One implication of adopting a utilitarian framework as a normative standard in the psychological study of morality is the inevitable conclusion that the vast majority of people are often morally wrong. For instance, when presented with Thomson’s footbridge dilemma, as many as 90% of people reject the utilitarian response (Mikhail, 2007). Many philosophers have also rejected utilitarianism, arguing that it is inadequate in important, morally meaningful ways, and that it presents an especially impoverished view of humans as ‘‘locations of utilities [and nothing more]. . .’’ and that ‘‘persons do not count as individuals. . . any more than individual petrol tanks do in the analysis of the national consumption of petroleum’’ (Sen & Williams, 1982, p. 4). For those who endorse utilitarianism, the ubiquitous discomfort toward its conclusions points to the pessimistic possibility that human moral judgment is even more prone to error than many other forms of judgment, and that attempting to improve the quality of moral judgment will be a steep uphill battle. Before drawing those conclusions, it might prove useful to investigate individuals who are more likely to endorse utilitarian solutions and perhaps use them as a psychological prototype of the ‘‘optimal’’ moral judge. What do those 10% 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.
This seems a reasonable cause for further investigation. And leads me to wonder, what is more likley, that 90% of people are in a very "don't believe your lying eyes" way wrong about the interpretation of their morality or that 10% of people actually have genuinely different moral intuitions on a particular set of issues? What if philosophers and cognitive scientists and psychopaths just have values that on reflection drift in different ways than other groups or each other (just because they agree on some utilitarian actions dosen't mean their systematized ethical frameworks are similar on other dimensions). Of course as Vladimir_M points out how one chooses to signal about moral issues and how one actually respond are two different things.
But could it be that perhaps society, rather than experiencing something fitting our accepted grand tale of moral progress (hastened by enlightened elites throughout history), is rather just rationalizing experiencing moral change that reflects raw demographic shifts, economic conditions and the fickle fashions of those in positions of authority on matters of moral arbitration and/or power? Ah, but that robs me of a comforting future with values that are just my own values extrapolated and "fixed", best not think of this too much then.
Moral reasoning can have specific psychometric meaning than is inconsistent with lay interpretations of moral reasoning.
''Professor Simon Baron-Cohen suggests that, unlike the combination of both reduced cognitive and affective empathy often seen in those with classic autism, psychopaths are associated with intact cognitive empathy, implying non-diminished awareness of another’s feelings when they hurt someone.[57] Moral judgment
Psychopaths have been considered notoriously amoral – an absence of, indifference towards, or disregard for moral beliefs. There ...
So says the title of an interesting recent paper I stumbled on yesterday (ungated link; h/t Chris Bertram). Here's the abstract:
This conclusion is very much along the lines of some of my recent LW comments (for example, those I left in this thread). To me it seems quite obvious that in the space of possible human minds, those that produce on the whole reasonably cooperative and reliably non-threatening behavior are overwhelmingly unlikely to produce utilitarian decisions in trolley-footbridge and similar "sacrificial" problems.
Of course, what people say they would do in situations of this sort is usually determined by signaling rather than a realistic appraisal. Kind and philosophical utilitarians of the sort one meets on LW would be extremely unlikely to act in practice according to the implications of their favored theories in real-life "sacrificial" situations, so their views are by themselves not strong evidence of antisocial personality traits. However, actually acting in such ways would be, in my opinion, very strong evidence for such traits, which is correctly reflected in the typical person's fear and revulsion of someone who is known to have acted like that. I would venture to guess that it is in fact the signaling-driven disconnect between people's endorsement of utilitarian actions and the actual decisions they would make that makes the found correlations fairly low. (Assuming also that these tests really are strong indicators of antisocial personalities, of course, which I lack the knowledge to judge.)
(Also, endorsement of utilitarianism even just for signaling value causes its own problems, since it leads to political and ideological support for all sorts of crazy ideas backed by plausible-sounding utilitarian arguments, but that's a whole different issue.)
Here is also a full citation for reference: “The mismeasure of morals: Antisocial personality traits predict utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas”, by Daniel M. Bartels and David A. Pizarro, Cognition 121 (2011), pp. 154-161.
Edit: As Wei Dai points out in a comment, I should also add that some of the previous literature cited by Bartels and Pizarro has concluded that, in their words, "individuals with higher working memory capacity and those who are more deliberative thinkers are... more likely to approve of utilitarian solution." One the face of it, taken together with the conclusions of this paper, this would mean that propensity for utilitarian responses may stem from different causes in different individuals (i.e. deliberative thinking versus antisocial traits).
My own hypothesis, however, is that deliberative thinking leads to verbal utilitarian responses that are likely due to signaling, and that propensity for actual utilitarian "sacrificial" acts would have a much weaker link to deliberative thinking and a much stronger link to antisocial traits than mere utilitarian statements. Unfortunately, I don't know how this could be tested empirically in an ethical manner.