Some evidence that morality comes, not from religious training, but from our evolutionary wiring:
The results were showing that when the volunteers placed the interests of others before their own, the generosity activated a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex. Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.
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Joshua D. Greene, a Harvard neuroscientist and philosopher, said multiple experiments suggest that morality arises from basic brain activities. Morality, he said, is not a brain function elevated above our baser impulses. Greene said it is not “handed down” by philosophers and clergy, but “handed up,” an outgrowth of the brain’s basic propensities.
It shouldn’t be surprising to find an evolutionary basis for altruism; critters that can work together will naturally have some advantage over those that have to plug along by themselves.
I’ve blogged before about the connection between mirror neurons, language, and morality, but it seems that this evolutionary wiring must go back farther than that.
No one can say whether giraffes and lions experience moral qualms in the same way people do because no one has been inside a giraffe’s head, but it is known that animals can sacrifice their own interests: One experiment found that if each time a rat is given food, its neighbor receives an electric shock, the first rat will eventually forgo eating.
A good article, but why did they have to include this?
Their 2006 finding that unselfishness can feel good lends scientific support to the admonitions of spiritual leaders such as Saint Francis of Assisi, who said, “For it is in giving that we receive.” But it is also a dramatic example of the way neuroscience has begun to elbow its way into discussions about morality and has opened up a new window on what it means to be good.
Assisi, schmassisi. I can hear the blather already: ‘Science is only now just beginning to recognise what spiritual leaders have been teaching for centuries.’ When in fact the discovery is one more sign of religion’s irrelevance.
29 May 2007 at 9:39 pm
I wonder if humans would do the same as the rats. I remember hearing of an experiment where grad students and rats were trained to go through a maze to find food. Once the pattern was established the experimenters moved the food. The rats stopped going down the same route of the maze before the students.
30 May 2007 at 7:38 am
Al Gore mentions mirror neurons in his new book (which is fantastic)in regards to how people with PTSD react to things that trigger the original trauma, and that this, on a vast scale is a factor/tool in why reason has been side-stepped on the way to many of the disasterous decisions of He Who Must Be Obeyed.
There was also quite a good article about recent findings about monkey morality in the NYT. I think I posted it to the Linguistics board with note about how they’ll probably find a monkey bible any day now.
14 June 2007 at 6:37 pm
The philosopher David Hume postulated that humans make moral or altruistic judgments, based not on logical necessity, but based on emotions, and on largely sentimental ideas about good/evil, society, life/death, etc. This ties in to the concept of “Psychological Egoism”, or “Psychological Hedonism:” i.e. humans only perform actions and make judgments that give them pleasure or satisfaction, avoid pain, or else provide some kind of personal (or evolutionary) benefit.
There are some problems with these ideas. For example, Psychological Egoism may be construed as circular reasoning.”If a person willingly performs an act, then he must derive personal benefit from it; thus, people only perform acts that benefit them.” Such statements are also difficult or impossible to rationally prove or disprove.
The Idea that humans make moral or altruistic judgments based on emotion, sentiment, or personal gain, does not fully explain why, for example, a soldier would reflexively jump on a grenade moments before it explodes, in order to save his comrades. The soldier would have no time to feel pleasure or pain, no time to contemplate the consequences,(and only barely enough time to recognize that it was, in fact, a grenade…)
Nor does it explain versions of the Robert Nozick thought experiment. If, hypotheticaly, there was a virtual reality machine that could duplicate real life perfectly, but would provide an enhanced level of pleasure, happiness, and satisfaction; the initial “gut reaction” of most people, Nozick found, was to not use such a machine.
Of course, all this is purely academic. Who knows the real reason why people make altruistic decisions? Maybe it’s simply boredom, or capriciousness…
~J.W.