The CEO Killer vs Killing by Health Care Denial (or why people suck at Ethical Math)

This essay examines the psychological phenomenon of moral distance through philosophical and empirical lenses, focusing on how it skews our ethical judgments.

The trolley problem highlights a profound quirk in human moral psychology: we tend to judge indirect harm as less morally wrong than direct harm, even when the outcomes are identical. In the classic scenario, most people say they would pull a lever to divert a trolley to kill one person instead of five. However, in the footbridge variant—where you must physically push someone onto the tracks to save the five—people are far more reluctant, despite the identical mathematical tradeoff.

Psychologists call this bias the “contact principle.” Actions requiring direct physical contact are perceived as more morally wrong than indirect actions, even when the outcomes are the same. This connects to the concept of “moral distance,” which refers to the physical and psychological separation between action and consequence. The greater this distance, the less moral responsibility people tend to attribute.

Key Research Findings: 1. Cushman et al. (2006) demonstrated that harm caused by direct physical contact is judged more harshly than harm caused by mechanical intermediaries. As steps increase between action and outcome, moral blame decreases. 2. Greene’s fMRI studies revealed that personal moral violations activate emotional centers in the brain more strongly, whereas impersonal ones engage cognitive regions, highlighting the role of emotional responses in moral judgments.

These psychological patterns have profound real-world implications, especially in institutional and systemic violence. Leaders who order drone strikes or enact harmful policies often face less moral condemnation than direct killers, despite causing more deaths. The abstraction and bureaucratic distance shield them from both psychological and legal accountability. Similarly, corporate decisions that lead to deaths—unsafe working conditions, environmental destruction—are treated more leniently than individual acts of violence. Institutional layers create moral distance that skews public perception and reduces legal consequences.

Evolutionary Roots: This cognitive bias likely emerged from our evolutionary past, where direct violence was the primary threat. In small-scale societies, assessing immediate physical harm was crucial for survival. However, in our modern, interconnected world, indirect harm can be far more devastating. Our moral intuitions lag behind this new reality.

Implications for Ethics and Accountability: Understanding this psychological quirk is crucial for building better ethical frameworks and accountability systems. While our instincts treat indirect harm as less severe, rational analysis reveals that consequences matter more than mechanisms. Aligning our intuitive judgments with rational ethical principles might involve educational programs that emphasize outcome-based thinking, policy reforms that close accountability gaps, or even AI systems designed to quantify and highlight indirect harms.

How do you think we might better address the challenges posed by this moral bias? Should education focus on training people to override these intuitive judgments, or are there other ways to reconcile intuition and reason in moral decision-making?

The CEO Killer seems to have found one way to address the challenges. Perhaps Mario will have a better method.