Abstract
It is by now a well-supported hypothesis in cognitive neuroscience that there exists a functional network for the moral appraisal of situations. However, there is a surprising disagreement amongst researchers about the significance of this network for moral actions, decisions, and behavior. Some researchers suggest that we should “uncover those ethics [that are “built into our brains”], identify them, and live more fully by them,” while others claim that we should often do the opposite, viewing the cognitive neuroscience of morality more like a science of pathology. To analyze and evaluate the disagreement, this paper will investigate some of its possible sources. These may include theoretical confusions about levels of explanation in cognitive science, or different senses of ‘morality’ that researchers are looking to explain. Other causes of the debate may come from empirical assumptions about how possible or preferable it is to separate intuitive moral appraisal from moral decisions. Although we will tentatively favor the ‘Set Aside’ approach, the questions outlined here are open areas of ongoing research, and this paper will be confined to outlining the position space of the debate rather than definitively resolving it.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
As Greene and Haidt [4] state: “… if one attempts to deconfound moral judgment with everything that is not specific to moral judgment (emotion, theory of mind, abstract reasoning, and so on) there will almost certainly be nothing left.”
This function is multiply realizable, and could be accomplished differently by, say, the way that a serial computer retrieves information from past experiences. More on levels of explanation will be discussed in the next section.
While not important at this point in the discussion, Greene’s quote here refers to a mismatch between the ultimate (evolutionary) causes of moral appraisals and actual moral decisions, rather than what we will be focusing on mostly in this paper, which is a mismatch between the proximate (cognitive-neural) causes of moral appraisals and moral decisions.
One might object that these intermediate positions are different than the Guide or Set Aside extremes. As we are characterizing these positions, any view that the functional network for moral appraisals should have priority amongst other considerations, or cannot be trumped on other grounds, is a Guide view. Although other positions might differ about how and when to set aside (sometimes? always?), they will here be grouped together.
It has been pointed out to me that many people engaged in the ‘emotivism/rationalism’ debate (are moral appraisals largely the product of emotion or rational deliberation?) consider it to have immediate consequences for the Guide/Set Aside debate (those who see affective components as primary are more likely to have a Set Aside view). However, our problem is logically consistent with either of these positions: one can hold that we should guide our behavior according to affective appraisals, or set aside appraisals produced by systems for rational inference.
While vagueness about levels of explanation is one possible cause of the Guide/Set Aside disagreement, it is unlikely that this is the only (or primary) source of contention because these distinctions are so common throughout the cognitive sciences. Therefore, we will move swiftly to the next issue without considering objections.
In personal communication, Greene has expressed some hesitance about this interpretation of his moral1/moral2 distinction. Therefore, the formulation here may be slightly deviant (although not necessarily inconsistent) with Greene’s original or current intentions.
As we are describing the FNMA, it consists not only of emotional processes but also typically ‘cognitive’ ones.
As much as this may seem like consequentialism or Utilitarianism, there are no a priori reasons for why the interests of others must reduce to one kind of utility (e.g., pleasure or pain), or why entities like intentions or character cannot be a part of people’s general interests. A non-a priori argument against character in moral2 explanations would look like Doris [33].
This is just one model amongst many in the psychology of race; others explain racial categorizations as the result of perceptual feature groupings [39], or by systems for tracking the boundaries of social groups [40], or even most directly, by a system with a direct function of categorizing ethnicities [41].
Of course, there exist many sophisticated objections to welfare, abortion, and euthanasia that do not rely solely on affective or intuitive responses.
For instance, if a person finds a small amount of change in a phone booth, that person is significantly more likely to help a stranger than not [50].
See Gigerenzer [55] for details
In the last few years there have been a number of studies examining the appraisals of ethicists and people who have taken ethics courses compared to control groups.
References
Hauser, Marc. 2006. Moral minds: How nature designed our universal sense of right and wrong. New York: Ecco/Harper Collins.
