Neurophilosopher argues morality is rooted in brain science, not reason
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First off every human question could be, at least theoretically, reduced to "brain science", because all we got is brains, this is just true by definition unless you invoke some sort of magic.
However this isn't actually a good argument for ditching higher level concepts. Reason doesn't stand in conflict to brain science, Talking about moral issues in terms of reason or even divine judgement or whatever is engaging in a higher level of abstraction, which can be vital to aid in creating meaning.
When you try to understand the meaning of a work of fiction you don't go around and count individual letters in the book and try to decipher the shape of the letter 'A', you look at emerging properties of the story and how things hang together in the broadest, not the narrowest, sense of the term. Likewise when discussing morality, it probably isn't very fruitful to try looking at chemicals in synapses for the same reason it's not very fruitful to try to argue about software programs by counting electrons in semiconductors.
>This is just a confused article which sets up a dichotomy between reason and brain science.
The article sets up an assumed dichotomy that you missed. That dichotomy is morality and reasoning. It assumes you're aware that morality and reasoning are two different and incompatible things. Then in assuming that you know this, it begins by saying that human morality is not created through reasoning but it is created as pre programmed behavior in our brain. You did not reason your way into knowing what is good or what is evil. You along with most people were born with a moral module in your head that predetermines what you consider to be "good" and "evil".
It does not set up a dichotomy between reasoning and brain science. Your brain can reason it also has preprogrammed instincts. "Brain science" encompasses the existence of both. The article is saying that morality is a preprogrammed instinct.
>However this isn't actually a good argument for ditching higher level concepts. Reason doesn't stand in conflict to brain science, Talking about moral issues in terms of reason or even divine judgement or whatever is engaging in a higher level of abstraction, which can be vital to aid in creating meaning.
Nothing is ditched. Again reasoning never did stand in conflict with brain science and the article never claimed this to be true. You are simply making an incorrect assumption that the article is doing this. The assumption you are making is that morality = logic or morality = reasoning. It's a common mistake because much of our morality feels logical but it is not, it is all instinctual pre programmed behavior similar to hunger or pain.
The issue here is that this moral module is highly integrated with our reasoning facilities so it is hard for us to see how our instinct to do "good" is similar to our instinct to avoid "pain." That being said there are certain moral paradoxes where you can bring your moral instincts into conflict with your logical brain. Meaning that these moral paradoxes can make you feel as if you should do one thing that is "moral" but when you think about it, it is actually illogical. See the link for a good example: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Trolley_problem#:~:text=The%20tr....
The logical outcome is to save as many people as possible by pulling the lever. But what if we replace the lever with just a single track with 5 people tied up and you can stop a train by pushing an unsuspecting really fat man in front of the train killing the fat man but stopping the train and saving 5 people. You can adjust the parameters of the experiment and change your moral feelings about the whole situation. Either way, in both thought experiments the logical thing to do is to save the most people, but I can introduce variables that mess with the emotional module in your brain. By replacing the lever with the actual pushing of a fat man the logical situation has not changed but I have influenced the moral centers of your brain.
The reason why your brain is built this way is because morality was evolved to help you behave in ways that would allow you to survive in communities of humans. It was not designed to help you reason about the fine grained logical behind it all... as long as your community passed the filter of natural selection nature thought it was good enough. Your moral brain did not need fine grained internal logical consistency in order to help you survive and form communities and societies therefore nature allowed the module to evolve and form in an imperfect and semi-illogical way.
The existence of a dichotomy between how we reason about this situation and how we morally feel about the situation should help you identify the fact that there are two separate modules in your brain where one module is logical and the other module is emotionally moral.
>When you try to understand the meaning of a work of fiction you don't go around and count individual letters in the book and try to decipher the shape of the letter 'A', you look at emerging properties of the story and how things hang together in the broadest, not the narrowest, sense of the term. Likewise when discussing morality, it probably isn't very fruitful to try looking at chemicals in synapses for the same reason it's not very fruitful to try to argue about software programs by counting electrons in semiconductors.
They are doing exactly as you say. The brain is too complex for a low level analysis. If we had the ability to do a low level analysis we would be able to build emulators or run the brain on a computer similar to how we can emulate entire computers on a computer. However because this is outside of our capabilities we come to the conclusion that morality is an instinctual phenomenon based off of high level analysis.
For example: In clinical psychology and you can actually physically identify people who lack all sense of morality and also identify the physical brain damage associated with it. The term for the condition is called "anti-social disorder" better known as "psychopathy." People who are psychopathic retain extremely high reasoning abilities with almost zero moral consciousness. See: https://www.damninteresting.com/the-unburdened-mind/ for more information.
