The Thinking Meat Project

Emotions vs rationality in moral decisions

Last week I blogged a news story about differences in brain activity between those who made a financial decision more rationally versus those who responded more to emotional cues. (A recent study indicates that it’s not that there’s less emotion in the former, but that the emotion is balanced by an increase in complex cognitive activity associated with planning and decision-making.) This article from the Boston Globe covers the way emotions and rationality interact when we make decisions about morality. Using one of those hypothetical situations so essential to the discussion of moral philosophy, this article discusses two possibilities for how humans make moral decisions. When we have decide whether or not it’s right to sacrifice one person for the benefit of multiple other people, do we base our decision on the philosophical principle that humans are ends in themselves, never means to an end, or do we decide based on our emotional response to the circumstances of the sacrifice? (I.e., are we less likely to decide that the sacrifice is right if we have to actually interact with the person being sacrificed, rather than just pushing a button or flipping a switch?) There’s some interesting evidence for the latter, but it’s the discussion of the former, toward the end of the article, that is most intriguing. Perhaps, suggests Marc Hauser of Harvard, we have an inborn system that figures out the philosophical principles of morality for us before we have a chance to exercise either our emotions or our thoughts. This system might be something analogous to our capacity for language, and exploring how far the analogy holds could open up some very interesting questions. Hauser has a book coming out soon…another one for the reading list.