So many people had this doubt how a heart rule the
head... how is it possible? Many philosophers have argued that people make
decisions about what's right and wrong based on moral principles and rational
thought. But other philosophers--and more recently, some psychologists and
neuroscientists--have argued that there's more to the story. When faced with a
moral dilemma, these scholars say, we rely on emotional reactions as well as
our powers of reasoning. In a study of brain damage, published today,
neuroscientists report evidence that emotions indeed exert a powerful influence
on moral judgments.
In the new study, Antonio Damasio of the University of
Southern California in Los Angeles and colleagues examined moral reasoning in
six people who had damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC), a brain
region that regulates emotions. The researchers presented the patients with
moral dilemmas that forced them to decide whether it was acceptable to
sacrifice one person's life to save several others. For example, participants
had to decide whether to flip a switch that diverts a runaway trolley from a
track leading to five workers to a track leading to just one worker. The
researchers also gauged the decisions of 12 people without brain damage and 12
patients with damage to brain regions unconnected to emotion.
In the trolley scenario, most people in all three groups
said it was okay to flip the switch. However, the VMPC patients' decisions
diverged when the scenario required inflicting direct personal harm on one
person to save several others--such as shoving a large person off a bridge to
slow a trolley headed for five people. From a strictly rational point of view,
it's better to save five people instead of one, but the thought of pushing an
innocent person to his death is emotionally wrenching. That may explain why
only about 20% of people in the control groups said they'd push. The VMPC
patients, on the other hand, made the utilitarian choice about twice as often,
the researchers report online today in Nature.
The findings fit nicely with other evidence that moral
judgments often involve a conflict between emotion and reason and that those
two competing influences rely on different networks of brain regions, says
Joshua Greene, a philosopher and cognitive neuroscientist at Harvard
University. But Jordan Grafman, a cognitive neuroscientist at the National
Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, Maryland, isn't
convinced that extreme moral dilemmas like the trolley problem evoke the same
cognitive processes--and involve the same brain regions--as moral judgments in the
real world involve. Even so, he says, the study "emphasizes that
disciplines other than philosophy can contribute to issues related to moral
behavior."
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