Since we have identified people with specific regions of their brain with brain damage who exhibit behavior and lack understanding of morality and empathy we can know from this high level analysis that morality is an instinctual in inborn phenomenon and not a logical one. Your logical brain knows 1 + 1 = 2 but this part of your brain is not the part of your brain that determines how you know good from evil. Again we know this from observing people who have lost the ability to know good from evil.
How does that even make any sense? You can turn the exact experiment around, there are people who have brain damage to the areas of their brain that let's them reason logically, but they still have intact moral behaviour.
By that logic, logic itself is not logical because there's an area in the brain that can be turned off? Then nothing is logical because practically every function of the brain can be missing.
You haven't shown that morality is instinctual, you have shown that morality happens in the brain, which big surprise as I said is true by definition.
Why is it supposed to follow from the fact that psychopaths exist that morality is "instinctual", or "born"? Rather than that they've lost their ability to reason about moral subjects?
I didn't point you to a source that talks about the physical aspect of psychopathy just the qualitative aspect. You're going to have to find that yourself on google it's easy to find.
Suffice to say that people who have psychopathy have either damage to the exact same area of the brain or a lack of nerve connections in the exact same area of the brain. Researchers have identified the exact physical location for this in the brain. If I recall correctly it's actually at the front of your brain above your eyes. Look it up.
>By that logic, logic itself is not logical because there's an area in the brain that can be turned off? Then nothing is logical because practically every function of the brain can be missing.
All areas of the brain can be turned off and on and damaged. There are tons of experiments and recorded cases in psychology about this. Literally tons, in fact it makes up a huge portion of the field of psychology. Psychologists understand the brain through people who have suffered damage from it. Here's one case of a woman who cannot feel fear: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/S.M._(patient)#:~:text=S.M.%2C%2....
Additionally we can even turn "on" parts of the brain. One of the treatments of depression involve "turning on" or stimulating a specific part of your brain with varying amounts of electricity. See: https://www.nami.org/About-Mental-Illness/Treatments/ECT,-TM...
It's not an off or on switch... more of a volume control but even that is a blunt description of what's going on.
>You haven't shown that morality is instinctual, you have shown that morality happens in the brain, which big surprise as I said is true by definition.
I have shown it's instinctual. Let me walk you through the reasoning. If the moral part of the brain suffers damage you are no longer moral, but you can still reason.
If you can still reason then if morality wasn't instinctual you can still be moral by your reasoning alone. However we have shown that by killing a part of the brain that doesn't affect your reasoning and creating psychopaths who can reason but cannot be moral we have shown that morality isn't part of reasoning.
>Why is it supposed to follow from the fact that psychopaths exist that morality is "instinctual", or "born"? Rather than that they've lost their ability to reason about moral subjects?
Wrong. Psychopaths can reason about moral subjects. Boolean logic and logic itself is universal and they can still reason that way. They just don't care to follow that reasoning, because morality itself is not logical. A psychopath can identify the behaviors we classify as "good" and the behaviors we classify as "evil" but he does not have an emotional response when plunging a knife into someones face. In short when the opportunity is advantageous to him, the psychopath will not hesitate to kill. Usually though, such actions are never advantageous, so the psychopath remaining logical to the core, will often not kill throughout his entire lifetime.
The words "Good" and "evil" at it's most logical essence are just words that classify certain behaviors and actions... there is no true logical existence of either word beyond its usage as categorization. To a true Neutral intelligence of pure logic and reasoning "good" and "evil" are just arbitrary categories that are made up by human culture and behavior. A psychopath is just closer to a neutral intelligence than a regular human being.
That is a biased choice, not a logical one. This is about agency for the converse choice (which I would make). Making a choice to kill someone unwittingly, versus a group of people dying wittingly (but without fault) is being taken for granted as the eponymous "the good of the many, outweigh the good of the few" Spock quote.
I don't subscribe to that and I am not extraordinarily aberrant. The cold indifference (and defensive noninvolvement behavior) born of urban living may contribute to this, but is present without widespread physical brain damage.
Logical based off of the axiom from spock which is what I'm assuming is something we all agree on. Killing one is better than killing many. We agree on this statement at least. Fault or no fault we can also agree doesn't have any real consequence. If someone died whether someone was at fault or not at fault doesn't change any actual outcome and is therefore illogical when you value human life as an axiom.
That being said, a normal human being does not arrive at this logical conclusion so readily because human morality is not designed to have a moral answer to this question.
