Neuroethics & Law Blog

Nietzschean Moral Psychology

Brian Leiter (Law & Philosophy, UT Austin) and Joshua Knobe (Philosophy, UNC-Chapel Hill) have posted The Case for Nietzschean Moral Psychology to SSRN.  The final version of the paper will appear in B. Leiter & N. Sinhababu (eds.), Nietzsche and Morality (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2007), as Leiter notes on his blog here.  The abstract sounds quite interesting:

Contemporary moral psychology has been dominated by two broad traditions, one usually associated with Aristotle, the other with Kant. The broadly Aristotelian approach emphasizes the role of childhood upbringing in the development of good moral character, and the role of such character in ethical behavior. The broadly Kantian approach emphasizes the role of freely chosen conscious moral principles in ethical behavior. We review a growing body of experimental evidence that suggests that both of these approaches are predicated on an implausible view of human psychology. This evidence suggests that both childhood upbringing and conscious moral principles have extraordinarily little impact on people's moral behavior.

This paper argues that moral psychology needs to take seriously a third approach, derived from Nietzsche. This approach emphasizes the role of heritable psychological and physiological traits in explaining behavior. In particular, it claims that differences in the degree to which different individuals behave morally can often be traced back to heritable differences between those individuals. We show that this third approach enjoys considerable empirical support -- indeed that it is far better supported by the empirical data than are either the Aristotelian or Kantian traditions in moral psychology.

Brain Scanning as Lie Detector

Another study is about to come out on the use of fMRI in lie detection, reporting 90% accuracy in detecting deception.  The study was led by Mark George at the Medical University of South Carolina.  Here's an excerpt from a news article on the study which will appear in Biological Psychiatry this week:

Researchers at MUSC conducted the study using 60 healthy men. They offered some extra money if they could manage to trick the machine but none could.

"We had some of our study group try to dupe us, and they were unable," George said.

The MRI images show that more blood flows to parts of the brain associated with anxiety and impulse control when people lie. More blood also flows to the part of the brain handling multitasking because it is hard for people to keep track of lies they have told.

In the study, researchers had participants commit a mock theft. Then questions about the theft were projected onto a screen while they were inside the MRI machine. Participants pressed a button to respond to the yes or no questions.

Errors of Acquittal vs. Conviction

The Legal Theory Blog highlights The Source of Blackstone's Intuition: Why We Think it Better to Free the Guilty than to Convict the Innocent by Sam Vermont. Here is the abstract:

What is the source of the intuition, famously articulated by William Blackstone, that it is better to let a multitude of guilty persons escape than to convict an innocent person? This paper argues that a main source of the intuition is a bias against conviction that arises from various psychological quirks. These quirks simply render false conviction more salient than false acquittal.

The Universality of Moral Judgments

Rebecca Saxe has written an article in the current issue of the Boston Review surveying some research on the universality of moral judgments, looking at cross-cultural solutions to trolley problems, the reasoning of young children, and insights from neuroimaging studies.  Here's an excerpt from the last part of her discussion:

Jorge Moll and his colleagues, for example, compared the blood-oxygen levels in the brain while subjects read different kinds of sentences: sentences describing moral violations (“They hung an innocent”), sentences describing unpleasant but not immoral actions (“He licked the dirty toilet”), and neutral sentences (“Stones are made of water”). They found that one brain region—the medial orbito-frontal cortex, the region just behind the space between the eyebrows—had a higher oxygenation level while subjects read the moral sentences than either of the other two kinds of sentences. Moll proposed that the medial orbito-frontal cortex must play some unique role in moral reasoning.  .  .  .

Still, the claim of a moral brain region remains controversial among cognitive scientists, who disagree both about whether such a brain region exists and what the implications would be if it did. Joshua Greene of Princeton University, for example, investigates brain activity while subjects solve Trolley Problems. He finds lots of different brain regions recruited—as one might imagine—including regions associated with reading and understanding stories, logical problem-solving, and emotional responsiveness. What Greene doesn’t find is any clear evidence of a “special” region for moral reasoning per se.

