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Neuro-Cognitive Systems Involved in Moral Reasoning

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The Moral Brain

Before considering the systems involved in moral reasoning, it is worth briefly considering what morality is. Two broad viewpoints on morality effectively exist. According to one, moral reasoning is mediated by some form of unitary system for processing social rule related information. Early adherents of this viewpoint included Kohlberg who considered the moral reasoning developed from conventional reasoning (Colby & Kohlberg, 1987). More recent adherents include Moll who has defined morality as: “the sets of customs and values that are embraced by a cultural group to guide social conduct” (Moll, Zahn, Oliveira-Souza, Krueger, & Grafman, 2005, p. 799).

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Jorge Moll’s Response on James Blair’s Paper

  • In his provocative chapter, Blair puts forth a “multiple moralities” approach, a view he shares with Jon Haidt and others, and contrasts it to what he interpreted from our work to be “a unitary view of morality”. His criticisms, although well articulated, simply do not do apply to our research, less so to our theoretical premises, as we will attempt to briefly show below.

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  • Firstly, we have never claimed that that we viewed morality as “unitary”, either phenomenologically or in terms of brain mechanisms, less so that this was in opposition to any purported multiple model of morality. Our early reference to Colby, Kohlberg, Speicher, Hewer, Candee, and Gibss’s work (Moll, Eslinger, & Oliveira-Souza, 2001) was a matter of borrowing an operational definition of moral judgment to start with, and cannot be taken as an argument to classify our views as “rationalistic” – even if that was the only experimental work ever carried out by our group. As often happens with flourishing lines of research, one regularly finds himself straddling on uncharted grounds, and must draw first on very general hypotheses. As far as we’re aware, we were among the first to study the functional correlates of moral judgment with fMRI (Oliveira-Souza & Moll, 2000), and at that time we necessarily had to depart from general ideas. In our view, considering this methodological strategy to be a solid theoretical system of premises is an undue overinterpretation of our work.

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  • Although we would refrain from using the expression “multiple moralities” (for reasons which fall beyond the scope of this short reply), we see no contradiction at all between Blair’s views of multiple processes underlying morality and our own perspective on morality. While exposing his arguments, Blair contrasts his “multiple moralities” view to a “unitary morality” and refers to the following definition employed in our theoretical article (Moll, Zahn, Oliveira-Souza, Krueger, & Grafman, 2005), which was taken from MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1984): “Here, morality is considered as the sets of customs and values that are embraced by a cultural group to guide social conduct, a view that does not assume the existence of absolute moral values”. Once more, the fact that we have used an operational definition to delimit what we consider to be the moral domain sphere in no way should be taken to imply that we have adopted a “unitary” stance regarding either the phenomenology or the neural underpinnings of morality. On the contrary, in our model paper we explicitly describe how different types of impairment of moral conduct do emerge from dysfunction in discrete brain regions, and provide clear hypotheses on how damage to subcomponents of the various cortical and limbic regions that have been linked to moral cognition and behavior would lead to distinct types of moral dysfunction. Assuming that we believe in a “unitary morality” because we have pointed to the involvement of a broadly defined but stable neural architecture in diverse aspects of moral cognition and behavior is therefore a misinterpretation of our theoretical and experimental work. This would be equivalent to claim that if one believes that visual function, broadly speaking, relies on a well defined set of brain regions (the visual system), one would necessarily believe that all distinctive visual experiences (e.g., motion, color, space) rely on exactly the same neural substrates.

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  • Secondly, Blair’s claim that we favor rationalistic views in moral psychology is also surprising. We were among the first to recognize and experimentally explore the pivotal role of emotions both in moral judgment and in moral sensitivity – and this was in fact largely influenced by the work of Jon Haidt on moral and basic emotions. Our views on how emotions are critically linked to moral appraisals were articulated in two papers in which we devoted particular attention to the influence of distinct moral emotions in moral judgment (Moll, Oliveira-Souza, Bramati, & Grafman, 2002; Moll, Oliveira-Souza, Eslinger, et al., 2002), a fact that is overlooked in Blair’s chapter. Furthermore, it is also interesting that Blair dedicates considerable space in his chapter discussing disgust as evidence for his multiple moralities view, and yet he fails to acknowledge our fMRI study on moral disgust, which was actually the first to directly probe the contribution of basic disgust and moral disgust to brain activation (Moll, Oliveira-Souza, et al., 2005). 

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  • Finally, James Blair unfortunately did not have the opportunity to assess our latest views on the contribution of attachment to morality, another piece of work which clearly reflects our view on how distinct neurobiological components and functions support diverse aspects of human morality.

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  • In summary, Blair’s qualification of “unitary moral system” is not appropriately applicable to our work. As such, our work is not actually a good framework against which to build criticisms in support of multiple moralities. If anything, were our work useful for the purpose of contrasting unitary versus multiple moralities, it would probably fit much more naturally as evidence in support of, not against, the latter view.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Intramural Research Program of the National Institutes of Health: National Institute of Mental Health.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Health and Human Services, Mood and Anxiety Program National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA

    James Blair

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Correspondence to James Blair .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Ghent University, Blandijnberg 2, Gent, 9000, Belgium

    Jan Verplaetse

  2. Ghent University, Blandijnberg 2, Gent, 9000, Belgium

    Jelle Schrijver

  3. Dept. Neurosurgery, University Hospital Antwerp, Wilrijkstraat 10, Edegem, 2650, Belgium

    Sven Vanneste

  4. Ghent University, Blandijnberg 2, Gent, 9000, Belgium

    Johan Braeckman

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Blair, J. (2009). Neuro-Cognitive Systems Involved in Moral Reasoning. In: Verplaetse, J., Schrijver, J., Vanneste, S., Braeckman, J. (eds) The Moral Brain. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6287-2_4

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