Lästips om moral och evolution

Pinker i NYT om The moral instinct refererar intressant:

Joshua Greene, a philosopher and cognitive neuroscientist, suggeststhat evolution equipped people with a revulsion to manhandling an innocent person. This instinct, he suggests, tends to overwhelm any utilitarian calculus that would tot up the lives saved and lost.

Theimpulse against roughing up a fellow human would explain other examplesin which people abjure killing one to save many, like euthanizing a hospital patient to harvest his organs and save five dying patients in need of transplants, or throwing someone out of a crowded lifeboat to keep it afloat.

By itself this would be no more than a plausible story, but Greene teamed up with the cognitive neuroscientist Jonathan Cohen and several Princeton colleagues to peer into people’s brains using functional M.R.I. They sought to find signs of a conflict between brain areas associated with emotion (the ones that recoil from harming someone) and areas dedicated to rational analysis (the ones that calculate lives lost and saved). [...]

Together, the findings corroborate Greene’s theory that our nonutilitarian intuitions come from the victory of an emotional impulse over a cost-benefit analysis.

Relaterat: Kommande Arne Ryde-konferens i Lund om Neuroeconomics.

Update on 19 jan 2008, kl 16:15 by bergh

...och på MR undrar Alex om vi verkligen behöver alla dessa brainscans som neuroeconomics pysslar med...

Comments

[Niclas]

Det är just denna typ av exempel som Hare använder för att skilja på intuitivt och kritiskt moraliskt tänkande. Med det senare kan och bör man sätta sig över de icke-utilitaristiska intuitionerna ibland.

http://nonicoclolasos.wordpress.com/2008/01/16/tva-nivaer-av-moraliskt-tankande/

[August]

Läs Gryning Över Kalahari!

Bra bok.