Here’s why we can’t agree on what’s worse: the cure or the disease
Human beings are not rational when it comes to decisions about life and death. We try to figure out whether lockdown regulations should be lifted or tightened based on mathematical models of how the virus might spread and how many people might die. But our minds struggle to make these decisions based on numbers alone. The debate on whether ‘the cure is worse than the disease’ in policy-decisions on the corona-virus, reminded me of research I came across a while back when I was reading a book called ‘Behave’ by Robert Sapolsky.
Take the famous ethical experiment: the Trolley dilemma. Imagine a trolley that’s rolling down a track, and it’s brakes are broken. It’s going to hit and kill five people. Under which circumstances do you think it’s okay to do something to save those five people if you have to kill someone else in the process? It turns out, that the circumstances under which you’d have to kill the one person, make a huge difference. If you have to pull a lever to put the trolley on a different track, and you accidentally kill another person who’s standing on that track, 60 to 70 percent of people would do it. However, if you’d have to push a person in front of the trolley in order to stop it, thereby killing that one person, only 30 percent of the people say they’d do that. (See: chapter 13 in the book Behave by Sapolsky, or research by Greene.)
If you were reasoning from a purely utilitarian standpoint (i.e. maximising well being for as many people as possible) of course the two scenarios are the same. However, it seems like we feel there’s something intuitively wrong with using one person intentionally to save the others. Instead of using the parts of our brain which are involved in rational decision-making (and most likely argue for a utilitarian approach), our amygdala (responsible for fear, survival responses) and vmPFC (the part of your brain that does ‘social decision-making’) take over.
There’s something else at play when we are deciding about life and death of our fellow human beings, which is time and space. Imagine you’re walking by a river in your hometown and a child has fallen in and is drowning. Most people would feel like they’d have to jump in and save the child, even if that would ruin their $500 suit. Alternatively, imagine a friend calls and says he’s in Somalia and a child there needs $500 medical treatment so her life can be saved. Would you send the money? Much less likely. (see: again Behave by Sapolsky, or this research by Peter Singer) It turns out that it really matters how far the child you’re about to save is away from you. If you happened to be in Somalia and saw a child drowning in a river there, you’d be very inclined to jump into the water and save it.
It turns out that in moral decision-making, the circumstances really matter. When the harm you’re doing is unintentional, and on a psychological distance (either in time or in space), it feels like sacrificing people to save others is acceptable. However, when it’s intentional and close by and active, it is something which most of us would reject doing.
I have been thinking about this stuff constantly as the debate around lockdowns versus hunger and poverty and economic downturn evolves. Initially, we saw many people dying in the overcrowded hospitals in Italy, and the desperate reports from doctors there made the threat very imminent. As more countries reported their first cases, the cry for a total shutdown to stop the spread increased. Not even the most sociopathic leaders in this world could resist the pressure to act to stop people from dying. Nearly the whole world went into lockdown. Even though from a purely utilitarian point of view that probably isn’t always the most logical thing to do.
We saw the hospitals filling up in Europe and New York, we read the stories of the parents dying alone in the COVID-wards, we watched coffins being piled up by men in protective clothing. We could not yet see the millions of people struggling with hunger, depression, extreme poverty, loneliness. That suffering was further away in time, and not yet visible.
As we’re moving through these turbulent times, I think our judgement of what’s right and wrong may shift with the reality we’re faced with. When we’ve been in lockdown for several weeks and we see children desperate for food aid in the streets in South Africa, while the hospitals are still empty, we think it’s justified to ease the lockdown regulations and allow for economic activity. But when the lockdown regulations are gradually lifted all over the world, it is likely that the spread of the virus will pick up speed again. And when a second wave of infection arises, once more we might be confronted with immediate and visible pain and death. Pictures of hospital wards filling up dominating the news. And we’d be strongly inclined to go back to doing what we can to stop the spread of the virus — thus moving back into lockdown.
We’ll go back and forth with potential waves of infection. Some of us who are driven by rationality will continue to call for utilitarian decision-making. But our human nature makes it very hard to go for purely rational decisions in this situation. Our instincts will tell us we have to save those who are suffering right in front of our eyes. That’s why it will be difficult to create policies based on mere mathematical calculations of the number of lives saved or sacrificed.
