“3/30/2010, 4:00pm EST”
Morality Study Narrows Gap Between Mind and Brain →
Scientists have found a surprising link between magnets and morality. A person’s moral judgments can be changed almost instantly by delivering a magnetic pulse to an area of the brain near the right ear, according to a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
[…]
The fact that scientists can adjust morality with a magnet may be disconcerting to people who view morality as a lofty and immutable human trait, says Joshua Greene, psychologist at Harvard University. But that view isn’t accurate, he says.
“Moral judgment is just a brain process,” he says. “That’s precisely why it’s possible for these researchers to influence it using electromagnetic pulses on the surface of the brain.”
It is extremely important for moralists of all kinds to be able to understand and adapt to the reality that we are physical beings. Moral propositions that deny the overwhelming evidence of our physical nature, or of any other fact, carry no justification and no authority.
I do want to point out one silliness of this article, however. After the quoted portion above, the article says, “The scientists are trying to take concepts such as morality, which philosophers once attributed to the human soul, and ‘break it down in mechanical terms.’”
First, go ahead and replace “philosophers” with “scientists” there, and the accuracy of the statement is the same — as is the triviality. Second, most philosophers today do not believe in the “soul” rubbish, just as most scientists do not. What I mean to counteract here are the implicit notions that (a) philosophy is irrelevant, and (b) that philosophy and science are not compatible. In reality, philosophy gave birth to science, and it continues to do so via formal logic’s governance of all that scientists do.
—Dan
Never leave home without it.
