Missing Shades of Grue

A recent study shows that people get some pleasure from giving anonymously to others.

The brain responses were measured by a functional M.R.I. machine as a series of transactions occurred. Sometimes the student had to choose whether to donate some of her cash to a local food bank. Sometimes a tax was levied that sent her money to the food bank without her approval. Sometimes she received extra money, and sometimes the food bank received money without any of it coming from her.

Sure enough, when the typical student chose to donate to the food bank, she was rewarded with that warm glow: increased activity in the same ancient areas of the brain -- the caudate, nucleus accumbens and insula -- that respond when you eat a sweet dessert or receive money. But these pleasure centers were also activated, albeit not as much, when she was forced to pay a tax to the food bank.

The NYT article concludes with this interesting observation.

The most intriguing results were the ones from two of the experimental subjects, students whose brain scans made them definite egoists yet who were also among the most generous in donating. You could dismiss them as statistical outliers, but I like to think we have finally spotted the creature dismissed by so many scholars as myth.

These two women enjoyed no neural reward from charity ? their brains didn?t get enough of a warm glow to compensate for the pain of parting with their money ? yet they made anonymous donations anyway. Diogenes, we may not have found an honest man, but we do seem to have located a couple of true altruists. Either that or two determined masochists.

Or perhaps they were true utilitarians, calculating and preferring the total amount of happiness that would come from their donation, even if their portion was relatively small.

Taxes a Pleasure? Check the Brain Scan - New York Times

An interview with Marc Hauser appears in the recent Discover Magazine. In Hauser's new book Moral Minds he pretends contends that humans evolved to have an innate moral sense, an innate moral grammar analogous to Chomsky's idea of an innate universal grammar underlying our linguistic competence. The book surveys most of important and interesting data available on the subject, but in the end, we are left with this:

Discover: What is the evidence that infants already have a moral code ingrained in their brains?

Hauser: I don't think we're ready to say.

Is Morality Innate and Universal? | Mind & Brain | DISCOVER Magazine

Cory Tomsons at Thought Capital writes about Jonathan Haidt's new article The "New Synthesis in Moral Psychology" in the recent edition of Science (May 2007). I also found a video of Haidt's interesting talk and interview at the 2012 New Yorker conference. A good discussion of how liberals and conservatives think differently about morality.

Following the press coverage and public discussion of the VT gunman, David Brooks writes about the "morality line" between individual responsibility and background forces. He worries that scientific explanations of human behavior leave something important out.

It's important knowledge, but it's had the effect of reducing the scope of the human self. "Man is the measure of all things," the Greek philosopher Protagoras declared millenniums ago. But in the realm of the new science, the individual is like a cork bobbing on the currents of giant forces: evolution, brain chemistry, stress and upbringing. Human consciousness is merely an epiphenomena of the deep and controlling mental processes that lie within.

So where is free will, responsibility, choice, the self? He adds,

There still seems to be such things as selves, which are capable of making decisions and controlling destiny. It?s just that these selves can?t be seen on a brain-mapping diagram, and we no longer have any agreement about what they are.

Maybe a line is the wrong thing to try and locate. It assumes that the scientific explanations of the processes of decision making and control are opposed to--or irrelevant to--an account of responsible agency. As Brooks sees it

The killings happen at a moment when the people who explain behavior by talking about biology, chemistry and social science are assertive and on the march, while the people who explain behavior by talking about individual character are confused and losing ground.

But these aren't opposing sides, are they? Individual character is not outside the scope of science, and neither are selves, motives and norms. What's required here is not a defense of territory but a better attempt to understand the sense in which individuals can have the appropriate degree of control over their decisions and actions. Brooks, despite his interest in establishing boundaries, seems to acknowledge something along these lines.

We?re never going back. We?re not going to put our knowledge of brain chemistry or evolutionary psychology back in the bottle. It would be madness to think Cho Seung-Hui could have been saved from his demons with better sermons.

But it should be possible to acknowledge the scientists? insights without allowing them to become monopolists. It should be possible to reconstruct some self-confident explanation for what happened at Virginia Tech that puts individual choice and moral responsibility closer to the center.

I'm not sure what "monopolists" is supposed to mean here. Perhaps it is this recent focus on the atypical and very disordered brain of the VT gunman that makes Brooks and others worry that all science will reveal is that we are all criminals beneath the surface--lacking the ability to make socially responsible decisions and act on them appropriately. Or that we are all robotic slaves to a rigid set of hardwired behaviors. Unfortunately we rarely have the occasion to highlight what science is learning about healthy brains--the ones that don't act on their homicidal fantasies. While such new knowledge might undermine an attachment to Cartesian selves and quasi-religious myths about moral responsiblity, it might also help us better cultivate and promote responsible brains that more typically serve responsible people.

Politika Erotika: DAVID BROOKS: The Morality Line; Thanks to GFP.

Mixing Memory presents a nice summary of the recent Koenigs, et al. study ("Damage to the prefrontal cortex increases utilitarian moral judgements" in Nature) in which subjects with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex were more likely than control groups to favor a utilitarian judgment over a normally potent emotion-driven judgment in high-conflict personal moral dilemmas. MM suggests that

when people are making these decisions, both the emotional reaction and the moral principle are available at the same time, and one will win out over the other, depending largely on the strength of the emotional response (which is strong in the personal scenarios, and weak in the impersonal ones, at least when they're just being read on paper). This would be inconsistent with strong intuitionist theories of moral judgment.

Mixing Memory : Emotion, Reason, and Moral Judgment