Lästips om moral och evolution

18 jan 2008, kl 17:37
bergh in Lite väl akademiskt, Lästips

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.

Article originally appeared on (http://andreasbergh.se/).