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A fallacious jar? The peculiar relation between descriptive premises and normative conclusions in neuroethics

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Abstract

Ethical questions have traditionally been approached through conceptual analysis. Inspired by the rapid advance of modern brain imaging techniques, however, some ethical questions appear in a new light. For example, hotly debated trolley dilemmas have recently been studied by psychologists and neuroscientists alike, arguing that their findings can support or debunk moral intuitions that underlie those dilemmas. Resulting from the wedding of philosophy and neuroscience, neuroethics has emerged as a novel interdisciplinary field that aims at drawing conclusive relationships between neuroscientific observations and normative ethics. A major goal of neuroethics is to derive normative ethical conclusions from the investigation of neural and psychological mechanisms underlying ethical theories, as well as moral judgments and intuitions. The focus of this article is to shed light on the structure and functioning of neuroethical arguments of this sort, and to reveal particular methodological challenges that lie concealed therein. We discuss the methodological problem of how one can—or, as the case may be, cannot—validly infer normative conclusions from neuroscientific observations. Moreover, we raise the issue of how preexisting normative ethical convictions threaten to invalidate the interpretation of neuroscientific data, and thus arrive at question-begging conclusions. Nonetheless, this is not to deny that current neuroethics rightly presumes that moral considerations about actual human lives demand empirically substantiated answers. Therefore, in conclusion, we offer some preliminary reflections on how the discussed methodological challenges can be met.

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Notes

  1. Recently, this conviction has been opposed by experimental approaches to philosophy in general and experimental ethics in particular. Major proponents endorsing experimental philosophy are, amongst others, Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols (for a theoretical and methodological justification of their approach, see [1]).

  2. For a discussion of the theoretical and methodological hallmarks of neuroethics, see [2].

  3. The same holds for the ever-growing research conducted under the umbrella term of moral psychology. Unlike in neuroethics, however, moral psychologists are less concerned with making normative claims, but rather aim at describing human functioning in moral contexts. This is not to ignore that the findings of moral psychology are frequently invoked into ethical controversies; sometimes they are consulted to serve as a ‘tie-breaker’ between conflicting theories.

  4. In current medical ethics, decision making and informed consent are hotly debated topics. For a recent investigation of these issues from a neuroethical perspective, see [5].

  5. There are, of course, a great many other scholars doing important work in neuroethics and moral psychology that we are not discussing here; see, e.g., [11–15].

  6. For an ingenious analysis of Greene’s normative ethical arguments, see [16].

  7. Many ‘traditional’ contemporary moral philosophers endorse one form or another of non-naturalistic moral realism (most prominently Derek Parfit, Tim Scanlon, and Thomas Nagel). On the other hand, proponents of naturalistic neuroethics are mostly either neuroscientists, like Sam Harris, who endorses a naturalistic form of moral realism, or neurophilosophers—some of whom hold opposing metaethical views, such as Jesse Prinz’s non-cognitivism and Patricia Churchland’s naturalistic moral realism. Josuha Greene is metaethically agnostic and lately considers himself to be a moral skeptic. Although he has frequently asserted the supremacy of utilitarianism as a normative view based on neuroimaging studies that he interprets according to a coherentist moral epistemology.

  8. For recent reflection on the plausibility of moral naturalism, see [17].

  9. Henceforth, we assume this metaethical premise to be present in the exemplary neuroethical arguments we consider. We are aware of the fact that not all neuroethical arguments are ipso facto committed to moral naturalism. However, the arguments we are using as paradigmatic examples throughout this article attempt to draw more or less direct normative conclusions from descriptive premises that describe brain activity, and such arguments are likely to presuppose moral naturalism. Our claim is just that the argumentative force of endeavors like this depends on moral naturalism, not that these are the only sorts of arguments available or that all proponents of neuroethics explicitly endorse or implicitly commit themselves to a robust form of moral naturalism.

  10. For a discussion of this issue, see [2]. Another form of neuroethical investigation (with which we are not concerned here) is merely to reveal the relevance of ethical concepts for neuroscientific research.

  11. For pertinent recent discussions, see [21–31]. Since Frankena [32], some people have called into question the existence of a naturalistic fallacy.

