Posts tagged morality

Badness, madness and the brain – the late 19th-century controversy on immoral persons and their malfunctioning brains In the second half of the 19th-century, a group of psychiatric experts discussed the relation between brain malfunction and moral misconduct. In the ensuing debates, scientific discourses on immorality merged with those on insanity and the brain. This yielded a specific definition of what it means to be immoral: immoral and insane due to a disordered brain. In this context, diverse neurobiological explanations for immoral mind and behavior existed at the time. This article elucidates these different brain-based explanations via five historical cases of immoral persons. (…) The rendering of the immoral person as brain-disordered is scrutinized in terms of changes in moral agency. Furthermore, a present immoral person is discussed to highlight commonalities and differences in past and present reasoning. [via,IMG] Same as it ever was.

Badness, madness and the brain – the late 19th-century controversy on immoral persons and their malfunctioning brains

In the second half of the 19th-century, a group of psychiatric experts discussed the relation between brain malfunction and moral misconduct. In the ensuing debates, scientific discourses on immorality merged with those on insanity and the brain. This yielded a specific definition of what it means to be immoral: immoral and insane due to a disordered brain. In this context, diverse neurobiological explanations for immoral mind and behavior existed at the time. This article elucidates these different brain-based explanations via five historical cases of immoral persons. (…) The rendering of the immoral person as brain-disordered is scrutinized in terms of changes in moral agency. Furthermore, a present immoral person is discussed to highlight commonalities and differences in past and present reasoning. [via,IMG]

Same as it ever was.

The Economist on the ethical case for using robots urging us to develop ways to deal with the dilemmas associated with robotics, “As they become smarter and more widespread, autonomous machines are bound to end up making life-or-death decisions in unpredictable situations, thus assuming—or at least appearing to assume—moral agency. ” This is especially relevant in military use. Campaign groups such as the International Committee for Robot Arms Control have been formed in opposition to the growing use of drones. But autonomous robots could do much more good than harm. Robot soldiers would not commit rape, burn down a village in anger or become erratic decision-makers amid the stress of combat. [via] [img] H/T themoralperspective

The Economist on the ethical case for using robots urging us to develop ways to deal with the dilemmas associated with robotics, “As they become smarter and more widespread, autonomous machines are bound to end up making life-or-death decisions in unpredictable situations, thus assuming—or at least appearing to assume—moral agency. ”

This is especially relevant in military use.

Campaign groups such as the International Committee for Robot Arms Control have been formed in opposition to the growing use of drones. But autonomous robots could do much more good than harm. Robot soldiers would not commit rape, burn down a village in anger or become erratic decision-makers amid the stress of combat. [via] [img]

H/T themoralperspective

The Moral Perspective: The more you think, the less you cheat

themoralperspective:

A new study in the journal Psychological Science suggests that the human tendency to cheat is a natural impulse, and that given some time for reflection, humans are less likely to cheat.

The research experiment — conducted by Shaul Shalvi, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam, and his…

Which has always amazed me neuroanatomically speaking. In 2002, the first research re: fMRI and lying was published and found that the distribution of deception-related activation in the brain suggests that lying involves both conflict and suppression of the truth. So it turns out, if lying and cheating is instinctual, it certainly doesn’t mean it’s any less neurally demanding.  

"Emotion and Morality in Psychopathy and Paraphilias"

Many sex offenders suffer from a paraphilia. Paraphilias are disorders characterized by recurrent and intrusive deviant sexual impulses. One paraphilia that shares some characteristics with psychopathy is sexual sadism.

Sadism, like psychopathy, is characterized by callousness, anger, and low empathy. Sadists derive sexual gratification from inflicting physical or emotional pain and suffering on others, and may thus represent the extreme end of the moral sensitivity spectrum” ranging from compassion to callousness. They show increased arousal (measured by penile plethsymograph responses) when perceiving people in pain, in sexual or nonsexual situations.

