Reinventing Morality
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Moral Science and Your Future
A common reaction to the radical
breakthroughs that seem to occur daily in neuroscience is impatience for
ever greater and more important breakthroughs. If we know what lying
looks like under fMRI (goes this line of thinking), when will we be able
to inoculate against deceit? If we can diagnose the roots of racism,
when will we be able to predict which student will go on a violent
shooting spree? If we know that bias has something to do the with the
amygdala, when will we be able to see it on our computer screens?
The emerging science of morality will not
relieve us of the hard work of examining our own motivations and
impulses. But it will present us with a lot more data. As this line of
inquiry progresses, as new neural-imaging techniques, new technologies
like virtual reality come to bear on this problem, we will likely lose
certainty about what is right and wrong rather than gain it.
People answering trolley problems will
surely give different answers when they’re allowed to “live” the survey
in a virtual-reality setting, when they can see the trolley, hear it
approach, meet a computer-graphics generated version of the person to be
saved or squashed. When we can view that decision-making process using
fMRI, MEG, or some other brain-imaging technique not yet in existence,
we may be able to see how slightly different firing patterns play out in
different decisions. We’ll examine people’s actions in light of their
brain activity and reach new understandings, and probably all sorts of
hasty conclusions as well.
More importantly, and controversially,
the science of morality may bring into doubt some of our most deeply
ingrained cultural perceptions about right and wrong. We’ll have new,
richer opportunities to examine our actions in the presence of
consequences. We probably won’t like what we see.
Those awkward realizations may be the
greatest value of moral science.
Consider that we’re called upon to make
moral decisions daily. Every so often, we’re given an important one, a
decision that will radically affect someone else’s life. Sometimes the
decision comes masked as a professional matter, as it did for U.S.
sheriff Tom Dart, who, when tasked with evicting individuals whose only
crime had been renting from a landlord who had defaulted on his
mortgage, decided against action and briefly suspended such evictions in
Cook County, Illinois. Sometimes the choice comes in a more dramatic
form, as in the case of Wesley Autrey, a New York man who jumped onto a
set of train tracks to save a stranger from a speeding subway.
The moral actions of Dart and Autrey
strike us as exceptional in their selflessness. But such feats of
heroism are the products of the same moral decision-making process that
occurs in each of us. When we are called upon to commit to such an act,
we first make the decisions that are easiest. Our faith (or lack there
of), upbringing, official job titles, obligations to our bosses or
clients, and our various experiences justify action in the interests of
self-preservation and in accordance with convention.
But suppose we were each given a better,
more sophisticated understanding of the root of morality, its universal
core. We suddenly have the opportunity to examine, perhaps even
experience, the other option and explore our emotional aversion to it.
We suddenly have a new tool to call upon, our private knowledge of the
neurological decision-making process. We play the choice out
differently, possibly picturing the person on the other end of the
problem, and we reach a different conclusion and commit to a different
action.
Something has happened. Insight into the
moral deliberative method has yielded a result that is more inline with
a broader, more rational, and surely more accurate understanding of what
is good. The process has been improved.
The Future has changed.
About the Author
Patrick Tucker is the senior editor of THE FUTURIST and director of
communications for the World Future Society.
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