{"id":535,"date":"2007-03-26T10:22:50","date_gmt":"2007-03-26T18:22:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tgdarkly.com\/blog\/?p=521"},"modified":"2007-03-26T10:22:50","modified_gmt":"2007-03-26T18:22:50","slug":"the-neurology-of-morality-and-the-politics-of-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2007\/03\/26\/the-neurology-of-morality-and-the-politics-of-science\/","title":{"rendered":"The Neurology of Morality and the Politics of Science"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is an interesting article in this month’s Economist<\/a> that illustrates, I think, some of the problems with social Darwinism, particularly when it is linked to a particular political outlook, as seemingly inevitably is the case. The article reports on a study of six people who have suffered damage to a part of the brain (the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC)) that is involved with social emotion. The study showed that these people were more likely than a control group to provide a “utilitarian” answer to the “runaway train paradox.” <\/p>\n

The “runaway train paradox” involves two dilemmas — in one, you must decide whether to push a person in front of an oncoming train in order to slow the train before it hits five other people further down the line; in the other, you must decide whether to switch the track so that that train will hit only one person further down the line rather than hitting five people. Most people will hesistate to push a person in front of the train to save five lives, but will not hesistate to switch the track so that the train hits one person further down the line instead of five. The six subjects with damaged VMPC’s felt the same about both possibilities — they would not hesitate in either case to sacrifice one person in order to save five. <\/p>\n

The article explains that “In these cases it seems that the decision on how to act is not a single, rational calculation of the sort that moral philosophers have generally assumed is going on, but a conflict between two processes, with one (the emotional) sometimes able to override the other (the utilitarian, the location of which this study does not address).”<\/em> This yin-and-yang of emotional and rational responses, the article says, “fits with one of the tenets of evolutionary psychology…. This is that minds are composed of modules evolved for given purposes…. The VMPC may be the site of a ‘moral-decision’ module, linked to the social emotions, that either regulates or is regulated by an as-yet-unlocated utilitarian module. “<\/em> <\/p>\n

So far, perhaps, so good. All of this seems very speculative, and a sample size of six people with brain damage hardly seems adequate, but nevertheless, it wouldn’t be surprising that the emotional and rational aspects of moral reasoning relate to different parts of the brain, and it doesn’t problematic per se if those parts of the brain developed over time through evolutionary processes. The kicker is in the article’s concluding paragraph: “This does not answer the question of what this module (what philosophers woudl call ‘moral sense’) is actually for. But it does suggest the question should be addressed functionally, rather than in the abstract. Time, perhaps, for philosophers to put away their copies of Kant and pull a dusty tome of Darwin off the bookshelf.”<\/em><\/p>\n

It seems to me that in this paragraph the article crosses from descriptive to prescriptive; from science to metaphysics. This is particularly so in that, as a devoted reader of the Economist, I’m well aware of that magazine’s pragmatist \/ libertarian political philosophy and its slant towards materialist metaphysics. In a very subtle way, this is an example of the materialist \/ pragmatist saying: “See there … all that ‘moral sense’ and whot is in your head. We shall move beyond this and learn to develop our utilitarian modules.”<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is an interesting article in this month’s Economist that illustrates, I think, some of the problems with social Darwinism, particularly when it is linked to a particular political outlook, as seemingly inevitably is the case. The article reports on a study of six people who have suffered damage to a part of the brain […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-535","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-technology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-8D","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/535","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=535"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/535\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}