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Cognitive Neuroscience and Moral Decision-making: Guide or Set Aside?

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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.

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Notes

  1. 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.”

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

  8. As we are describing the FNMA, it consists not only of emotional processes but also typically ‘cognitive’ ones.

  9. 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].

  10. 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].

  11. Of course, there exist many sophisticated objections to welfare, abortion, and euthanasia that do not rely solely on affective or intuitive responses.

  12. 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].

  13. See Gigerenzer [55] for details

  14. 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.

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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.

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    Derek Leben

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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

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