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If It Feels Good to Be Good, It Might Be Only Natural

By Shankar Vedantam
From The Washington Post
May 28, 2007
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 hardwired,
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."

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