Dwyer, Susan. 2006. How good is the linguistic analogy? In The innate mind, volume 2: Culture and cognition, ed. Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence, and Stephen Stich, 169–190. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mikhail, John. 2008. Moral cognition and computational theory. In Moral psychology, volume 3: The neuroscience of morality: Emotion, brain disorders, and development, ed. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, 81–91. Cambridge: MIT.
Greene, Joshua, and Jonathan Haidt. 2002. How (and where) does moral judgment work? Trends in Cognitive Sciences 6: 517–523.
Casebeer, William, and Patricia Churchland. 2003. The neural mechanisms of moral cognition: A multiple-aspect approach to moral judgment and decision-making. Biology and Philosophy 18(1): 169–194.
Moll, Jorge, Roland Zahn, Ricardo de Oliveira-Souza, Frank Krueger, and Jordan Grafman. 2005. The neural basis of human moral cognition. Nature Reviews. Neuroscience 6(10): 799–809.
Gazzaniga, Michael. 2005. The ethical brain. New York: Dana Press.
Greene, Joshua. 2002. The terrible, horrible, no good, very bad truth about morality and what to do about it. Dissertation in the Department of Philosophy, Princeton University.
Haidt, Jonathan. 2001. The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review 108(4): 814–834.
Roskies, Adina, and Shaun Nichols. 2008. Bringing moral responsibility down to earth. Journal of Philosophy 105.
Huemer, Michael. 2005. Ethical intuitionism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hutcheson, Francis. 1725. An inquiry into the original of our ideas of beauty and virtue; in two treatises. London: W. and J. Smith.
Hume, David. 1975/1751. Enquiries concerning human understanding and concerning the principles of morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Flanagan, Owen, and Robert Williams. 2010. What does the modularity of morals have to do with ethics? Four moral sprouts plus or minus a few. Trends in Cognitive Science.
Greene, Joshua. 2003. From neural “is” to moral “ought”: What are the moral implications of neuroscientific moral psychology? Nature Reviews. Neuroscience 4: 847–850.
Hauser, Marc, Liane Young, and Fiery Cushman. 2008. Reviving Rawls’s linguistic analogy: Operative principles and the causal structure of moral actions. In Moral psychology, volume 2: The cognitive science of morality: Intuition and diversity, ed. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, 107–143. Cambridge: MIT.
Smart, Jack. 1959. Sensations and brain processes. Philosophical Review 68: 141–156.
Watson, James. 1930. Behaviorism. New York: Norton.
Marr, David. 1982. Vision: A computational investigation into the human representation and processing of visual information. New York: Freeman.
Chomsky, Noam. 2000. New horizons in the study of language and mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Korsgaard, Christine. 1996. The sources of normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Singer, Peter. 1995. How are we to live? Ethics in an age of self interest. New York: Prometheus Books.
Mackie, John. 1977. Ethics: Inventing right and wrong. New York: Penguin.
Joyce, Richard. 2001. The myth of morality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Greene, Joshua. 2007. The secret joke of Kant’s soul. In Moral psychology, volume 3: The neuroscience of morality: Emotion, brain disorders, and development, ed. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, 81–91. Cambridge: MIT.
Dean, Richard. 2010. Does neuroscience undermine deontological theory? Neuroethics 3: 43–60.
Timmons, Marc. 2008. Toward a sentimentalist deontology. In Moral psychology, volume 3: The neuroscience of morality: Emotion, brain disorders, and development, ed. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, 93–103. Cambridge: MIT.
Becker, Selim. 2010. The normative insignificance of neuroscience.
McCloskey, Michael. 1983. Intuitive physics. Scientific American 248: 122–130.
Hirschfeld, Lawrence, and Susan Gelman. 1994. Mapping the mind: Domain specificity in cognition and culture. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Gigerenzer, Gerd, Peter Todd, and the ABC Research Group. 1999. Simple heuristics that make us smart. New York: Oxford University Press.
