Does moral action depend on "reasoning?" The Temple Foundation has assembled various prominent thinkers and sought their answers.
Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga's essay is devoid of any ghost in the machine:
What if most humans, regardless of their culture or religious beliefs or age or sex, chose the same option when faced with a moral conflict? What if those same people gave wildly different reasons for why they made their particular choices? This, in fact, is the state of affairs for much of our moral behavior. Recent research in human brain science and ancillary fields has shown that multiple factors feed into the largely automatic and deterministic processes that drive our moral decisions.
Gazzaniga cautions us his mechanistic view of human decision-making does not make obsolete "the value of holding people in a society accountable for their actions, though it does suggest that the "endless historical discussion" of "free will and the like has little or no meaning."
What evidence substantiates Gazzaniga's view?
First, most scientific research shows that morality is largely universal, which is to say, cross-cultural. It is also easily revealed to be present in young infants. It has a fixed sequence of development and is not flexible or subject to exceptions like social rules. Indeed, recent brain-imaging studies have found that a host of moral judgments seem to be more or less universally held and reflect identifiable underlying brain networks. From deciding on fairness in a monetary exchange to rendering levels of punishment to wrongdoers, the repertoire of common responses for all members of our species is growing into a rich list. [Further,] all decision processes resulting in behaviors, no matter what their category, are carried out before one becomes consciously aware of them.
