MORAL PRÁCTICA*

Hola! les dejo un artículo de J. Greene en base al cual se generará el debate de hoy en la noche en la Mesa del Café... por si gustan acompañarnos y si quieren leerlo también!! (espero les gustee)...

¿Por qué hoy en la noche? pues... nos movemos con la dinámica scial y existieron medidas de prevnción por las cuales no pudimos reunirnos en días anteriores...

Hoy Jueves 7 de Mayo! 8 pm.. En el Sorbo del Café de plaza del sol.. (planta baja)... NO FALTEN!!



GreeneOPINIONMany moral philosophers regard scientific research as irrelevant to their work becausescience deals with what is the case, whereas ethics deals with what ought to be.

Someethicists question this is/ought distinction, arguing that science and normative ethicsare continuous and that ethics might someday be regarded as a natural socialscience. I agree with traditional ethicists that there is a sharp and crucial distinctionbetween the ‘is’ of science and the ‘ought’ of ethics, but maintain nonetheless thatscience, and neuroscience in particular, can have profound ethical implications byproviding us with information that will prompt us to re-evaluate our moral values and ourconceptions of morality.Many moral philosophers boast a wellcultivated indifference to research in moralpsychology. This is regrettable, but not entirely groundless1.

Philosophers have longrecognized that facts concerning how people actually think or act do not imply facts abouthow people ought to think or act, at least not in any straightforward way.This principle issummarized by the Humean2 dictum that one can’t derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. In a similarvein,moral philosophers since Moore3 have taken pains to avoid the ‘naturalistic fallacy’,the mistake of identifying that which is natural with that which is right or good (or,more broadly, the mistake of identifying moral properties with natural properties).Prominent among those accused by Moore of committing this fallacy was Herbert Spencer,the father of ‘social Darwinism’, who aimed to ground moral and political philosophy inevolutionary principles4.

Spencer coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’, giving Darwin’spurely biological notion of fitness a sociomora twist: for the good of the species, thegovernment ought not to interfere with nature’s tendency to let the strong dominatethe weak.Spencerian social Darwinism is long gone, but the idea that principles of natural sciencemight provide a foundation for normative ethics has won renewed favour in recent years.Some friends of ‘naturalized ethics’ argue, contra Hume and Moore, that the doctrine ofthe naturalistic fallacy is itself a fallacy, and that facts about right and wrong are, in principleat least, as amenable to scientific discovery as any others.Most of the arguments infavour of ethics as continuous with natural science have been rather abstract, with noattempt to support particular moral theories on the basis of particular scientific research5,6.Casebeer’s neuroscientific defense of Aristotelian virtue theory (this issue) is a notableexception in this regard7.A critical survey of recent attempts to naturalize ethics is beyond the scope of thisarticle. Instead I will simply state that I am sceptical of naturalized ethics for theusual Humean and Moorean reasons.Contemporary proponents of naturalized ethics are aware of these objections, but in myopinion their theories do not adequately meet them. Casebeer, for example, examines recentwork in neuroscientific moral psychology and finds that actual moral decision-making looksmore like what Aristotle recommends8 and less like what Kant9 and Mill10 recommend.From this he concludes that the available neuroscientific evidence counts against themoral theories of Kant and Mill, and in favour of Aristotle’s. This strikes me as a nonsequitur.How do we go from ‘This is how we think’ to ‘This is how we ought to think’? Kantargued that our actions should exhibit a kind of universalizability that is grounded in respectfor other people as autonomous rational agents9.Mill argued that we should act so asto produce the greatest sum of happiness10. So long as people are capable of taking Kant’s orMill’s advice, how does it follow from neuroscientific data — indeed, how could it followfrom such data — that people ought to ignore Kant’s and Mill’s recommendations in favourof Aristotle’s? In other words, how does it follow from the proposition that Aristotelianmoral thought is more natural than Kant’s o Mill’s that Aristotle’s is better?Whereas I am sceptical of attempts to derive moral principles from scientific facts, Iagree with the proponents of naturalized ethics that scientific facts can have profoundmoral implications, and that moral philosophers have paid too little attention to relevantwork in the natural sciences.My understanding of the relationship between science andnormative ethics is, however, different from that of naturalized ethicists.