What someone chooses in this moral paradox is not an indicator of brain damage or psychopathy. What happens is most people hit a sort of bump and are at first unsure what to choose. The purpose of this paradox is to illustrate paradoxical logic and raise awareness about how morality is not logical nor internally consistent. Your decision killed more people and absolved you of responsibility. The moral module of your brain does not evaluate this paradox into a final conclusion where you are perfectly comfortable with either decision. Likely what occurs is that you begin reasoning about the better solution and your logical brain picks a solution but, again your moral brain will never be fully comfortable with it.
Lets change it even further. Let's say the train runs over a switch which triggers a nuclear bomb that will blow up a city killing millions.
Now the logical outcome becomes more apparent. It becomes almost absurd not to push the person.
We can make it even more uncomfortable. Let's say the fat person is nimble, simply pushing the person doesn't do anything because the fat person can simply move out of the way of the train. In order to keep that person on the tracks you have to Plunge a knife into his heart after you pushed him.
Or let's change more parameters. Let's make it so you don't even see the train. There's just a lever 20,000 miles a way and you have the option to pull it to save millions or leave it to save one.
Man slaughter to save millions. What choice do you make? The answer doesn't matter. The whole point of this paradox is to raise self awareness and to show how adjusting unrelated illogical parameters can sway your moral decisions. It exists to show that you have a seperate moral module in your brain that is an imperfect product of natural selection. The module was never meant to be logically consistent it was only meant to help you survive and interact with other people and society.
No. That's the heart of it. Everyone dies. You do not save anyone, ever.
> Killing one is better than killing many.
Again, this is misguided. There is a view that one choice is not better because of the method proposed (choosing for someone else). Although most people cannot articulate it, removing agency is the moral wrong, not the temporary value as a moral net good, ascribed to human life.
> Lets change it even further. Let's say the train runs over a switch which triggers a nuclear bomb that will blow up a city killing millions.
That's not the same moral question. Now you have 2 populations who are unwitting and without fault. Again, I would not propose to choose as a moral right. If I can wreck the train (which I think is an option), I would not do that either. Moral relativism is a child's view of the world (everyone's life has limitless potential) and a moral dead end and I do not subscribe to it. I retain that life is sacred, just not MORE sacred in aggregate.
> Let's say the fat person is nimble, simply pushing the person doesn't do anything because the fat person can simply move out of the way of the train. In order to keep that person on the tracks you have to Plunge a knife into his heart after you pushed him.
As abhorrent as it may appear, my morality dictates the resolution much more clearly.
> Or let's change more parameters. Let's make it so you don't even see the train. There's just a lever 20,000 miles a way and you have the option to pull it to save millions or leave it to save one.
It should be clear, again, that I do not make the choice for another or a million others. That is my moral position.
You're just getting pedantic. I don't care about your personal opinion, but the world agrees logically saving 10 is better than saving 1. Moral paradoxes like killing baby hitler isn't the point, it's just used to illustrate the point. I am not debating the paradox I am asking you to examine how your own brain resolves the paradox.... everyone has a different position on what to do.
>Again, this is misguided. There is a view that one choice is not better because of the method proposed (choosing for someone else). Although most people cannot articulate it, removing agency is the moral wrong, not the temporary value as a moral net good, ascribed to human life.
I'm not talking about whether something is moral or right or wrong. I'm taking a neutral view. I'm trying to explain another point but you're getting side tracked. You can use your logic and create your own little logical framework for judging what's right or wrong, I don't care about that, that's not what I'm talking about.
>As abhorrent as it may appear, my morality dictates the resolution much more clearly.
Again I could care less about your morality or even mine. This is not the point. In general such a situation will make any normal human being at least pause before they make either decision.
Here's what's going on with you. You have a moral framework you formulated by reasoning about all the logical rules and axioms. These axioms are arbitrary. You feel responsibility is more wrong then saving 10 million people or vice versa so you stick with that certain logic as a conscious choice. Other people may follow different logical rules, it's all arbitrary and what axioms you choose as the basis of your framework isn't interesting. Nobody cares, it's like saying your favorite color is blue and my favorite color is red. Arbitrary and not important.
Also nobody cares about how strictly you follow your logical framework. You can violate it, you can be inconsistent and you can break your own rules or follow it like religion. Not important. This is not the message I'm trying to convey. Try reading my post again, it seems you missed my main point.
>As abhorrent as it may appear, my morality dictates the resolution much more clearly.