Premack, David, and Ann Premack. 1994. Moral belief: Form vs content. In Mapping the mind: Domain specificity in cognition and culture, ed. Lawrence Hirschfeld and Susan Gelman. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Doris, John. 2001. Lack of character. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Flanagan, Owen. 1996. Ethics naturalized: Ethics and human ecology. In Mind and morals, ed. L. May, M. Friedman, and A. Clark. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2007/1947. Existentialism is a humanism, trans. Carol Macomber. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter. 2009. Morality without God. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wilson, Margaret. 2002. Six views of embodied cognition. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 9(4): 625–636.
Oakes, Penelope, and John Turner. 1990. Is limited information-processing capacity the cause of social stereotyping? In The European review of social psychology, ed. W. Stroebe and M. Hewstone, 111–135. England: Wiley.
Taylor, S., S. Fiske, N. Etcoff, and A. Ruderman. 1978. The categorical and contextual bases of person memory and stereotyping. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36: 778–793.
Hirschfeld, L.W. 2001. On a folk theory of society: Children, evolution, and mental representations of social groups. Personality and Social Psychology Review 5(2): 107–117.
Gil-White, Francisco. 2001. Are ethnic groups biological ‘species’ to the human brain? Current Anthropology 42(4): 515–554.
Greenwald, Anthony, Debbie McGhee, and Jordan Schwartz. 1998. Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: The implicit association test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74: 1464–1480.
Kelly, Daniel, Edouard Machery, and Ron Mallon. Forthcoming. Racial cognition and normative racial theory.
Special issue of journal of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81(5)
Wright, Jen. Personal communication, June 11, 2010.
Hudspeth, A.J. 1983. Mechanoelectrical transduction by hair cells in the acousticolateralis sensory system. Annual Review of Neuroscience 6: 187–215.
Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter. 2008. Framing moral intuitions. In Moral psychology, volume 2: The cognitive science of morality: Intuition and diversity, ed. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, 47–77. Cambridge: MIT.
Sunstein, Cass. 2005. Moral heuristics. Brain and Behavioral Sciences 28: 531–573.
Inbar, Yoel, David Pizarro, and Paul Bloom. 2008. Conservatives are more easily disgusted than liberals. Cognition and Emotion 23: 714–725.
Isen, Alice. 1987. Positive affect, cognitive processes, and social behavior. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 20: 203–253.
Knobe, Josh. 2005. Attribution and normativity: A problem in the philosophy of social psychology. Unpublished manuscript, UNC Chapel Hill.
Kruger, Joachim, and David Funder. 2004. Towards a balanced social psychology: Causes, consequences, and cures for the problem-seeking approach to social behavior and cognition. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 27: 1–15.
Mikhail, John. 2005. Moral heuristics or moral competence? Reflections on sunstein. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28: 557–558.
Gigerenzer, Gerd. 2008. Moral intuition = fast and frugal heuristics? In Moral psychology, volume 2: The cognitive science of morality: Intuition and diversity, ed. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, 1–26. Cambridge: MIT.
Gigerenzer, Gerd. 2008. Why heuristics work. Perspectives on Psychological Science 3(1): 20–29.
Green, Lee, and David Mehr. 1997. What alters physicians’ decisions to admit to the coronary care unit? The Journal of Family Practice 45(3): 219–226.
Pinker, Steven. 2007. The stuff of thought: Language as a window onto human nature. New York: Viking Press.
Simons, Daniel, and Christopher Chabris. 1999. Gorillas in our midst: Sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events. Perception 28(9): 1059–1074.
Schacter, Dan. 2001. The seven sins of memory: How the mind forgets and remembers. New York: Houghton Mifflin.
Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 12th Annual Pitt/CMU Graduate Philosophy Conference, as well as the 36th Annual Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and I wish to thank the audience for their helpful comments. I also owe a great thanks to Liane Young, Justin Sytsma, Joshua Greene, Fiery Cushman, Colin Klein, Jonathon Hricko, Bryan Miller, Jeff Maynes, and John Waterman for their helpful comments and feedback.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Leben, D. Cognitive Neuroscience and Moral Decision-making: Guide or Set Aside?. Neuroethics 4, 163–174 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-010-9087-z
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-010-9087-z