inkbluesky

calm and rocky coast. Two words that we usually wouldn’t use in concert, to be both calm and rocky seems a contradiction.

Impaired emotional processing affects moral judgements 

Mr Spock, the fictional Vulcan famously logical and lacking in emotion, sacrificed himself for his comrades in the movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan with the following words to Captain Kirk: “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one…”

Now, revealing new research shows that people with damage to a key emotion-processing region of the brain also make moral decisions based on the greater good of the community, unclouded by concerns over harming an individual.

It is the first study to demonstrate how emotion impacts moral judgement and sheds light on why people often act out of respect for an individual rather than choosing to act in a more logical, utilitarian way. The findings could cause a rethink in how society determines a “moral good”, and challenge the 18th-century philosophies of Immanuel Kant and David Hume.

I’m not doing the article justice, but the short version is that people who have had an area of their brain damaged called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC) were confronted with the Spock predicament – “For example, subjects had to say whether they would throw a person in front of a train if doing so would stop the train from barrelling into five workmen, killing all five.” Most participants would not choose to sacrifice the individual to save the many – their identification with the individual outweighing any logical or what could be called Kantian considerations. While those with damaged VMPC were more utilitarian – save the five. Yet when presented with  impersonal  morally distant decisions the group with damaged VMPC and the non-damaged group  would make about the same decision – to generally choose to to what was best for the greatest number even if a few were harmed. The moral to the story is that we need the full arsenal of our emotional-mental arsenal to be able to weigh all the  factors involved in making a moral decision – both consideration of the individual life and its dignity and the well being of the “many”. There are a few examples of the kinds of moral dilemmas they used in the study at the link. Here’s one to get the morning water cooler discussion going:

You are the captain of a military submarine travelling underneath a large iceberg. An onboard explosion has caused you to lose most of your oxygen supply and has injured one of your crew who is quickly losing blood. The injured crew member is going to die from his wounds no matter what happens.

The remaining oxygen is not sufficient for the entire crew to make it to the surface. The only way to save the other crew members is to shoot dead the injured crew member so that there will be just enough oxygen for the rest of the crew to survive.

Would you kill the fatally injured crew member in order to save the lives of the remaining crew members?