The Making of the Mind: The Neuroscience of Human Nature (26 page)

The social attributions made about strangers have been investigated using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). A standard moral reasoning task was given to determine if in-group members, about whom attributions of warmth and competence are made, are treated differently than out-group members, who are seen as neither warm nor competent (e.g., the homeless). The task poses a moral dilemma: Is it acceptable to take the life of one person in order to save the lives of five others? The scenario presented read as follows. “An empty runaway streetcar speeds down the tracks toward five people. Joe, from an overpass, sees this accident unfolding. If Joe chooses, he can shove a bystander off the overpass to block the streetcar, saving the five people. How morally acceptable is it for Joe to push the bystander off the overpass?”
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This problem was presented to American college students who had to make this decision about different types of individuals who would be sacrificed. For in-group members (i.e., students or Americans), there was reluctance to sacrifice
even one person despite the fact that five would be saved. On the other hand, the results showed that cold and incompetent strangers, such as the homeless, were seen as more acceptable sacrifices. Taking the life of one homeless person was regarded as especially appropriate to save the lives of five others. Other less extreme out-groups of pitied individuals (e.g., warm but incompetent elderly) and envied individuals (e.g., the cold but competent rich) fell in between.
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The fMRI data revealed seven cortical regions with differential activity for sacrificing low warmth, low competence people in order to save high warmth, high competence individuals. All seven of them showed activation in the left hemisphere. Only two of the seven revealed bilateral activation.
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In addition to these, the left middle occipital cortex showed more activation for sacrificing low competent compared with high competent victims. In a comparison of saving high competent individuals compared with the low competent, the left anterior cingulate was relatively more active. In short, the left hemisphere was heavily involved in the attributions made in this task, as anticipated by other research indicating the left hemisphere as the home of the interpreter. Attributions about others stem from the interpreter part of the modern mental ensemble. This, again, reflects how these neocortical networks color our experience of the social world.

Mohandas Gandhi, the Mahatma, exemplifies for us the moral mind in his life of compassion for the poor and downtrodden and in his vigorous but nonviolent attacks on injustice through acts of civil disobedience. Throughout his life (1869–1948) Gandhi worked to free India from British colonial rule and to establish a universal moral standard for the treatment of all Indians, regardless of their caste, including British occupiers. Gandhi fought against British governmental policies, but only through nonviolent resistance. His universal moral code mandated avoiding harm to other living beings and living with love for the good of others.
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He put into action the Kantian categorical imperative: seek only those moral codes that ought to be universally applied to all. Fairness, in a word, was the driving principle of the moral reasoning exemplified in Gandhi's life. It was a sense of fairness shaped not only by compassionate caring but also by a need for justice:

[Gandhi] was a tireless champion of the rights and well-being of the poor and powerless, not only in his own country but around the world. On a personal level, he put himself in the service of others, often tending the sick and nursing the injured…. Gandhi's life is a story of compassion for those in need, a defense of universal justice, and a passionate articulation of the effectiveness of dialogue and nonviolent resistance. Each of these aspects of his moral reasoning demonstrates the depth and breadth of Gandhi's fairness. A close reading of how he addressed the major moral crises of his life also illustrates the typical integration of justice and care considerations in the resolution of real life moral problems.
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A concern for fairness arises from the capacity to reason about moral groups, taking into account what is ethically right. In perceiving events in the world, particularly the actions of human beings that impact other human beings, the interpreter comments on the degree of justice and caring manifested. The inner voice of those of us with a strong sense of fairness might say: “Everyone should get her fair share. It's wrong to
use
people. I wouldn't want to cheat anyone, any more than I would want to be cheated. I try to be kind to everyone. Everyone deserves respect. We're all in this together.”
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One way to fairness is through sensitivity to social justice and equity. This path relies on the ability of human beings to employ logic and abstract concepts of equitable arrangements. It depends on the symbolic thought capabilities of human beings as well as on the advanced working memory needed to reason. Lawrence Kohlberg hypothesized three levels of development that must be passed through as children develop a sense of social justice.
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In the first level, young children focus on the negative consequences of an action. Young children are highly egocentric, meaning that they see the world chiefly from their own perspective. An action is considered wrong precisely because it results in the child being punished for doing it. It is the parental authority figure who makes the decision about what is right or wrong. The next step on the path involves thinking about right and wrong in a social or interpersonal way rather than egocentrically. An action is wrong if it harms a friendship with another person or if it harms the family or the community. At this point, the child is able to think about ethically right actions being helpful to the group, not just the individual. The final step is to understand that, as members of society, we are obligated to obey universal rules of social justice. Understanding the concept of a social contract, and eventually coming to adhere to abstract principles of justice, completes the development of moral reasoning. Note that justice reasoning is heavily dependent on the human capacity for language. Only through language do we have a means for thinking about abstract concepts, including concepts like “justice” and “universal.” Imagine trying to reason at this highest level entirely by drawing pictures rather than by talking or writing.

