Chapter Review: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Moral Judgment and Decision-Making

The Cognitive Neuroscience of Moral Judgment and Decision-Making is chapter 88 of the 2020 book The Cognitive Neurosciences (sixth edition). This chapter was written by Joshua Greene and Liane Young. The book is academic, 1113 pages long and expensive ($233). It is not written for a general audience. It is a fairly detailed review of the state of cognitive neurosciences for academics and researchers.

Moral thinking is whole-brain thinking

Greene is the pioneer of one of the major models of the neuroscience of morality, the dual process model (mentioned in this book review):

Unconscious emotion-intuition and conscious reasoning lead to moral judgment (dual inputs): Reasoning + emotion → moral judgment

According to this hypothesis, both unconscious emotions and intuitions and conscious reason play a role in moral thinking and decision-making. The evidence to support that general thesis strikes me as overwhelming. What isn't known is the details of how the brain does what it does.

One concern about the neuroscience of morality that Greene and Young (G&Y) discuss is the possibility that morality as a separate scientific research field could be in danger of becoming meaningless. Accumulating evidence shows that morality appears to have few or no neural mechanisms that are unique to  moral thinking. In other words, moral thinking appears to rely mostly or completely on the same pathways and brain structures that mediate various kinds of non-moral thinking. G&Y comment: “It’s now clear, however, that the ‘moral brain’ is, more or less, the whole brain .... Understanding this is, itself, a kind of progress .... if this unified [whole brain] theory of morality is correct, it doesn't bode well for a unified theory for moral neuroscience.”

Apparently, there is no specific brain structure(s) that uniquely do the mental data processing involved in making moral judgments.

Morality and moral neuroscience defined; The specter of warring tribalism

If one wants to do research on something, it helps to have a definition or description of it. The description has troubling implications for long-term human survival and well-being. G&Y write:

“... we regard morality as a suite of cognitive mechanisms to enable otherwise selfish individuals to reap the benefits of cooperation. Humans have psychological features that are straightforwardly moral (such as empathy) and others that are not (such as in-group favoritism) because they enable us to achieve goals that we can’t achieve through pure selfishness. .... Morality evolved, not as a device for universal cooperation but as a competitive weapon -- as a system for turning Me into Us, which in turn enables Us to outcompete Them. It does not follow from this, however, that are are doomed to be warring tribalists. Drawing on our ingenuity and flexibility, it’s possible to put human values ahead of evolutionary imperatives, as we do when we use birth control.”

Morality and pragmatic rationalism

Based on my limited understanding of history, humans have always been warring tribalists and arguably still are today to some extent. Although it usually doesn’t seem that way, here is less warring between armies and nations going on in modern times than in past centuries.

Other than birth control, G&Y do not give evidence for their belief that ingenuity and flexibility can allow the species to put moral values ahead of evolutionary imperatives. The sentiment seems to be mostly aspirational, not empirical. In view of the major expansion of power that modern communications technologies give to demagogues, tyrants, liars and other bad people, one can argue that democratic, rule of law-driven societies are falling to evolutionary imperatives, including authoritarianism. The rapid rise of modern communications technology has blown right past slow human evolution. Societies have to evolve because biological evolution cannot keep up.

One core goal of pragmatic rationalism’s moral structure is to somehow form a gigantic Us in-group for the human species. As I learn more, e.g., by reading chapter 88 of this book, that seems increasingly unlikely. The next best thing seems to try to unite all people in a single country based on the four core moral values that pragmatic rationalism is based on. Inherent in the third moral value, service to the public interest, is an anti-war bias that is intended to reduce violence generally, including between nations.

The problem with the nation-size In group formation hypothesis is that, as we are witnessing in real time, demagogues, liars and other bad people who rely on dark free speech, can tear the people of a nation to pieces. It is odd because the conservative and GOP side is explicitly appealing to American nationalism, but it nonetheless is tearing us apart. A major reason the modern conservative appeal is tearing us apart appears to be that it is significantly grounded in irrational bigotry, racism, distrust, hate, misogyny and intolerance of Out groups. Dark free speech has created all of that poison in the minds of millions of people.

At present, circumstances and evolutionary imperatives do not bode well for the rise of pragmatic rationalism. In my opinion, that is unfortunate to say the least.