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The Dual Track Theory of Moral Decision-Making: a Critique of the Neuroimaging Evidence

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Abstract

The dual-track theory of moral reasoning has received considerable attention due to the neuroimaging work of Greene et al. Greene et al. claimed that certain kinds of moral dilemmas activated brain regions specific to emotional responses, while others activated areas specific to cognition. This appears to indicate a dissociation between different types of moral reasoning. I re-evaluate these claims of specificity in light of subsequent empirical work. I argue that none of the cortical areas identified by Greene et al. are functionally specific: each is active in a wide variety of both cognitive and emotional tasks. I further argue that distinct activation across conditions is not strong evidence for dissociation. This undermines support for the dual-track hypothesis. I further argue that moral decision-making appears to activate a common network that underlies self-projection: the ability to imagine oneself from a variety of viewpoints in a variety of situations. I argue that the utilization of self-projection indicates a continuity between moral decision-making and other kinds of complex social deliberation. This may have normative consequences, but teasing them out will require careful attention to both empirical and philosophical concerns.

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Notes

  1. See [2] for behavioral data. Selim Berker notes that the trolley problems studied in the empirical literature differ in subtle but important ways from those used in the philosophical literature ([3], 297ff), a problem that I’ll pass over here.

  2. I will use ‘decision-making’ rather than the more common ‘deliberation’ because ‘deliberation’ is ambiguous between reflection on particular cases and reflection on general rules. The studies I discuss have focused on decisions about individual cases. This may involve reflection on general principles, but need not.

  3. For critiques, see [9–11]. The ‘inference’ terminology needn’t be taken literally: one can do reverse inference probabilistically by showing that some cognitive process was likely to have occurred given some brain activation. There is good empirical evidence that probabilistic reverse inference is equally problematic [12].

  4. This causes their own theory some grief—PC activation was also found to be most active during utilitarian moral judgments. They argue that perhaps all action requires some affective motivation, and that these areas provide this in the case of utilitarian judgment ([2], 397). They provide no independent empirical evidence for this claim, though. Further, as Berker notes, establishing this would be of dubious help to their theory as “what is at stake here is whether all moral judgment, not all action, has an affective basis.” ([3], 307).

  5. Greene et al. cite only Maddock’s meta-review of emotion-processing studies in support [13]. However, Maddock specifically excludes the PC from his argument: his focus is on retrosplenial cortex, and he uses the inferior edge of the precuneus as one of his limiting boundaries ([13], 310). Further, Maddock’s argument that PCC is specific to emotion processing is based only on the fact that he couldn’t find any non-emotion studies that activated it ([13], 313). That argument is, as I will show, no longer sustainable.

  6. Later fMRI investigations of moral decision-making have come to a similar conclusion; see for example ([29], 812).

  7. Greene et al. identify the STS in their 2004 work. A similar region with the same Brodmann’s area, though with a slightly more dorsal extent, is identified as the Angular Gyrus in the 2001 study. While Greene et al. did not provide activation foci for the angular gyrus in their 2001 paper, they consider the 2004 STS activation (the only ‘personal’ activation in BA 39) a replication of the results of their 2001 study ([4], 391). I shall follow them in doing so, and so identify the activation in the two areas.

  8. The two studies that Greene et al. cite in favor of STS being an area specialized for aversive stimuli both used visual presentations of people [34, 35]; the activation attributed to emotion in these experiments can also be explained by enhanced attention to salient facts about human figures.

  9. It is worth highlighting a subtle but important shift in the description of STS in Greene et al.’s work between 2001 and 2004. The areas associated with personal moral dilemmas are, in 2001, attributed to emotional processing in an unqualified sense. In 2004, however, they are identified as areas important to “emotion and social cognition” ([2], 391). One might think that the distinction between the two is rather important. ‘Social cognition,’ at least as performed in the STS, can involve straightforwardly cognitive processes—that is, it may just as well support rarefied deliberation about other’s goals as well as more immediate, emotionally laden interactions . Further, it is one thing to set up ‘emotions’ against proper moral decision-making—that at least has a long history. But it’s not obvious why or how ordinary moral deliberation could be distinct from social cognition: on nearly every theory of moral cognition (including the utilitarian), moral decision-making centrally involves thinking about our obligations to others to whom we are socially related (I will return to this theme below).

  10. This activation is relative to similarly difficult tasks that require attributing false representations to nonintentional objects like pictures, suggesting that working memory effects are unlikely to explain the increase.

