Jan Verplaetse, Localizing the Moral Sense: Neuroscience and the Search for the Cerebral Seat of Morality, 1800-1930

Abstract

The neuroscience of moral decision-making and moral cognition is one of newest and more fashionable developments of functional imaging of the human brain. There is a rapidly growing literature on the parts of the brain activated in different types of moral judgments and in the role of the part of the brain said to be involved in ‘theories of mind’ in moral decisions (J. D. Greene and J. M. Paxton, ‘Patterns of Neural Activity Associated with Honest and Dishonest Moral Decisions’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 30, 2009). As this field is only a few decades old, I was surprised by the title under review, Localizing the Moral Sense: Neuroscience and the Search for Morality, 1800–1930. Was this another example of modern imaging being reminiscent if not imitative of classical phrenology? Verplaetse's book begins with a long discussion of conscience and the moral sense through the eighteenth century. The next chapters deal with the moral organ in phrenology and then attempt to locate the moral centre in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century by the new brain localizers (Hitzig, Ferrier), clinical neurologists (Kleist), cortical histologists (Meynert, Flechsig, Brodman), criminal anthropologists (Benedikt), and psychiatrists (Rush, Pinel). Each chapter is filled with rather dense and detailed accounts of the views on the localization of higher faculties particularly related to the moral sense. After diligently ploughing through these chapters looking for the localization of the moral sense I discovered that almost no one except the phrenologists had believed that they had managed to localize the moral sense. Most speculations were just about the localization of higher intellectual faculties. These faculties were usually placed in the frontal lobe but occasionally elsewhere such as a motor or occipital cortex. The whereabouts of the moral sense seems to have eluded the speculations of most everybody except the phrenologists. As Verplaetse put it ‘localizations of a moral centre in the brain, mostly in the frontal area, did occur but were exceptional. The vast majority of neurologists and psychiatrists adopted a different attitude; On the one hand there were specialists … who resolutely rejected the existence of such a centre. On the other hand, there were those who believed that a cerebral function generated by a morality could be localized somewhere in the brain, but who never advanced a precise localization … ’ (p. 244).