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thepeel
Joined: 08 Aug 2004
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 Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2007 7:45 am Post subject: Evolution, and the future of morality. |
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magine that killers have invaded your neighborhood. They're in your house, and you and your neighbors are hiding in the cellar. Your baby starts to cry. If you had to press your hand over the baby's face till it stopped fighting�if you had to smother it to save everyone else�would you do it?
If you're normal, you wouldn't, according to a study published last week in Nature. But if part of your brain were damaged�the ventromedial prefrontal cortex�you would. In the study, people were given hypothetical dilemmas: Would you throw a fatally injured person off a lifeboat to save everyone else? Would you kill a healthy hostage? Most normal people said no. Most people with VMPC damage said yes.
It's easy to dismiss the damaged people as freaks. But the study isn't really about them. It's about us. Neuroscience is discovering that the brain isn't a single organ. It's an assembly of modules that sometimes cooperate and sometimes compete. If you often feel as though two parts of your brain are fighting it out, that's because, in fact, they are.
Some of those fights are about morality. Maybe abortion grosses you out, but you'd rather keep it safe and legal. Or maybe homosexuality sounds icky, but you figure it's nobody's business. Emotion tells you one thing; reason tells you another. Often, the reasoning side makes calculations: Letting old people die is tragic, but medical dollars are better spent on saving kids. Throwing the wounded guy off the lifeboat feels bad, but if it will save everyone else, do it.
Philosophers have a name for this calculating logic: utilitarianism. They've been debating it for 200 years. Some says it's sensible; others say it's ruthless. Lately, however, the debate has been overrun by neuroscience. According to the neuroscientists, philosophers on both sides are wrong, because morality doesn't come from God or transcendent reason. It comes from the brain.
Three years ago in the journal Neuron, the neuroscientists illustrated their point. Using brain scans, they showed that utilitarian decisions involved "increased activity in brain regions associated with cognitive control." From this and other data, they surmised that the moral debate "reflects an underlying tension between competing subsystems in the brain." On one side are "the social-emotional responses that we've inherited from our primate ancestors." On the other side is a utilitarian calculus "made possible by the more recently evolved structures in the frontal lobes." The war of ideas is a war of neurons.
That's where the new study comes in. The idea was to find out what happens when the emotional side, through the VMPC, gets knocked out. As predicted, calculation takes over. Take a kidney? Kill your son? Push a guy in front of a trolley? If it'll save more lives, sure.
Some of the study's authors think this finding vindicates emotions. Since people with VMPC damage are "abnormally 'utilitarian,' " they argue, emotions are necessary to produce "normal judgments of right and wrong." In fact, the authors add, "By showing that humans are neurologically unfit for strict utilitarian thinking, the study suggests that neuroscience may be able to test different philosophies for compatibility with human nature."
In other words, brain science has discredited religion and philosophy, but don't worry: Morality won't disappear. Brain science is offering itself as the new authority. What's moral, in the new world, is what's normal, natural, necessary, and neurologically fit. |
http://www.slate.com/id/2162998/pagenum/all/#page_start |
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mithridates
Joined: 03 Mar 2003
Location: President's office, Korean Space Agency
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| Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2007 9:26 am Post subject: |
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Seems like a rather silly article. Utilitarianism is a fun concept to play around with when you have clear-cut situations like imaginary son vs. 100 people, but those situations never happen. The existence of this board itself is proof that utilitarianism doesn't mean all that much, since reality comes in small doses and not grand choices - given the choice of spending 500 hours on a board like this vs. 500 hours on a new language or new skill that will raise one's salary anybody will choose the latter, but in real life we chat on a board.
It also fails to take into account the possibility that the wounded person will throw _himself_ off the boat to save the others in a situation like one of the ones mentioned in the article.
Reduce the scale to something more realistic and the picture changes. Instead of pushing a person off a boat to save a hundred, maybe we push someone out of a train because there's no more room for the doors to close and it can't depart. Or instead of smothering a baby that's about to cry because it'll keep people from noticing, maybe you give your girlfriend a quick slap to shut her up in the movie theatre because she's ruining the movie for 100 people. Suddenly what looked like pure prudence and utilitarianism in the studies turns out to be just being an asshole to get ahead a step or two. And in the end 99% of what life is is just the sum of one small decision after another, and in these decisions pure utilitarianism never wins. |
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Masta_Don
Joined: 17 Aug 2006
Location: Hyehwa-dong, Seoul
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| Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2007 10:35 am Post subject: |
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| I'm using my brain to think. |
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Nowhere Man
Joined: 08 Feb 2004
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| Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2007 1:12 pm Post subject: ... |
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| Imagine that killers have invaded your neighborhood. They're in your house, and you and your neighbors are hiding in the cellar. Your baby starts to cry. If you had to press your hand over the baby's face till it stopped fighting�if you had to smother it to save everyone else�would you do it? |
I think I might put my hand over the baby's mouth. Not sure if that would make less noise than smothering it. Perhaps someone can do some research on this.
In any event, I could still throw the baby at the attackers. |
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