While this clearly represents profound moral insensitivity, the capacity for “normal” moral judgment has not been directly investigated in this disorder. Sadists may be less likely than other sex offenders to show cognitive distortions that justify moral transgressions, since an understanding of the immorality of their actions (causing harm) is precisely what facilitates sexual gratification. Thus, like psychopaths they appear to understand the wrongness of their actions. [via]

Unlike psychopaths who know right from wrong but just don’t care, I suggest that sadists, who also enjoy inflicting pain/suffering, would show increased activation in the domain specific frontoinsular (FI) cortex, hinting at a higher sense of a certain type of empathy (comparatively) and regulation of moral judgement, depending on amount of emotional processing exercised. Pleasure and reward centers should show similair activation. wah-psh.

ResearchBlogging.org

Harenski, C., & Kiehl, K. (2011). Emotion and Morality in Psychopathy and Paraphilias Emotion Review, 3 (3), 299-301 DOI: 10.1177/1754073911402378

Greene JD, Sommerville RB, Nystrom LE, Darley JM, & Cohen JD (2001). An fMRI investigation of emotional engagement in moral judgment. Science (New York, N.Y.), 293 (5537), 2105-8 PMID: 11557895

Greene’s “dual-process theory” of moral decision-making posits that rationality and emotion are recruited according to the circumstances, with each offering its own advantages and disadvantages. He likens the moral brain to a camera that comes with manufactured presets, such as “portrait” or “landscape,” along with a manual mode that requires photographers to make adjustments on their own. Emotional responses, which are influenced by humans’ biological makeup and social experiences, are like the presets: fast and efficient, but also mindless and inflexible. Rationality is like manual mode: adaptable to all kinds of unique scenarios, but time-consuming and cumbersome.

“The nice thing about the overall design of the camera is that it gives you the best of both worlds: efficiency in point-and-shoot mechanisms and flexibility in manual mode,” Greene explains. “The trick is to know when to point and shoot and when to use manual mode. I think that this basic design is really the design of the human brain.”

The Biology of Right and Wrong (via theatlantic)

— I was hoping the Atlantic actually did a piece on Joshua Greene.  The Green/Cohen paper, For the law, neuroscience changes nothing and everything from 2004 is one of the most well known neurolaw papers out there. It definitely got me started in this area.

In “Tinkering With Our Ethical Chemistry”, Guy Kahane, deputy director of the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics, writes: Humans are born with the capacity to be moral, but it is a limited capacity which is ill equipped to deal with the ethical complexities of the modern world. For thousands of years, humans have relied on education, persuasion, social institutions, and the threat of real (or supernatural) punishment to make people behave decently. We could all be morally better, but it is clear that this traditional approach cannot take us much further. It is not as if people would suddenly begin to behave better if we just gave them more facts and statistics, or better arguments.  So we shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss the suggestion that science might help—in the first instance, by helping us design more effective institutions, more inspiring moral education, or more persuasive ethical arguments. But science might also offer more direct ways of influencing our brains. These are, of course, hypothetical questions. We don’t yet know what is possible. But it is better to begin the ethical discussion too early than too late. And even if “moral pills” are just science fiction, they raise deep questions. Will we want to take them if they ever become available? And what does it say about us if we won’t?    Via.  Image: D. Sharon Pruitt (CC).   

In “Tinkering With Our Ethical Chemistry”, Guy Kahane, deputy director of the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics, writes:

Humans are born with the capacity to be moral, but it is a limited capacity which is ill equipped to deal with the ethical complexities of the modern world. For thousands of years, humans have relied on education, persuasion, social institutions, and the threat of real (or supernatural) punishment to make people behave decently. We could all be morally better, but it is clear that this traditional approach cannot take us much further. It is not as if people would suddenly begin to behave better if we just gave them more facts and statistics, or better arguments. 

So we shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss the suggestion that science might help—in the first instance, by helping us design more effective institutions, more inspiring moral education, or more persuasive ethical arguments. But science might also offer more direct ways of influencing our brains.

These are, of course, hypothetical questions. We don’t yet know what is possible. But it is better to begin the ethical discussion too early than too late. And even if “moral pills” are just science fiction, they raise deep questions. Will we want to take them if they ever become available? And what does it say about us if we won’t?   

Via.  Image: D. Sharon Pruitt (CC).