I suspect most readers of this blog are familiar with Peter Singer – mostly through his views on infanticide and euthanasia.  Many others are already familiar with his book Animal Liberation – a book that served as the first inspiration for many who are now in the animal rights movement.

Singer’s worldview – and the policies he promotes to form a better one – fall within the framework of utilitarianism, which is defined briefly here:

Utilitarianism is an ethical theory holding that the proper course of action is the one that maximizes the overall “good” of the greatest number of individuals. It is thus a form of consequentialism, meaning that the moral worth of an action is determined by its resulting outcome. The most influential contributors to this theory are considered to be Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.

Utilitarianism was described by Bentham as “the greatest happiness or greatest felicity principle”.

Singer is probably the best popularly-known advocate of the utilitarian ethics.  His advocacy of infanticide and euthanasia – both voluntary and nonvoluntary – are a result of his promotion of utilitarianism as the most rational approach to ethical choices.  In the case of nonvoluntary euthanasia, persons with severe cognitive disabilities can be killed humanely and increase the greater good – especially if the organs of those people could be harvested and transplanted into people with more ability to appreciate the extra amount of life.

And, you know, when Singer and others lay it out, it really sounds logical – bloodlessly and brutally without any kind of empathy – but logical.  It’s a point of view in which every person who makes a choice about killing someone else for the greater good is operating from the purest of motives.  That’s always sounded quite a bit removed from the world I inhabit, in which people make choices – including life-changing ones – for reasons that range from heroic to selfish to downright criminal.

It turns out that a couple of researchers are interested in how utilitarianism works out in the real world as well.  Or rather, they’re interested in finding out just who is willing to make utilitarian decisions.  From a press release that was issued about the study last week:

Antisocial personality traits predict utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas

Study questions the widely-used methods by which lay moral judgments are evaluated; results found individuals who are least prone to moral errors also possess a set of prototypically immoral psychological characteristics

NEW YORK – September 30, 2011 – A study conducted by Daniel Bartels, Columbia Business School, Marketing, and David Pizarro, Cornell University, Psychology found that people who endorse actions consistent with an ethic of utilitarianism—the view that what is the morally right thing to do is whatever produces the best overall consequences—tend to possess psychopathic and Machiavellian personality traits. (Emphasis added.)

In the study, Bartels and Pizarro gave participants a set of moral dilemmas widely used by behavioral scientists who study morality, like the following: “A runaway trolley is about to run over and kill five people, and you are standing on a footbridge next to a large stranger; your body is too light to stop the train, but if you push the stranger onto the tracks, killing him, you will save the five people. Would you push the man?” Participants also completed a set of three personality scales: one for assessing psychopathic traits in a non-clinical sample, one that assessed Machiavellian traits, and one that assessed whether participants believed that life was meaningful. Bartels and Pizarro found a strong link between utilitarian responses to these dilemmas (e.g., approving the killing of an innocent person to save the others) and personality styles that were psychopathic, Machiavellian or tended to view life as meaningless.

These results (which recently appeared in the journal Cognition) raise questions for psychological theories of moral judgment that equate utilitarian responses with optimal morality, and treat non-utilitarian responses as moral “mistakes”. The issue, for these theories, is that these results would lead to the counterintuitive conclusion that those who are “optimal” moral decision makers (i.e., who are likely to favor utilitarian solutions) are also those who possess a set of traits that many would consider prototypically immoral (e.g., the emotional callousness and manipulative nature of psychopathy and Machiavellianism).

While some might be tempted to conclude that these findings undermine utilitarianism as an ethical theory, Prof. Bartels explained that he and his co-author have a different interpretation: “Although the study does not resolve the ethical debate, it points to a flaw in the widely-adopted use of sacrificial dilemmas to identify optimal moral judgment. These methods fail to distinguish between people who endorse utilitarian moral choices because of underlying emotional deficits (like those captured by our measures of psychopathy and Machiavellianism) and those who endorse them out of genuine concern for the welfare of others.” In short, if scientists’ methods cannot identify a difference between the morality of a utilitarian philosopher who sacrifices her own interest for the sake of others, and a manipulative con artist who cares little about the feelings and welfare of anyone but himself, then perhaps better methods are needed. (Emphasis added.)

The article itself, which can be read here in pdf format,  is only 8 pages long and worth the read.  This is a paragraph describing some individuals within the 10% of the population who are likely to embrace utilitarianism:

What do those10% of people who are comfortable with the utilitarian solution to the footbridge dilemma look like? Might these utilitarians have other psychological characteristics in common? 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).  In fact, one well-defined group of utilitarians likely shares these characteristics as well—the subset of philosophers and behavioral scientists who have concluded that utilitarianism is the proper normative ethical theory.

Unstated here seems to be an assumption that there isn’t any overlap between that “subset of philosophers and behavioral scientists” and individuals who score high in terms of psychopathy and Machiavellianism.  I think that’s an untested assumption and therefore not one that should be made.  Seriously.

Maybe the best summary comes from Joshua Rothman at the Boston Globe in his column “The Practical Psychopath“:

Psychologists, they argue, should stop assuming that the utilitarian moral choice is the right one. Each moral judgment is part of a general outlook. It might be important to have a utilitarian on board your lifeboat–he “may be able to act for the greater good in ways that prove difficult” for most people. But it’s important, too, that most people have moral outlooks attuned to everyday life. It’s lucky that most people aren’t utilitarians.

And yes – to people out there with strong feelings on this – I’m the first one to admit that psychology isn’t a hard science.  But bioethics isn’t a science at all – and the haphazard approach it takes to empirical matters (which might be due to the field’s roots in philosophy) often defies the old adage “the plural of anecdote is not data.”

But this study is in some ways good news for Peter Singer.  If he ever wants to go off to some island somewhere and establish a community based on utilitarian ethics, the authors of this study have identified just the types of people who are already willing to use utilitarian ethics.  They might even let him use their test that screens for psychopathic and Machiavellian personality traits.  That would be what I’d call a very brave new world.  –Stephen Drake

h/t to John B Kelly for pointing this study out to me.