Koenigs, Michael et al - Damage to the Prefrontal Cortex Increases Utilitarian Moral Judgments

04/06/2007

Nature, 03/27/2007

This is a short study done by moral psychologists who studied subjects with Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex, a part of the brain that is considered important for executing emotional responses and also encoding the emotional value of sensory stimuli. There has been previous work done that connects emotions to moral judgments, but it is unclear whether this is cause, effect, or correlational. This study tries to show that the emotive value of certain situations exerts influence on the moral judgments most non-VMPC damaged subjects.

In this study three groups were examined: VMPC subjects, other brain damaged subjects whose damage isn't considered to be relevant to emotion generation or moral judgments, and non-brain damaged subjects. Each group was given a number of circumstances with questions at the end of them with yes/no answers attached. Some of the scenarios were non-moral in nature, and two sets were moral. Of the moral, some were judged (by an independent group of non-damaged subjects) to be more or less 'emotionally salient', corresponding to 'personal' and 'impersonal' divisions.

The hypothesis is: If emotions have a role in influencing moral judgments, those who have difficulty generating emotions (VMPC) will not have their moral judgments influenced.

In the testing, the VMPC subjects were more apt to judge the personal and impersonal moral scenarios equally, or at least far more equally, than the other groups. Thus there is an absence of a 'personal/impersonal' distinction in VMPC subjects. The ability to apply explicit rules of max/min in moral scenarios is still retained by VMPC subjects (pg 3, top right side), suggesting that these judgments are 'utilitarian'.


Wade, Nicholas - Scientists Finds the Beginnings of Morality in Primate Behavior, New York Times, 03/20/2007

This is a popular article that talks about primatologists, biologists and so on finding elementary 'morality' in other animals. The big conflict is between Dr. de Waal, who has recently taken a few tough positions. The one most grand is that human moral decisions derive 'above all' from 'fast, automated, emotional judgments'. De Waal also is in favor of the claim that this is a group-level adaptation, primarily to deal with in-group and out-group situations (e.g. warfare).

The evidence points to the ability of other primates to learn social rules, reciprocity, peacemaking, and their capacity for empathy. The next step is to claim this is the bedrock of moral judgments [see article above this one].

The debate is poorly framed between rationalists and scientists.