Would You Kill Baby Hitler? (And Other Psychopathic Musings) | Kevin Dutton | Big Think

Would You Kill Baby Hitler? (And Other Psychopathic Musings, with Kevin Dutton)

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Would you kill a baby if you knew he would grow up to be Hitler? Psychologist and author Kevin Dutton explores the mindset of psychopaths as a window into this fascinating ethical question.

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KEVIN DUTTON:

Dr. Kevin Dutton is the author of The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success. Dutton is a research psychologist at the Calleva Research Centre for Evolution and Human Science, Magdalen College, University of Oxford.

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TRANSCRIPT:

KEVIN DUTTON: When we talk about the trolley problem, actually, research has been done on the kinds of people who are willing to shove the fat guy over the rails. And what that research has uncovered is that these people tend to be utilitarians in our society. They tend to be people who are able to get the job done, who are less morally squeamish. Now, you know, I’ve actually presented a variation of this dilemma to various psychopaths. I’ll give you an example of what the variation of the dilemma is. Imagine that you are a transplant surgeon and you have five patients all in need of a transplant. So, heart, lungs, whatever, whatever, and they’re all going to die if they don’t get that transplant, but there are no matching donors available. Just by chance a young traveler happens to walk past your surgery one day for just a regular checkup and it turns out hypothetically that he is a direct match for all five.

Now imagine that you are the transplant surgeon. Imagine if there was no comeback to you if that traveler somehow disappeared. Would it be right to kill that young traveler in order to take his five organs to transplant them into your five patients? Now, okay, most people, again, it’s a five to one life score, exactly like the trolley problem, but most people would say absolutely not. That’s just not right. It’s ethically not right to kill that person. But I’ve given this to psychopathic killers and they’ve said well actually you know what: Imagine if you were the families of those five guys. One life lost, is it really that bad when you’re saving five others? What if that guy was an evil terrorist and the five guys who needed the transplants were peace workers or aid workers for instance. Would that make it any different?

Now these are kinds of scenarios, these are kinds of decisions that world leaders and politicians have to grapple with. I mean, here’s another little one to conjure with. Imagine that you were hypothetically left in a room with a newborn baby and you were left in that room for ten minutes with that newborn baby and I told you—and you have to believe this, it’s true—that that newborn baby will grow one day into Adolf Hitler. And I told you there would be no moral comeback, no legal comebacks on you were you to kill that baby with a pillow and walk out of that room. Now, what would you do? Would you kill that baby and save millions of lives further on down the line in history or would you not be able to do it? These are moral conundrums which are kind of played out in everyday life. I’m obviously reducing these to absurdities, but these are the kinds of decisions on a lesser level that you have to make if you’re a politician or if you’re a world leader.

Sending anyone out into battle knowing that there’s a chance that they might not come back, committing thousands of troops to a war is something that not many people can carry lightly on their conscience. And if you look at psychopathic traits well actually psychopathic traits are pretty well represented in politicians and world leaders. You think about it: Politicians and leaders have to deal with all sorts of nasty kinds of crises during their administrations, anything from the threats from rogue states to natural disasters like hurricanes or floods. Also, though they have to be pretty confident to run for office at all, they have to be very good at presenting themselves in a certain light and they have to be very persuasive and manipulative. I mean one senior UK politician who should for obviously reasons remain nameless had a great quote and he said to me: In politics, the only way to know who’s stabbing you in the back is to see their reflection in the eyes of the person stabbing you from the front. I mean that’s a great kind of quote which for me sums up that kind of snakes and ladders game, every man for himself, cutthroat kind of existence that characterizes politics I would say probably across the board in most nations of the world.