  11. The deficits in vmPFC patients are also problematic for Greene’s normative project. Berker puts the point well when he notes that: “it is dialectically problematic first to appeal to patients with damage to emotional brain regions when making an empirical case for the dual-process hypothesis and then to go on to argue that the verdicts of these brain regions should be neglected (in effect urging us to be more like these patients), since many patients with this sort of brain damage make moral decisions in their personal lives that count as disastrous when evaluated by just about any plausible normative standard.” ([3], 314).

  12. Amodio and Frith set the boundaries of arPFC at Talairach z  =  2 to about z  =  45 ([52], 270). Greene et al.’s foci are at z  =  17 and z  =  19 in 2001 and 2004, respectively.

  13. See the exchange between [62] and [63] for a discussion.

  14. This also allows an alternative explanation of the reaction time data in [69]. Greene et al. observe that cognitive load selectively slows utilitarian judgments. However, scenarios in which a purely utilitarian choice is the plausible one are, arguably, relatively unfamiliar in everyday life. One should expect a compensatory mechanism to be more active in these cases, and reaction times to be correspondingly slower when under load. Greene et al.’s alternative interpretation, that working memory is required for utilitarian judgment per se, seems implausible for two reasons. First, increasing cognitive load only increased reaction time, not the proportion of non-utilitarian judgments, contrary to what one would expect from interference with a functionally crucial subcomponent. Second, the subpopulation of subjects who gave the most utilitarian judgments actually responded faster than those who gave non-utilitarian judgments, contrary to what one would expect if utilitarian judgment essentially required slow working memory processes.

  15. For an example, see ([7], 167).

  16. Moll and de Oliveira-Souza, for example, suggest that vmPFC might be more responsible for the evaluation of other-regarding prosocial reasons for action, while the vlPFC evaluates other-critical reasons responsible for resentment and anger [48].

  17. This is a general problem facing the direct test of dual-track theories. Similar critiques have been posed for dual-track theories of memory [84] and first- and second-language acquisition [85].

  18. This reduces to a more general concern about the use of null hypothesis significance testing; see [86] for the general concern, and [87, 88] for discussions in the context of neuroimaging.

  19. Note that this would avoid the problem with deductive readings of reverse inference, namely that they appear to be straightforwardly invalid because they affirm the consequent (‘If function F is performed, then A is active; A is active, therefore F was performed’) [12]. I commit to nothing further about how IBE itself should be understood; I’m inclined to think that it will itself be cashed out in probabilistic terms, but that is irrelevant for the present purpose.

  20. Schacter et al. discuss similar associations [91]. Also interesting for the present discussion is [94], which discusses a case in which a subject had both amnesia and failed self-regulation in social situations.

  21. For a development of this idea, see Chapter 4 of [97]. In an intriguing study, Finger et al. noted a common substrate in dmPFC for moral transgressions and witnessed social transgressions [61]. They suggest that this may correspond to the intention to repair social relationships with others, a usual requirement of such transgressions. This further step in moral decision-making deserves careful study.

  22. A canonical source is [1]. For a contemporary proposal that also draws on neuroimaging evidence, see Section 2 of [7].

  23. For example, insofar as we have moral intuitions about particular cases, they may be shaped by how easy or difficult it is to form higher-order judgments. Adam Smith, for example, notes that “if we consider all the different passions of human nature, we shall find that they are regarded as decent, or indecent, just in proportion as mankind are more or less disposed to sympathize with them” ([1], I.ii).

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Jennifer Ashton, Derek Baker, Selim Berker, Tom Dougherty, Dave Hilbert, Esther Klein, Ruth Leys, TristramMcPherson, ChrisMole, Sally Sedgwick, Nick Stang, Rachel Zuckert, and the 2009–10 UIC Humanities Institute fellows for helpful comments and discussions. I received useful feedback on previous drafts from audiences at University of Miami, Johns Hopkins University, and University of Illinois at Chicago. The present work was supported in part by a fellowship from the UIC Institute for the Humanities.

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    Colin Klein

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Correspondence to Colin Klein.

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Work on this paper was supported by a fellowship from the UIC Institute for the Humanities.

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Klein, C. The Dual Track Theory of Moral Decision-Making: a Critique of the Neuroimaging Evidence. Neuroethics 4, 143–162 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-010-9077-1

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