Mind Makes Right: Brain damage, evolution, and the future of morality

Look around you, says William Saletan. The world of touch, tribe, and taboo is fading. In a study, people were given hypothetical dilemmas: Would you throw a fatally injured person off a lifeboat to save everyone else? Would you kill a healthy hostage? Most normal people said no. Most people with a certain part of their brain damaged (ventromedial prefrontal cortex) said yes....

Neuroscience is discovering that the brain isn't a single organ. It's an assembly of modules that sometimes cooperate and sometimes compete. If you often feel as though two parts of your brain are fighting it out, that's because, in fact, they are. Emotion tells you one thing; reason tells you another. . . . Once technology manipulates ethics, ethics can no longer judge technology. Nor can human nature discredit the mentality that shapes human nature. In a utilitarian world, what's neurologically fit is utilitarianism. It'll become the norm, the standard of right and wrong. Sure, a few mental relics of our primate ancestry will be lost. But it'll be worth it. I think. . . .

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