
Neurophilosopher argues morality is rooted in brain science, not reason - pseudolus
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/neurophilosopher-argues-morality-is-rooted-in-brain-science-not-reason-1.5470360
======
Barrin92
This is just a confused article which sets up a dichotomy between reason and
brain science.

First off every human question could be, at least theoretically, reduced to
"brain science", because all we got is brains, this is just true by definition
unless you invoke some sort of magic.

However this isn't actually a good argument for ditching higher level
concepts. Reason doesn't stand in conflict to brain science, Talking about
moral issues in terms of reason or even divine judgement or whatever is
engaging in a higher level of abstraction, which can be vital to aid in
creating meaning.

When you try to understand the meaning of a work of fiction you don't go
around and count individual letters in the book and try to decipher the shape
of the letter 'A', you look at emerging properties of the story and how things
hang together in the broadest, not the narrowest, sense of the term. Likewise
when discussing morality, it probably isn't very fruitful to try looking at
chemicals in synapses for the same reason it's not very fruitful to try to
argue about software programs by counting electrons in semiconductors.

~~~
leafboi
Wrong. You're confused. Allow me to explain. Step by step.

>This is just a confused article which sets up a dichotomy between reason and
brain science.

The article sets up an assumed dichotomy that you missed. That dichotomy is
morality and reasoning. It assumes you're aware that morality and reasoning
are two different and incompatible things. Then in assuming that you know
this, it begins by saying that human morality is not created through reasoning
but it is created as pre programmed behavior in our brain. You did not reason
your way into knowing what is good or what is evil. You along with most people
were born with a moral module in your head that predetermines what you
consider to be "good" and "evil".

It does not set up a dichotomy between reasoning and brain science. Your brain
can reason it also has preprogrammed instincts. "Brain science" encompasses
the existence of both. The article is saying that morality is a preprogrammed
instinct.

>However this isn't actually a good argument for ditching higher level
concepts. Reason doesn't stand in conflict to brain science, Talking about
moral issues in terms of reason or even divine judgement or whatever is
engaging in a higher level of abstraction, which can be vital to aid in
creating meaning.

Nothing is ditched. Again reasoning never did stand in conflict with brain
science and the article never claimed this to be true. You are simply making
an incorrect assumption that the article is doing this. The assumption you are
making is that morality = logic or morality = reasoning. It's a common mistake
because much of our morality feels logical but it is not, it is all
instinctual pre programmed behavior similar to hunger or pain.

The issue here is that this moral module is highly integrated with our
reasoning facilities so it is hard for us to see how our instinct to do "good"
is similar to our instinct to avoid "pain." That being said there are certain
moral paradoxes where you can bring your moral instincts into conflict with
your logical brain. Meaning that these moral paradoxes can make you feel as if
you should do one thing that is "moral" but when you think about it, it is
actually illogical. See the link for a good example:
[https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Trolley_problem#:~:text=The%20tr...](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Trolley_problem#:~:text=The%20trolley%20problem%20is%20a,to%20save%20a%20larger%20number.&text=There%20is%20a%20runaway%20trolley,up%20and%20unable%20to%20move).

The logical outcome is to save as many people as possible by pulling the
lever. But what if we replace the lever with just a single track with 5 people
tied up and you can stop a train by pushing an unsuspecting really fat man in
front of the train killing the fat man but stopping the train and saving 5
people. You can adjust the parameters of the experiment and change your moral
feelings about the whole situation. Either way, in both thought experiments
the logical thing to do is to save the most people, but I can introduce
variables that mess with the emotional module in your brain. By replacing the
lever with the actual pushing of a fat man the logical situation has not
changed but I have influenced the moral centers of your brain.

The reason why your brain is built this way is because morality was evolved to
help you behave in ways that would allow you to survive in communities of
humans. It was not designed to help you reason about the fine grained logical
behind it all... as long as your community passed the filter of natural
selection nature thought it was good enough. Your moral brain did not need
fine grained internal logical consistency in order to help you survive and
form communities and societies therefore nature allowed the module to evolve
and form in an imperfect and semi-illogical way.

The existence of a dichotomy between how we reason about this situation and
how we morally feel about the situation should help you identify the fact that
there are two separate modules in your brain where one module is logical and
the other module is emotionally moral.

>When you try to understand the meaning of a work of fiction you don't go
around and count individual letters in the book and try to decipher the shape
of the letter 'A', you look at emerging properties of the story and how things
hang together in the broadest, not the narrowest, sense of the term. Likewise
when discussing morality, it probably isn't very fruitful to try looking at
chemicals in synapses for the same reason it's not very fruitful to try to
argue about software programs by counting electrons in semiconductors.

They are doing exactly as you say. The brain is too complex for a low level
analysis. If we had the ability to do a low level analysis we would be able to
build emulators or run the brain on a computer similar to how we can emulate
entire computers on a computer. However because this is outside of our
capabilities we come to the conclusion that morality is an instinctual
phenomenon based off of high level analysis.

For example: In clinical psychology and you can actually physically identify
people who lack all sense of morality and also identify the physical brain
damage associated with it. The term for the condition is called "anti-social
disorder" better known as "psychopathy." People who are psychopathic retain
extremely high reasoning abilities with almost zero moral consciousness. See:
[https://www.damninteresting.com/the-unburdened-
mind/](https://www.damninteresting.com/the-unburdened-mind/) for more
information.

Since we have identified people with specific regions of their brain with
brain damage who exhibit behavior and lack understanding of morality and
empathy we can know from this high level analysis that morality is an
instinctual in inborn phenomenon and not a logical one. Your logical brain
knows 1 + 1 = 2 but this part of your brain is not the part of your brain that
determines how you know good from evil. Again we know this from observing
people who have lost the ability to know good from evil.

