Joshua Greene

And what that tells you is that the same response can be given for very different reasons.

For the psychopaths, it's because they didn't have the emotional voice in their head saying, don't do that.

And for the Buddhist monks, they have that voice, but they can also cultivate a kind of compassion.

They say, but what about the other five people?

And I hear both voices, but at least you're saving more lives.

And so they would say it's acceptable.

They did say about this sutra that this sutra is like not for the little kids.

Like you don't want people going around thinking that they can commit murder if they think it's for the greater good.

So you need to kind of have those guardrails.

Other people have studied other types of conditions.

So there's a condition called alexithymia, which involves people not having good access to their own emotional states.

And those people are more likely to give a utilitarian response.

I mentioned earlier patients with different types of brain damage.

So patients with damage to the basolateral amygdala or the hippocampus are more likely to say that it's wrong to push the guy off the footbridge, et cetera.

I will say anecdotally that a lot of people who take a strong utilitarian stance

in their own lives, that there's a higher incidence of people who are autism spectrum.

And some people have sort of posthumously diagnosed Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, as having autism spectrum disorder or being neurodivergent in that way, as you might say.

And the thought is that

The utilitarian calculation is available to reasoning.

One notable thing about Bentham, he was one of the first people in the Western philosophical tradition to advocate for what we now call gay rights.