Moral cognition and neuroethics

This week’s readings focused on moral cognition and neuroethics. I thought that Greene and Haidt’s article “How (and where) does Moral Judgment Work?” approached the endless and repetitive questions of moral psychology from a clear and progressive prospective. They recognize that the historical view of analyzing moral judgments juxtaposed emotion and reason, and that this is unproductive. Greene and Haidt are continuing to advance the new field of neuroethics, suggesting that both reason and emotion are involved with moral decision-making, but that perhaps emotions engage in a more dominant role, which is opposite of traditional theories. They compare Damasio’s studies of Phineas Gage with more recent studies of similar brain damaged patients, referring to their inability to effectively use ‘somatic markers.’ Although these patients were able to pass regular IQ tests and showed knowledge of social/moral circumstances, they failed at playing the Iowa Gambling Test and their real-life actions proved disastrous. This shows what we have already learned (especially from Damasio): to know is not to KNOW (or act upon), information is not instinct. Green and Haidt write: “Their affective deficits render them unable to feel their way through life, which suggests that normal decision making is more emotional and less reasoned than may have believed” (518).

They also discussed patients with early childhood prefrontal damage who exhibited strong signs of egocentric, immoral behavior. They tested the same as adults except that their knowledge of moral norms was undeveloped because they weren’t old enough to learn and store that knowledge. Were the children’s actions more immoral than the adult patients? If so, does this have to do with the amount of stored moral and social knowledge? If it does, how does that work if the adults with prefrontal damage have the knowledge stored but do not use it—does just having the knowledge make them somehow less outwardly immoral—do remnants of their ‘old personalities’ seep into their everyday decisions even after brain damage occurs? This also raising questions for me concerning sociopaths. I’m assuming Green and Haidt are referring to children who literally had damage done to their brain like Gage, but what about strictly environmentally produced prefrontal damage—is this possible? Assuming that ‘true’ sociopaths come to be from environmental circumstances, do they develop prefrontal damage over time? What circumstances produce this outcome, opposed to other possible diseases and mental illnesses? Greene ad Haidt touch on this when they note that case studies of people who have exhibited violent criminal behavior have been abused as children and/or also have frontal damage. Damasio also touches on this in his article “Neuroscience and Ethics: Intersections.” He refers to adults with brain damage has having ‘acquired sociopathy,’ while early onset patients also have ‘acquired sociopathy,’ but combined with a developmental factor.

An important point that Hauser makes in his article “The Liver and the Moral Organ” is about language. We cannot forget the relationship between culture, environment, reason, emotion, and language. Hauser writes: “We are endowed with a moral faculty that operates over the casual-intentional properties of actions and events as they connect to particular consequences. We posit a theory of universal moral grammar which consists of the principles and parameters that are a part and parcel of this biological endowment. Our universal moral grammar provides a toolkit for building possible moral systems. Which particular moral system emerges reflects details of the local environment or culture, and a process of environmental pruning whereby particular parameters are selected and set early in development” (2). We must also keep in mingd that language itself has divided emotion and reason and morality, but it seems like what we are finally coming to realize, is that these three words and meanings are intrinsicly linked together.