May 2018 Supervisor Prof. Dr. Stephan Sellmaier Research Center for Neurophilosophy and Ethics of Neurosciences Graduate School of Systemic Neurosciences First Reviewer: Prof. Dr. Stephan Sellmaier Second Reviewer: Prof. Dr. Dr. Hannes Leitgeb External Reviewer: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Stephan Schleim Date of Submission: 02/05/2018 Date of Defense : 28/09/2018 Contents 1 Introduction4 1.1 Brief History of Trolley Dilemmas . .4 1.2 A few preliminaries . .7 1.3 The significance of the Doctrine of Double-Effect . .9 1.4 Argumentational structure and content . 11 2 The relation between Evolutionary Psychology and different kinds of modularity: "Mechanistic Modularity" and "Functional Modularity" { A differentiation 15 2.1 Mechanistic Modularity and Evolutionary Adaptations . 17 2.1.1 Evolvability argument (watchmaker argument) and the module's properties . 19 2.1.2 Practicality argument (specific breakdown pattern argument) and the module's properties . 29 2.2 Are Trolley Dilemma Judgement Mechanisms Mechanistic Modules? Testing Mikhail's Mechanism for modularity . 36 2.3 Functional Modularity and Evolutionary Adaptations . 56 3 Are Trolley Dilemma Judgement Mechanisms Functional Modules? - Evolutionary Psychologists' main evidence re-evaluated 66 4 Development 91 5 Universality 105 5.1 What does Universality have to do with Innateness? . 105 5.2 Are the judgments in Cushman et al.'s 2007 paper really universal? Inner- cultural and cross-cultural distribution . 108 5.3 Are the judgement patterns the same cross-culturally? . 113 5.4 Inner-cultural agreement rates vary cross-culturally . 122 5.5 A different angle: How many people judge two dilemmas equivalently? . 124 5.6 Comparing judgements in Switch and Loop Type cases: Is the Doctrine of Double-Effect a universal principle? . 128 5.7 How universal is the Action/Omission Principle? . 134 5.8 \Universal Moral Grammar" or just \Moral Grammar?" . 136 6 Poverty of Stimulus 140 6.1 Different facets of the Poverty of Stimulus argument . 141 6.1.1 Definitions of \Learned" . 141 6.1.2 Adaptedness, Evolutionary Adaptedness and Inheritedness . 142 6.1.3 A general objection against Poverty of Stimulus arguments . 147 6.2 The Logical Problem of Language Acquisition . 148 6.2.1 The Logical Problem of Language Acquisition and generativity . 148 6.2.2 Generativity in the moral domain . 152 6.2.3 The Logical Problem of Language Acquisition: The issue with \Learning like a little scientist" . 160 6.2.4 LPLA arguments applied to Trolley Dilemmas . 162 6.2.4.1 Is explicit exposure to moral principles necessary or suffi- cient for acquiring them? . 163 6.2.4.2 Is explicit exposure to moral principles necessary or suffi- cient for acquiring them? . 165 6.2.4.2.1 Catholics and the Doctrine of Double-Effect: Not innate, but indoctrinated? . 171 6.2.4.2.2 Negative evidence through explicit instructions . 187 7 Alternatives to innateness: A Social Learning Account for Morality 200 8 Conclusion 208 A Bibliography 210 B Appendix 229 1 Introduction Over the last few decades, something of a 'morbid' trend has arisen in moral psychology and moral philosophy: The use of Trolley Dilemmas. Trolley Dilemmas are thought experiments in which a train is heading towards five people. The train will hit and kill those five people, unless someone is sacrificed in order to stop the train. Trolley Dilemmas are enormously useful, in a variety of ways. 1.1 Brief History of Trolley Dilemmas The first Trolley Dilemma, a version of the so-called side-track scenario, was used (amongst an abundance of other hypothetical scenarios) by ethicist Philippa Foot to evoke intuitions1 about when it is permissible to kill a person to save another one in the context of a discussion about abortions.2 Its wording was as follows: \[. ] the driver of a runaway tram [...] can only steer [the tram] from one narrow track on to another; five men are working on one track and one man on the other; anyone on the track he enters is bound to be killed." (Foot 1967, p. 7). She assumes that steering the train onto the track with the one person would be deemed permissible or even obligatory by most people (Foot 1967, pp. 7, 10). Judith Jarvis Thomson and Frances Myrna Kamm followed her in her use of train-track life/death scenarios and added more variants to the pool of Trolley Dilemmas, such as the Loop Case (Thomson 1985, pp. 1402/1403), where the track with the one man loops back to the track with the five. This dilemma reads as follows: \Let us now imagine that the five on the straight track are thin, but thick enough so that although all five will be killed if the trolley goes straight, the bodies of the five will stop