[tt] WP: If It Feels Good to Be Good, It Might Be Only Natural

[Premise Checker]

If It Feels Good to Be Good, It Might Be Only Natural
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/27/AR2007052701056_pf.html
[Thanks to Sarah for this.]

By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 28, 2007; A01

The e-mail came from the next room.

"You gotta see this!" Jorge Moll had written. Moll and Jordan
Grafman, neuroscientists at the National Institutes of Health, had
been scanning the brains of volunteers as they were asked to think
about a scenario involving either donating a sum of money to charity
or keeping it for themselves.

As Grafman read the e-mail, Moll came bursting in. The scientists
stared at each other. Grafman was thinking, "Whoa -- wait a minute!"

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.

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.

Grafman and others are using brain imaging and psychological
experiments to study whether the brain has a built-in moral compass.
The results -- many of them published just in recent months -- are
showing, unexpectedly, that many aspects of morality appear to be
hard-wired in the brain, most likely the result of evolutionary
processes that began in other species.

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.

What the new research is showing is that morality has biological
roots -- such as the reward center in the brain that lit up in
Grafman's experiment -- that have been around for a very long time.

The more researchers learn, the more it appears that the foundation
of morality is empathy. Being able to recognize -- even experience
vicariously -- what another creature is going through was an
important leap in the evolution of social behavior. And it is only a
short step from this awareness to many human notions of right and
wrong, says Jean Decety, a neuroscientist at the University of
Chicago.

The research enterprise has been viewed with interest by
philosophers and theologians, but already some worry that it raises
troubling questions. Reducing morality and immorality to brain
chemistry -- rather than free will -- might diminish the importance
of personal responsibility. Even more important, some wonder whether
the very idea of morality is somehow degraded if it turns out to be
just another evolutionary tool that nature uses to help species
survive and propagate.

Moral decisions can often feel like abstract intellectual
challenges, but a number of experiments such as the one by Grafman
have shown that emotions are central to moral thinking. In another
experiment published in March, University of Southern California
neuroscientist Antonio R. Damasio and his colleagues showed that
patients with damage to an area of the brain known as the
ventromedial prefrontal cortex lack the ability to feel their way to
moral answers.

When confronted with moral dilemmas, the brain-damaged patients
coldly came up with "end-justifies-the-means" answers. Damasio said
the point was not that they reached immoral conclusions, but that
when confronted by a difficult issue -- such as whether to shoot
down a passenger plane hijacked by terrorists before it hits a major
city -- these patients appear to reach decisions without the anguish
that afflicts those with normally functioning brains.

Such experiments have two important implications. One is that
morality is not merely about the decisions people reach but also
about the process by which they get there. Another implication, said
Adrian Raine, a clinical neuroscientist at the University of
Southern California, is that society may have to rethink how it
judges immoral people.

Psychopaths often feel no empathy or remorse. Without that
awareness, people relying exclusively on reasoning seem to find it
harder to sort their way through moral thickets. Does that mean they
should be held to different standards of accountability?

"Eventually, you are bound to get into areas that for thousands of
years we have preferred to keep mystical," said Grafman, the chief
cognitive neuroscientist at the National Institute of Neurological
Disorders and Stroke. "Some of the questions that are important are
not just of intellectual interest, but challenging and frightening
to the ways we ground our lives. We need to step very carefully."

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.

Moral decision-making often involves competing brain networks vying
for supremacy, he said. Simple moral decisions -- is killing a child
right or wrong? -- are simple because they activate a
straightforward brain response. Difficult moral decisions, by
contrast, activate multiple brain regions that conflict with one
another, he said.

In one 2004 brain-imaging experiment, Greene asked volunteers to
imagine that they were hiding in a cellar of a village as enemy
soldiers came looking to kill all the inhabitants. If a baby was
crying in the cellar, Greene asked, was it right to smother the
child to keep the soldiers from discovering the cellar and killing
everyone?

The reason people are slow to answer such an awful question, the
study indicated, is that emotion-linked circuits automatically
signaling that killing a baby is wrong clash with areas of the brain
that involve cooler aspects of cognition. One brain region activated
when people process such difficult choices is the inferior parietal
lobe, which has been shown to be active in more impersonal
decision-making. This part of the brain, in essence, was "arguing"
with brain networks that reacted with visceral horror.

Such studies point to a pattern, Greene said, showing "competing
forces that may have come online at different points in our
evolutionary history. A basic emotional response is probably much
older than the ability to evaluate costs and benefits."

While one implication of such findings is that people with certain
kinds of brain damage may do bad things they cannot be held
responsible for, the new research could also expand the boundaries
of moral responsibility. Neuroscience research, Greene said, is
finally explaining a problem that has long troubled philosophers and
moral teachers: Why is it that people who are willing to help
someone in front of them will ignore abstract pleas for help from
those who are distant, such as a request for a charitable
contribution that could save the life of a child overseas?

"We evolved in a world where people in trouble right in front of you
existed, so our emotions were tuned to them, whereas we didn't face
the other kind of situation," Greene said. "It is comforting to
think your moral intuitions are reliable and you can trust them. But
if my analysis is right, your intuitions are not trustworthy. Once
you realize why you have the intuitions you have, it puts a burden
on you" to think about morality differently.

Marc Hauser, another Harvard researcher, has used cleverly designed
psychological experiments to study morality. He said his research
has found that people all over the world process moral questions in
the same way, suggesting that moral thinking is intrinsic to the
human brain, rather than a product of culture. It may be useful to
think about morality much like language, in that its basic features
are hard-wired, Hauser said. Different cultures and religions build
on that framework in much the way children in different cultures
learn different languages using the same neural machinery.

Hauser said that if his theory is right, there should be aspects of
morality that are automatic and unconscious -- just like language.
People would reach moral conclusions in the same way they construct
a sentence without having been trained in linguistics. Hauser said
the idea could shed light on contradictions in common moral stances.

U.S. law, for example, distinguishes between a physician who removes
a feeding tube from a terminally ill patient and a physician who
administers a drug to kill the patient.

Hauser said the only difference is that the second scenario is more
emotionally charged -- and therefore feels like a different moral
problem, when it really is not: "In the end, the doctor's intent is
to reduce suffering, and that is as true in active as in passive
euthanasia, and either way the patient is dead."