Casebeer andothers view science and normative ethics as continuous and are therefore interested innormative moral theories that resemble or are ‘consilient’with theories of moral psychology.Their aim is to find theories of right and wrong that in some sense match naturalhuman practice. By contrast, I view science as offering a ‘behind the scenes’ look at humanmorality. Just as a well-researched biography can, depending on what it reveals, boost ordeflate one’s esteem for its subject, the scientific investigation of human morality can helpus to understand human moral nature, and in so doing change our opinion of it.Neuroscience and normative ethics There is a growing consensus that moraljudgements are based largely on intuition — ‘gut feelings’ about what is right or wrong inparticular cases11.

Sometimes these intuitions conflict, both within and between individuals.Are all moral intuitions equally worthy of our allegiance, or are some more reliable thanothers? Our answers to this question will probably be affected by an improved understandingof where our intuitions come from, both in terms of their proximate psychological/neuralbases and their evolutionary histories.Consider the following moral dilemma (adapted from Unger12). You are drivingalong a country road when you hear a plea for help coming from some roadside bushes.Youpull over and encounter a man whose legs are covered with blood. The man explains that hehas had an accident while hiking and asks you to take him to a nearby hospital.Your initialinclination is to help this man,who will probably lose his leg if he does not get to the hospitalsoon.However, if you give this man a lift, his blood will ruin the leather upholstery of yourcar. Is it appropriate for you to leave this man by the side of the road in order to preserveyour leather upholstery (FIG. 1a)? Most people say that it would be seriously wrong to abandon this man out of concern forone’s car seats.Now consider a different case (also adapted from Unger12), which nearly allof us have faced.

You are at home one day when the mail arrives.You receive a letter froma reputable international aid organization. The letter asks you to make a donation of twohundred dollars to their organization. The letter explains that a two-hundred-dollardonation will allow this organization to provide needed medical attention to somepoor people in another part of the world. Is it appropriate for you to not make a donationto this organization in order to save money (FIG. 1b)?Most people say that it would not be wrong to refrain from making a donation inthis case.And yet this case and the previous one are similar. In both cases, one hasthe option to give someone much needed medical attention at a relatively modestfinancial cost.And yet, the person who fails to help in the first case is a moral monster,whereas the person who fails to help in the second case is morally unexceptional.Whyis there this difference? About thirty years ago, the utilitarianphilosopher Singer argue that there is no real moral difference between cases such as thesetwo, and that we in the affluent world ought to be giving far more than we do to helpthe world’s most unfortunate people13.(Singer currently gives about 20% of his annual income to charity.) Many people,when confronted with this issue, assume or insist that there must be ‘some good reason’for why it is alright to ignore the severe needs of unfortunate people in far off countries,but deeply wrong to ignore the needs of someone like the unfortunate hiker in the firststory. (Indeed, you might be coming up with reasons of your own right now.)Maybe there is ‘some good reason’ for why it is okay to spend money on sushi and powerwindows while millions who could be saved die of hunger and treatable illnesses. Butmaybe this pair of moral intuitions has nothing to do with ‘some good reason’ andeverything to do with the way our brains happen to be built.

To explore this and related issues, my colleagues and I conducted a brain imagingstudy in which participants responded to the above moral dilemmas as well as manyothers14.The dilemma with the bleeding hiker is a ‘personal’ moral dilemma, in which themoral violation in question occurs in an ‘upclose- and-personal’ manner. The donationdilemma is an ‘impersonal’ moral dilemma, in which the moral violation in question doesnot have this feature. To make a long story short,we found that judgements in responseto ‘personal’moral dilemmas, compared with ‘impersonal’ ones, involved greater activity inbrain areas that are associated with emotion and social cognition.Why should this be?An evolutionary perspective is useful here.Over the last four decades, it has become clearthat natural selection can favour altruistic instincts under the right conditions, and manybelieve that this is how human altruism came to be15. If that is right, then our altruisticinstincts will reflect the environment in which they evolved rather than our present environment.With this in mind, consider that our ancestors did not evolve in an environment inwhich total strangers on opposite sides of the world could save each others’ lives by makingrelatively modest material sacrifices.