  12. As we said before, if one is skeptical about that, at least the epistemic and linguistic difference between facts and norms is rather uncontentious and needs to be methodologically accounted for.

  13. The relation between facts and norms is peculiar because there is no straightforward, i.e., direct, way of drawing conclusive arguments from one realm to the other. That is, neither from facts to norms, nor from norms to facts. We will further explain this point in what follows. The general idea is that in current neuroethics, investigators frequently form conclusions according to a suite of convictions that covertly inherits some content from the investigators' preexisting normative convictions.

  14. Asking whether the empirical claim is correct is, of course, an empirical question and can thus be tackled through the assessment of the data. More important for present purposes is the second claim, which questions the normative significance of the experimental design. In the debate on free will, for example, an often invoked criticism of the Libet experiments is that they do not properly investigate free will, but rather, as Markus Schlosser puts it, ‘freedom of indifference’ [35].

  15. In what follows, we will elaborate more on this and aim at making the point that this can also be thought of as a kind of ‘meta-normative’ conviction. These sorts of claims take a stand on the viability of certain forms of normativity (e.g., emotional arousal in moral judgments), but without really providing any metaethical reasoning for this conviction.

  16. This, again, is merely illustrative and not meant to be a statement that we endorse or believe to be true.

  17. When considering this example it is not our purpose to argue for or against any particular normative ethical theory. Rather, we attempt to show how the persuasiveness of neuroethical arguments with this sort of structure is threatened by the particular methodological challenges we discuss.

  18. Admittedly, Greene’s picture is a bit more complex than we describe it here for the sake of simplicity. Greene argues for what he calls a ‘dual-process theory of moral thinking’, according to which there are two distinct psychological systems forming moral judgments. The ‘automatic mode system’ generates moral judgments based on emotional responses to morally significant situations and leads to rapid ad hoc reactions. In contrast, the ‘manual mode system’ generates moral judgments based on conscious deliberation, thereby possibly overriding the automatic mode system in favor of what reason tells us to be the morally right conduct. For further details, see [36–39]. For Singer’s treatment of moral intuitions, see [40].

  19. Here, we should add that this judgment is based on the outcome, thereby presupposing a consequentialist framework. In light of this, one wonders whether this begs the question; however this is a question for another day.

  20. Elsewhere, Greene elaborates more on why he believes Kantian ethics to be grounded in emotions and why this is not a plausible basis for ethical reflection on his view [43].

  21. For a similar claim, see Berker’s critique of Greene’s fMRI based discussions of said trolley cases [16].

  22. See [47] for details.

  23. Despite the fact that a lot of philosophical discussions are affected by some sort of a normative fallacy, as of yet, Campbell’s paper is the only published work elaborating on this issue.

  24. For an illuminating theory of how personhood and personal identity are fundamentally based on dynamic interactions among biological, psychological, and social attributes and functions of a person’s life that are mediated through a social and cultural infrastructure, see Marya Schechtman’s ‘person life view’ [54]. A great merit of this view is that it coheres very well with recent evidence from social neuroscience and developmental psychology.

  25. For further details, see [2].

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Acknowledgments

We owe special thanks to Pedro L. Chaves, Gabriele Contessa, Lucas Jurkovic, Daniel T. Kim, Gregory J. Walters, Katherine Wayne, Annemarie Wolff, and three anonymous referees for valuable feedback on earlier drafts of this article. For financial support, we are grateful to the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), Michael Smith Chair in Neurosciences and Mental Health (EJLB-CIHR), Michael Smith Foundation, and the Hope of Depression Foundation (HDRF/ISAN) to Georg Northoff, and for a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the University of Ottawa and a research grant from Taipei Medical University-Shuang Ho Hospital, Brain and Consciousness Research Center to Nils-Frederic Wagner.

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  1. Mind, Brain Imaging and Neuroethics Research Unit, University of Ottawa Institute of Mental Health Research, Ottawa, Canada

    Nils-Frederic Wagner & Georg Northoff

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Wagner, NF., Northoff, G. A fallacious jar? The peculiar relation between descriptive premises and normative conclusions in neuroethics. Theor Med Bioeth 36, 215–235 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-015-9330-z

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