Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality (book by Patricia S. Churchland)

[Alex]

Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality
Patricia S. Churchland
2011
Princeton University Press
$24.95 / £16.95
288 pp.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-3808-0
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9399.html


From sample chapter 1: Introduction:

...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 untethered to the "hard and fast"; that is, it had no strong connection to evolution or to the brain, and hence was in peril of loating on a sea of mere, albeit conident, opinion. And no doubt the medieval clerics were every bit as conident.  (p. 2)
 
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 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.  ...(p. 3)

...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.  ...(p. 4)

...Just as Hume said. Naturalism, while shunning stupid inferences, does nevertheless find the roots of morality in how we are, what we care about, and what matters to us—in our nature. Neither supernaturalism (the otherworldly gods), nor some rareied, unrealistic concept of reason, explains the moral motherboard.  ...(p. 6)

...The truth seems to be that the values rooted in the circuitry for caring—for well-being of self, offspring, mates, kin, and others—shape social reasoning about many issues: conlict resolution, keeping the peace, defense, trade, resource distribution, and many other aspects of social life in all its vast richness. Not only do these values and their material basis constrain social problem-solving, they are at the same time facts that give substance to the processes of iguring out what to do—facts such as that our children matter to us, and that we care about their well-being; that we care about our clan. Relative to these values, some solutions to social problems are better than others, as a matter of fact; relative to these values, practical policy decisions can be negotiated.  (p. 8)

The hypothesis on offer is that what we humans call ethics or morality is a four-dimensional scheme for social behavior that is shaped by interlocking brain processes:
(1) caring  (rooted in attachment to kin and kith and care for their well-being),
(2) recognition of others' psychological states (rooted in the beneits of predicting the behavior others),
(3) problem-solving in a social context (e.g., how we should distribute scarce goods, settle land disputes; how we should punish the miscreants), and
(4) learning social practices (by positive and negative reinforcement, by imitation, by trial and error, by various kinds of conditioning, and by analogy).  ...(p. 9)

...Briely, the strategy for developing the central argument in the book is this:
The next chapter will give a bit of background concerning the evolutionary constraints on social and moral behavior.
The third chapter goes into detail on the evolution of the mammalian brain and how it supports caring, examining the role of hormones such as oxytocin.
The fourth chapter looks more closely at cooperation, especially human cooperation, and data regarding the role of oxytocin in cooperation and trust.
The fifth chapter on genes is cautionary, focusing on what is known, and not known, about "genes for" moral modules in the brain.
The sixth chapter addresses the social importance of the capacity for attributing mental states, and the possible brain basis for such a capacity.
In the seventh chapter, the matter of rules and the role of rules in moral behavior puts the discussion into a more traditional philosophical form.
Religion and its relation to morality are the topics of the concluding chapter.  (p. 11)



Alex's comment:  Highly recommended by a member at the IRAS (Institute of Religion in an Age of Science) email list.  You may download and take a look at the sample chapter 1.
她說得對。高談闊論道德哲學，子虛烏有。不如紮實地將我們的知識建基於進化生物學、神經科學、遺傳學、進化、大腦、與基因的真實資料與數據。

[Alex]

I've started looking at Pat Churchland's Braintrust. In the Introduction there is a wonderful discussion about how Naturalism has a sophisticated way of dealing with ought from is. It is based on "passions" that go beyond emotions and far beyond reason. It is an excellent book on the neuroscience of morality.

Stanley Klein to Iras <[e-mail]>
Sep 5, 2011