The Normative Insignificance of Neuroscience

Bibliographic Data

ID6325887
AuthorsSelim Berker (Harvard University Press, corresponding author)
Year2009
Volume37
Issue4
Pages293-329
Publication date2009-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePhilosophy & Public Affairs (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0048-3915 • E-ISSN: 1088-4963
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/j.1088-4963.2009.01164.x
OpenAlexW2137038272
LanguageEN
Citations received44
References cited3

No doubt when historians of science look back on the first decade of the twenty-first century, they will dub it "The Age of the fMRI."Functional magnetic resonance imaging has revolutionized the empirical study of the human mind, leading to far-reaching changes in the research paradigms of psychology, economics, and (especially) the burgeoning field of neuroscience; by one estimate, an average of eight peer-reviewed articles employing fMRI were published per day in 2007. 1 So perhaps it was inevitable that empirically minded philosophers would take some of these fMRI studies to have profound implications for philosophy.Indeed, it has recently been argued that the ground-breaking research by psychologist Joshua D. Greene and colleagues into the neural bases for our moral intuitions should lead us to change our opinions about the trustworthiness of those intuitions.Crudely put, Greene and his colleagues think there are two warring subsystems underlying our moral intuitions: the first makes use of emotional neural processes and generates the sorts of judgments typically associated with deontological positions in ethics; the second makes use of more cognitive neural processes and generates the sorts of judgments typically associated with utilitarian/consequentialist positions in ethics; and the two subsystems duke it out for one's overall moral verdict about a given case. 2 By itself, this claim is merely an empirical hypothesis about what, as a matter of fact, causes us to make the moral judgments that we do make.However, Peter Singer and Greene himself have argued that this empirical hypothesis, if true, would also yield conclusions about the sorts of moral judgments that we should make.In particular, Singer and Greene think that the truth of Greene's empirical hypothesis would give us good grounds to discount our deontological intuitions about 1 Jonah Lehrer, "Picture Our Thoughts: We're Looking for Too Much in Brain Scans," The Boston Globe (August 17, 2008

Art history · Psychoanalysis · Classics · Free Will and Agency · History · Neuroethics, Human Enhancement, Biomedical Innovations · Philosophy · Psychology · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment

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