This is bioethics bytes with me, David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.
Bioethics Bytes is made in association with Vox, which we here are Centre for Practical Ethics and made possible by a grant from the Wellcome Trust.
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A train is hurtling towards five people. It's out of control.
You want a footbridge standing next to a very obese man. The only way to save the five, it's to push the man over the footbridge to his certain death.
His boat would stop the train and save five lives. So should you do it?
Should you give him a shove? Most people would say no.
Utilitarians say yes. You should take one life to save five.
Now it turns out that the answer you give will depend on how much serotonin there is flowing through your brain.
This raises an intriguing possibility in the future, might we be able to alter people's moral behaviour with concoctions of chemicals?
That's been the research topic of Mollie Crockett, now based in Zurich, but formerly of Cambridge University.
Molly Crockett, welcome to Bioethics Bites. Thank you very much.
The topic we're going to focus on is brain chemistry and moral decision making.
You've done a lot of research on serotonin levels and how those can affect behaviour.
Could you just say a little bit about that? Yeah, so we've done a number of experiments looking at how boosting or depleting serotonin
levels influenced decision making in terms of reacting to being treated unfairly.
So we use a game from economics called the Ultimatum Game, which has two players, a proposer and a responder.
The proposer suggests a way how to share a sum of money with the responder.
And the responder can either accept the offer, in which case both players get the money,
or the responder can reject the offer, in which case neither player gets any money.
And a lot of studies have shown that responders will reject offers that they think are unfair to prevent unfair proposers from getting any money.
So if I were playing this automation game with you, I might have £30 and say,
I'll give you £5 and keep 25, and then you have to decide whether that's a fair deal or not.
And if you refuse it, neither of us gets the money.
But it seems like a fair deal. We both get the amounts stated.
Exactly. And when this game was first coming out,
it actually surprised a lot of economists because their models predicted that people would always accept an offer,
no matter how unfair, because some money is better than no money.
But it turns out, of course, that a lot of people would rather have nothing.
Then see someone who's treated them unfairly get the lion's share.
So this sort of spurred a whole thunderstorm of research looking at social preferences.
So how we value both our own outcomes, but also how they relate to the outcomes of others.
So you've got this ultimatum game set up and then what happens when you start playing around with serotonin levels?
So what we found is that when you lower people's serotonin levels,
when they're in the role of responder, they're more likely to reject offers they think are unfair.
And conversely, when you boost serotonin levels, this makes them less likely to reject unfair offers.
So there seems to be this link between having a low serotonin state and being
unwilling to let people get away with things that are perceived as unfair.
Exactly. So we're now starting to explore the motivations that seem to be driving this effect.
One idea is that lowering serotonin makes people just more concerned about unfairness,
and another possibility is that it just makes them more revengeful or spiteful.
And so we're doing some other experiments to explore those possibilities.
And when you were doing these experiments, did everybody respond to more or less the same way?
One interesting thing that we found in our experiment, where we enhanced serotonin function with citalopram,
is that individuals who scored higher on empathy tended to show stronger effects of the drug on their behaviour.
We gave people a separate questionnaire asking them questions like, I find it easier to put myself in someone else's shoes,
or I find myself getting very involved in characters emotions and in novels and in films.
People who tended to answer yes to those kinds of questions showed much stronger
effects of the serotonin drug on their behaviour in the ultimatum game.
So what we think might be going on is that our serotonin drug might be enhancing some sort
of emotion or motivation that was already stronger in highly empathetic individuals,
something like the aversion to causing harm or damage to someone else.
We know that serotonin plays a strong role in aggression and in regulating aggression.
And if you think about it, rejecting an unfair offer is sort of an aggressive kind of retaliatory act.
So. What might be going on is that more highly empathic individuals might have a stronger aversion to causing harm in the first place,
which could have been enhanced by the serotonin drug. And we saw evidence for this in a separate domain when we asked people to judge
whether it's morally acceptable to harm one person in order to save many others.
So these are these classic trolley problems.
And what we found is that the serotonin drug also made people less likely to say it's acceptable to harm one in order to save money.
