Waldmann Michael R, Dieterich Jörn H
Department of Psychology, University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany.
Psychol Sci. 2007 Mar;18(3):247-53. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01884.x.
Most people consider it morally acceptable to redirect a trolley that is about to kill five people to a track where the trolley would kill only one person. In this situation, people seem to follow the guidelines of utilitarianism by preferring to minimize the number of victims. However, most people would not consider it moral to have a visitor in a hospital killed to save the lives of five patients who were otherwise going to die. We conducted two experiments in which we pinpointed a novel factor behind these conflicting intuitions. We show that moral intuitions are influenced by the locus of the intervention in the underlying causal model. In moral dilemmas, judgments conforming to the prescriptions of utilitarianism are more likely when the intervention influences the path of the agent of harm (e.g., the trolley) than when the intervention influences the path of the potential patient (i.e., victim).
大多数人认为，将一辆即将撞死五个人的电车转向另一条轨道，致使电车上仅一人死亡，这在道德上是可以接受的。在这种情况下，人们似乎遵循功利主义的准则，倾向于将受害者数量减至最少。然而，大多数人不会认为，为了拯救五名原本会死亡的患者而杀死医院里的一名访客在道德上是合理的。我们进行了两项实验，在实验中我们查明了这些相互矛盾的直觉背后的一个新因素。我们表明，道德直觉受到潜在因果模型中干预位置的影响。在道德困境中，当干预影响伤害行为主体（如电车）的路径时，比当干预影响潜在患者（即受害者）的路径时，更有可能做出符合功利主义规定的判断。
