“Are Doing Harm and Allowing Harm Equivalent? Ask fMRI”

Most people, as well as the law, recognize that doing harm is morally worse than not doing anything when you know there to be a risk, thereby allowing harm to just happen. To that end, you would assume that judging the former to be worse is cognitively more demanding than the latter. Well, so did Fiery Cushman. He does research surrounding neuroethics up at Brown to see “…how the brain has evolved to process moral dilemmas and make moral judgments.”

People typically say they are invoking an ethical principle when they judge acts that cause harm more harshly than willful inaction that allows that same harm to occur. That difference is even codified in criminal law. A new study based on brain scans, however, shows that people make that moral distinction automatically. Researchers found that it requires conscious reasoning to decide that active and passive behaviors that are equally harmful are equally wrong. Via

This is interesting because you would think that in order to decide that doing harm is worse than non-acting that results in harm, it would require lots of conscious reasoning to arrive at that point, like most moral dilemmas. But it turns out, that’s the easy part for our brains requiring less activity…the hard part for our dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which via the fMRI scans show evidence of using more “careful deliberative controlled thinking” is after weighing the two, deciding that they are both as bad. Now that makes even more sense, huh.

I’ve read enough of his fascinating work to contact Dr. Cushman about an idea I had a couple months ago to see if collaborations with him are possible. He is very accessible, but it appears my new lab- AKA the hardest lab to get into ever, is taking me away from this.  Yes, I’m still waiting on that confirmation… fingers crossed so hard it hurts. 

Above: Looking at a moral choice Test subjects who feel that doing active harm is morally the same as allowing harm to occur will show more brain activity. The notion that active harm is worse appears to be automatic, a psychological default requiring less thought. (Credit: Cushman Lab/Brown University)