Braintrust What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality
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Copyright © 2011 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
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Jacket illustration: Brain © Sebastian Kaulitzki/Shutterstock
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Churchland, Patricia Smith.
Braintrust : what neuroscience tells us about morality / Patricia S.
Churchland.
p. ; cm.
What neuroscience tells us about morality
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-691-13703-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Ethics. 2. Neurobiology.
I. Title. II. Title: What neuroscience tells us about morality.
[DNLM: 1. Neuropsychology. 2. Morals. 3. Neurosciences—methods.
4. Philosophy. 5. Social Behavior. WL 103.5]
QP430.C58 2011
612.8—dc22 2010043584
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Electra
Printed on acid-free paper. ¥
Printed in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
It’s a vice to trust everyone, and equally a vice to trust no one.
—Seneca
This is our mammalian conflict: what to give to others and what to
keep for yourself. Treading that line, keeping others in check and
being kept in check by them, is what we call morality.
—Ian McEwan, Eternal Love
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Contents
List of Illustrations ix
1. Introduction 1
2. Brain-Based Values 12
3. Caring and Caring For 27
4. Cooperating and Trusting 63
5. Networking: Genes, Brains, and Behavior 95
6. Skills for a Social Life 118
7. Not as a Rule 163
8. Religion and Morality 191
Notes 205
Bibliography 235
Acknowledgments 259
Index 261
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Illustrations
2.1. The molecular structure of oxytocin 15
3.1. Subcortical pathways 29
3.2. Spheres of caring 31
3.3. The cerebral cortex 36
3.4. The human pain system 38
3.5. The anatomy of the insula 39
3.6. The cingulate cortex, orbitofrontal cortex, amygdala,
and hippocampus 41
3.7. The vagus nerve pathways 43
3.8. The reward system 51
6.1. The prefrontal cortex in six species 120
6.2. Mirror neurons in premotor cortex 136
6.3. Major landmarks on the surface of the human brain 148
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braintrust
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1. Introduction
Trial by ordeal seemed to me, as I learned about it in school, ridicu-
lously unfair. How could it have endured as an institution in Europe
for hundreds of years? The central idea was simple: with God’s inter-
vention, innocence would plainly reveal itself, as the accused thief
sank to the bottom of the pond, or the accused adulterer remained
unburned by the red hot poker placed in his hand. Only the guilty
would drown or burn. (For witches, the ordeal was less “forgiving”: if
the accused witch drowned she was presumed innocent; if she bobbed
to the surface, she was guilty, whereupon she was hauled off to a wait-
ing fire.) With time on our hands, my friend and I concocted a plan.
She would falsely accuse me of stealing her purse, and then I would
lay my hand on the stove and see whether it burned. We fully expected
it would burn, and it did. So if the test was that obvious, how could
people have trusted to trial by ordeal as a system of justice?
From the medieval clerics, the answer would have been that our test
was frivolous, and that God would not deign to intervene with a mir-
acle for the benefit of kids fooling around. That answer seemed to us
2 • C h a pt er 1
a bit cooked up. What is the evidence God ever intervened on behalf
of the wrongly accused? A further difficulty concerned nonbelievers,
such as those not yet reached by missionaries, or . . . maybe me? Still,
this answer alerted us to the matter of metaphysical (or as we said then,
“otherworldly”) beliefs in moral practices, along with the realization
that what seemed to us obvious about fairness in determining guilt
might not be obvious after all.
My history teacher tried to put the medieval practice in context,
aiming to soften slightly our sense of superiority over our medieval
ancestors: in trial by ordeal, the guilty were more likely to confess,
since they believed God would not intervene on their behalf, whereas
the innocent, convinced that God would help out, were prepared to
go to trial. So the system might work pretty well for getting confessions
from the guilty, even if it did poorly for protecting the innocent. This
answer alerted us to the presence of pragmatics in moral practices,
which struck us as a little less lofty than we had been led to expect.
