There was a great post up at The Frontal Cortext on morality, psychopaths, and emotions. I was originally just going to put a link to it on the ever-popular sidebar on the front page. However I thought I'd go off on my own riff by tying these studies to some of the discussions Blake and I have been having.
First a quote from the NYT article on the Nature study that prompted all this.
Damage to an area of the brain behind the forehead, inches behind the eyes, transforms the way people make moral judgments in life-or-death situations, scientists reported yesterday. In a new study, people with this rare injury expressed increased willingness to kill or harm another person if doing so would save others’ lives.
The findings are the most direct evidence that humans’ native revulsion to hurting others relies on a part of neural anatomy, one that evolved before the higher brain regions responsible for analysis and planning.
[...]
Yet the findings, appearing online yesterday, in the journal Nature, confirm the central role of the damaged region, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is thought to give rise to social emotions, like compassion.
Previous studies showed that this region was active during moral decision making, and that damage to it and neighboring areas from severe dementia affected moral judgments. The new study seals the case by demonstrating that a very specific kind of emotion-based judgment is altered when the region is offline. In extreme circumstances, people with the injury will even endorse suffocating an infant if that would save more lives.
“I think it’s very convincing now that there are at least two systems working when we make moral judgments,” said Joshua Greene, a psychologist at Harvard who was not involved in the study. “There’s an emotional system that depends on this specific part of the brain, and another system that performs more utilitarian cost-benefit analyses which in these people is clearly intact.”
Adding in some of the comments from The Frontal Cortex.
The absence of emotion is visible in an fMRI machine. After being exposed to fearful facial expressions, the emotional parts of the normal human brain, like the amygdala, show increased levels of activation. So do the cortical parts responsible for recognizing faces. (Fear seems to potentiate our sensations.) As a result, a frightened face becomes a frightening sight; we naturally imitate the feelings of others. The brains of psychopaths respond to these fearful faces with silence. Their emotional areas are unperturbed, and their facial recognition system is even less interested in fearful faces than in perfectly blank stares.
Because psychopaths are unable to process emotions properly, they also don't understand the innate personal/impersonal moral distinction drawn by most human beings. Most children begin to separate personal transgressions (like hitting somebody) from impersonal transgressions (like talking in class) around the age of three. When asked why acts of personal violence are wrong, young kids will refer to the harm done to the individual. Getting hit hurts. However, when young children are asked why impersonal moral errors are wrong, they typically refer to the social disorder that will inevitably ensue. You can't talk in class because the teacher is talking. You can't cut to the front of the line because everybody has to wait their turn.
[...]
Psychopaths don't distinguish between personal and impersonal violations. When psychopaths are asked why it's wrong to hurt somebody, they are much less likely to mention the suffering of another person. Instead, they allude to the pernicious effects of social disorder.
OK, lots of quotation there. But I wanted to set the context. The question then arises of how God judges morality. There is roughly this distinction between a view of ethics that verges on utilitarianism and a view of ethics tied to a kind of responsibility to the Other. (Interestingly often expressed in terms of our reaction/responsibility to the face of the Other)
Now if we tie ethics to reason, are we making ethics into the ethics of the psychopath? Of course we don't need to argue God's morality works like our morality. But, I suspect especially to Mormons, there is a danger if we make God's "good" too unlike our own good. And clearly our processing of ethics (what most Mormons would call the "light of Christ") is tied intrinsically to emotion. If we make ethics purely a matter of reasons and divest it of emotion then do we make God a psychopath?
Put simply, must God to be moral move beyond reason and include an "emotional" response to the Other? (Regardless of exactly how this processing is done.)
I raise this issue because I think God and emotion are often put in a kind of opposition, especially in the orthodox Christian tradition where God is without body, parts or passions. And some move, like Anselm, to the view that God is so unlike us that terms like "good" are so weakly analogous that we can say God isn't good in the sense we understand it. It seems to me that while Mormons, who emphasize the value of the body and passions, ought embrace emotions in divine thinking we often don't.
(I should add that I think Blake goes part way towards the God as emotionally engaged - I just don't think he goes far enough)
Yes. I think learning to trust God is just as contingent upon sensing that he loves his children as it is upon sensing that his judgement is perfect.
Clark, my sense is what this is what Cetti is trying to get at in her Dialogue article on "The Theology of Desire." I'd be interested in your reaction to that article.
Is it available online?
Hmmm, I guess it's not available yet (but eventually it should be here). I'll email you a copy.
I should add that I think God has to have desires and emotions and that these are fundamentally important. However I don't ultimately look at the issue in terms of ethics, which I'm simply not well versed upon.
From a scriptural perspective it seems that God engages in these two levels of moral analysis; there are cases where one vividly sees, and/or can imagine, conflict between the two.
Enoch's vision comes to mind where God recognizes that the greater good will be served by cleansing the earth, but experiences great emotional pain at this moral necessity.
The Father is often described in LDS discourse as finding the sufferings of Jesus very painful and difficult, while at the same time making it an integral part of his plan to bring about the greatest good for the greatest number of his children.
I've closed comments in order to avoid spam since I don't check this older blog as much anymore.
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