Culture club could be key to moral choices

mumbai: cellphone calls received from one of the hijacked jetliners on september 11 allude to a tussle between hijackers and passengers. this presumably led to the abrupt crash in the woodlands of virginia, killing everyone on board, while saving countless other innocent lives targeted by the hijackers. the three passengers who grappled with the hijackers to divert the plane, therefore, managed to convert what was essentially a no-win situation into an inspiring saga of courage and sacrifice.did passengers on the other two flights that slammed into the world center have a similar option? would it have been possible to minimise the horrific damage and casualties? the answers to these hypothetical questions may never be known. however, moral philosophers and psychologists, who have been studying similar situations to unravel the various ways in which people respond to a moral dilemma, have made intriguing findings. they have found, for instance, that when faced with the choice of throwing a switch that will kill certainly one person while saving five others from a hurtling trolley, most people find it morally acceptable to throw the switch. but when the alternative offered involves deliberately pushing a heavy stranger to halt the trolley in its tracks, most people recoil. they say that in the latter case, it's morally wrong to kill one person to save five. ``after many years of debate, moral philosophers have never been able to arrive at a set of principles to explain why people see the two situations differently,'' reports sandra blakeslee in the new york times. ``but now a new study suggests that at least part of the answer lies not in philosophy but in the working of the brain.'' the study in the journal science, published just three days after the attacks in the u.s., found that the two dilemmas engaged different parts of the brain. in the first scenario, the idea of throwing a switch, which was impersonal, was found to be processed by an area of the brain dealing mainly with memory. in the second scenario, by contrast, the alternative of personally pushing a stranger to his death was found to activate the part of the brain involved with emotions, temporarily suppressing the memory areas. what is more revealing, however, is that princeton psychologist jonathan cohen, who was involved with the brain imaging study, says the findings offer ``tools to understand why people with different cultural backgrounds can arrive at different conclusions about moral dilemmas, like taking a life for some greater good. ``if people's gut-level emotions are organised differently as a result of their backgrounds,'' he added, ``they may reason differently about what is right and wrong.'' a simian view of a `moral dilemma', for example, could be quite different. this is highlighted in a fable involving the mughal emperor akbar and his wily minister birbal. while discussing the limits of self-transcendence, they put a female rhesus monkey with her baby in a transparent tank gradually being filled with water. at first, the mother goes on holding the baby overhead, over the steadily rising water level. however, in the story when the water rises to the level of her nostrils, the rhesus macaque panics and drops the baby under her feet, thereby `proving' birbal's contention that the drive for self-preservation is ultimately so demanding that it may even subvert noble maternal instincts. the story is silent about akbar's response. after all, men are not macaques. if anything, the terrorist attacks on the world trade center and the pentagon show that moral reasoning differs among individuals and across cultures.