~~~
Barrin92
>Since we have identified people with specific regions of their brain with
brain damage who exhibit behavior and lack understanding of morality and
empathy we can know from this high level analysis that morality is an
instinctual in born phenomenon and not a logical one.

How does that even make any sense? You can turn the exact experiment around,
there are people who have brain damage to the areas of their brain that let's
them reason logically, but they still have intact moral behaviour.

By that logic, logic itself is not logical because there's an area in the
brain that can be turned off? Then nothing is logical because practically
every function of the brain can be missing.

You haven't shown that morality is instinctual, you have shown that morality
happens in the brain, which big surprise as I said is true by definition.

Why is it supposed to follow from the fact that psychopaths exist that
morality is "instinctual", or "born"? Rather than that they've lost their
ability to reason about moral subjects?

~~~
leafboi
>How does that even make any sense? You can turn the exact experiment around,
there are people who have brain damage to the areas of their brain that let's
them reason logically, but they still have intact moral behaviour.

I didn't point you to a source that talks about the physical aspect of
psychopathy just the qualitative aspect. You're going to have to find that
yourself on google it's easy to find.

Suffice to say that people who have psychopathy have either damage to the
exact same area of the brain or a lack of nerve connections in the exact same
area of the brain. Researchers have identified the exact physical location for
this in the brain. If I recall correctly it's actually at the front of your
brain above your eyes. Look it up.

>By that logic, logic itself is not logical because there's an area in the
brain that can be turned off? Then nothing is logical because practically
every function of the brain can be missing.

All areas of the brain can be turned off and on and damaged. There are tons of
experiments and recorded cases in psychology about this. Literally tons, in
fact it makes up a huge portion of the field of psychology. Psychologists
understand the brain through people who have suffered damage from it. Here's
one case of a woman who cannot feel fear:
[https://www.wikiwand.com/en/S.M._(patient)#:~:text=S.M.%2C%2...](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/S.M._\(patient\)#:~:text=S.M.%2C%20also%20sometimes%20referred%20to,consequence%20of%20Urbach%E2%80%93Wiethe%20disease).

Additionally we can even turn "on" parts of the brain. One of the treatments
of depression involve "turning on" or stimulating a specific part of your
brain with varying amounts of electricity. See: [https://www.nami.org/About-
Mental-Illness/Treatments/ECT,-TM...](https://www.nami.org/About-Mental-
Illness/Treatments/ECT,-TMS-and-Other-Brain-Stimulation-Therapies)

It's not an off or on switch... more of a volume control but even that is a
blunt description of what's going on.

>You haven't shown that morality is instinctual, you have shown that morality
happens in the brain, which big surprise as I said is true by definition.

I have shown it's instinctual. Let me walk you through the reasoning. If the
moral part of the brain suffers damage you are no longer moral, but you can
still reason.

If you can still reason then if morality wasn't instinctual you can still be
moral by your reasoning alone. However we have shown that by killing a part of
the brain that doesn't affect your reasoning and creating psychopaths who can
reason but cannot be moral we have shown that morality isn't part of
reasoning.

>Why is it supposed to follow from the fact that psychopaths exist that
morality is "instinctual", or "born"? Rather than that they've lost their
ability to reason about moral subjects?

Wrong. Psychopaths can reason about moral subjects. Boolean logic and logic
itself is universal and they can still reason that way. They just don't care
to follow that reasoning, because morality itself is not logical. A psychopath
can identify the behaviors we classify as "good" and the behaviors we classify
as "evil" but he does not have an emotional response when plunging a knife
into someones face. In short when the opportunity is advantageous to him, the
psychopath will not hesitate to kill. Usually though, such actions are never
advantageous, so the psychopath remaining logical to the core, will often not
kill throughout his entire lifetime.

The words "Good" and "evil" at it's most logical essence are just words that
classify certain behaviors and actions... there is no true logical existence
of either word beyond its usage as categorization. To a true Neutral
intelligence of pure logic and reasoning "good" and "evil" are just arbitrary
categories that are made up by human culture and behavior. A psychopath is
just closer to a neutral intelligence than a regular human being.

------
OneGuy123
> "Telling right from wrong, or deciding how to feel about other people's
> behaviour, is a job for our consciences."

Well the moral and good men in WW2 would never even thought of killing.

But then they were ordered to, and because everyone said "it's ok to kill"
this taboo of killing was suspended for the few years of the war.

So our morals are obviously complete relative to what most people around us
are doing.

Kill a random guy in 2010? Murder. Kill a random guy in a way in 1945? A pat
on the back and the medal.

From a biological survival standpoint "beeing good" matters only "within the
tribe" because that is how you stay alive and thrive.

But if the tribe would trive better as a whole if you murder the opposing
tribe then that is also "being good".

If morality is rooted in brain science it merely means that it's not absolute,
but relative since brain changes if evolution happens.

Today's goods are tomorrow's evils.

And then there are doctors and academics who say we should dump chemicals in
water to artificaly increase "altruism".

