This is bioethics bytes with me, David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.
Bioethics Bytes is made in association with Oxford's Hero Centre for Practical Ethics and made possible by a grant from the Wellcome Trust.
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What can science tell us about morality? Many philosophers would say nothing at all.
Facts don't imply values, they say.
You need further argument to move from facts about us and about the world to conclusions about what we ought to do.
For example, most humans are altruistic. They genuinely care about the well-being of friends and family, and to a lesser extent, even at strangers.
They'll give money to charity to help people they've never even met.
Suppose science gives us a compelling scientific explanation for why we're altruistic.
Does not tell us whether we should be altruistic. Professor Pat Churchland is a well-known US scientist based at the University
of San Diego who works at the intersection of neuroscience and philosophy.
Pat Churchland, welcome to Bioethics Bytes. Thanks so much, Nigel.
It's a pleasure to be here. The topic we're going to focus on is what neuroscience can tell us about morality.
I wonder if we could just begin by sketching your view of the neural basis of morality.
It's a beautiful story. There was a major shift in brain organisation and structure as mammals evolved and
there were a number of changes that were really important in the mammalian brain,
and one of which was that it was organised to see to the care and the nurture of offspring.
In the case of reptiles or frogs or snakes, for example, basically what happens is that the female lays the eggs and goes on her merry way.
In the case of mammals, because they were born very immature,
circuitry was in place to ensure that when there was separation of the infant from the mother, the mother felt pain and so did the infant.
They felt pleasure and well-being when they reconnected.
And we know something about that circuitry and we know that oxytocin,
although not by any means the only important molecule is in a certain sense, at the hub of all of that.
Just to clarify, what is oxytocin? What does it do?
Oxytocin is actually a very ancient molecule, and it's found in all reptiles and probably almost all animals.
But it in reptiles served very different purposes.
It had to do with smooth muscle contraction for the release of eggs, for example, in mammals.
It was put to rather different uses and it uses it head to head in the brain had to do with attachment between parent and offspring.
This shift in the mammalian brain was kind of like an extension of care of oneself,
seeing to one's own temperature and safety and food, to seeing to the temperature and safety and food of the others.
I can see how that works with the care of one's own offspring,
and there's obviously a genetic component to that in terms of looking after one's genes and so on.
But how does that extend to others who aren't related?
Yes. So this has been known for a while.
That is the role of oxytocin in parent infant bonding.
But a discovery about ten years ago with regard to mate attachment suggested something that
gave us insight into how care and attachment can extend beyond offspring to unrelated others,
to friends and so forth. And here was the story.
There are a number of kinds of voles. And as you know, voles are rodents look a little bit like mice, except they have very short tails.
Now, I'm going to contrast for you two kinds of voles. There's prairie voles and there's montane voles.
And in prairie voles, something very surprising and unusual was observed.
And that is that after the first meeting, the male and the female bond for life, the male guards the nest,
the male helps take care of the offspring and they just like to hang out together.
By contrast, let's talk about the montane voles.
There is no mate attachment. They mate and then they go on their merry way.
So when this behaviour was observed, Sue Carter and a number of other neurobiologists asked this question What's the difference in the brain,
the receptors to which oxytocin binds, or the receptors to which a very similar molecule vasopressin binds?
The density of receptors in very specific places in the prairie vole brain was different from that of the Montane vole brain.
And they. Found when they did the manipulations that you can imagine, for example, blocking those receptors that they could change the behaviour.
Now when you step back and kind of look at what was likely the genetic change
that takes you from caring for offspring to also caring for and being bonded.
Team-mates The second one is probably quite small and it has to do with the particular ecology for prairie voles.
After all, they live out on the open prairie where they are susceptible to predation by kestrels.
That's not true, of course, for montane voles. The insight that followed this was really important,
and that is you can make a small genetic change having to do with small aspects of circuitry or small aspects of receptor density.
And you can get things like mate attachment or kin attachment or calf attachment attachment to friends and others in the group,
and possibly even extending to individuals that are strangers or to individuals that are not even within your own species.
What would be the advantage of an individual cooperating with people who aren't close relatives?
Well, that's a very good question. And we can ask that same question in the context of baboons or chimpanzees or wolves, for example.
A wolf pack can much more easily bring down a major game like a caribou or a moose.
A wolf pack jointly can drive a grizzly bear off a kill.
Your food resources are much greatly enhanced than if you try to make it on your own.
A lone wolf or a lone coyote alone baboon.
The lone chimpanzee doesn't last very long.
They can't get the food resources and they're much more vulnerable to predation.
Now, it's so interesting to me to think about it in this way, because Darwin clearly understood this point about the advantages of group living.
But if you look at HUME and at Adam Smith, it's there.
And if you look at Aristotle, when he talks about humans as social by nature and about the advantages of being social by nature, it's there as well.
And so what I think is really kind of amazing about this time in science is that these earlier
hunches about what was likely to be the case are turning out to indeed have a real biological basis.
I can imagine someone listening to this saying, Why are you talking about animals?
Human morality isn't simply a matter of group cooperation in the way it is with chimpanzees.
It's got a kind of self-reflective aspect to it and a cultural aspect of it.
This isn't morality. This is a long way back in the past.
These are all the precursors of morality. There's a fair point there.
Part of the reason, of course, we're interested in the behaviour of other primates is because the human brain and the chimpanzee brain,
for example, are so very, very similar. I mean, the brains of all mammals are remarkably similar in structure and organisation.
