经济学人下载:实用主义者并非好人

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。