The alternative path to fairness places much greater emphasis on the power of empathy for the feelings of others. By emphasizing caring and
compassion for others one can also reason about what is fair—this more emotional path to moral reasoning should be seen as a complement to the rational path of concern for the self, the group, and finally principles of social justice. This path to fairness thus exploits the advanced social intelligence of human beings. It relies more on being able to read the minds of others and feel their pain. However, an advanced social intelligence alone is not enough. Rather, the theory-of-mind capacities merely allow for the ability to engage in care reasoning, a form of reasoning that is just as dependent on an advanced system of working memory as justice reasoning. Similar to Kohlberg's three stages of moral reasoning, Carol Gilligan proposed three steps along the caring pathway as well.
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Again, because children are egocentric, the first step involves self-love. Young children care for themselves only, orienting their concerns to individual survival. The second step requires moving beyond this selfish stage to a concern with the well-being of others. In fact, caring for the needs of others completely overtakes moral reasoning, as goodness is defined as self-sacrifice. Working memory must be combined with insight into the feelings of others to achieve this concern. The self-sacrificial stage is transcended when people take the final step, whereby the needs of others and the self are morally equated. The focus here is on a morality of nonviolence in which one's actions should neither harm the self nor harm others, as seen in the protest practices advocated by Gandhi. A refusal to hurt others thus leads one to fairness, but it does so through the development of caring and compassion rather than through abstract principles of social justice.

In the most extreme form of altruism, there is a willingness to sacrifice even one's life in order to save the lives of others. This could be understood in terms of the second stage of care reasoning in which taking care of the needs of others above all else is the standard of what is right and good. However, it could also be, in the case of life or death circumstances, that the injunction to do no harm to others or to oneself boils down to a choice. Do I harm myself or another? In natural disasters, ship or airplane accidents, and the combat of war, grave and agonizingly real moral dilemmas must be confronted. According to the perspective advanced here, making the altruistic decision of self-sacrifice ought to be more common when the ensemble of the modern mind becomes engaged to overcome the instinctual response of
self-survival. Unless our capacity for advanced working memory and social intelligence can be brought to bear, the most likely response is the fast and habitual one of self-preservation.

A comparison of two famous disasters at sea makes this point well.
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On the night of April 14, 1912, the RMS
Titanic
, the greatest luxury ship of its day, struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic on its maiden voyage from South Hampton to New York. Of the 2,207 confirmed passengers and crew, 1,517 were lost to the frigid sea. Over a period of nearly three hours, between the time the ship struck the iceberg and the eventual sinking, numerous acts of altruism occurred. There were not enough lifeboats for all on board, and the ship's crew called for saving the women and children first. Hundreds of men perished rather than selfishly taking a place in a lifeboat, despite the certainty of a painful death for those who remained with the ship. Compared with a reference group of older adults (greater than thirty-five years of age) who traveled third class and had no children, significant advantages in survival rates were found for children under the age of sixteen, women between the ages of sixteen and thirty-five, and parents with children. Thus, the social injunction to save women and children first in fact resulted in altruistic acts of self-sacrifice on the
Titanic
.

