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<blockquote data-quote="John Morrow" data-source="post: 2150270" data-attributes="member: 27012">If you haven't read that article yet, you still might want to.&nbsp; The disgust suggests that's your anterior insula was kicking in and playing a role in your assessment.The gist of the article is that moral decisions are often a contest between the rational cerebral cortex, which makes cold utilitarian decisions of the sort your friends were making, and the anterior insula, which makes an emotional assessment based on empathy and produces feelings of disgust that can supercede the cold rational decision.&nbsp; A person can make very different moral assessments of situations with the same utilitarian parameters (e.g., sacrifice one life to save five) by adjusting a person's emotional distance from the person sacrificed and their involvement in the sacrifice (e.g., killing a friend or a stranger, letting them die or causing them to die, etc.).&nbsp; The researchers claim that they can predict the sorts of moral choices a person will make based on which of those parts of their brain responds more strongly.That's why I think part of the problem is that by role-playing the NPCs that were killed, your empathy for them was a lot stronger than your friends, who were probably looking at them as faceless Stormtroopers.&nbsp; As a result, you had a very different moral assessment of the situation than they did.&nbsp; It doesn't mean they were monsters or you were out of your mind.&nbsp; It just means that their decision was coldly utilitarian and impersonal while your decision was empathetic and emotional.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="John Morrow, post: 2150270, member: 27012"] If you haven't read that article yet, you still might want to. The disgust suggests that's your anterior insula was kicking in and playing a role in your assessment. The gist of the article is that moral decisions are often a contest between the rational cerebral cortex, which makes cold utilitarian decisions of the sort your friends were making, and the anterior insula, which makes an emotional assessment based on empathy and produces feelings of disgust that can supercede the cold rational decision. A person can make very different moral assessments of situations with the same utilitarian parameters (e.g., sacrifice one life to save five) by adjusting a person's emotional distance from the person sacrificed and their involvement in the sacrifice (e.g., killing a friend or a stranger, letting them die or causing them to die, etc.). The researchers claim that they can predict the sorts of moral choices a person will make based on which of those parts of their brain responds more strongly. That's why I think part of the problem is that by role-playing the NPCs that were killed, your empathy for them was a lot stronger than your friends, who were probably looking at them as faceless Stormtroopers. As a result, you had a very different moral assessment of the situation than they did. It doesn't mean they were monsters or you were out of your mind. It just means that their decision was coldly utilitarian and impersonal while your decision was empathetic and emotional. [/QUOTE]

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