Here’s an article worth talking about around the coffee machine. The following introduces an article called “Should a self-driving car kill the baby or the grandma? Depends on where you’re from.”
In 2014 researchers at the MIT Media Lab designed an experiment called Moral Machine. The idea was to create a game-like platform that would crowdsource people’s decisions on how self-driving cars should prioritize lives in different variations of the “trolley problem.” In the process, the data generated would provide insight into the collective ethical priorities of different cultures.
They surveyed more than 40 million responses from 233 countries. Some outcomes are not surprising, like “participants from collectivist cultures like China and Japan are less likely to spare the young over the old.” Conversely, “Countries with more individualistic cultures are more likely to spare the young.”
The number of lives spared depends on culture as well. The article notes, “Countries with more individualistic cultures are more likely to spare more lives.”
In the original paper, the researchers even explored the affect of social status on people’s preferences.
“we observe that higher country-level economic inequality… corresponds to how unequally characters of different social status are treated. Those from countries with less economic equality between the rich and poor also treat the rich and poor less equally in the Moral Machine.
This relationship may be explained by regular encounters with inequality seeping into people’s moral preferences, or perhaps because broader egalitarian norms affect both how much inequality a country is willing to tolerate at the societal level, and how much inequality participants endorse in their Moral Machine judgments.”
What about gender? A interesting phenomenon emerged.
In nearly all countries, participants showed a preference for female characters; however, this preference was stronger in nations with better health and survival prospects for women. In other words, in places where there is less devaluation of women’s lives in health and at birth, males are seen as more expendable in Moral Machine decision-making.
There are several things we can take away from this study. For the moment, I’ll highlight just one. This research reconfirms a point I’ve made before.
Moral sentiments are greatly influenced by whether one lives in an individualist or collectivist culture.
In many cases, we cannot “objectively” or “authoritatively” state that one moral preference is more or less biblical. Also, the ancient biblical world was more collectivistic than ours; this suggests that we sometimes might misunderstand some of the Bible’s ethical impactions.
What say you?
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