Word: morals
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Philosophers have argued over this claim for a quarter of a millennium without resolution. Time's up! Now scientists armed with brain scanners are stepping in to settle the matter. So far it looks like Hume was onto something; though reason can shape moral judgment, emotion is often decisive, and that explains some strange quirks in our moralizing...
These cranial wrestling matches could be televised. As people ponder a moral dilemma, brain scans show changing activity levels in a part of the brain linked to abstract reasoning and cognitive control. In brains that take the utilitarian path, this part strengthens until dominant; in brains that refuse to kill one innocent to save many, it weakens until emotion...
Princeton philosopher Peter Singer cites Greene's work in arguing that we should re-examine our moral intuitions and ask not just whether these impulses still serve their original evolutionary logic, but whether that logic merits respect in the first place. Why obey moral impulses that evolved to serve what Richard Dawkins calls the "selfish gene"--such as sympathy that gravitates toward kin and friends? Why not worry more about people an ocean away whose suffering we could cheaply alleviate? Isn't it better to save 10 starving African babies than to keep your 90-year-old father on life...
Singer's radically utilitarian brand of moral philosophy has its work cut out for it. In the absence of arduous cranial wrestling matches, reason may indeed be, as Hume famously put it, "slave of the passions...
Wright is a Schwartz senior fellow at the New America Foundation and author of Nonzero and The Moral Animal...