Would You Kill the Fat Man (20 page)

Harry, it turns out, is a plant. Unbeknown to him, Olly has been tested on a puzzle with many parallels to the trolley problem: the Ultimatum Game.
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The Ultimatum Game has had a career trajectory similar to the Fat Man’s. It first appeared in 1982, shortly before the Fat Man. It began in one discipline (economics) and was analyzed as an idealized form of negotiation initially purely in an a priori way, a puzzle that could be resolved on paper with (quite simple)
mathematics. The “solution” was then tested in the real world. After that the game flew the nest of its parent discipline and into other fields, including evolutionary biology, anthropology, sociology, and neuroscience. As with the Fat Man, findings from the Ultimatum Game have been cited as evidence that morality is hardwired, innate. As with the Fat Man, the game is being used to test how chemical intervention can alter decision making. And as with the Fat Man, there are vitriolic critics who condemn this academic construct for being an artificial laboratory experiment that cannot be transplanted in any useful way into the real world.

The standard Ultimatum Game involves two players. This time let’s call them Thomas and Adam. Thomas is given a sum of money, say £100. He can then choose to give any amount of that £100 to Adam. Adam has the option of accepting this division of the £100 or rejecting it: if he rejects it, neither player receives anything. If Thomas offers only £1 to Adam, then it seems to make sense for Adam to accept it. If Adam accepts this distribution, he gets £1. £1 is better than nothing and nothing is what he will receive if he rejects the offer. Since it would make sense for Adam to accept any amount, however small, it would also seem to make sense for Thomas to offer the smallest possible amount.

That is the result that a mathematical model might predict: it’s how some economists claim Rational Economic Man ought to respond. But, as it turns out, it’s not how flesh-and-blood men and women react. When it was initially put to subjects in the United States, there were two surprises. First, those in the role of Thomas typically offered around 40 percent of the total pot: some even offered half. Second, those playing Adam, on the receiving end, typically rejected any offer that
was below about 25 percent. They preferred to scotch the whole deal rather than accept what they regarded as a measly and insulting proposal.

The Ultimatum Game has become the economist’s favorite experiment, conducted innumerable times. As with the Fat Man, experimenters have tinkered with the variables, testing it with different stakes, on different ages, on both sexes, on twins, between different races and groups, in different places, even on animals (chimpanzees are rational maximizers, taking whatever they’re offered!)
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There has been a comparison of behavior when the responder was plain-looking and when the responder was attractive. Another comparison has analyzed what happens when subjects know one another and when they’re strangers. They’ve tried the Ultimatum Game on people who are exhausted and, as in the experiment with Harry and Olly, when people are thirsty.

To make the game feel real, the stakes have to be real. But funds are limited even in enviably endowed universities. So through financial necessity, the game has had to be played with small sums. That, of course, skews the findings, since if the comfortably well off are irked by a stingy offer, it’s not too much of a hardship for them to snub it. But Ultimatum Game experiments have now been carried out in more than thirty countries, in places where the dollar has considerably more purchasing power than in the United States. The most extraordinary result was in Indonesia. In a $100 game, offers of $30 or lower were still routinely turned down. This was back in 1995 when $30 was the equivalent of a fortnight’s wages.

So what’s going on here? Why do people offer more than they need to and why are some offers rejected? Why would anyone scoff at free money?

There are two types of answer. In one camp are those who regard the results as misleading because they mask our basic naked self-interest. In the other are those who use the Ultimatum Game as evidence that we are at least partially altruistic and that we emerge from the womb with an ingrained belief in, and capacity for, fairness.

The Ultimatum Game is relatively new, but it taps into an argument with a long and impressive pedigree about, crudely put, whether humans are born good or evil (or whether they’re shaped entirely by experience). Jesus Christ, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the novelist William Golding have all contributed to this debate. Locke thought the mind at birth was a
tabula rasa,
a blank slate. Our beliefs were formed and molded by experience. But others—let’s categorize them into the Hobbesians and the Smithians—suspected that a baby emerged from the womb with moral dispositions. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) believed that man was an essentially self-interested creature, and without a community or state police force, people would club one another to death. They would be scared even to go to sleep. While today’s caricature of the Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith (1723–1790) has him endorsing this grim Hobbesian diagnosis of the human psyche, in fact the opposite was the case. True, Smith writes in
The Wealth of Nations
that the invisible hand of the market works well when people pursue personal gain. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we can expect our dinner but from their regard to their own interest.”
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Yet in
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
he explicitly states that self-interest is not the sole and dominating motivation: “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to
him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.”
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Both sides can cite Ultimatum Game studies to bolster their case. In an experiment in which the proposers were offered complete anonymity, many more people made greedy offers, suggesting that what seems to motivate people is not altruism but reputation. A good reputation for, say, honesty and fair dealing obviously lubricates transactions and negotiations. (Many of the studies have been carried out with students, who know that the professor is taking an interest in the results: hardly surprising, then, that they seek to ingratiate themselves by making generous offers.)

There’s even cross-cultural support for the Hobbesian view. Although people in Indonesia behaved like those in Indiana, some quirky results were recorded elsewhere. In small-scale societies generous offers to strangers were less likely (possibly because in such societies there’s normally no need to trade with strangers). What’s more, in one or two remote parts of the world, in particular among the Au and Gnau peoples of Melanesia, there were examples of people making hypergenerous offers (in excess of 50 percent), and, more unusual still, seeing some of these offers rebuffed! This startling phenomenon was explained by researchers in terms of the Melanesian culture of status-seeking through the giving of gifts. Refusing a gift is a rejection of being subordinate. So these results are consistent with the Hobbesian analysis that we’re fundamentally self-interested.