On May 7, 1915, the cruise liner RMS
Lusitania
was torpedoed by a German U-boat just a few miles off the coast of Ireland. The ship was similar in design to the RMS
Titanic
, and their passenger lists and crews were comparable. However, the situation facing the passengers on the two ships was different in a critical way. The
Lusitania
sank in a scarce eighteen minutes. With so little time, there was little chance for reflection by those on board. There was no time to engage the deliberative processes made possible through our advanced social intelligence and working memory capacity. Of the 1,949 confirmed passengers and crew on board, 1,313 died. There is no reason to believe that the men on the
Lusitania
were less altruistic in general than those on the
Titanic
. Nor is there reason to believe that caring for the lives of women or children ahead of their own was not stressed. In fact, “in both disasters, the captain issued orders to their officers and crew to follow the social norm of ‘women and children first.’ These orders were successfully carried out on the
Titanic
, but not on the
Lusitania
, due to the time constraints and problems
launching the lifeboats.”
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Relative to the reference group, children under the age of sixteen, females sixteen to thirty-five years of age, and parents with children had no advantages in survival. For males sixteen to thirty-five years of age in the prime of physical condition, survival probability showed a small but statistically significant advantage over the reference group of older, childless, third-class passengers on the
Lusitania
. In sinking in just eighteen minutes, such an advantage would be expected. Yet there was no such advantage for this physically able group of males on the
Titanic.
In fact, young males had a worse survival rate than the reference group.

Fairness will not rule human actions with respect to the rights of others if a person fails to engage in the deliberation required by justice reasoning or care reasoning. Lack of time is only one reason why such failures occur. Another is a failure to devote the executive attention required by the effortful process of moral engagement. When an authority figure orders one to commit an immoral or unethical act, it requires considerable mental effort to think through what is right and what is wrong. Whether one arrives at fairness by appealing to universal principles of social justice or by asserting a priority of nonviolence to the self and others, reflection is required. None of this will happen if the individual simply disengages from the process. Such moral disengagement is the easy path to take when the blame for wrong actions can be placed elsewhere, when one is simply following orders. Even evil acts can be mindlessly committed if the responsibility is displaced to the authority figure. Albert Bandura explained why: “Moral control operates most strongly when people acknowledge that they cause harm by their detrimental actions…. Disengagement…operates by obscuring or minimizing the agentive role in the harm one causes. People will behave in ways they typically repudiate if a legitimate authority accepts responsibility for the effects of their conduct.”
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Stanley Milgram conducted extensive research on how obedience to an authority figure disengages the human faculty for moral reasoning. He found that people were willing to administer electric shocks to another human being when instructed to do so by an experimenter in a psychology research study. Compliance was common even when the shocks administered were extremely dangerous (450 volts). The import of this finding is immense, as Jerry Burger noted in his more recent attempt to replicate the results: “the haunting images
of participants administering electric shocks and the implications of the findings for understanding seemingly inexplicable events such as the Holocaust and Abu Ghraib have kept the research alive for four decades.”
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In Milgram's most famous experiment, he created a situation in which a research participant believed he was teaching a partner the correct answers in a paired-associate learning task. Each stimulus word was paired with a correct response word. If the learner made a mistake in responding to a stimulus word, the experimenter—wearing a white lab coat to indicate his status as an authority figure—told the participant to deliver a punishment to the learner in the form of an electric shock. By punishing incorrect responses, the participant was actively teaching the learner the right answers. The shocks ranged from 15 to 450 volts, from mild to extremely dangerous. The teachers were further instructed to start with the 15 volt shock and then progress up the scale of 30 switches.

In reality, the learner received no shocks, since the learner was in fact a confederate of the experimenter. In the original experiment, the learner was hidden from view of the participant, but the sounds of his cries of pain to the shocks could be readily heard at the 150-volt level. The learner complained that his heart was bothering him and that he wanted out. From 150 to 330 volts, the learner yelled in pain and insisted on stopping the experiment. After 330 volts, the learner could no longer scream of protest, implying he was physically injured by the teacher's infliction of punishments. In each case, the experimenter sat a few feet from the teacher and repeated the command to continue raising the shock level with each mistake whenever the teacher showed signs of wanting to discontinue. The experimenter did not end the session until there had been four consecutive trials in which the teacher had resisted administering a shock or had administered the full 450-volt shock.