~~~
lowdose
To kick off a morality discussion on HN with a Godwin shows you have good
amount of confidence. I have changed my mind a lot on this stance when I read
that in Protestants churches for 400 years was preached that the Jews killed
Jesus. Antisemitism was baked in such that even the King of England is seen on
pictures with Hitler himself.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_Christianity](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_Christianity)

~~~
jxurueydyys
This is a really lazy criticism considering they never specified which side
they were talking about. WW2 is a good example because most Americans have
some general knowledge of the subject to help them understand the topic
compared to other possible examples.

Their point holds because there are numerous societies where killing is viewed
as immoral but which make an exception for their soldiers performing their
duties. Do you have an actual counter-argument or are we just using reddit
memes as dismissals now?

~~~
lowdose
> Do you have an actual counter-argument or are we just using reddit memes as
> dismissals now?

Your first comment under a throwaway account framing the argument at the level
of reddit, are you kidding me?

------
masterphilo
I would be more surprised if morality wasn't rooted in the brain!

The biggest issue I have with this article is the vague notion of morality
discussed. There's a deeper problem revolving around what morality _is_ in
human life, ie, what it means to be moral, something philosophers have been
debating for centuries and indeed still debating to this day. This article
actually implicitly assumes that morality is traceable to evolutionary forces
in our past that supported the species' survival, but it's important to
understand that due to the faculty of reason in our species, biological forces
no longer have ultimate control of us, and morality in this sense could re-
defined in ways that accord with our perception of the world we live in,
freeing us from of the shackles of our instincts.

------
tgbugs
Somehow I knew this was Patricia before opening the article (cbc.ca,
neurophilosophy, and morality only have so many names associated with them). I
had a number of discussions with her about this about two or three years ago,
and my key take home from those is that you have to let go of what you
personally think the term morality means when you enter into a scientific
context. Moral behavior is not 'moral' in the absolute sense that is being
rejected here, it is 'moral behavior' in the sense that it is what the average
human being thinks society thinks the 'moral' behavior is in the given
situation. The fact that, on average, there seems to be some agreement on this
is fascinating. How such a thing evolves, and the reasons for its persistence
are vital questions that we have to grapple with.

Another observation that I have had on this is that trying to convince
philosophers that morality can be reduced to a decision problem and thus that
Kant is not wrong, rather that he is just an asshole who didn't know that
Turing complete systems exist, is a very hard thing to do. Their reaction
against the dangers of belief in the categorical imperative is extremely well
founded, and instructive for those who think that things like smart contracts
might be a good idea.

One great advantage of defining traditional morality as being closely
equivalent to the evolutionary imperatives of our biological substrate is that
we can stop playing the stupid post-hoc rationalization game where we try to
come up with rational explanations for what is fundamentally contingent
behavior. This in turn provides us with an entirely clear space to start to
imagine what post-moral society might look like, and envision what algorithmic
morality might look like if we were actually able to feed Bentham's machine
with all the factors instead of the stupidly limited number of measurements
and dimensions that are usually imagined and that remain centuries out of date
with the current state of the art in logic and computation.

Whether we want to live in a society where we have agreed that everything can
be decided upon must be reducible to a decision problem, or whether we want to
allow ourselves the get out of jail free card that is denying that we know
enough to make the decision at all is another question. However, before we can
even get there we need to be freed from the misbegotten idea that morality is
in any way universal, or derived from natural law, or that natural law even
exists. Out of an incredible body of work I will always thank Patricia for
taking this head on.

I should also note that the argument that morality is rooted in biology is in
no way mean to belittle what evolution has discovered. Patricia has argued
that many of the positions taken by modern defenders of enlightenment ideals
wildly undervalue so called traditional or local knowledge as "unenlightened"
because that knowledge was not arrived at from first principles, but from
long, hard experience accumulated and passed down over generations, and that
westerns in particular have an abysmal track record when it comes to thinking
they know better and thus not listening to the people who know that the reason
why the crops are not planted by the river is because the hippos will come out
and try to kill you if you do.

------
badrabbit
Morality is rooted in authority.

~~~
antonvs
If that were the case, morals would always be aligned with authority, and
protests or dissent wouldn't exist.

~~~
badrabbit
They are always aligned with authority, that is what I was implying. Protests
anf dissent exist over disagreemnts about authority.

~~~
antonvs
Protests and dissent exist over disagreements about morality.

Authority is a mechanism by which certain moral positions are enforced, but
morality is not "rooted in" authority. If it were rooted in authority, it
wouldn't make sense for it to be in opposition to that authority.