I'm not calling you abhorrent. But the fact that appears abhorrent to you says something about your brain. This is the key point I'm talking about, read it twice:
You follow a logical rule set but another part of your mind is telling you that the action appears abhorrent. This means that there are two modules in your mind telling you two different things. One part of your mind is telling you to follow the rules another part of your mind is telling you the action is abhorrent. Two modules: reasoning and morality.
>It should be clear, again, that I do not make the choice for another or a million others. That is my moral position.
I could care less about your personal decision or someone else's personal decision. That is not what I'm talking about. I was responding to the original poster to prove to him that morality is an instinctual phenomenon because we can infer the existence of two modules in the brain: reasoning and morality. That's it.
> the world agrees logically saving 10 is better than saving 1
You're posing a third party opinion as fact. This is not a useful discussion when you pose a dilemma and then declare there is no dilemma. I have illustrated how there is a perspective that does not adhere to that and a good many people follow it, whether you agree or not (ie indifferent cruelty). You do not seem to have a coherent view of "the whole world", given this trivial oversight that you pay lip service in analysis.
>>> That dichotomy is morality and reasoning. (premise) It assumes you're aware that morality and reasoning are two different and incompatible things. (trapdoor weasel phrase - "<author> assumes" not leafboi!)
>>> The logical outcome is to save as many people as possible by pulling the lever. (subjectively morally correct premise that illustrates a dichotomy)
>> Either way, in both thought experiments the logical thing to do is to save the most people (repeated, of your own assertion)
> I'm taking a neutral view. (disingenuous)
Believe what you will, your points need work. They are not compelling as stated because there is no inherent dichotomy. It may exists for people who struggle with a specific moral framework, which is flawed and do not operated on such a framework in practice. People function just fine without much thought because there is no dichotomy. There are conflicting convictions to orthogonal moral precepts, but there is no doubt they are all flexible with reasoning (even if subconscious) rather than a strict "morality vs reason, which to choose?!" I have illustrated a counterpoint that is a view which is both morally consistent and logically consistent, and you have turned around and declared it irrelevant. Your impartiality rings hollow as well as your attempt to remain detached from your own assertions. Good luck with whatever.
First off let's get it out of the way your previous post was about your own moral framework and what you would do when encountering a moral paradox and how you would resolve it. Let's make things simple and let me say that I 100% agree with your own moral framework and what you will do. Basically you were presenting a topic to me that completely agree with. So what's the point? What are you trying to say. It seems there is no point.
Let me cut through all your tangential BS and help you get straight to the point. You don't agree there are two moral modules in your mind. You don't make it clear but you use the words "People function just fine without much thought because there is no dichotomy." As evidence.
First off those moral paradoxes are 1 in a billion cases. People rarely encounter situations that require them to decipher such dilemmas. The moral module of the brain has evolved for dealing with normal and daily situations not obscure hypothetical issues. The paradox is drawn up to show you this imperfection, to illustrate how the module does not provide satisfactory emotions to resolve certain moral situations.
Second off just because you encounter a moral paradox doesn't mean your brain turns to scrambled eggs, you still have the ability to resolve a conflict in your mind. We do it quite often and we even have a word to describe the emotion we feel that's related to making a costly decision: "guilt."
Thirdly the brain is just a series of modules interplaying with each other. YOu deal with moral conflicts and many other conflicts within your mind every single day and you resolve these conflicts with little thought.
It's simple. Have you ever felt conflicted about anything? Have you felt the need to eat a lot of bacon or some other food but you know it's going to be unhealthy? That's conflict, that's a dichotomy..
Have you felt a strong desire or some object that you can't afford so you just steal it? Perhaps a child wants candy that his parents won't let him buy so he steals it despite being aware it's wrong. That is moral conflict that is moral dichotomy.
Do you feel that you need to exercise to stay healthy and strong but also feel the need to be lazy? Have you both loved and hated a beautiful woman/man?
You need to realize that conflicting dichotomies in our brain is so common that it's obvious. Everyone experiences it to some degree and dare I say on a weekly or even daily basis. You're making this absurd claim that there is no moral dichotomy because people function fine so there must be no dichotomy.
The truth is opposite. People function just fine Despite all kinds of conflicts and dichotomies bombarding their heads. All these temptations and conflicting desires and thoughts that we encounter easily resolve into a singular decision.
>There are conflicting convictions to orthogonal moral precepts, but there is no doubt they are all flexible with reasoning (even if subconscious) rather than a strict "morality vs reason, which to choose?!"