So this is sort of separate evidence for the idea that serotonin might be promoting people's aversion to causing harm to others.
It's interesting the way you describe that,
because some people would put it not so much as causing harm to others, but sacrificing one to save the many.
If you say causing harm to others, it looks like an obviously immoral action.
But if you talk about sacrifice, it becomes something like a morally difficult but appropriate response.
Absolutely. And this is why questions of whether serotonin is a moral enhancer or a moral inhibitor are so complicated,
because within the domain of philosophy and ethics, you have these different sort of schools of moral thought,
one of which the utilitarian school says that it is acceptable to sacrifice one to save money, whereas other perspectives,
like the D.A. logical perspective suggests that actually there are certain actions that are just morally wrong.
Here we have the neurochemistry sort of coming in as an additional layer.
Serotonin seems to push people more towards the D onto logical side, but that's not to say it's making them more or less moral.
Actually, there is a at least one more broad brush moral theory.
If you talk about Aristotelian ism with the emphasis on the development of a virtuous character,
that does seem to be somewhat threatened by this kind of discovery that people's
responses to such a degree affected by things which they were probably unaware of,
and if they could be so easily swayed by whether they've had sufficient protein in their diet.
This seems to be suggesting that at least to be a morally virtuous person might be more difficult than some philosophers are perhaps opposed.
I think that's an interesting possibility. I mean, one point is that the effects of these manipulations are fairly subtle.
So they're not going to dramatically change someone's character, as you say, but they will have effects at the margins.
Another thing that pops to mind is that once we find out about these things and we can learn
how to put ourselves in situations that are likely to produce morally beneficial outcomes.
Maybe a sort of revamp of the concept of Aristotelian character and virtue ethics is that we should try to
learn as much as possible about what are the situational factors that influence our moral behaviour so that
we can act with the goal of being as moral as possible and put ourselves in situations that are going to
promote virtuous failures and to pre-emptively avoid situations that are likely to produce negative behaviour.
When you published your results, there was a lot of press attention.
Some of it had a kind of caricature of what the implications are of this kind of research.
Could you maybe talk a bit about that? Was there anything that you felt went too far in the conclusions it drew from what you'd actually done?
The tricky thing about the work that we're doing is that these neurochemical systems are extremely complicated.
They're very widespread in the brain. They have very far reaching effects.
Serotonin, for example, in addition to influencing moral judgement and behaviour,
also influences sleep, sex, appetite, other aspects of cognition like learning.
So it's not at all straightforward to just make sweeping statements like more serotonin is a good thing.
Less serotonin is a bad thing. You know, these systems are very tightly regulated, self-regulating.
In fact, there have actually been huge breakthroughs in neuroscience in the last decade, and many people are excited about possibilities.
But there are a significant number of people who think that the whole enterprise is reductionist,
that making claims about the nature of humanity on the basis of doing some
experiments on people's brains or on the sorts of chemicals they ingest and so on,
is too simplistic. It doesn't really show us what human beings are like.
I think this reaction to the research, it could be motivated by a bit of unease, let's say, with the implications of this work.
Ultimately, what it suggests is that people aren't as in control of their decisions as they might think that they are,
and in particular the work that we've done on moral values.
It could make people uneasy because people have this conception that moral values are fixed and stable and sort of core to their character.
The fact that we can shift them around below people's awareness I think is a little bit scary.
So one reaction could be to say, Well, people. Or just way more complicated than that.
And it's impossible to reduce something as important and profound and and complex as moral judgement to a single chemical in the brain.
You know, my response is, well, first of all, of course,
morality is not just about serotonin levels or oxytocin levels or electrical impulses in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.
It's much more complex than that, of course. But we do these experiments where we hold all things equal and see what happens
when we shift one part of this complex apparatus and we do fine effects.
But I think that the implications of this work are rather hopeful.
In fact, they sort of point to ways in which we could improve conflict resolution, for example.
That's interesting. How could manipulating serotonin levels lead to any kind of change in conflict resolution?
There are two ways.
So the first is more of an idea and not related to the neurobiology itself, but just the idea that our values seem to not be as stable as we think.
