道德哲学

　　Goodness has nothing to do with it

　　无关善良

　　Utilitarians are not nice people

　　实用主义者并非好人

　　Sep 24th 2011 | from the print edition

　　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 aphorism that “the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.”

　　大体来看，约翰?穆勒和杰里米?边沁通常是被看做好人，因为这二者设想建立了叫做实用主义的一种道德理论。这一理论的意义就深藏在边沁的一句格言中：道德与法律的根本在于大多数人的最大程度上的幸福。

　　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.

　　这些听起来真是完美无瑕，但当你开始将其应用在某一特殊案例中，完美理论就瓦解了，比如说，一个实用主义者或许会认可对恐怖主义嫌疑分子做一些拷问折磨，为了每个人最大程度的幸福，当然你会理解。此种观察引起哥伦比亚大学的Daniel Bartels和康纳尔大学的David Pizarro二位学者的疑问：怎样的人群是真正抱有实用主义的人生观？而二人在《认知》杂志上揭晓出的答案让人不太舒服。

　　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.

　　检测人们选择实用主义地办事的意愿如何有一个经典的方法，叫做“电车学”。该研究的主体要受到一些思维实验的考验，是有关一列运行中的有轨电车或是火车。但它们都涉及抉择，而且任选其一都无法避免死亡。举个例子，在火车前方的铁轨上有5个铁路工人，火车正在前进，这些人必死无疑除非实验主体即故事中的旁观者不袖手旁观。设定他站在铁道上的一座桥上，站在他旁边的是一个巨胖的陌生人，而他自己无力阻止列车前行；但是如果他把那个陌生人退下去，此人的巨大身体会阻拦住列车从而就拯救了五条人命。不幸的是，这也会使这个陌生人丧生。

　　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%.

　　Bartels博士和Pizarro博士从之前的研究中得知有90%的人不会选择这种实用主义的行为，牺牲一个救五个。但是之前也没有人去探问剩下10%的人到底有着怎样的天性。

　　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”. Each was asked to indicate, for each statement, where his views lay on a continuum that had “strongly agree” at one end and “strongly disagree” at the other. These statements, and others like them, were designed to measure, respectively, psychopathy, Machiavellianism and a person’s sense of how meaningful life is.

　　为了探明这一问题，这两位研究者给208位大学生做了一连串的电车测试并以四探针测试仪那样的精细程度检测他们反应的实用主义程度几何。参与者们还要对一些陈述作出回应以此来检测个体心理，这些陈述包括；我喜欢看拳击；掌控别人的最好方式就是说他们爱听的；当你真正去思考生活时，生活都不值得你为之生活。对于每一个陈述，每个参与者都要表明其观点是落在完全赞成或是完全反对的一方。这些以及其他类似的表达都是专门设计分别来检测精神变态、权术主义和人生价值观的。

　　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, Machiavellian 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.

　　然后，Bartels和 Pizarro把电车测试的结果和人格测试结果联系起来，他们发现对道德抉择（即把那个胖子推下桥）的实用主义选择和精神变态、不择手段或是厌世情绪的人格有着很大联系。他们还指出实用主义者或会为人类谋求更多的幸福，可他们本身却并不快乐。

　　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, Machiavellian misanthropes? Apparently, yes.

　　这并不说明实用主义就是错的。法律的精确完善不可避免的要伤害一些人的利益，这也是边沁和穆勒想要去提高完善的主要社会问题之一。而实用主义为人们提供了一个算是合理的思维框架来决定谁应该被被踩在脚下不管不顾。但是，Bartels和 Pizarro两位博士的实验结果却提出了一个问题，人们希望哪一类人做法律的制定者呢？精神变态不择手段的反人类者？显然正是他们在做。