PHYSICAL LOCATION OF MORAL JUDGMENT

Recently, I’ve begun to listen in, participate little, to the forums at the Internet Infidels web site, just as I’ve also been adding scientific sites to my “favorites” column in IE. In a chain devoted to discussing the “objectivity” of moral judgment, in one of the postings, I came across a link to which opened to an article from Vol. 6 No. 12 December 2002 issue of TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences. The article is the work of Joshua Greene and Jonathan Haidt.

I couldn’t ask for anymore support for my thinking that the human mind is mostly a determined thing, barely able to waddle on its own, thus humbling the mighty moralists who still live in brains conditioned and set back 2000 years in the past by Bible reading. The findings also support the information about left brain “spin meistering” which I’ve mentioned several times in past posts as regards people who’ve had their corpus callosum severed in order to cure uncontrollable seizures. Read these pieces of their premise, for example:

“Moral psychology has long focused on reasoning, but recent evidence suggests that moral judgment is more a matter of emotion and affective intuition than deliberated reasoning. Here [in the article] we discuss recent findings in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, including several studies that specifically investigate moral judgment. These findings indicate the importance of affect, although they allow that reasoning can play a restricted but significant role in moral judgment. They also point towards a preliminary account of the functional neuroanatomy of moral judgment, according to which many brain areas make important contributions to moral judgment although none is devoted specifically to it.”

In the 1980s “...new findings in evolutionary psychology and primatology began to point to origins of human morality in a set of emotions... that make individuals care about the welfare of others... and about cooperation, cheating, and norm-following....”

The feelings which we call moral feelings are, according to the article, intuitions. “These intuitions—for example, about reciprocity, loyalty, purity, suffering—are shaped by natural selection, as well as by cultural forces. [La Cerra, in her THE ORIGIN OF MINDS certainly agrees with the influence of both culture and natural selection in shaping the mechanisms by which the human animal meets her bioenergetic needs.] People certainly do engage in moral reasoning, but, as suggested by studies of informal reasoning, these processes are typically one-sided efforts in support of preordained conclusions.” Like the guy with severed corpus callosum, we act first, or judge first, and then make up reasons, excuses, later. “...people can very easily construct post-hoc reason to justify their actions and judgments.” Or as the authors quote William James: “A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”

The body of the article supports these findings with detailed analysis of experimental data, under the headings of such things as “Somatic markers and decision-making”, “Neuroimaging”, “The neuroanatomy of moral judgment”, and ending with “Conclusions”, one of which is “Neuroimaging studies of moral judgment in normal adults, as well as studies of individuals exhibiting aberrant moral behavior, all point to the conclusion, embraced by the social intuitionist model, that emotion is a significant driving force in moral judgment.”