If we can get that idea out there, which is backed up by brain research.
This could actually encourage people to maybe you listen to those whom they disagree with.
There's a great study that was just out in science in the last year, led by Carol Dweck at Stanford.
They did this work in Israel and Palestine. They randomly assigned Israelis and Palestinians to read one of two articles.
One article suggested that aggressive groups have a fixed nature.
And the other article suggested that aggressive groups have a changeable nature.
And those who read the article about changeable groups were more willing to meet with the other side and hear
their point of view and more willing to compromise on issues of contention like the status of Jerusalem,
for example, from a game theoretic perspective.
This is essentially trying to get people out of bad equilibria, because if you think that your opponent is never going to budge,
then there's no point in investing any resources into negotiating with them.
But if we can get this idea out there that people's moral values actually are not fixed but can change,
then maybe people are going to be a little bit more willing to listen to others in that experiment.
You describe, though, it could be a placebo effect by telling people a falsehood.
You get to a better outcome because the people believe that character is malleable.
But if it's not true, it's not going to produce the end result necessarily.
Yeah, that is a good point. And that sort of, I guess, leads to the second possibility,
which is we might be able to discover ways to chemically make people less attached to their moral beliefs.
It's sort of a fanciful idea, you know, getting negotiators to pop a few pills before heading to the table.
But, you know, if we could actually discover what makes people attached to their beliefs who are willing to defend them at all costs,
if we could find ways to make them less attached, then this this could potentially be a useful tool for conflict resolution.
I mean, we're a long way off from figuring this kind of thing out, but it's an interesting direction.
I can imagine people being quite terrified by that thought of negotiators taking serotonin pills or
something like this before they go in to negotiate and then discarding some of their prior beliefs.
One way of describing that would be what you're doing is actually manipulating people.
And the further stage of that is, of course, when it gets into the hands of the wrong people.
Some tyrant could use this information to manipulate people to agree to things
that they didn't really want to agree to and think it was their own idea.
Yeah, it's a two edged sword, just like with anything. I think the key with developing these kinds of interventions is that the deployment
of them is going to have to be a very highly reasoned and considered process.
You can think of it in terms of a pre-commitment strategy.
We know that emotions influence our decisions, sometimes in very damaging ways.
A lot of good decision making and willpower has to do with foreseeing the effects of
emotions on our decisions and putting ourselves in situations where those can play a role.
Like not going to the grocery store when you're hungry, for example,
because you know that if you go when you're hungry, you're going to buy things that you'll regret later.
In a similar way, you could imagine a negotiator who recognises in himself that he's emotionally attached to certain issues that,
from a sort of utilitarian perspective, aren't really the best issues to be attached to in terms of the well-being of large groups of people.
And such an individual could essentially pre commit to letting go of his emotional attachment to those issues for the duration of the New Year.
Should, for example, you know, of course, we are a long way off from from fully understanding what the implications of these
potential technologies are for conflict resolution and for individual decision making.
What do you see as the future of this kind of research? What is the best outcome?
You could get from the investment of many hours of your lifetime in this area?
Well, recently I've been talking a lot more with philosophers who work on ethics to try and identify potential
avenues for enhancing certain human capabilities that we can pretty much all agree are a good thing.
One area is, is this human motivation to cooperate and to engage in interactions that have mutually beneficial outcomes for everyone involved.
One avenue is to try and figure out how to enhance that motivation and things like empathy and altruism,
which a lot of neuroscientists are working on.
But the key will be to identify particular virtues that we could enhance without increasing people's vulnerability to those who might exploit them,
for example. How do you think research in neuroscience is changing the picture of what a human being is?
Well, I think one thing that is coming out from all this research is that a lot of our
decisions are influenced by factors that are beyond our awareness and control,
which has sort of two and four implications. The first being that parts of ourselves that we think are really stable actually might not be so stable,
and this might make us think more deeply about who we are.
Additionally, I think it points to a need to try and identify these factors so that we can be aware of how we're being
influenced by them and give us the tools to put ourselves in situations that can bring out the best in us.
Molly Crockett, thank you very much. Thanks.
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