If there’s such a thing as moral compass, If It Feels Good to be Good, It May Only Be Natural says that it's between your ears. Recent researchers have found that moral decisions they asked their subjects to make while wired up to a brain scanner lit up portions of the ancient part of the brain. This suggests that morality might be more a product of nature rather than nurture.
These sorts of findings help explain why some moral decisions are harder to make than others:
Moral decision-making often involves competing brain networks vying for supremacy, he said. Simple moral decisions — is killing a child right or wrong? — are simple because they activate a straightforward brain response. Difficult moral decisions, by contrast, activate multiple brain regions that conflict with one another, he said.
Lots of implications here, and the article is well-written enough to include discussions of them. But the one that really stands out for me is this: If morality is brain-based, what about those whose brains have been damaged in these areas? In fact, the article describes some research that addresses this:
When confronted with moral dilemmas, the brain-damaged patients coldly came up with “end-justifies-the-means” answers. Damasio said the point was not that they reached immoral conclusions, but that when confronted by a difficult issue — such as whether to shoot down a passenger plane hijacked by terrorists before it hits a major city — these patients appear to reach decisions without the anguish that afflicts those with normally functioning brains.
Whoa! While providing lots of material to keep pulp fiction and screenwriters busy for a while, there are some pretty deep questions here.
“Eventually, you are bound to get into areas that for thousands of years we have preferred to keep mystical,” said Grafman, the chief cognitive neuroscientist at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. “Some of the questions that are important are not just of intellectual interest, but challenging and frightening to the ways we ground our lives. We need to step very carefully.”
Kind of makes you wonder about the idea of a moral majority, doesn’t it?
Tags: brain morality