Morality on the Brain

Reason ^ | January 27, 2006 | Ronald Bailey

[neverdem]

Cerebral scans for right and wrong

"Can you name a scientific discovery that has ever added to our understanding of morality?" asked Discovery Institute senior fellow, Wesley Smith, over dinner after our recent debate with science reporter Chris Mooney in New York City. Fortunately, I could.

Anyone who has ever taken an undergraduate course in moral philosophy will remember the moral dilemma posed in the "trolley problem": You are standing next to a switch in a trolley track and you notice that a runaway trolley is about to hit a group of five people who are unaware of their danger. However, if you switch the track, the trolley will hit only one person. What do you do? Most undergraduates say that they would switch the track; after all, five lives are worth more than one.

In the second version of the problem, you are standing on a bridge over a trolley track beside a fat person. Again you notice that the runaway trolley is headed toward five unaware people. Do you push the fat person onto the track to stop the trolley? Notice the moral calculus is the same, one life to save five. But in this second version most undergraduates say that they would not push the fat stranger onto the track. (We will simply ignore the issue of whether or not you should jump onto the track to save the five people—that's for a graduate level moral philosophy seminar.)

Moral philosophers have puzzled over the disparity in the answers to these two versions of the moral dilemma posed by the trolley problem. Then along came a graduate student in psychology at Princeton University, Joshua Greene, who had access to a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine that allowed him to scan the changes in blood flow in human brains in real time. He put some undergraduates into the fMRI, posed both versions of the trolley problem to them, and found that their brains lit up differently in each case.

Greene and his colleagues found "that brain areas associated with emotion and social cognition (medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate/precuneus, and superior temporal sulcus/temperoparietal junction) exhibited increased activity while participants considered personal moral dilemmas, while 'cognitive' brain areas associated with abstract reasoning and problem solving exhibited increased activity while participants considered impersonal moral dilemmas." In other words, the first case (impersonal) runs straight through our prefrontal cortices that coldly balance costs and benefits, while the second case (personal) also engages those parts of our brains that cause us to feel empathy and which cause us to hesitate to shove someone off a bridge.

Granted, Greene's fMRI experiment does not tell us what the right answer to the trolley problem is, but it does tell us a bit about how many of us make moral decisions.

More recently (and after my dinner with Smith), researchers at the University College London have found that men enjoy retribution more than women do. Tania Singer and her colleagues set up an experiment in which 32 volunteers witnessed people play a financial game in which some players were fair and others were unfair. Later the volunteers were placed in fMRIs where they watched as both the fair and unfair players received a mild electric shock. When a fair player was shocked, the parts of brains associated with feelings of empathy lit up for both women and men. When an unfair player was shocked the brains of the women volunteers still lit up with empathy. However, in the men's brains, not only were the empathy areas silent, the parts of the brain indicating feelings of reward were activated in a big way. The men evidently felt happy when the bastards got what they deserved. I know I would have.

Singer noted that the male volunteers "expressed more desire for revenge and seemed to feel satisfaction when unfair people were given what they perceived as deserved physical punishment." She added, "This investigation would seem to indicate there is a predominant role for men in maintaining justice and issuing punishment."

This kind of information about how men and women tend to differ in their moral judgments (or feelings of righteousness) will certainly be of interest to, say, lawyers when they select jury members.

Smith is right when he suggests that science cannot tell us what is right and what is wrong morally speaking. However, as the foregoing examples show, science can tell us more about why we make the moral decisions that we do. As neuroscience develops, I believe that the discoveries it makes about how our brains work will help us to make better moral decisions in the future.

For example, go ahead and heave that fat stranger onto the tracks.

Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent.

[orionblamblam]

> "Can you name a scientific discovery that has ever added to our understanding of morality?"

Well, a whole bunch of 'em led to the industrial revolution... which led to the discovery that slavery was immoral.

[highlander_UW]

So which were liberals, the one or the five?

