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.
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