Drunken Utilitarians

Not dispositive, as lawyers say, but suggestive, from The Atlantic: Asking drunk people in a study to answer the trolley and the footbridge problems (“In the first, people must choose whether they would flip a switch to divert a runaway trolley, killing one person but sparing five others; the second asks about pushing someone off a bridge for the same purpose”), the researchers

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 [Aaron] Duke, who also co-authored a paper on the study, “The drunk utilitarian: Blood alcohol concentration predicts utilitarian responses in moral dilemmas.”