post 14: evolutionary psychology

Date: Sun, 1 Aug 2004 19:05:08


i read the article on evolutionary psychology twice and i still don't quite get how evolution plays into this. if i am not mistaken, what the writer means by evolutionary psychology, is that exposure to moral questions activate different parts of the brain, and brain is thought to be a product of evolution. what joshua greene, a neuroscientist from princeton, tries to argue, is that attempts to answer moral questions are not solely a product of human reasoning; emotions also play a role in such attempts. his current research using MRI scanner to take the image of the brain while the subject attempts to answer moral and nonmoral questions has shown that nonmoral questions activate parts of the brain used to answer logical questions, while moral questions activate both the parts used for logic, and the parts used for emotions.

greene thinks there is more to morality than just what meets the eye. he claims that morality is "instinctive" that even animals have their own systems of morality. the author of the article, carl zimmer, gives examples about how monkeys punish other monkeys who do not behave for the benefit of the whole monkey society. pretty much like mill's utilitarianism that greene claims to have put "what's good before what's right." now, if morality is really that simple, then philosophers like immanuel kant wouldn't have gone through all the trouble to formulate ethics. greene seems to have particular fondness for kantian ethics, since he claims it to put "what's right before what's good."

if the answers people give to moral dilemmas are really products of evolution, then the research greene is doing might help scientists, or psychologists, or even philosophers to understand better how people actually comes up with those answers. so far the conclusion that greene has come up with from people's brain imaging data that he collected using the MRI scanner, is that emotions does play role in moral dilemmas. so merely human reasoning does not provide adequate basis for one who wants to formulate a universal law of morality.