Question: If you commit a crime to feed your hungry child, are you a bad person or did you commit the crime out of necessity?

Laura Joyner answered on 12 Nov 2021:

So there’s an area of research called moral psychology (which is possibly one of my favourite subjects) that helps us understand how we make decisions like this.

Here you have two different types of moral thinking. On one hand you have consequentialism, where we literally make our decision based on the outcome (e.g. you have fed a hungry child). On the other hand there is deontology, where we would judge that any act that causes harm is wrong, regardless of the outcome.

The most famous examples of this in action are two moral dilemmas called “The Trolley Problem” and “The Footbridge Problem”. A group of researchers (Greene et al.) managed to show that these moral dilemmas can sometimes be split into ‘moral-personal’ (e.g. you are directly having to commit an act of harm) and ‘moral-impersonal’ (e.g. the act is mediated in some way, for example, taking the money out of a wallet you find on the street – you don’t have contact with the person directly who has lost that money). What they found is that when participants were asked moral-personal dilemmas, areas of the brain related to emotion were more active and areas related to cognition were less active than during moral-impersonal dilemmas.

Basically, what this means, is that some research suggests that our decisions might be more influenced by emotional reasoning in the scenario you have given. The fact that you asked me if “I” committed a crime to feed my child may influence my judgement. Also, research has shown there are other factors that might influence this – for example, the fact that it’s someone genetically close (e.g. “MY child”) plus the fact it’s a child generally, as age can play a role in judgements too. In this scenario, I am probably more likely to say ‘it was out of necessity’

However, if you asked someone if it was OK for “SOMEONE ELSE” to commit a crime to feed a “STRANGER” in their “THIRTIES” the response might be different to your current question because of how we make these moral decisions!