But there is also a heavy burden of evidence in support of the Smithians, that we’re born altruistic, at least to a degree, and that it’s our biology, an innate altruism or sense of justice, that drives us to make generous offers and an innate sense of fairness that compels us to reject bad ones. Certainly there
seems to be evidence that biology plays a part. A study contrasting identical twins with fraternal twins in Sweden suggests a striking genetic factor: unlike fraternal twins, identical twins offered and accepted similar amounts.

Biological factors have been examined in other ways. When thirsty subjects were offered a poor distribution of water they often chose to go without rather than accept the deal. There have been experiments on subjects deprived of sleep. You might expect people who were tired to accept any offer they were given; that a mild state of discomfort would make people care less whether or not an offer was fair. In fact the opposite seems to occur. When people are deprived of sleep, and too tired to think reflectively about an offer, emotion predominates: a poor split is more likely to be hurled back into the proposer’s face.

The same psychologists and neuroscientists who are investigating how we respond to the Trolley Problem also make use of the Ultimatum Game. Thus, there have been Ultimatum Game tests conducted both with psychopaths and with those who have damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (which is involved in the formation of social emotions). As described earlier (see
chapter 13
), VMPC patients are more likely to push the Fat Man. When playing the Ultimatum Game, such patients are more likely to reject unfair offers. When frustrated or provoked, VMPC patients are prone to exhibit anger or petulance.

What happens in the brain when stingy (or generous) offers are made has been the focus of study by neuroscientists. The reward regions of the brain (associated, for example, with eating a chocolate bar) are more active when a recipient is offered a high amount, while the insula cortex, which responds to disgust, is activated when people are offered a small amount.

Pay Cheese

Just as researchers have used the trolley problems to assess the impact on behavior of hormones such as serotonin, testosterone, and oxytocin, the Ultimatum Game has served the same function.

Thus, an experiment showed that people with high levels of serotonin are more likely to accept offers that others regard as unfair. If you have to negotiate with union leaders over beer and sandwiches, a good tactic is to slip chunky slices of cheese between the bread: cheese is rich in serotonin. Workers who believe their managers are skimming most of the profits for themselves
will
consider cutting off their nose to spite their face, if they can simultaneously give a black eye to the bosses. They will, in other words, be inclined to hurt themselves if this is the only way to inflict punishment on others. But serotonin reduces such temptation. As for testosterone, it decreases generosity, perhaps one reason why women make more generous offers than men, while oxytocin has the opposite effect.

Should we start pumping oxytocin through the air conditioning system? The precautionary principle counsels us to err on the side of caution. For one thing, if we meddle with hormones like oxytocin, serotonin, or testosterone, the result will never be straightforward. These are Stakhanovite little hormones: they do tireless work in the brain and they’re interconnected. So an intervention the effect of which is generally considered positive may produce negative consequences too. Some outcomes may prove not just deleterious but irreversible.

What’s more, an alteration that appears beneficial in one context may be harmful in another. A sniff of oxytocin up the nostrils makes people more trusting: society as a whole might function better if we all trusted each other a little more. On the
other hand, we wouldn’t want the young woman who leaves a club on a Saturday night with a man she’s just met to be overly trusting.
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There are reasons, therefore, to be wary of the new scientific and technological possibilities. On the whole, evolution has equipped us reasonably well. We don’t always trust people, since not everyone is worthy of our trust. But evolution hasn’t got it right in every particular. It would surely be better if we were more concerned about the plight of distant strangers. There are well-known studies that show that if we hear about a tragedy that’s befallen one particular individual we are more likely to care than if we hear news of one that’s befallen thousands. That’s not rational. And although we need to weigh the risks of taking action to improve ourselves ethically, enhancement may in certain circumstances be not only acceptable but morally essential.

PART 4

The Trolley and Its Critics

CHAPTER 15

A Streetcar Named Backfire

I don’t do trolleys.

THAT WAS A DISMISSIVE COMMENT of an excellent philosopher, approached to discuss trolleyology.
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“It’s symptomatic of a disease in moral philosophy,” moaned another.

Some moral philosophers devote their lives to trolley-type dilemmas. Many more cite trolleyology in lectures and seminars and instruct their students to read at least part of the trolley literature. But trolleyology turns the grey matter of other philosophers red. They would like to shunt the trolleys into a remote retirement depot. Philippa Foot is held unwittingly responsible for creating a Frankensteinian monster.

The fear and loathing are worth trying to understand.

It cannot be a suspicion of thought experiments generally. Trolleyology has to be seen within a broader context. Thought experiments and extended metaphors are the meat and potatoes of philosophy—part of the staple diet not just in moral philosophy but in all sub-genres of the discipline. Plato, in
The Republic
, has the famous allegory of the cave: prisoners shackled in a cave look at shadows on the wall that they mistakenly take for actual people. In fact, the shadows are caused by puppeteers manipulating puppets behind them. Plato is making a
point about how deeply detached we are from reality. In
Meditations
, the father of modern philosophy René Descartes raises the possibility that an evil demon has fooled us into believing even things about which we feel certain, such as 2+3=5. John Locke has a famous thought experiment in which the soul of a prince—with all the prince’s thoughts and memories—is transferred into the body of a cobbler. What makes a person the same person over time is not the body but consciousness, Locke believed. In the eighteenth century, Kant imagines a hypothetical case about a hunted, innocent man who takes refuge in your house. A murderer knocks on the door and demands to know whether his quarry is hiding inside. (Kant claimed it would be wrong, even in these circumstances, to lie.) Wittgenstein tried to demonstrate the absurdity of a private language—a language that (necessarily) only one individual could use—by imagining we each had a matchbox inside that was something we all referred to as a “beetle,” but I couldn’t look into your box and you couldn’t look into mine. In that case, said Wittgenstein, the term beetle could not refer to a particular thing—since we might all have different things in our boxes.
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