Consider also that our ancestors did evolve in anenvironment in which individuals standing face-to-face could save each others’ lives,sometimes only through considerable personal sacrifice. Given all of this, it makessense that we would have evolved altruistic instincts that direct us to help others in direneed, but mostly when the ones in need are presented in an ‘up-close-and-personal’way.What does this mean for ethics? Again,we are tempted to assume that there must be‘some good reason’ why it is monstrous to ignore the needs of someone like the bleedinghiker, but perfectly acceptable to spend our money on unnecessary luxuries whilemillions starve and die of preventable diseases.Maybe there is ‘some good reason’for this pair of attitudes, but the evolutionary account given above suggests otherwise: weignore the plight of the world’s poorest people not because we implicitly appreciate thenuanced structure of moral obligation, but because, the way our brains are wired up,needy people who are ‘up close and personal’ push our emotional buttons, whereas thosewho are out of sight languish out of mind.This is just a hypothesis. I do not wish to pretend that this case is closed or,more generally,that science has all the moral answers. Nor do I believe that normative ethics is on itsway to becoming a branch of the natural sciences, with the ‘is’ of science and the ‘ought’ ofmorality gradually melding together. Instead,I think that we can respect the distinctionbetween how things are and how things ought to be while acknowledging, as the precedingdiscussion illustrates, that scientific facts have the potential to influence our moralthinking in a deep way.Neuroscience and meta-ethics Philosophers routinely distinguish betweenethics and ‘meta-ethics’.

Ethics concerns particular moral issues (such as our obligationsto the poor) and theories that attempt to resolve such issues (such as utilitarianism orAristotelian virtue ethics).Meta-ethics, by contrast, is concerned with more foundationalissues, with the status of ethics as a whole.What do we mean when we say somethinglike “Capital punishment is wrong”? Are we stating a putative fact, or merely expressingan opinion? According to ‘moral realism’ there are genuine moral facts, whereas moralanti-realists or moral subjectivists maintain that there are no such facts. Although thisdebate is unlikely to be resolved any time soon, I believe that neuroscience and relateddisciplines have the potential to shed light on these matters by helping us to understand ourcommon-sense conceptions of morality.I begin with the assumption (lamentably, not well tested) that many people, probablymost people, are moral realists. That is, they believe that some things really are right orwrong, independent of what any particular person or group thinks about it. For example,if you were to turn the corner and find a group of wayward youths torturing a straycat16, you might say to yourself something like, “That’s wrong!”, and in saying this youwould mean not merely that you are opposed to such behaviour, or that some group towhich you belong is opposed to it, but rather that such behaviour is wrong in and of itself,regardless of what anyone happens to think about it. In other words, you take it that thereis a wrongness inherent in such acts that you can perceive, but that exists independently ofyour moral beliefs and values or those of any particular culture.

This realist conception of morality contrasts with familiar anti-realist conceptions of beauty and other experiential qualities.When gazing upon a dazzling sunset,we might feel as if we are experiencing a beauty that is inherent in the evening sky, but many people acknowledge that such beauty, rather thanbeing in the sky, is ultimately ‘in the eye of the beholder’. Likewise for matters of sexualattraction.You find your favourite movie star sexy, but take no such interest in baboons.Baboons, on the other hand, probably find each other very sexy and take very little interestin the likes of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.Who is right, us or the baboons?Many of us would plausibly insist that there is simply no fact of the matter.Although sexinessmight seem to be a mind-independent property of certain individuals, it is ultimatelyin the eye (that is, the mind) of the beholder.The big meta-ethical question, then, might be posed as follows: are the moral truths towhich we subscribe really full-blown truths, mind-independent facts about the nature ofmoral reality, or are they, like sexiness, in the mind of the beholder? One way to try to answer this question is to examine what is in the minds of the relevant beholders. Understanding how we make moral judgements might help us to determine whether our judgements are perceptions of external truthsor projections of internal attitudes.