What are you saying here? Are you saying that there are conflicting convictions orthogonal to moral precepts? Isn't that what I'm saying? I never said people have problems picking between morality and reasoning. It's easily done and people (like yourself) even have trouble figuring out which part of their mind is logical and which part is moral (they confuse the two modules thinking it's the same thing.)
The fact of the matter is, along with what you feel internally there is physical evidence that morality is seperate from reasoning. All psychopaths lack morality and additionally exhibit brain damage in the same area of their brain while maintaining high reasoning faculties. This is compelling evidence despite what you say.
Literally I have physical evidence from brain damage and I have evidence that you can gather from deciphering your own moral emotions.. It's pretty evidence that morality is instinctual and separate from reasoning.
>Good luck with whatever.
Good luck understanding me. I don't think you're capable of grasping a single word I said.
Well the moral and good men in WW2 would never even thought of killing.
But then they were ordered to, and because everyone said "it's ok to kill" this taboo of killing was suspended for the few years of the war.
So our morals are obviously complete relative to what most people around us are doing.
Kill a random guy in 2010? Murder. Kill a random guy in a way in 1945? A pat on the back and the medal.
From a biological survival standpoint "beeing good" matters only "within the tribe" because that is how you stay alive and thrive.
But if the tribe would trive better as a whole if you murder the opposing tribe then that is also "being good".
If morality is rooted in brain science it merely means that it's not absolute, but relative since brain changes if evolution happens.
Today's goods are tomorrow's evils.
And then there are doctors and academics who say we should dump chemicals in water to artificaly increase "altruism".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_Christianity
Their point holds because there are numerous societies where killing is viewed as immoral but which make an exception for their soldiers performing their duties. Do you have an actual counter-argument or are we just using reddit memes as dismissals now?
Your first comment under a throwaway account framing the argument at the level of reddit, are you kidding me?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24197646
[1] How plausible is it? Bulgakov's novel is opposite to most which touch on this theme, in that its genre for the present day scenes is magical realism, but its genre for the pilate and christ scenes is hardboiled.
There must also be a component of getting used to it at some point, but several people who killed someone (often with the sponsorship of some country that can socialise the cost of war) found their first experiences to be traumatic.
The biggest issue I have with this article is the vague notion of morality discussed. There's a deeper problem revolving around what morality is in human life, ie, what it means to be moral, something philosophers have been debating for centuries and indeed still debating to this day. This article actually implicitly assumes that morality is traceable to evolutionary forces in our past that supported the species' survival, but it's important to understand that due to the faculty of reason in our species, biological forces no longer have ultimate control of us, and morality in this sense could re-defined in ways that accord with our perception of the world we live in, freeing us from of the shackles of our instincts.
Another observation that I have had on this is that trying to convince philosophers that morality can be reduced to a decision problem and thus that Kant is not wrong, rather that he is just an asshole who didn't know that Turing complete systems exist, is a very hard thing to do. Their reaction against the dangers of belief in the categorical imperative is extremely well founded, and instructive for those who think that things like smart contracts might be a good idea.
One great advantage of defining traditional morality as being closely equivalent to the evolutionary imperatives of our biological substrate is that we can stop playing the stupid post-hoc rationalization game where we try to come up with rational explanations for what is fundamentally contingent behavior. This in turn provides us with an entirely clear space to start to imagine what post-moral society might look like, and envision what algorithmic morality might look like if we were actually able to feed Bentham's machine with all the factors instead of the stupidly limited number of measurements and dimensions that are usually imagined and that remain centuries out of date with the current state of the art in logic and computation.
Whether we want to live in a society where we have agreed that everything can be decided upon must be reducible to a decision problem, or whether we want to allow ourselves the get out of jail free card that is denying that we know enough to make the decision at all is another question. However, before we can even get there we need to be freed from the misbegotten idea that morality is in any way universal, or derived from natural law, or that natural law even exists. Out of an incredible body of work I will always thank Patricia for taking this head on.
I should also note that the argument that morality is rooted in biology is in no way mean to belittle what evolution has discovered. Patricia has argued that many of the positions taken by modern defenders of enlightenment ideals wildly undervalue so called traditional or local knowledge as "unenlightened" because that knowledge was not arrived at from first principles, but from long, hard experience accumulated and passed down over generations, and that westerns in particular have an abysmal track record when it comes to thinking they know better and thus not listening to the people who know that the reason why the crops are not planted by the river is because the hippos will come out and try to kill you if you do.
Authority is a mechanism by which certain moral positions are enforced, but morality is not "rooted in" authority. If it were rooted in authority, it wouldn't make sense for it to be in opposition to that authority.