DOMINATIONone life for five increase as we get literally farther away from our victim,
as we move out of the H&N peripersonal space into the dopaminergic
extrapersonal?
Start by eliminating the H&N sensation of physical contact. Imag-
ine you’re standing some distance away watching the scene unfold.
There’s a switch you can pull that will divert the train from the track
with five people on it to a track that will kill only one. Do nothing, and
the five will die. Will you throw the switch?
Pull back farther. Imagine you are sitting at a desk in a different city
on the other side of the country. The phone rings and a frantic railway
worker describes the situation. From your desk you control the path of
the train. You can activate a switch and divert the train to a track with
only one person on it, or do nothing and allow the train to hit the five
people. Will you throw the switch?
Finally, make the situation as abstract as possible: squeeze out all
the H&N and make it purely dopaminergic. Imagine that you are a
transportation systems engineer, designing the safety features of the
railway track. Cameras have been installed by the side of the tracks to
provide information about who is standing where. You have the oppor-
tunity to write a computer program that will control the switch. The
program will use the camera information to choose which track will kill
the fewest people. Will you write the software that in the future might
save five people by killing one?
The scenarios change but the outcomes will be the same: one life
is sacrificed so that five can be saved, or five lives are lost to avoid the
direct killing of one person. Very few people would put their hands on
an innocent person’s back and push him to his death. Yet very few peo-
ple would hesitate to write the software that would manage the track
switches in a way that minimizes loss of life. It’s almost as if there were
two separate minds evaluating the situation. One mind is rational, mak-
ing decisions based on reason alone. The other is empathic, unable to
kill a man, regardless of the big-picture outcome. One seeks to domi-
nate the situation by imposing control to maximize the number of lives
saved; the other does not. Whether a person chooses one outcome or
the other partly depends on activity within the dopamine circuits.