The connection between morals and emotions is surprisingly strong. As Joshua Greene wrote in his article, “How (and where) Does Moral Judgment Work?”, emotion is a significant aspect in moral judgment. There is now neuro-imaging and fMRI testing that can support the correlation and studies on pre-frontal cortex damage in children and adults is also discovering the connection between morality and emotions. Antonio Damasio continues his exploration into prefrontal damage by defining acquired sociopathy. Damasio talks about how when there is damage in the prefrontal cortex, there is also emotional disturbance on multiple levels: decreased emotional reactions, compromising of social emotions, poor planning of everyday activities, and poor management o human relationships. There is no disorder in perception, movement, conventional memory, language, and general reasoning ability, only within the social emotional behavior. Why is it that there is this onset of sociopath-like behavior? A section of the prefrontal cortices is meant for making social and moral decisions and also plays a part in acquiring knowledge to create morals. So, morals and ethics have a foundation in the neurological functions that are connected to the genesis of emotions. Like when Damasio was discussing Phineas Gage in his book, Descartes’ Error, Greene also discusses how people suffering from prefrontal damage have social knowledge intact, but are unable to use it within real-life situations. Their basic decision making skills become based on a logic that lacks emotional reasoning.
The amount of damage done on one’s emotional and moral connections also depends on whether or not the prefrontal damage was done during childhood or adulthood. Early prefrontal damage is far more serious than in adult prefrontal damage because children never learn the social and moral rules that they are violating whereas adults do have that knowledge. Adults are able to create emotional signals that can guide the decision-making process based on past successful experiences. Children do not have these memories to rely on, but both children and adults modify the settings of the network as a result of new experiences. Their social behavior becomes impaired because of their lack of moral analysis within social settings because the knowledge of moral norms is completely deficient within children with prefrontal damage.
As Greene says, moral reasoning matters within social contexts and findings within the world of social psychology support that. People evaluate others and apply stereotypes to others automatically based on moral reasoning. When someone is motivated to maintain a relationship and defend their ideas these will bias one’s judgments and help to motivate future reasoning. People are also willing to sacrifice material interests, time and physical integrity in order to defend their societal causes, principles and ideologies. Morality has the ability to promote cooperation and helping but is also capable of creating hostility among individuals and social groups. People are constantly challenging others’ values and ideologies to defend their own moral reasoning in life.
When looking at how those with prefrontal damage are unable to achieve moral or emotional competence within social situations, there is understanding to why they cannot succeed at life. If emotions and morality are connected and influenced by one another, then one cannot succeed in society without them. Morals have to have an emotional connection because we live so strongly by them and morals are created from experiences that we analyze with our emotions. The judgment that takes place within social settings is largely based on what “feels right” or not. How can that be recreated for someone with prefrontal damage? How can someone who has had prefrontal damage since childhood achieve a moral lifestyle? Is there any way to help their memories relearn moral cues if we cannot recreate emotions to support the moral judgments?
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The Biology of Moral Anguish
Several of the articles also discussed the effects of what Damasio coined as “acquired sociopathy.” In his article, “Neuroscience and Ethics: Intersections,” he explains that damage to certain sectors of the prefrontal cortex caused subjects to experience a significantly diminished ability to ”feel” for others and therefore make the “correct” moral decisions. I found the differences between adult-onset acquired sociopathy and early onset cases to be particularly intriguing. While “adult-onset patients know the rules that they violate, early-onset patients do not; they have failed to learn those rules . . . Moreover, early-onset cases reinforce the notion that emotions play a critical role in both processes: the making of wise decisions in the healthy adult, and the learning of the knowledge relevant to wise decision making during the formative years.” (Damasio) As many of the other articles explained this week, a large percentage of criminals have been shown to have damage to areas of the brain responsible for empathy and moral decision-making, and interestingly, a significant percentage of this damage is either innate or developed through no fault of the subject. Since we’re considering ethics this week, is it ethical to hold these subjects with acquired sociopathy, especially early onset ones, to the same moral standards as the rest of us? He can we justify punishing individuals who cannot understand their actions, or be blamed for this deficiency? How can we not?
I thought an interesting that Anderson, et. al. raised was the question of whether, when a reward/punishment center has been damaged, it might be possible to recruit other learning systems to process social learning, with behavioral or pharmaceutical interventions.
Is the kind of right/wrong reaction that Hauser characterizes as a moral judgement different from or related to the positive/negative valence response that several of our readings have referred to?
Laurel brings up a lot of the same questions I found myself asking with this week's readings. I suppose I never thought about morality and its ties to emotions before these readings. Yet, now I can't see how one could possibly separate morality and emotionality. As Greene says, children with prefrontal damage will not be able to form social, moral forms of reasoning. Their choices in life will be based on logic alone. This is interesting to me, because I feel like it must be possible for these children to learn from their own experiences and their families, peers, etc. about what is morally correct and what is not. If they decide to commit a list of moral behavior to memory, couldn't they function somewhat normally in the social world?
As these readings also point out, adults with prefrontal damage can rely on previous experiences when dealing with the question of morality. Yet, how can their concept of right and wrong develop and grow without emotionality? Morals are different for everyone, yet we all rely on our emotional experiences to form a sense of morality in our own behavior.
This weeks readings focused on emotions and there role in moral action. It makes sense that moral decisions involve logic and emotional processes. As we have seen in this week’s reading, specific areas of the brain directly correlate to moral and social forms of reasoning. I became curious about the processes of acquiring these morals. A few weeks ago we read about the various stages of a child’s development and the ages at which children become aware of more complex emotions such a jealousy, embarrassment, and shame. When in development does an individual begin to develop moral awareness? How flexible is moral development?
In adults, how do psychological illnesses and issues affect moral behaviors? And do psychological issues always have an affect on the prefrontal cortex itself?
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