Bringing medical tools to bear on moral questions, cognitive scientists are invading the territory of philosophers, theologians and clerics.
Using neurology patients to probe moral reasoning, researchers for the first time drew a direct link between the neuroanatomy of emotion and moral judgment. Knock out certain brain cells with an aneurysm or a tumor, they discovered, and while everything else may appear normal, the ability to think straight about some issues of right and wrong has been permanently skewed. "It tells us there is some neurobiological basis for morality," said Harvard philosophy student Liane Young, who helped to conceive the experiment.
The effort to understand the biology of morality is far from academic.
For Harvard neuroscientist Marc Hauser, the moral-dilemma experiment is evidence the brain may be hard-wired for morality. Most moral intuitions, he said, are unconscious, involuntary and universal. To test the idea, he gathered data from thousands of people in hundreds of countries, all of whom display a remarkable unanimity in their basic moral choices. A shared innate capacity for morality may be responsible, he concluded.
However, since no two brains are exactly alike, each brain's ability to perceive right and wrong might be unique. Even so, it would be curious if, in the neural substrates of morality, we find common ground.
Source: Science Journal, The Wall Street Journal, May 11, 2007