How We Make Life-and-Death Decisions

How We Make Life-and-Death Decisions a Time Magazine article.... I think Eadwine will enjoy this one since she's always asking about this kind of decisions...

Excerpt:

QUOTE

Philosophers have argued over this claim for a quarter of a millennium without resolution. Time's up! Now scientists armed with brain scanners are stepping in to settle the matter. So far it looks like Hume was onto something; though reason can shape moral judgment, emotion is often decisive, and that explains some strange quirks in our moralizing.

Harvard psychologist Joshua Greene does brain scans of people as they ponder the so-called trolley problem. Suppose a trolley is rolling down the track toward five people who will die unless you pull a lever that diverts it onto another track--where, unfortunately, lies one person who will die instead. An easy call, most people say: minimizing the loss of life--a "utilitarian" goal, as philosophers put it--is the right thing to do.

But suppose the only way to save the five people is to push someone else onto the track--a bystander whose body will bring the trolley to a halt before it hits the others. It's still a one-for-five swap, and you still initiate the action that dooms the one--but now you are more directly implicated; most people say it would be wrong to do this deal. Why?[...]

Well.. when you get close to things like that it keeps the mind busy, you can understand that.

Very interesting article by the way. Shows the out of sight out of mind idea well.

when i read things like this, i always try to think back on my own experiences to see how i stack up to whatever the "norm" is.
i think it is only human nature to make decisions like that from emotion rather than rational thought; that's all there is time for in snap life or death situations.
if i were making a life-or-death decision, like what kind of treatment for a serious illness i would choose, i would like to think i'd be rational. or at least, more rational than i would be on the fly.

I think that's interesting because there many scientists not came to the conclusion that in fact decisions in general (not only in this kind of border cases) are taken subconsciously and then the "logic" is the brain way to justify the decision that's already taken. (I'll probably have to read "Blink")