More broadly, even if there were a specialized brain region that honored the moral–conventional distinction, what would this teach us about that distinction’s source, or universality? Many people share the intuition that the existence of a specialized brain region would provide prima facie evidence of the biological reality of the moral–conventional distinction. The problem is that even finding a specialized neural region for a particular kind of thought does not tell us how that region got there. We know, for example, that there is a brain region that becomes specially attuned to the letters of the alphabet that a person is able to read, but not of other alphabets; this does not make any one alphabet a human universal. Similarly, if Western minds (the only ones who participate in brain-imaging experiments at the moment) distinguish moral from conventional violations, it is not surprising that Western brains do.

Michael Cholbi comments on Saxe's article over here at PEA Soup blog.

Freedom of Memory

This weekend, I will be presenting a draft of my paper, entitled "Freedom of Memory," at the 2005 Health Law Scholars Workshop, hosted by the American Society for Law, Medicine & Ethics, at Saint Louis University School of Law. 

On Monday, I will make a similar presentation at Hofstra Law School in Hempstead, NY as part of its faculty workshop series.

Blog readers in attendance are encouraged to introduce themselves.

Euthanasia During Hurricane Katrina

According to the Daily Telegraph, "Doctors working in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans killed critically ill patients rather than leave them to die in agony as they evacuated."  Here's some more from the article:

With gangs of rapists and looters rampaging through wards in the flooded city, senior doctors took the harrowing decision to give massive overdoses of morphine to those they believed could not make it out alive.

One New Orleans doctor told how she "prayed for God to have mercy on her soul" after she ignored every tenet of medical ethics and ended the lives of patients she had earlier fought to save.

Her heart-rending account has been corroborated by a hospital orderly and by local government officials.

One emergency official, William Forest McQueen, said: "Those who had no chance of making it were given a lot of morphine and lain down in a dark place to die."

Euthanasia is illegal in Louisiana and the doctors spoke only on condition on anonymity.

(via HealthLawProf Blog).

This is Your Brain on Evolution

Researchers led by University of Chicago geneticist Bruce Lahn present findings in Science suggesting that the human brain has continued to evolve over the last 60,000 years or so.  See stories here and here and here.  These articles suggest that this is a surprising finding, though I would have been more surprised if this were not the case.  What rightfully seems to be in dispute, however, is the manner in which the human brain has evolved. From the first NYT article:

Lahn and colleagues examined two genes, named microcephalin and ASPM, that are connected to brain size. If those genes don't work, babies are born with severely small brains, called microcephaly.

Using DNA samples from ethnically diverse populations, they identified a collection of variations in each gene that occurred with unusually high frequency. In fact, the variations were so common they couldn't be accidental mutations but instead were probably due to natural selection, where genetic changes that are favorable to a species quickly gain a foothold and begin to spread, the researchers report. . . .

For the microcephalin gene, the variation arose about 37,000 years ago, about the time period when art, music and tool-making were emerging, Lahn said. For ASPM, the variation arose about 5,800 years ago, roughly correlating with the development of written language, spread of agriculture and development of cities, he said.

The research has been controversial because the alleles, which arguably enhance cognitive function, are more common in some populations than others.  The second NYT article notes:

[Dr. Lahn] said he expected that more such allele differences between populations would come to light, as have differences in patterns of genetic disease. "I do think this kind of study is a harbinger for what might become a rather controversial issue in human population research," Dr. Lahn said. But he said his data and other such findings "do not necessarily lead to prejudice for or against any particular population."

The wishy-washiness of the last quote seems to undermine its message, though I suppose the article may have lost some of the tone of the original statement.

Arafat Cause of Death

According to the New York Times, Yasir Arafat's medical records indicate that he died "from a stroke that resulted from a bleeding disorder caused by an unidentified infection." Details are still mysterious. Story here.

Intentional Battery and Double Effect: The Director's Cut

John Mikhail (Law, Georgetown) has posted a revised version of "Aspects of the Theory of Moral Cognition: Investigating Intuitive Knowledge of the Prohibition of Intentional Battery and the Principle of Double Effect" on SSRN.  John tells me that the revision contains some new experiments, data, and analyses.  As Larry Solum writes in characteristic blue ink, the paper is "highly recommended"!