[fanfan]

Would it make a difference if it was a thin person standing next to you?

[neverdem]

Here's the URL to Tania Singer's paper,

http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~tsinger/publications/Singer_NATURE_2006.pdf

or you can find the link here.

[taxcontrol]

I disagree.

I would postulate that the industrial revolution did not show that slavery was immoral, rather that it was economically costly.

After all, in the pure calculus of profit, a slave must be bought, fed, protected from the elements, and there is an additional cost of the enforcement of the slavery. If you want to lower the cost of purchasing slaves, then each slave must have certain basic maintenance to stay alive and productive.

On the other hand, machines also require maintenance (mechanic instead of a doctor) and housing and even food (coal, steam, oil etc).... but there is one cost machines to not require.... the cost to enforce the condition of slavery. No guards, no whips, no injuries, no dogs and slave hunters etc.

I would also postulate that had a machine been available to pick cotton then within a decade or two slavery would have simply been too costly to maintain in the US.

[Clock King]

Well, a whole bunch of 'em led to the industrial revolution... which led to the discovery that slavery was immoral

Hmmm. I tend to disagree. Inventions are just tools, and tools have no morals; the morals are based on what humans decide to do with the tools (do I use a hammer to build a house, or make a warhammer to kill with). I propose that the industrial age inventions simply made slavery less economical. A cotton gin could do the work of dozen slaves who needed to be fed, clothed, housed, etc.

[taxcontrol]

I believe that the assumption is that it would require a fat person to actually disrupt the trolley.... physics aside.

[Clock King]

Beat me by that, much!

[orionblamblam]

> Inventions are just tools, and tools have no morals;

Slaves are just tools...

> I propose that the industrial age inventions simply made slavery less economical.

Exactly so. By removing the economic justification for slavery, a justification that had existed for millenia, men were freed up to see that Biblically-justified slavery was in fact morally wrong.

The rise of science, with its consequent impact on technology, changed morality.

[spinestein]

[In the second version of the problem, you are standing on a bridge over a trolley track beside a fat person. Again you notice that the runaway trolley is headed toward five unaware people. Do you push the fat person onto the track to stop the trolley?]



Not enough information to make a decision.

Is the fat person your boyfriend or girlfriend? Santa Claus? Bryant Gimbel? Michael Moore?

What if I, myself, weigh 400 pounds? Should I jump?

And why isn't just shouting out "HEY, LOOK OUT FOR THAT TRAIN YOU IDIOTS!" an option? Am I unable to speak for some reason?

And what happens if you push the fat person onto the tracks, derailing the train, and it causes the train to smash onto the platform killing 100 people who were actually smart enough to look out for their own survival in place of the 5 fools who aren't that smart? Doesn't that make you personally responsible for significantly weakening the human gene pool?

I think these are all important questions which have to be answered before a moral decision can be made.

<?:^)

[tpaine]

You are standing next to a switch in a trolley track and you notice that a runaway trolley is about to hit a group of five people who are unaware of their danger.
However, if you switch the track, the trolley will hit only one person.
What do you do?

No question about it; -- switch the track; after all, one person has a better chance to dodge than five.

In the second version of the problem, you are standing on a bridge over a trolley track beside a fat person. Again you notice that the runaway trolley is headed toward five unaware people. Do you push the fat person onto the track to stop the trolley?

No. There is no guarantee that the fat person would stop the runaway trolley.

(We will simply ignore the issue of whether or not you should jump onto the track to save the five people—that's for a graduate level moral philosophy seminar.)

'Graduate level?'. -- Hardly.. - Again -- how could your sacrifice guarantee to stop the trolley?

[Alex Murphy]

In the second version of the problem, you are standing on a bridge over a trolley track beside a fat person. Again you notice that the runaway trolley is headed toward five unaware people. Do you push the fat person onto the track to stop the trolley?

If we're talking about Ted Kennedy or Michael Moore, I'd say this is a trick question.

