Emotion and Morality

“Should subjective feelings matter when deciding right and wrong? Philosophers have debated this question for thousands of years. Some say absolutely: Emotions, like our love for our friends and family, are a crucial part of what give life meaning, and ought to play a guiding role in morality. Some say absolutely not: Cold, impartial, rational thinking is the only proper way to make a decision. Emotion versus reason—it’s one of the oldest and most epic standoffs we know.”

“Davis: You describe moral decision-making as a process that combines two types of thinking: “manual” thinking that is slow, consciously controlled, and rule-based, and “automatic” mental processes that are fast, emotional, and effortless. How widespread is this “dual-process” theory of the human mind?”

“Davis: These neural mechanisms you describe are involved in making any kind of decision, right?— the brain weighs an emotional response with a more calculated cost-benefit analysis whether you’re deciding whether to push a guy off a bridge to save people from a runaway train, or trying not to impulse buy a pair of shoes.

Greene: Right, it’s not specific to morality at all.”

“What makes moral thinking moral thinking is the function that is plays in society, not the mechanical processes that are taking place in the brain when people are doing it. I, among others, think that function is cooperation, allowing otherwise selfish individuals to reap the benefits of living and working together.”

“Davis: The idea that morality has no special place in the brain seems counterintuitive, especially when you think about the sacredness surrounding morality in religious contexts, and its association with the divine.”

“Greene: Yes, people often assume that morality has to be a special thing in the brain. And early on, there was—and to some extent there still is—a lot of research that compares thinking about a moral thing to thinking about a similar non-moral thing, and the researchers say, aha, here are the neural correlates of morality. But in retrospect it seems clear that when you compare a moral question to a non-moral question, if you see any differences there, it’s not because moral things engage a distinctive kind of cognition; instead, it’s something more basic about the content of what is being considered.”