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  3. In the grand scheme of things Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill are normally thought of as good guys. Between them, they came

In the grand scheme of things Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill are normally thought of as good guys. Between them, they came

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问题     In the grand scheme of things Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill are normally thought of as good guys. Between them, they came up with the ethical theory known as utilitarianism . The goal of this theory is encapsulated in Bentham’s famous saying that "the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation. "
    Which all sounds fine and dandy until you start applying it to particular cases. A utilitarian, for example, might approve of the occasional torture of suspected terrorists—for the greater happiness of everyone else, you understand. That type of observation has led Daniel Bartels at Columbia University and David Pizarro at Cornell to ask what sort of people actually do have a utilitarian outlook on life. Their answers, just published in Cognition, are not comfortable.
    One of the classic techniques used to measure a person’s willingness to behave in a utilitarian way is known as trolleyology. The subject of the study is challenged with thought experiments involving a runaway railway trolley or train carriage. All involve choices, each of which leads to people’ s deaths. For example: there are five railway workmen in the path of a runaway carriage. The men will surely be killed unless the subject of the experiment, a bystander in the story, does something. The subject is told he is on a bridge over the tracks. Next to him is a big, heavy stranger. The subject is informed that his own body would be too light to stop the train, but that if he pushes the stranger onto the tracks, the stranger’s large body will stop the train and save the five lives. That, unfortunately, would kill the stranger.
    Dr Bartels and Dr Pizarro knew from previous research that around 90% of people refuse the utilitarian act of killing one individual to save five. What no one had previously inquired about, though, was the nature of the remaining 10%.
    To find out, the two researchers gave 208 undergraduates a battery of trolleyological tests and measured, on a four-point scale, how utilitarian their responses were. Participants were also asked to respond to a series of statements intended to get a sense of their individual psychologies. These statements included, "I like to see fist fights" , "The best way to handle people is to tell them what they want to hear", and "When you really think about it, life is not worth the effort of getting up in the morning". These statements, and others like them, were designed to measure, respectively, psychopathy , and a person’ s sense of how meaningful life is.
    Dr Bartels and Dr Pizarro then correlated the results from the trolleyology with those from the personality tests. They found a strong link between utilitarian answers to moral dilemmas (push the fat guy off the bridge) and personalities that were psychopathic, or tended to view life as meaningless. Utilitarians, this suggests, may add to the sum of human happiness, but they are not very happy people themselves.
    That does not make utilitarianism wrong. Crafting legislation—one of the main things that Bentham and Mill wanted to improve—inevitably involves riding roughshod over someone ’ s interests. Utilitarianism provides a plausible framework for deciding who should get trampled. The results obtained by Dr Bartels and Dr Pizarro do, though, raise questions about the type of people who you want making the laws. Psychopathic misanthropes ? Apparently, yes.
According to the case of trolleyology, we know that utilitarians usually make a decision by______.
选项 A、weighing the consequences of different scenarios
B、complying with an absolute and unchanged moral standard
C、giving priority to the interest of a specific group
D、calculating the best way to avoid risk
答案A
解析 从电车案例中，我们知道选择5个人死还是1个人死，这是一个两难的问题，其中牵涉到一个人所尊崇的道德标准。那些选择让5个人死的人也许是因为他们相信这样一种绝对道德标准，那就是不应该夺取无辜者的性命；而选择一个人死的人，也就是功利主义者，他们行事的依据是对两种不同的后果进行衡量，选择损失较小的方案，保证大多数人的安全。由此可见，功利主义者做决定的基础应该选[A]，而非[B]。[C]错误，功利主义者并不是优先考虑特定群体的利益，而是针对不同情况进行衡量，保证多数人的利益。在电车案例中，无论做出怎样的选择，都会有人死，这种风险是无法规避的，因此[D]也不能入选。
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