Abstract
Matthew Liao’s edited collection Moral Brains: The Neuroscience of Morality covers a wide range of issues in moral psychology. The collection should be of interest to philosophers, psychologist, and neuroscientists alike, particularly those interested in the relation between these disciplines. I give an overview of the content and major themes of the volume and draw some important lessons about the connection between moral neuroscience and normative ethics. In particular, I argue that moving beyond some of the dichotomies implicit in some of the debates advanced in the book makes the neuroscience of moral judgment much more useful in advancing normative ethics.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Blair RJR (2007) The amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex in morality and psychopathy. Trends Cogn Sci 11:387–392. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2007.07.003
Crockett MJ (2013) Models of morality. Trends Cogn Sci 17:363–366. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2013.06.005
Daw ND, Gershman SJ, Seymour B, Dayan P, Dolan RJ (2011) Model-based influences on humans’ choices and striatal prediction errors. Neuron 69:1204–1215. doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2011.02.027
Gigerenzer G (2008) Moral intuition = fast and frugal heuristics? In: Sinnott-Armstrong W (ed) Moral psychology: the cognitive science of morality: intuition and diversity, vol 2. MIT Press, Cambridge, pp 1–26
Greene JD (2014) Beyond point-and-shoot morality: why cognitive (neuro)science matters for ethics. Ethics 124:695–726. doi:10.1086/675875
Greene JD, Nystrom LE, Engell AD, Darley JM, Cohen JD (2004) The neural bases of cognitive conflict and control in moral judgment. Neuron 44:389–400. doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2004.09.027
Haidt J (2012) The righteous mind: why good people are divided by politics and religion. Pantheon Books, New York
Haidt J, Bjorklund F (2008) Social intuitionists answer six questions about morality. In: Sinnott-Armstrong W (ed) Moral psychology: the cognitive science of morality: intuition and diversity, vol 2. MIT Press, Cambridge, pp 181–217
Ji DY, Wilson MA (2007) Coordinated memory replay in the visual cortex and hippocampus during sleep. Nat Neurosci 10:100–107. doi:10.1038/Nn1825
Kahneman D, Frederick S (2005) A model of heuristic judgments. In: Holyoak KJ, Morrison RG (eds) The Cambridge handbook of thinking and reasoning. Cambridge Universty Press, Cambridge, pp 267–293
Parkinson C, Sinnott-Armstrong W, Koralus PE, Mendelovici A, McGeer V, Wheatley T (2011) Is morality unified? Evidence that distinct neural systems underlie moral judgments of harm, dishonesty, and disgust. J Cogn Neurosci 23:3162–3180
Pigden CR (2010) Hume on is and ought. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke
Rolls ET (2005) Emotion explained. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Shenhav A, Greene JD (2010) Moral judgments recruit domain-general valuation mechanisms to integrate representations of probability and magnitude. Neuron 67:667–677. doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2010.07.020
Sinnott-Armstrong W (2008) Is moral phenomenology unified? Phenomenol Cogn Sci 7:85–97. doi:10.1007/s11097-007-9065-z
Sinnott-Armstrong W, Wheatley T (2012) The disunity of morality and why it matters to philosophy. Monist 95:355–377
Sinnott-Armstrong W, Wheatley T (2013) Are moral judgments unified? Philos Psychol 27:451–474. doi:10.1080/09515089.2012.736075
Sinnott-Armstrong W, Young L, Cushman F (2010) Moral intuitions. In: Doris J (ed) The moral psychology handbook. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 246–272
Thompson VA (2009) Dual-process theories: a metacognitive perspective. In: Evans JSBT, Frankish K (eds) In two minds: dual processes and beyond. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 171–196
Thompson VA, Prowse Turner JA, Pennycook G (2011) Intuition, reason, and metacognition. Cogn Psychol 63:107–140. doi:10.1016/j.cogpsych.2011.06.001
Williams B (1995) The point of view of the universe: Sidgwick and the ambitions of ethics. In: Altham JEJ, Harrison R (eds) Making sense of humanity and other philosophical papers, 1982–1993. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 153–171
Acknowledgements
For helpful comments and suggestions, I would like to thank Claudia Passos-Ferreira and Zoe Drayson.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Gonzalez-Cabrera, I. Moving beyond dichotomies: Liao, S. Matthew (ed.), Moral Brains: The Neuroscience of Morality, Oxford University Press, 2016. Biol Philos 32, 1035–1046 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-017-9590-2
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-017-9590-2