it, and it will therefore not reach the one. On the other hand, the one on the right-hand track is fat, so fat that his body will by itself stop the trolley, and the trolley will therefore not reach the five. May the agent turn the trolley?" (Thomson 1985, 1403). Thomson then adds: \Some people feel more discomfort at the idea of turning the trolley in the loop variant than in the original Bystander at the Switch"(Thomson 1985, 1403). All three Ethicists use their 1Like Peter van Inwagen (Inwagen 1997) and Ernest Sosa (Sosa 2007), I will take intuitions to be (conscious) inclinations to believe, or, as Williamson rephrased Peter van Inwagen ((van Inwagen 1997, p. 309), cited after (Williamson 2004, p. 126)): \in some cases, the tendencies to make certain beliefs attractive to us". Hence, if I intuit that Person One should turn the trolley to the track with the one person, I am inclined to believe that Person One should turn the trolley to the track with the one person. The issue of whether a moral statement such as \one should turn the trolley to the track with the one person" bears truth value, hence, can be true or false (as Sosa holds for the contents of \propositional intuitions" (Sosa 2007, p. 52), is a matter for a different discussion. For a discussion of this matter, see (Stratton-Lake and Zalta 2016). For a discussion of different accounts of \intuition", see (Pust 2017) and (Kauppinen 2015). Sosa defends a somewhat narrower definition of what he calls \propositional intuitions" than the one I will apply: \S intuits that p if and only if S's attraction to assent to <p> is explained rationally by two things in combination: (a) that S understands it well enough, (b) that <p> is true." (Sosa 2007, p 52) 2This is a context in which she placed the scenario; I do not believe that abortion is a matter of one person's rights against another's. 4 (or, as in Thomson's case, their and other people's) opinions about the permissibility to kill the one and then seek to suggest normative principles that explain those opinions and can predict intuitions for further cases (and, if they are established, guidelines for further actions): 3 They look for moral principles that are coherent with all or most of those opinions and, ideally, seem to transport some moral relevance. To provide an example for coherent principles without moral relevance: If we came up with a principle like \people wearing brown shirts may be sacrificed in any case to save other people" this may not be an appropriate moral principle, even if it was coherent with all our intuitions (we had until then only deemed sacrificing people with brown shirts permissible in all scenarios and this is the only obvious feature that discerns the people whom we may sacrifice from the ones we may not). This is because wearing brown (where the color does not refer to anything morally relevant such as a political opinion) is usually not seen as a morally relevant feature (unlike, for instance, using someone merely as a means to achieve something but not as an end; see (Kant 1785, p. 38)). The requirement for those principles to reflect properties that most people would accept as morally relevant will be of some importance when we come to a different usage of Trolley Dilemmas: In 2001, neuroscientists entered the field of \trolleyology". Joshua Greene et al. (Greene et al. 2001) used fMRI to compare how their subjects' brains processed two different types of dilemmas: the classical side-track dilemma and a scenario going by the name \footbridge dilemma". If confronted with the former, many people agree that it is permissible to save the five by sacrificing the one on the side track (see, for instance, (Cushman et al. 2007) and (Foot 1967, pp. 7, 10). Confronted with the latter, in which a large person is shoved in front of the trolley to stop it, many people find it impermissible to sacrifice the large person, including \Everybody to whom I have put this case" according to Thomson (Thomson 1985 p. 1409), who invented this scenario. Greene et al. 2001 hypothesized that most people find it more permissible to turn the trolley onto the side track and kill one than to shove the person in front of the trolley and kill them not (only) because of the moral principles at work in their decision-making, but because the \footbridge dilemma" elicited negative emotions which then led the subjects to decide against the negatively connotated action. They predicted and found \that brain areas associated with emotion would be more active during contemplation of dilemmas such as the footbridge dilemma as compared to during contemplation of dilemmas such as the [side track] trolley dilemma" (Greene et al.