The New Frontier of Ethics: Values and the Moral Brain

Abstract

Historically, the development of philosophy and science has been for mutual benefit. There are, however, tensions expressed among some philosophers over the explanatory power of neuroscience, which appears to reduce human experience to all matters scientific, signaling the end of morals as a theoretical discipline. The claim that morality shares a universal pursuit of moral development that requires rational insight is a familiar one among rationally based moral theories. Research findings in neural science shifts the emphasis. There is no celebrated moral domain of a moral agent's mind for such theories to serve as guides to morally justified actions. Social scientists Marc Hauser, (1) Steven Pinker, (2) Jonathan Haidt, (3) and others provide empirical evidence to demonstrate that universality is not a priori, as many moral theorists believed. By establishing moral conduct based on empirically functional physical principles of evolutionary biology and cognitive science, they mark another epoch of challenging the boundaries of philosophy. Cognitive scientists argue that moral concepts are reflections of underlying brain functions and that these brain functions extensively explain the modes of being moral through empirically derived experiments. The evidence thereby derived moves this protean new science to conclude that the function of moral assessment and value is inherently linked to the hardwiring of the human brain. In this essay, I argue that the scientific model is not an isomorphism of moral activity, but what is arguably the actual physical manifestation of moral behavior and attitudes. The scientific evidence provided in this new frontier, however powerful, does not expunge the values maintained by moral agents. These values are formed through a confluence of factors, internal and external. Furthermore, far from concern that the new scientific evidence displaces moral philosophy, it provides clearer focus of the more critical questions that moral theorists can best address in light of the facts. In Hauser's recent work, Moral Minds (4), he argues that morality is innate in human beings as part of an evolutionary inheritance. This moral instinct, Hauser proposes, is analogous to Noam Chomsky's theory that language formation is a universal capacity of the brain's depth structure that is immune to cultural differences. (5) This hypothesis explains how human moral capacities evolve to learn emotionally-laden, reinforced social rules. The study contains a range of rich experiments on how developing emotionally caused moral judgments. Infants and children entail recognition of self and empathy toward another's pain. In adults, Hauser discloses how injured or malformed brains of psychopaths lead to judgments that do not distinguish moral and conventional transgressions and to their inability to adopt another person's perspective. This failure is attributed to the psychopath's inability to read submissive cues, according to neuroscientist James Blair, and their lack of acknowledgement of how to control urges of aggression. Due to the deficient input of emotions that detect distress in others, the brain cannot restrain urges of aggression. (6) The role of emotions in moral conduct is revisited by Hauser and other social scientists, since they offer empirical evidence for what human beings share universally. This emphasis is what David Hume proposed in the 18th century. (7) Sympathy forms the bonds of human actions that vary with intensity with the regard to proximate concentric rings of relatedness. Hume challenged the belief about what constituted moral reasoning that operated from what was held as a rational model, one that valued the detached and dispassionate moral view of right and wrong. Kant, you may recall, reinforces the rational model when he formulates the criterion for moral conduct that derives from reason. (8) The attainment of a moral character for Kant required that we resist acting on motives that would incline us to satisfying the emotions and not reason itself. …