Abstract
Moral dilemmas have long been debated in moral philosophy without reaching a definitive consensus. The majority of value pluralists attribute their origin to the incommensurability of moral values, i.e. the statement that, since moral values are many and different in nature, they may conflict and cannot be compared. Neuroscientific studies on the neural common currency show that the comparison between allegedly incompatible alternatives is a practical possibility, namely it is the basis of the way in which the agent evaluates choice options. Indeed, both in economic and moral decision-making, the value of options is represented and directly compared in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Therefore, we contend that moral dilemmas do not originate from value incommensurability and, on the basis of the neuroscientific discoveries on the neural currency, we derive the implications for the philosophical debate on moral dilemmas. We also provide a possible connection between the experience of moral dilemmas and their neural representation: one of the causes of the individual’s indecision is the neural tie, i.e. the condition in which two options have the same value at neural level, and her regret could be due to the motivational force of the rejected option that is still signalled by affective processes in the brain. We apply this interpretation and the common currency hypothesis to vocational decisions and propose that, although from the agent’s perspective the options are qualitatively different, they may be nevertheless equivalent at neural level. This can be seen as a reason for downgrading the importance commonly attributed to the risk of making the “wrong choice”.
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28 October 2019
In the initial online publication, the second author’s given name should have been displayed in full and in the running head the names were not properly abbreviated.
Notes
Hence, the difference between “decision” and “choice” does not derive from the kind of the alternatives (e.g. economic items, social rewards, moral norms). The difference is rather due to, in the first instance, the discipline-specific vocabularies of moral philosophy, on the one hand, and neuroscience and economics, on the other; in the second instance, it is due to the emphasis on the process of considering the reasons in favor of the alternatives, which is present in “decision” but not in “choice”.
Sophie is a Polish woman forced by a guard of a Nazi concentration camp to choose which of her two children will be killed. In this moral dilemma, the same value, i.e. the life of one’s own children, demands two different actions but supplies the same reason to prevent their death.
Rationalism and experientialism are to be understood as Weber’s ideal types: they are simplified general models, according to which we can establish if a philosopher has a rationalist or experientialist propensity. Hence, not every philosopher can be defined as rationalist or experientialist (Gowans 1996).
See also Williams 1973: 172, 175-176; 1981 [1979]: 74.
These different types of value are: (1) specific obligations towards some people and institutions, (2) duties deriving from people’s general rights, (3) utility, (4) perfectionist ends or values, and (5) commitment to one’s own projects or undertakings (1979: 129).
Although value incommensurability is usually held by value pluralists, value monism, too, can admit value incommensurability if the moral value that is assumed to be the only one is conceived as complex and appearing in a variety of settings, as in Mill’s conception of higher and lower pleasures ((2003) [1863], parr. 4-8: 187-188).
There is no agreement regarding what a case of parity means in a moral dilemma. According to authors such as Parfit (1984: 430-431) and Griffin (1986: 80-81, 95-98; 1997: 38-39), in cases of parity the alternatives are defined “roughly equal”, which is an imprecise or approximate version of “equally good” that is included in the Trichotomy Thesis (see Hsieh 2016); if two options, A and B are roughly equal, it means that neither is worse than the other and if a third option is better than B(A), it does not imply that it is better than A(B). According to Chang, however, there is a fourth relation, called “on a par”, defining a situation in which two options, A and B, are too different to be judged equally good and neither is better than the other, but they are nevertheless comparable (Chang 2002: 661-662).
fMRI is a method of brain scanning that identifies the variation in oxygen uptake of the neurons, i.e. the nerve cells, by detecting the changes in the magnetic fields of the water molecules that are in the neurons. Hence, fMRI indirectly measures neural activity as it records the flow of blood, i.e. the metabolic demand of the brain, and not directly the activity of neurons.
Non-invasive brain stimulation is a method for modulating brain activity through either the application of weak direct currents to the brain (transcranial direct current stimulation) or a strong short current (transcranial magnetic stimulation).
Lesion studies assess if an area is necessary for the performance of a given task by testing if patients with a damage to that area are impaired in carrying out the task.
Single-cell studies measure directly the electrical reaction of a neuron to a stimulus, namely its firing rate. As they rely on an invasive method, they are conducted on animals or when patients undergo brain surgery for other reasons.
The preferences of each subject were elicited in a behavioral session consisting of same-type lotteries (in which the same kind of reward ranged in probability and quantity) and mixed-type lotteries (where the rewards were food or water and money). On the basis of the choices of the subjects, the indifference points were computed. The latter are the choices in which the two alternatives have the same economic value for the subject. See also Smith et al. 2010 for similar results with a different type of reward (pictures of attractive female faces).
See also Hutcherson et al. 2015.
Of course, this extends not only to the fact that rewards from different existential sources are expressed in a common currency, but, more generally, to the fact that the brain translates all different aspects of perceived reality in terms of the quite homogeneous kind of biochemical events that happen inside it. The former is just a subcase of the latter.
In case the conflict is between two values that are deontological rules of the affective system, the more the two different motivations coming from the affective system are similar in force, the more the agent is undecided.
The same obviously holds for minor things such as the choice between different places for a vacation period, a new car or a restaurant for the next evening.
People are sometimes in anguish because they think that the choice they make may prove wrong in the future, and in some way they will be lost. In these cases, they are averse to the possible regret that their choice can bring about in the future. Yet even in such cases, the origin of their worry is the assumption that one choice option is right and the other wrong, together with the lack of information regarding the long-term expected benefits of the options.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Michele Loi for his helpful comments on the earlier draft of this manuscript.
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Eleonora Viganò’s work was partly supported by the Cogito Foundation (grant number 17-117-S)
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The original version of this article has been revised: the second author's given name is displayed in full and the running head has been corrected.
Eleonora Viganò wrote sections 1-4 and 6 of the manuscript.
Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri wrote subsection 4.3 and section 5 of the manuscript.
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Viganò, E., Lombardi Vallauri, E. Moral and Vocational Dilemmas Meet the Common Currency Hypothesis: a Contribution to Value Commensurability. Rev.Phil.Psych. 11, 83–102 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-019-00448-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-019-00448-7