How hideously unfair if you were innocent and did go to trial. I could
visualize myself, bound by ropes, drowning in a river after being ac-
cused of witchcraft by my piano teacher.1
So what is it to be fair? How do we know what to count as fair? Why
do we regard trial by ordeal as wrong? Thus opens the door into the
vast tangled forest of questions about right and wrong, good and evil,
virtues and vices. For most of my adult life as a philosopher, I shied
away from plunging unreservedly into these sorts of questions about
morality. This was largely because I could not see a systematic way
through that tangled forest, and because a lot of contemporary moral
philosophy, though venerated in academic halls, was completely un-
tethered to the “hard and fast”; that is, it had no strong connection to
evolution or to the brain, and hence was in peril of floating on a sea
of mere, albeit confident, opinion. And no doubt the medieval clerics
were every bit as confident.
It did seem that likely Aristotle, Hume, and Darwin were right: we
are social by nature. But what does that actually mean in terms of our
Introduction • 3
brains and our genes? To make progress beyond the broad hunches
about our nature, we need something solid to attach the claim to.
Without relevant, real data from evolutionary biology, neuroscience,
and genetics, I could not see how to tether ideas about “our nature” to
the hard and fast.
Despite being flummoxed, I began to appreciate that recent develop-
ments in the biological sciences allow us to see through the tangle, to
begin to discern pathways revealed by new data. The phenomenon of
moral values, hitherto so puzzling, is now less so. Not entirely clear, just
less puzzling. By drawing on converging new data from neuroscience,
evolutionary biology, experimental psychology, and genetics, and given
a philosophical framework consilient with those data, we can now
meaningfully approach the question of where values come from.
The wealth of data can easily swamp us, but the main story line can
be set out in a fairly straightforward way. My aim here is to explain
what is probably true about our social nature, and what that involves in
terms of the neural platform for moral behavior. As will become plain,
the platform is only the platform; it is not the whole story of human
moral values. Social practices, and culture more generally, are not my
focus here, although they are, of course, hugely important in the val-
ues people live by. Additionally, particular moral dilemmas, such as
when a war is a just war, or whether inheritance taxes are fair, are not
the focus here.
Although remarks of a general sort concerning our nature often fall
on receptive ears, those same ears may become rather deaf when the
details of brain circuitry begin to be discussed. When we speak of the
possibility of linking large-scale questions about our mind with devel-
opments in the neurosciences, there are those who are wont to wag
their fingers and warn us about the perils of scientism. That means, so
far as I can tell, the offense of taking science into places where alleg-
edly it has no business, of being in the grip of the grand delusion that
science can explain everything, do everything. Scientism, as I have
been duly wagged, is overreaching.
4 • C h a pt er 1
The complaint that a scientific approach to understanding moral-
ity commits the sin of scientism does really exaggerate what science is
up to, since the scientific enterprise does not aim to displace the arts
or the humanities. Shakespeare and Mozart and Caravaggio are not
in competition with protein kinases and micro RNA. On the other
hand, it is true that philosophical claims about the nature of things,
such as moral intuition, are vulnerable. Here, philosophy and science
are working the same ground, and evidence should trump armchair
reflection. In the present case, the claim is not that science will wade
in and tell us for every dilemma what is right or wrong. Rather, the
point is that a deeper understanding of what it is that makes humans
and other animals social, and what it is that disposes us to care about
others, may lead to greater understanding of how to cope with social
problems. That cannot be a bad thing. As the Scottish philosopher
Adam Smith (1723–90) observed, “science is the great antidote to the
poison of enthusiasm and superstition.” By enthusiasm here, he meant
ideological fervor, and undoubtedly his observation applies especially
to the moral domain . Realistically, one must acknowledge in any case
that science is not on the brink of explaining everything about the
brain or evolution or genetics. We know more now than we did ten
years ago; ten years hence we will know even more. But there will
always be further questions looming on the horizon.
The scolding may be sharpened, however, warning of the logical
absurdity of drawing on the biological sciences to understand the plat-
form for morality. Here the accusation is that such an aim rests on
the dunce’s error of going from an is to an ought, from facts to values.
Morality, it will be sternly sermonized, tells what we ought to do; biol-
ogy can only tell what is the case.2 With some impatience, we may be
reproached for failing to heed the admonition of another eighteenth-
century Scottish philosopher, David Hume (1711–76), that you can-
not derive an ought statement from statements about what is. Hence
my project, according to the scold, is muddled and misbegotten. “Stop
reading here” would be the advice of the grumbler.
