Morality might not only by in cultural but genetic

Read "If It Feels Good to Be Good, It Might Be Only Natural" by Shankar Vedantam, The Washington Post, May 28, 2007.

The article cites recent brain research indicating not only that morality might be hard wired into the human brain, but that other animals might have altruistic behavior hard wired into their brains. The suggestion is that our ability to empathize with the feelings of others might be involved, and that more complex moral problems involving choices among alternatives each with moral implications are harder and involve more and wider spread brain activity.

This is not a surprise. Homo sapiens is a social species and must have evolved behaviors that allow social interaction. There must be some recognition by the individual of behaviors that are allowed in the group and those that are not. We expect evolved behavior to be represented in the brain. The research is most important in illuminating just how that representation occurs.

We also know that cultures have developed in which learned behavior modifies instinctive behavior. So we understand that cultures also determine what is considered moral. Some morality that is common across all cultures is probably hard wired into the brain. Some moral judgments that differ from culture to culture are probably culturally determined in each.

The article notes:

In another experiment published in March, University of Southern California neuroscientist Antonio R. Damasio and his colleagues showed that patients with damage to an area of the brain known as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex lack the ability to feel their way to moral answers.

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.

Research which indicates that an injured brain behaves differently in making moral judgments than does an uninjured brain implies that our treatment of people with such brain injuries who make what we consider to be immoral choices should be modulated by the realization that it is not their "moral fault" but at least in part a symptom of their injury. We treat people with symptoms as "patients" while we treat people who commit criminally immoral behavior as "prisoners".

Of course, we don't understand very much yet about the workings of the brain. It seems to be that sociopaths have brains that work differently than those of the rest of us. Perhaps we should find ways of identifying the sociopathic brain early, and of treating sociopaths in a way that is both humane and that protects society from acts that they might commit due to that pathology.

I draw the conclusion that it is important to have philosophers debate ethics. We know that evolved behaviors are not always the most functional for organisms in new environments (e.g. turtles cross busy roads, moths are attracted by flames). Indeed, we can assume that moral codes that evolved culturally may also have failings (e.g. lots of cultures had slaves, killed the defenseless, and fought useless wars). We may well be able to reason about ethics, find better solutions to some genetically and old-culturally determined ethical norms, and train ourselves into a new, better cultural morality.