More specifically,we might ask whether the appearance of moral truth can be explained in a way that does not require the reality ofmoral truth. As noted above, recent evidence from neuroscience and neighbouring disciplines indicates that moral judgement is often anintuitive, emotional matter.Although many moral judgements are difficult,much moral judgement is mplished in an intuitive, effortless way.An interesting feature of many intuitive, effortless cognitive processes is that they are accompanied by a perceptual phenomenology. For example, humans can effortlessly determine whether a given face is male or female without any knowledge of how such judgements are made.When you look at someone, you have no experience of working out whether that person is male or female. You just see that person’s maleness or femaleness. By contrast, you do not look at a star in the sky and see that it is receding.

One can imagine creatures that automatically process spectroscopic redshifts, but ashumans we do not. All of this makes sense from an evolutionary point of view. We have evolved mechanisms for making quick, emotion-based social judgements, for ‘seeing’ rightness and wrongness, because our intensely social lives favour such capacities, but there was little selective pressure on ourancestors to know about the movements of distant stars. We have here the beginnings of a debunking explanation of moral realism: we believe in moral realism because moral experience has a perceptual phenomenology, and moral experience has a perceptual phenomenology because natural selection has outfitted us with mechanisms for making intuitive, emotion-based moral judgements,much as it has outfitted us with mechanisms for making intuitive, emotion-based judgements about who among us are the most suitable mates.

Therefore,we can understand our inclination towards moral realism not as an insight into the nature of moral truth, but as a by-product of the efficient cognitive processes we use tomake moral decisions.According to this view, moral realism is akin to naive realism about sexiness, like making the understandable mistake of thinking that Tom Cruise is objectivelysexier than his baboon counterparts.(Note that according to this view moral judgement is importantly different from gender perception. Both involve efficient cognitive processes that give rise to a perceptual phenomenology, but in the case of gender perception the phenomenology is veridical: there really are mind-independent facts aboutwho is male or female.) Admittedly, this argument requires more elaboration and support, and some philosophers might object to the way I have framed the issue surrounding moral realism. Othersmight wonder how one can speak on behalf of moral anti-realism after sketching an argumentin favour of increasing aid to the poor. (Brief reply: giving up on moral realism does not mean giving up on moral values. It is one thing to care about the plight of the poor, and another to think that one’s caring is objectively correct.) However, the point of this brief sketch is not to make a conclusive scientificcase against moral realism, but simply to explain how neuroscientific evidence, and scientificevidence more broadly, have the potential to influence the way we understand morality. (Elsewhere I attempt to make this case more thoroughly17.) Understanding where our moral instincts come from and how they work can, I argue, lead us to doubt that our moral convictions stem from perceptions of moral truth rather than projections of moral ttitudes. Some might worry that this conclusion, if true, would be very unfortunate. First, it is importantto bear in mind that a conclusion’s being unfortunate does not make it false. Second, this conclusion might not be unfortunate at all.

A world full of people who regard their moral convictions as reflections of personal values rather than reflections of ‘the objective moral truth’ might be a happier and more peaceful place than the world we currently inhabit17.The maturation of human morality will, in many ways, resemble the maturation of an individual person.As we come to understand ourselves better — who we are, and why we are the way we are — we will inevitably change ourselves in the process. Some of our beliefs and values will survive this process of self-discovery and reflection, whereas others will not. The course of our moral maturation will not be entirely predictable, but I am confident that the scientific study of human nature will havean increasingly important role in nature’s grand experiment with moral animals. Joshua Greene is at the Department of Psychologyand the Center for the Study of Brain,Mind,and Behavior, Princeton University,Princeton,New Jersey 08544, USA.e-mail: jdgreene@princeton.edu