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[MUSIC]
Hi again.
Today, we will talk about the relationship between emotions, empathy and ethics.
And we will talk about some ethical challenges
as the result of this kind of analysis.
I will try [COUGH] to explain you how we take positions.
We experience situation in which we can see a train,
[COUGH] which is approaching to a different location of the railroad.
And then the end of each of both sides, we can find several people.
In one direction, the train will kill one guy.
It's a very nice guy.
[LAUGH] And at the other section,
the train will kill five persons.
So, [COUGH] if you were forced to decide
at the cross which direction must the follow the train,
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you surely will try to choose the one that could minimize the number of deaths.
If you need to compare one versus five deaths,
then, you will close to decide to kill one person.
You must decide, but, because otherwise, the train will kill surely five person.
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a very towards the train,
the body will stop the train.
So, it's the same situation like the previous one
situation, in which we must decide between one and
five, in this case between one and six lives.
It's from a rational perspective is the same,
to save one life or to save five or six lives.
It's the same, but this is a different situation in the second context,
in the second scenario of the trolley problem,
you need to make physically something in order to stop the the train.
You need to kill directly one person.
So, most people when are faced to this dilemma
try not to choose to kill nobody.
They prefer that the train kill six people instead of kill
by themselves one person directly.
And it's normal, because when we try to make moral decisions,
we are never making pure and 100% rational processes.
We are always mixing the kind of response
with all the processes involved into how that responses can be really obtained.
So, this experiment has been reproduced and
made with neurological tools.
And we have seen that the roles of emotions
into human mental processes Is very important.
And it has explained that.
It has justified the creation of new research fields like neuroethics or
neurophilosophy because we see at the same time that
emotions that are culturally flavored justify and
explain how people are reacting to some kind of circumstances.
And when we think carefully, most of our actions involve always other humans.
We are never talking about really abstract things.
When we think on philosophical questions, or even on really practical questions,
our thoughts involve more humans that are there making more things.
So, emotions are the backbone of moral systems.
It explains the emergence of the strong interest
in the last decade on neuroethical analysis and
philosophy of inspired by neuro-studies.
At the same time, it's dangerous because can emerge something that we
have seen in previous sessions that we have called a naturalistic fallacy.
That is implies ought.
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Most of times you can really modulate your reactions
thanks to several control mechanisms.
So, we can say that and
assume that our rationalizations are always emotionally processed.
There's a new field, neuroscience, that has contributed to these new insights
into classic ethics and philosophy, for example neuroethics and neurophilosophy.
And during the processing of these analysis,
we can be faced with a possible mistake,
a naturalistic fallacy that we should
be able to avoid very strongly because it's very, very, very, very dangerous.
Jordi VallverdúProfessor Dr.
