The 'Ethics' of the Common Contemporary People

"There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is one person on the side track. You have two options: (1) Do nothing, and the trolley kills the five people on the main track. (2) Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person. Which is the correct choice?"

"As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by putting something very heavy in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you – your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track, killing him to save five. Should you proceed?"

The Common Contemporary People, well the majority of humans, would pull the lever to kill one instead of five, but would not push the fatman off to save five. Someone with a coherent moral or ethical beliefs would call this inconsistency, incoherence. You may say that they are confused between a consequentialist moral theory and a deontological one. I believe they are not confused, they are coherent (there is a core of beliefs that make this coherent).

The common contemporary people ascribe to a somewhat coherent moral belief. Although they may deny it, they believe in an egoistic consequentialistic one. They decide on the 'morality of an action by weighing the implications that the action might cause to themselves. They base their ethics or morality on the consequences that it will bring to their psychology mainly.

To kill the first one would give them less guilt and the comfort of feeling that they have brought more good. It may even make them feel heroic. However, to push someone off in the second scenario would leave them with guilt, especially because they need to touch their victim physically, or more guilt because he is fat. The alternative would be non-involvement which would not leave any guilt, but instead provide a detachment from the event. They can assure themselves that they could not do otherwise. They stand before no judge of morality. Personal gain is the focus of the contemporary people. The only thing that determines the rightness of an action is how the action make them feel.

This may be an immoral ethical belief, but this is a coherent moral theory nonetheless. At least it is better than a relativistic one, or not.