Academic

Utilitarianism & Brain Abormality

By Lawrence Solum

Guy Kahane & Nicholas Shackel have a Communication on the website of Nature entitled Do abnormal responses show utilitarian bias?  Here is the summary:

Arising from: M. Koenigs et al. Nature 446, 908?911 (2007); Koenigs et al. reply

Neuroscience has recently turned to the study of utilitarian and non-utilitarian moral judgement. Koenigs et al.¹ examine the responses of normal subjects and those with ventromedial?prefrontal?cortex (VMPC) damage to moral scenarios drawn from functional magnetic resonance imaging studies by Greene et al.^{2, 3, 4}, and claim that patients with VMPC damage have an abnormally "utilitarian" pattern of moral judgement. It is crucial to the claims of Koenigs et al. that the scenarios of Greene et al. pose a conflict between utilitarian consequence and duty: however, many of them do not meet this condition. Because of this methodological problem, it is too early to claim that VMPC patients have a utilitarian bias.

And the summary of the original piece Koenigs et al.:

The psychological and neurobiological processes underlying moral judgement have been the focus of many recent empirical studies. Of central interest is whether emotions play a causal role in moral judgement, and, in parallel, how emotion-related areas of the brain contribute to moral judgement. Here we show that six patients with focal bilateral damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC), a brain region necessary for the normal generation of emotions and, in particular, social emotions, produce an abnormally 'utilitarian' pattern of judgements on moral dilemmas that pit compelling considerations of aggregate welfare against highly emotionally aversive behaviours (for example, having to sacrifice one person's life to save a number of other lives). In contrast, the VMPC patients' judgements were normal in other classes of moral dilemmas. These findings indicate that, for a selective set of moral dilemmas, the VMPC is critical for normal judgements of right and wrong. The findings support a necessary role for emotion in the generation of those judgements.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on March 24, 2008 (boomark / email).