“When confronted with very, very hard questions about the value of life, decisions are grounded in multiple and sometimes competing considerations about harm, welfare, individual rights, fairness, and justice,” said lead author Audun Dahl, Associate Professor of psychology at the University of California in the US. “Contrary to popular belief, people are quite able to articulate all of this when asked to justify how they arrived at their decision,” he added .
432 adolescents, college students, and other adults were a part of the research Dahl conducted. He gave them examples of hypothetical dilemma scenarios. In one scenario, he said 5 people are standing on a track. If they could throw the switch and make the train change tracks, it would only kill one person as opposed to the five. In another scenario, five people were tied to a track. A bystander could push one person on the track rescuing the lives of the others.
Dahl said, “both adolescents and adults considered a number of factors: the fundamental value of life, the intrinsic rights of individuals, their involvement and their responsibilities in the scenarios, as well as guilt and social repercussions.” He concluded, “Our findings rebut the notion that adults can’t reason about moral issues.”