[Clock King]

I'm still not sure I can agree. Even at the height of slavery, there were those disagreed with it and fought against it. What was their reading of the Bible? Also, almost all cultures including non-Judeo-Christian ones practiced it, so they didn't come at it from a Biblical justification. And of course, we have the case of Nazi Germany, which enslaved people and used them as slave labor, even though they were as technologically advanced as anyone (if not moreso, depending on who you believe). And they were Christian/Lutheran. I'll have to ponder this some more to get a coherant argument one way or the other. But for now, the economic angle seems to work for me. As you said, "Slaves are just tools." You're right, and what do you do when you get a better tools to replace the older one? Chainsaw vs. axe., washing machine vs. washboard, etc.

[spinestein]

[I propose that the industrial age inventions simply made slavery less economical. A cotton gin could do the work of dozen slaves who needed to be fed, clothed, housed, etc.]


That is the point. It's easier to make the right moral decisions when it doesn't cost so much.

In pre-industrial societies, it is economically advantageous for women to have many children, starting at an early age, and for them to stay at home to take care of them. In that case, women tend to be very limited in their opportunities for education, employment or public influence of any kind.

Since the average couple in the U.S. has less than 2 children, we have the luxury of indulging our moral righteousness enough to "allow" women to access the same societal opportunities as men.

[orionblamblam]

> Even at the height of slavery, there were those disagreed with it and fought against it. What was their reading of the Bible?

The Bible was used by both sides in the slavery debate. The Old Testament says nothing bad about slavery, while mentioning it fairly often; the New Testament says virtually nothing about slavery at all.

> we have the case of Nazi Germany, which enslaved people and used them as slave labor...

Yes, because it made economic sense to do so, thus flippign morality around again. It didn't hurt that they could simply declare the slaves "non-humans." A terribly effective way of bypassing many moral codes.

> And they were Christian/Lutheran.

Much of Germany was, yes. But the leadership... not so much. Hitler was just plain nuts, and bought into late 19th/early 20th century theosophical Madame Blavatsky wackiness about ascended masters and Golden Ages and Atlantis and whatnot. Nevertheless, whiel the Nazi leadership was not Christian by any reasonable definition, it wasn't Hitler and Goering out there running the ovens.

> and what do you do when you get a better tools to replace the older one? Chainsaw vs. axe.

I have an axe (several, actually) but no chain saw. "Better" is often subjective.

As to the specifics of slavery: you get a wide range of results. In some places, when slavery stopped making economic + moral sense, it simply ended with the passage ofa few laws and the freeing of the slaves (the slave states in the North, frex). But in other places, you got things like The War Of Southern Aggression. And had Hitler won WWII... most of the slaves, once their utility in the war industry ended, they'd likely been turned into fertilizer or ash.

But it's never a good idea to try to get a good grasp on concepts of reality by looking at the Third Reich. Them boys was *nuts.*

[Clock King]

But it's never a good idea to try to get a good grasp on concepts of reality by looking at the Third Reich. Them boys was *nuts.*

You're right there. I hesitated to use them as an example because they are so often used as an example of evil, it has become cliche. And you touched on something else I thought of in the mean time. We probably have to look at individual societies and their individual circumstances separately to determine why they practised slavery (or didn't). It could be economic (empire expansion for large societies, or resource competition for small ones), or it is simply what was done after a conquest (tribe overuns another tribe), or genetic (Mars needs women...(sorry)), or population control. All I can say is I'm glad we live in era and land where generally, slavery is no longer acceptable.

[orionblamblam]

> All I can say is I'm glad we live in era and land where generally, slavery is no longer acceptable.

Well...

[GovernmentShrinker]

Hopefully the train would be far away and moving slowly, or you'd probably on be halfway through working out the answers to the question when the train made the decision for you.

[qam1]

"Can you name a scientific discovery that has ever added to our understanding of morality?"

Ultrasound

Thanks to ultrsound we can now see the living baby growing in the womb, thus we have a higher % of the population now that is pro-life.