Have a Moral Dilemma? Start with Your Gut Reaction, but Don’t Stop There | Glenn Cohen | Big Think

Have a Moral Dilemma? Start with Your Gut Reaction, but Don’t Stop There

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Making ethical decisions is a process that starts in our gut, i.e with our automatic response. But it is essential to also think about moral dilemmas, says Harvard Law Professor Glenn Cohen.Helping someone in desperate need is an ethical choice, yet it is a choice we would all make without hesitating, i.e. thinking a single thought. The reason, according to Harvard Law Professor Glenn Cohen, is that ethical choices start in the gut. Our intuition, programmed my millions of years of evolution, instructs us what to do without needing rational deliberation. But at times, especially when making an ethical decision implies a sacrifice on our behalf, rational deliberation is necessary, and likely inescapable.

Because humans have given extensive thought to hypothetical and real-world ethical dilemmas, entire schools of ethical thought have developed. Perhaps the most well known of these schools are consequentialism and deontology, and within these, utilitarianism and Kantianism, respectively.

Glenn Cohen's book is Patients with Passports: Medical Tourism, Law, and Ethics.

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PROFESSOR, HARVARD LAW SCHOOL:

Prof. Glenn Cohen is one of the world's leading experts on the intersection of bioethics (sometimes also called "medical ethics") and the law, as well as health law. He also teaches civil procedure. From Seoul to Krakow to Vancouver, Professor Cohen has spoken at legal, medical, and industry conferences around the world and his work has appeared in or been covered on PBS, NPR, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, Mother Jones, the New York Times, the New Republic, the Boston Globe, and several other media venues.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Glenn Cohen: When thinking about an ethical problem first of all you should start always with your gut intuition. What's my intuition about this case? You never stop there. You have to keep pushing yourself to say why do I think this. First thing to do I think is to think about cases that are somewhat similar and somewhat different. Sometimes it's varying one fact. So a great example from this classic one in philosophy is the trolley problem. There's a trolley coming at – you're the conductor of a trolley; it's coming at a branch in the road; you're heading towards five people but if you flip of the switch you can redirect it so that it kills only one person. What should you do is the problem.

Well, when you start with that case we then begin with variations: what if it's three people versus one person? What if in fact there are three tracks and not two and one of them would lead to your own death for example? What if in fact instead of having to just flip the switch you'd have to push a fat man off a bridge in the way of the trolley? So these are all variations in the case and you begin by thinking does my answer change by that variation? Why would my answer change in that variation? Can I derive a principle from this? So there are principles like action versus inaction. The greater versus the fewer. The question of how at proximity I am. Did I cause the problem to begin with or am I just coming on the scene at a time when I can help, for example? So you push yourself to derive principles. You then test those principles out in new cases that are alike and unalike again. That's one way of approaching the problem.

The other is a much more top or down way, which is to start thinking about big schools of thinking in ethics. And really the big schools are on the one hand consequentialism, of which utilitarianism is probably the most common, which says that which maximizes good is the right thing to do. So do that, which maximizes good and we aggregate across people. We think of individual as containers of utility in the classic utilitarianism. The second big school is deontology, would of which the most famous version is probably Kantianism. And here there is an idea that even if something would maximize good states and affairs would produce the most welfare, we sometimes have obligations to do something different. We have constraints in what we can do. And for Kant it was a question of whether the maxim behind your action could result in a universal law of nature. That was his test or one of his tests under the categorical imperative. So Kantians think about things like rights, they think about things like dignity and they think about it in a way that freestanding from welfare and utility.

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