A Crash Course in the Neuroscience of Moral Motivation: An Introduction1

Imagine you are walking down a Los Angeles street when you see a homeless man. He's sitting outside a coffee shop and begging for food. You stop to give him a sympathetic look. Quickly, you enter the shop to buy a muffin and juice. You then give him the food, which he happily takes. After wishing him well, you continue on walking. By many accounts, you have just done a morally good action. In real life, you may never have given food to a starving man. However, it is likely that you have done other morally good actions.2 Maybe you have done volunteer work in your community. Maybe you have donated to charity. Think of a time you did a morally good action. Got it? Good. How can we explain why you did this moral action? Or more broadly, how can we explain why we act at all? One popular explanation of action comes from folk psychology. Luke summarizes, [f]olk psychology posits that we humans have beliefs and desires, and that we are motivated to do what we believe will fulfill our desires.3 While the folk psychology model is useful for daily life, it does have several grave flaws. In response to these flaws, economists have refined and quantified folk psychology into neoclassical economics. These economic models are more useful than folk psychology for explaining and predicting human action. However, as Luke points out, they still arent perfect. In A Crash Course in the Neuroscience of Human Motivation, Luke describes the challenges these models face.4 Moreover, he details how the neoclassical model can be further improved and reduced through the insights of modern neuroscience. Nevertheless, that reduction only covers amoral actions. Were still left with the question at the beginning of this post: What is the explanation for our moral actions? This sequence uses neuroscience to shed light on that question. It will do so over the course of four posts. This is the first post, which serves as an introduction. It has introduced the driving question behind the sequence: how can we explain moral action? It also outlines the other posts in the sequence. The second post describes philosophical accounts of general motivation to act. It uses folk psychological terms like motivation, as philosophy largely relies on folk psychology. The post delves into Humean and anti-Humean theories of motivation, as well as externalist and internalist accounts.
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This is the penultimate draft. If you have any corrections or criticisms, please let me know. Crockers Rules are in effect. 2 In this post, I implicitly suppose moral realism is true. I did this for ease of explanation. The neuroscience I will describe does not depend on any particular metaethical view. I encourage moral antirealists/irrealists to read morally good action as actions which some accounts consider moral, or something similar. 3 See A Crash Course in the Neuroscience of Human Motivation at: <http://lesswrong.com/lw/71x/a_crash_course_in_the_neuroscience_of_human/>. 4 Ibid.

The third post covers the different philosophical accounts of moral action. It discusses four main views: instrumentalism, cognitivism, sentimentalism, and personalism.5 Comparisons between the views show where they agree and disagree. The views are described with reference to the controversies outlined in the second post. Last, this post details the different experiences should we anticipate about the brain by accepting one view over the others. The fourth post concludes the sequence. It compares the anticipated facts of each philosophical view with how the brain actually works. Some views are much more consistent with the neuroscience than others are. Thus, those that are consistent are more likely to be correct.6 While we cannot yet definitely rule out any of the four views, some face severe challenges. These challenges should be noted when painting the larger metaethical picture.

In this context, cognitivism doesnt refer to the metaethical view that moral language expresses truthapt propositions. 6 As per Bayesian probability theory, P(H|E) P(E|H). For an explanation of the relevant mathematics, see An Intuitive Explanation of Eliezer Yudkouskys Intuitive Explanation of Bayes Theorem by Luke Muehlhauser. Found at: <http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=13156>.