"Something to Ponder..."

In today's excerpt - Jonah Lehrer proposes that
morality is a form of decision-making, and is based
on emotions, not logic:

"Psychopaths shed light on a crucial subset of
decision-making that's referred to as morality. Morality
can be a squishy, vague concept, and yet, at its
simplest level, it's nothing but a series of choices
about how we treat other people. When you act in a
moral manner - when you recoil from violence, treat
others fairly, and help strangers in need - you are
making decisions that take people besides yourself
into account. You are thinking about the feelings of
others, sympathizing with their states of mind.

"This is what psychopaths can't do. ... They are
missing the primal emotional cues that the rest of us
use as guides when making moral decisions. The
psychopath's brain is bored by expressions of terror.
The main problem seems to be a broken amygdala, a
brain area responsible for propagating aversive
emotions such as fear and anxiety. As a result,
psychopaths never feel bad when they make other
people feel bad. ... Hurting someone else is just
another way of getting what he wants, a perfectly
reasonable way to satisfy desires. The absence of
emotion makes the most basic moral concepts
incomprehensible. G. K. Chesterton was right: 'The
madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The
madman is the man who has lost everything except
his reason.'

"At first glance, the connection between morality and
the emotions might be a little unnerving. Moral
decisions are supposed to rest on a firm logical and
legal foundation. Doing the right thing means carefully
weighing competing claims, like a dispassionate
judge. These aspirations have a long history. The
luminaries of the Enlightenment, such as Leibniz and
Descartes, tried to construct a moral system entirely
free of feelings. Immanuel Kant argued that doing the
right thing was merely a consequence of acting
rationally. Immorality, he said, was a result of illogic. ...
The modern legal system still subscribes to this
antiquated set of assumptions and pardons anybody
who demonstrates a 'defect in rationality' - these
people are declared legally insane, since the rational
brain is supposedly responsible for distinguishing
between right and wrong. If you can't reason, then you
shouldn't be punished.

"But all of these old conceptions of morality are based
on a fundamental mistake. Neuroscience can now
see the substrate of moral decisions, and there's
nothing rational about it. 'Moral judgment is like
aesthetic judgment,' writes Jonathan Haidt, a
psychologist at the University of Virginia. 'When you
see a painting, you usually know instantly and
automatically whether you like it. If someone asks you
to explain your judgment, you confabulate ... Moral
arguments are much the same: Two people feel
strongly about an issue, their feelings come first, and
their reasons are invented on the fly, to throw at each
other.'

"Kant and his followers thought the rational brain
acted like a scientist: we used reason to arrive at an
accurate view of the world. This meant that morality
was based on objective values; moral judgments
described moral facts. But the mind doesn't work this
way. When you are confronted with an ethical
dilemma, the unconscious automatically generates
an emotional reaction. (This is what psychopaths can't
do.) Within a few milliseconds, the brain has made up
its mind; you know what is right and what is wrong.
These moral instincts aren't rational. ...

"It's only after the emotions have already made the
moral decision that those rational circuits in the
prefrontal cortex are activated. People come up with
persuasive reasons to justify their moral intuition.
When it comes to making ethical decisions, human
rationality isn't a scientist, it's a lawyer. This inner
attorney gathers bits of evidence, post hoc
justifications, and pithy rhetoric in order to make the
automatic reaction seem reasonable. But this
reasonableness is just a facade, an elaborate self-
delusion. Benjamin Franklin said it best in his
autobiography: 'So convenient a thing it is to be a
reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or
make a reason for everything one has a mind to
do.'

"In other words, our standard view of morality - the
philosophical consensus for thousands of years - has
been exactly backward. We've assumed that our moral
decisions are the byproducts of rational thought, that
humanity's moral rules are founded in such things as
the Ten Commandments and Kant's categorical
imperative. Philosophers and theologians have
spilled lots of ink arguing about the precise logic of
certain ethical dilemmas. But these arguments miss
the central reality of moral decisions, which is that
logic and legality have little to do with
anything."

Jonah Lehrer, How We Decide, Houghton,
Mifflin, Harcourt, Copyright 2009 by Jonah Lehrer,
Kindle Loc. 1922-79.

For Stephen Christopher Harris

"Fear Eats the Soul"