How We Make Life-and-Death Decisions

Greene explains his findings in Darwinian terms. Back in the hunter-gatherer environment of human evolution, you killed people directly, not by the triple bank shot of pulling a lever that shifted a plate that rerouted a train. So an evolved aversion to the killing of an innocent might be especially sensitive to visions of direct physical assault. Imagining the triple bank shot impacts us less viscerally, causing a weaker aversion that is more easily outweighed by calculation.
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