Are Utilitarians Jerks?

In "When Morality is Hard to Like," by Jorge Moll and Ricardo de Oliveira-Souza of the Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience Unit at Labs D’Or in Rio de Janeiro in the February/March 2008 issue of Scientific American Mind, the topic is: How does emotion affect our judgment about what is moral? The authors refer to a study published last year in Nature that found that damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC, located above the eye sockets) "increases a preference for ‘utilitarian’ choices in moral dilemmas–judgments that favor the aggregate welfare over the welfare of fewer individuals."

People with VMPFC damage are more likely to (in the trolley scenarios) say they would push a fellow passenger in front of a train to save a group of people further down the track (i.e., they would not only sacrifice the one for the many, but they’d actually do the deed themselves). According to David Pizarro, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Cornell University, "The judgments of [VMPFC] patients look less like the frequent non-utilitarian judgments of normal participants and more like the responses of sociopaths" (33). Ouch.

At first, it sounds like the conclusion will be that utilitarians and sociopaths share some kind of brain damage that makes them unable to factor in prosocial sentiments such as guilt, empathy and compassion. Instead, they make their decisions purely on numbers and on finding a solution that provides the best result for the largest number of people.

"This conclusion might hold water if it were not for the fact that some people other than sociopaths and brain-injured patients also stubbornly endorse utilitarianism. Many nonsociopathic, healthy-brained philosophers and social scientists take utilitarianism quite seriously, " (33) according to Pizarro.

As we know, that is certainly true in the animal rights/welfare business.

Now, there are two schools of thought here (at least):

1. Utilitarianism clearly isn’t the result only of brain damage. If people with uninjured brains are utilitarians, that would mean they are deciding to temporarily put aside their emotions and calculate the cold, hard facts as if they were a mathematical equation. As Pizarro says, "For most of us, being good utilitarians would require sacrificing emotions that, although they might make us morally superior, would also make us jerks" (33).
2. The opposite is true. Utilitarianism isn’t a result of a lack of empathy. It’s the opposite–it’s full of empathy. Here’s the reasoning: utilitarians realize the good to humanity in acting to maximize the happiness of the most people for the longest time. So it’s really a combination of valuing happiness and empathy, and acting to bring about the best result for the most people. (And note that at one point there is a reference to "all sentient beings" (35) but there is no talk of nonhuman animals or any duty to them; this is all about people.)

What do you think? Are utilitarians acting out of compassion and expressing how much they value the long-term happiness of others, or are they "jerks"?