This post was written by guest contributor, Jillian Meyer.
Should you cheat on your exam to get a good final grade in your class? When is it okay to lie? If your child is going for an internship at your company, is it morally permissible to give them a leg up over other applicants? We make moral decisions every day, forming a moral personality from the choices we make about right and wrong. Our moral foundations come from many different sources, such as our religions, the legal system, and even our personal past experiences. The brain plays a big role in moral decision making, and damage to certain areas can completely change our morality. To articulate the impact the brain can have on morality, moral psychologists often turn to the philosophical roots of moral perspectives. Ancient philosophy continues to define our moral decisions today, so knowledge of different philosophical theories is imperative and detailed below.
Ethical Theories
According to Aristotle, people should become virtuous by doing virtuous things. One of the most well-known, modern, western ethical theories started with Aristotle himself: virtue ethics. Just as the name suggests, this theory focuses on the virtues one must acquire to live a good life. Aristotle focused not on the moral action of a situation, but rather on the moral character of a person. He emphasized cultivating virtues such as honesty, courage, justice, generosity, and more. Virtue ethics places virtues and vices at the center of the theory, asking what the most virtuous person would do in a given situation.
Another popular modern ethical theory is consequentialism, which focuses on all of the potential consequences of a moral act. In consequentialism, it does not matter what the most virtuous person would do in a situation, but rather it identifies all of the possible consequences and suggests that the action with the most positive outcome should be taken. A popular form of consequentialism, utilitarianism, gives specification to “the most positive outcome” by suggesting that it can be defined as the outcome that produces the greatest overall amount of net happiness. Philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick were all early proponents of utilitarianism. Mill explains this theory, stating that “[a]ctions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness”(Mill, 1863, p. 77). Consequentialism is a moral framework that examines all of the possible consequences of an action and weighs the positivity of the outcomes, and utilitarianism decides the most positive outcome based on what action will produce the greatest net happiness.
The final prevalent modern ethical theory, deontology, often stands in opposition to consequentialism. Instead of focusing on all of the consequences of an action, deontology instead focuses on the moral action itself and suggests that not all actions can be justified by the consequences. While there are many parts of deontological theory, the main considerations include fundamental principles and rights. For example, deontology suggests that certain actions like lying or stealing are fundamentally immoral and never justified. Also, humans have certain fundamental rights that should never be violated, such as the right to not be murdered. Immanuel Kant is the philosopher most commonly associated with deontological theory, emphasizing that we must always treat people as ends and never means to an end.
It is important to note that Greek philosophy, which became the basis for modern western philosophy, does not hold the only set of ethical theories and frameworks out there. In fact, western, educated, industrialized, religious, and democratic (WEIRD) states are the outliers of the world. However, in the western world, virtue ethics, utilitarianism, and deontology are the most widely talked about (and researched) philosophical theories.
Ethical Decision Making
Moral psychology research has found that altering the way we process information can alter the moral decisions we ultimately make. Duke and Bègue’s “drunk utilitarian” piece found that blood alcohol content correlates with utilitarian moral decisions, suggesting that we make more utilitarian decisions when our social cognition is impaired. Researchers have also discovered that people make more utilitarian decisions (maximizing happiness) when they are presented with a dilemma written in their second language. Additional research has found that this is due to the distancing and blunting of emotional reactions to dilemmas, allowing participants to see them in a more unemotional way. Our emotions can impact our moral decisions, and it seems that situations without an emotional factor lead us to more calculated utilitarian decisions. Further studies have shown that even just foreign accents lead people to make more utilitarian decisions. When given the trolley (an impersonal moral dilemma) and footbridge (a more personal moral dilemma) problems, participants made more utilitarian decisions listening to a speaker in the same language but with a foreign accent compared to a speaker in the same language with the same accent. These researchers provide three possible explanations for this phenomenon: emotion reduction, increased cognitive load, and psychological distance, which could all play a part in this finding.
Morality and the Brain
Cognitive research has furthered this distinction between emotion-based and logic-based moral decisions. Greene and colleagues found that different brain regions are activated for intuitive, emotional moral thought (the ventromedial prefrontal cortex) and reasoned, logical moral thought (the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex). Process dissociation models in social psychology have found a way to separate these two cognitive processes within a single task, such as a morality attribution task. One multinomial processing tree created by Gawronski and colleagues provides a way to analyze this distinction in moral decision making, separating intentional, utilitarian decisions from unintentional, deontological decisions. By understanding how these philosophical theories function differently cognitively, moral psychologists can better understand how different kinds of moral decisions are made.
Our moral decisions are based on a plethora of factors and can be altered with very minor changes to how our brains process moral dilemmas. The philosophical theories of virtue ethics, utilitarianism, and deontology have provided a foundation for understanding different moral perspectives, and a helpful starting point for scientific research on moral decisions. Moral psychology is continuing to combine the humanities research in philosophy with the science research in psychological and brain sciences to learn more about how we make the moral decisions that shape our lives.
Acknowledgements:
A big thank you to Dr. Joseph Porter, the philosophy pro and a great friend, for aiding my interpretation of these early philosophical concepts!
Edited by Chloe Holden and Emma Cleary
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