Brain Damage

As readers of this blog will have noted, I write often about the hubris of scientists, especially evolutionary biologists and neuroscientists, who are trying to reduce human behavior to the most primitive level of unconscious, uncontrollable, and irrational reflexes, born out of random mutations and their utility in species survival.

            I used to think that some institutions had my back on this, notably the Jesuits, who educated me for eight crucial years. Reading Plato as early as high school, and taking courses in Logic and Epistemology, Metaphysics, Ethics, and the like every semester of college, I was proud of the inquiry tradition of these schools.  (For those who might think Catholic education is necessarily blindered, please read philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s chapters on Notre Dame and BYU in Cultivating Humanity; and remember the Jesuits are well to the left of the Holy Cross fathers.)

            So I was delighted, at first, to see an article about a young scientist at my alma mater who had received a national grant for her work.  The piece, entitled “Moral Compass,” described the work of a woman studying “what she calls moral intuition.” My school seemed to be continuing the tradition of asking the Big Questions, as did Jesus, Aquinas, Kant, and all those moral giants we were introduced to in our philosophy and theology classes.

But my hopes were dashed when I found that the scholar was approaching the problem with the tools of neurology, not philosophy, in her ominously named “morality lab.”  Specifically, she was using Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation to jolt the brain’s right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ), then used functionalMRI to watch brain activity as subjects heard about a person who tried but failed to poison a friend.  The conclusion: people who have had that part of their brain temporarily zapped are more lenient toward the failed attempt than unzapped subjects.

All well and good, if a little truncated perhaps for the reading audience.  We all pretty much know that damage to various parts of the brain can cause behavioral changes (from aggression to depression to lack of judgment), as well as that using various parts of the brain can develop greater connections and even greater overall size of those parts (London cab-drivers with large geographic memories, violinists with more developed hand areas).  But the article went on to quote the young scientist thus: “For a while now, I’ve been really interested in moral intuitions and where they come from—and the extent to which people share these intuitions.  When someone has a different set of intuitions, how do you know who’s right?”

That last sentence floored me for two reasons: that where moral intuitions come from is answerable in terms of synaptic locations, and even more, that knowing who’s right could be determined by examining the brain activity of the person having the intuition.           

Moral intuitions apparently mean immediate judgments, as studied in such classes as Harvard professor Michael Sandel’s “Justice,” widely available on the Internet.  In these studies, people are asked to respond quickly to a case, then to examine the validity of their intuition, and to elucidate possible reasons for and against it.  (The young scientist in question apparently attended exactly this class, which set her off on her career path.)

Are these intuitions instantaneous eruptions from a segment of our brain, or are they more the result of life’s experience, both direct and indirect?  Since the publication of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, there has been a lot of discussion of this question, and most writers and researchers have concluded that our “intuition,” as in his cases of art critics who doubted a statue’s authenticity, and tennis players who could predict faults on serves as soon as the stroke was beginning, is most valid when it is a rapid judgment based on long familiarity with a given situation.  Isn’t it likely that “moral intuitions” are more likely to be right when they’re grounded in years of thought, discussion, reading, and life experience?  (The child’s outburst that “it’s not fair” that rain spoiled the trip to the beach surely isn’t of the same validity as the later declaration that “it’s not fair” that he should be punished for cheating on a paper when he didn’t do so.)

So if I were asked where a moral judgment came from, I would suggest many possible answers: universal perceptions of what is harmful to oneself or to others, cultural upbringing, social conditions, ethical reflection, and on and on.  “Above and behind the right ear” would never even occur to me.  Would it to you?

It’s interesting that Socrates took up the same issue over two millennia ago.  While in prison, he tells us:

“I heard someone who had a book of Anaxagoras, out of which he read that mind was the disposer and cause of all, and I was quite delighted at the notion of this… What hopes I had formed, and how grievously was I disappointed! As I proceeded, I found my philosopher altogether forsaking mind or any other principle of order…I might compare him to a person who…when he endeavored to explain the causes of my actions, went on to show that I sit here because my body is made up of bones and muscles; and the bones, as he would say, are hard and have ligaments which divide them, and the muscles are elastic, and they cover the bones, which have also a covering or environment of flesh and skin which contains them; and as the bones are lifted at their joints by the contraction or relaxation of the muscles, I am able to bend my limbs, and this is why I am sitting here in a curved posture… forgetting to mention the true cause, which is that the Athenians have thought fit to condemn me, and accordingly I have thought it better and more right to remain here and undergo my sentence…

There is surely a strange confusion of causes and conditions in all this. It may be said, indeed, that without bones and muscles and the other parts of the body I cannot execute my purposes. But to say that I do as I do because of them, and that this is the way in which mind acts, and not from the choice of the best, is a very careless and idle mode of speaking. I wonder that they cannot distinguish the cause from the condition.”

That same error of confusing causes and conditions is apparently still with us.

Further, what exactly does the study, or the snippet from it the college magazine published, tell us?  That people are more lenient toward the person who fails to commit a misdeed when their RTPJ is disrupted.  Not only do we not know whether we’re talking about averages, or the same people under two circumstances.  We also don’t know whether they judged these would-be killers extremely harshly and then somewhat less harshly, or fairly harshly and then very leniently.  Or whether a disrupted RTPJ left them with more scope to consider the situation in a broader light, or made them indifferent to the matter and so less punitive.

Most of all, how could this study in any way tell us which moral intuition was right?  Is any moral intuition by a person with an apparently whole RTPJ “right”?  If two people whose RTPJs appear similar come to different judgments, who’s right?  Whatever the truth of the old question whether “ought” can be derived from “is,” there’s not much likelihood of ever being able to prove that a point of view is right by examining the neuro-bio-electro-chemical events that accompany holding or stating that point of view.

If we could do that, imagine the effects.  No need for debates to choose a candidate – just put them in the scanner.  Criminals could prove their innocence by showing a clean RTPJ or whatever other locus was relevant, or could plead the “defective RTPJ” defense.  Unless we could agree on the precise definition of health or superiority in RTPJs, we could always dismiss others’ views:  this liberal has an overactive RTPJ, that conservative an underactive one, so he is too soft-hearted, she’s too severe.  (Maybe we could define a healthy RTPJ as the site of Right, True, and Proper Judgments.)

One way of looking at this project is that it’s running backward.  It makes perfect sense to examine the brains of people whose views or actions are highly atypical, to see if there’s a biological contribution: does the dyslexic, autistic or sociopathic person have a specific brain abnormality?  Does the gifted person have some different abnormality? (The second has so far been much harder to come upon than the first.) But when two apparently normal people hold differing moral intuitions, say on war, capital punishment, abortion, or hate speech, does it make any sense to think that we can examine their brains to find out not only why they differ (I expect there are dozens of places in the brain, from memories to emotions to others we can barely dream of, that go into a complex decision), but to say who is right?

We need, and I believe will always need, separate criteria for deciding what is right and for discovering what neural correlates happen when we make a moral choice. Trying to do otherwise can lead in one of two directions: fruitless quests to find moral and immoral synapses, or frightening efforts to control behavior by altering the brains of the morally wrong.  Nazi eugenics were bad enough, but judging and condemning people for the state of their brains as others were once judged and exterminated because of their noses or foreheads would be even more disastrous.