Fairness on the Brain

Talking about ethics can be scary to some people. People wonder: Whose ethics? Am I ethical? Do I know what ethics is? When I give talks at universities, I therefore refer to the several studies that have shown that primates have an innate sense of fairness. Here is one article in National Geographic, "Monkeys Show Sense of Fairness, Study Says."

The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday on another study supporting this line of thought. The article, titled "Charting the Agony Of a Brain as It Struggles to Be Fair," says that neural analysis of the brain shows humans have a distaste for unfair situations. From the article:

To trigger the brain behavior, the 26 volunteers had to believe their decisions really would affect orphans being denied their seat at a groaning board of plenty where others feasted. So, the experimenters made them all study a 10-page brochure with pictures of 60 orphans.

In 36 rounds of testing, each subject had 10 seconds to choose the lesser of two evils: Allow some children to keep more than their fair share of meals or take away their food to eliminate inequity.

It was a measure of the economics of morality. Dr. Hsu made the inequities more or less severe by changing the number of meals donated to different groups of children. That provoked patterns of neural activation that revealed the brain's distaste for injustice and its willingness if the disparity was wide enough -- in one case, one child receiving five times more than another -- to punish the rich by putting them on short rations. To redress the extremes, people were willing to confiscate meals even when it hurt the orphanage as a whole, Dr. Hsu, now at the University of Illinois, reported recently at a meeting of the Society for Neuroeconomics in Nantasket, Mass.

Making Moral Sense

After reading a Peter Singer commentary on whether we should trust our moral intuition I took Harvard's Moral Sense Test, "a series of moral dilemmas to probe the psychological mechanisms underlying our moral judgments." It's a quick, interesting exercise where subjects rate the choices of characters in various scenarios. Without ruining any surprises (in case you take the test), to me the interesting tension is between intention and consequence. I was reminded of the Buddhist concept kun long, which I understand as a person's overall state of heart and mind, closely linked to motivation and an integral part of ethical decision-making.

Recent research suggests that Craig Newmark might be on to something when he does things because they feel right. There is increased brain activity in the emotional centers during moral decision-making of a personal nature—for example, when imagining physically killing someone as opposed to flipping a switch to kill someone. But Singer would probably say that Newmark doesn't go far enough. "The fact that our moral intuitions are universal and part of our human nature does not mean that they are right," he says. I'm skeptical about Singer separating ethical reasoning from our evolution, from how it is lived, but that's the mental lab of philosophy.

Singer's reasoning matches with other research that New York Times science writer Dennis Overbye describes in an article on free will (Times Select). He writes that "the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control."—the order of brain activity is action then decision, contrary to the traditional model.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett is not fazed by this reversal. Overbye paraphrases him:

...it is precisely our immersion in causality and the material world that frees us. Evolution, history and culture, he explains, have endowed us with feedback systems that give us the unique ability to reflect and think things over and to imagine the future.

That, Dennett believes, is what makes us moral agents.