The Frontal Cortex

My vacation is over. Your humble blogger is now back to work, complete with some awkward tan lines and a slightly jet-lagged brain.

I'd thought I'd begin by making sure everybody read Richard Rorty's scathing review of Marc Hauser's new book, Moral Minds, in the NY Times. Hauser's claims are simple: he holds that "we are born with abstract [moral and ethical] rules or principles, with nurture entering the picture to set the parameters and guide us toward the acquisition of particular moral systems." Thus, he believes that neuroscience will soon discover "what limitations exist on the range of possible or impossible moral systems." As anyone familiar with Rorty's pragmatic philosophy can guess, he's skeptical of such an approach. (I'm not sure why they let Rorty review this book, since his negativity was entirely predictable. If I were Hauser, I'd be pissed.) While I have yet to read Hauser's book, I think Rorty's skepticism sounds exactly right. I don't believe that colorful fMRI images will ever lead us to reconsider the 10 commandments or revise Tort law. While neuroscience might expose the neural anatomy of our moral intuitions, exposing the substrate of something sheds no light on whether it is right or wrong. Hauser is fond of Chomsky analogies - he thinks morality is just as innate as linguistic grammar - but he forgets that the neuroscience of language will never tell us how to conjugate a verb, or compose a sentence.

Hauser hopes that his book will convince us that "morality is grounded in our biology." Once we have grasped this fact, he thinks, "inquiry into our moral nature will no longer be the proprietary province of the humanities and social sciences, but a shared journey with the natural sciences." But by "grounded in" he does not mean that facts about what is right and wrong can be inferred from facts about neurons. The "grounding" relation in question is not like that between axioms and theorems. It is more like the relation between your computer's hardware and the programs you run on it. If your hardware were of the wrong sort, or if it got damaged, you could not run some of those programs.

Knowing more details about how the diodes in your computer are laid out may, in some cases, help you decide what software to buy. But now imagine that we are debating the merits of a proposed change in what we tell our kids about right and wrong. The neurobiologists intervene, explaining that the novel moral code will not compute. We have, they tell us, run up against hard-wired limits: our neural layout permits us to formulate and commend the proposed change, but makes it impossible for us to adopt it. Surely our reaction to such an intervention would be, "You might be right, but let's try adopting it and see what happens; maybe our brains are a bit more flexible than you think." It is hard to imagine our taking the biologists' word as final on such matters, for that would amount to giving them a veto over utopian moral initiatives.

The humanities and the social sciences have, over the centuries, done a great deal to encourage such initiatives. They have helped us better to distinguish right from wrong. Reading histories, novels, philosophical treatises and ethnographies has helped us to reprogram ourselves -- to update our moral software. Maybe someday biology will do the same. But Hauser has given us little reason to believe that day is near at hand.