BYCU
An old friend sends me this piece: The Cold Logic of Drunk People. I should've ran it earlier; it's excellent.
The gist of the article and the study that fuels it: Drunk people are more likely to be coldly utilitarian than sober people.
It's a stunning idea, since we've all been told that logical people are practical people, that it's the level-headed and objective thinkers who are utilitarian, and that it's the Christians and fanatics that embrace impractical dogma and non-utilitarian ideologies.
Yet this study indicates just the opposite: the more inebriated the person, the more likely he is to flip the switch and kill a person in order to save five people.
His team found a correlation between each subject's level of intoxication and his or her willingness to flip the switch or push the person–the drunker the subject, the more willing he or she was to kill one hypothetical person for the sake of the hypothetical many. This choice follows the logic of utilitarianism: More good is done by saving five people than harm is done by killing one.
This "really undermines the notion that utilitarian preferences are merely the result of more deliberation," said Duke, who also co-authored a paper on the study, charmingly titled, "The drunk utilitarian: Blood alcohol concentration predicts utilitarian responses in moral dilemmas."
What's it all mean? I really don't know. It's just something to tuck away in our memory banks when thinking about why Thomistic natural law is better than Millian utilitarianism.