But of course, as you say, in the case of humans, culture is hugely important.
Now you don't want to just focus on culture as it is right now.
What you also want to think about is the development of cultural institutions over time.
So if you think about humans as they began in Africa about 250,000 years ago,
those early groups in their social life and social organisation were probably pretty similar to chimpanzees and baboons.
Now the difference, of course, is that humans seem to have this capacity over time to evolve artefacts and tools, also to evolve social institutions.
And once humans began to congregate in very large groups, largely made possible by the advent of agricultural techniques,
then we begin to see a sort of new level of problem solving,
problem solving, having to do with resource distribution, private property, how to deal with miscreants, how to deal with inheritance and so forth.
But those institutions came about, I guess you'd say, as a result of collective problem solving about what will work and what won't work.
And if I may just go back to human Adam Smith again, but also to Aristotle.
I mean, all of them understood the importance of institutions in our social life and that if you have really terrible and corrupt institutions,
it's going to reflect badly on the prosperity and well-being of.
Everybody. Now, you've told a story about the origins of what I call the precursors of morality.
You seem to be saying that's what morality now is.
So you're moving from a description of facts about the past and facts about neuroscience to
saying how we engage with each other now and how we ought to engage with each other now.
Interesting. We might want to talk about just briefly is what do we mean by morality?
I may have a slightly looser conception, one which is, again, very dependent on HUME.
My conception sort of sees social behaviour on a spectrum so that there is social behaviour at one end,
which has got to do with etiquette and manners and in which hand you hold your fork matters that help perhaps grease the wheels of sociality,
but which are not really, really serious. And then at the other end, you have social practices that bear upon really,
really serious aspects of social life where you exactly say morality begins and etiquette and manners shades off,
I think is not really as important as the fact that we recognise what are the prototypical cases of moral issues.
If you think as experimental psychology has shown that all of our workaday categories are radially structured,
meaning that they have prototypes at the centre where we agree upon what counts as an instance of that category,
and that, with declining similarities, shades off to a fuzzy boundary.
Carrots and potatoes or prototypical vegetables.
Mushrooms and parsley. Well, some people count them as vegetables and some people don't.
And I think the same is true of many concepts that we use in the social domain, what it is, to be honest, or what it is to be fair.
These we understand in terms of prototypical cases and we may disagree at the boundaries and there may be no right answer
at the boundary whether this is really an instance of moral behaviour or whether it's merely social and conventional.
If you think about morality in that way as having to do with very serious matters and as
being a workaday concept with fuzzy boundaries at the edge and prototypes at the centre,
I think it helps us see also why there can be differences amongst groups as to the
way they handle certain kinds of issues with regard to such things as fairness.
It also helps us see the important role that social problem solving and the development of institutions to answer problem solving issues.
It helps us understand how that works as well. But right to the heart of morality is this notion that we have a concern for other people's interests.
But the way you described it, that concern is really just a concern for our own genes.
So for many people, that wouldn't be morality at all. Let's think about this in a slightly different way.
It's not that an individual is maximising his self-interest in anything like a straightforward, conscious way.
When we do things like fall in love, it's not because we explicitly say to ourselves, Oh, well, you know, I must get on with propagating my genes.
That's all kind of background stuff.
The evolution of the brain did this really interesting thing.
It took the circuitry for self-interest and it expanded it.
So you genuinely do care for others.
So you kind of want to distinguish between the sort of background, ultimate cause and the proximal cause that motivates people in the here and now.
You've mentioned David HUME.
David HUME famously said that you can't move straightforwardly from a description of the world, the way the world is to the way it ought to be,
that there has to be some kind of implied evaluative premise to get from any descriptive account to a moral account.
That's right. When you go back and read him, of course, he's always a lot more subtle than you think.
When you go back, you realise that in that famous passage, what he's actually doing is lambasting clerics in particular,
who think that there is a simple inference that takes you from something that is the case to something that ought to be the case,
such as let's just take a hypothetical example. Small boys do work as chimney sweeps.
Therefore, small boys ought to work as chimney sweeps. And HUME thought that any kind of inference that was simple and direct like that was stupid.
On the other hand, HUME was a naturalist about ethics, considerations of cell survival and the moral sentiment that is care about.
Others were motivating.
And that meant that those were, as it were, facts about the nature of the species in virtue of which certain things ought to happen.
So HUME, as a naturalist, of course, was quite willing to see that there is a way of getting from what is the case to what ought to be the case.
If he had been alive today, he would very likely have been fascinated by the developments in neuroscience.
But I'm still intrigued to know which developments can actually shed light on morality,
which reflect on our understanding of what we are in relation to how we ought to be.
I think that's a wonderful question,
and I don't think there is very much in neuroscience right now that can really bear upon that really difficult questions about
the fairness of an inheritance tax or about the obligation to donate in Oregon or when a war is a just war and so forth.
These, I think, are questions where neuroscience certainly today but in the foreseeable future is really not going to have anything to say.
There are some other examples, though, where I think a discovery in neuroscience makes a relevant contribution.
So for example, the understanding that in children the prefrontal neurones are not, well,
myelinated and aren't really well-developed until early adulthood has had an impact on the court's decision about trying capital crimes in children.
The frontal structures are known to be very important in executive control in general,
and that means they're important in impulse control and envisaging the consequences
of one option versus another of not being overwhelmed by your passions.
And in the case of youthful offenders,
18 and under their brain lacks the maturity to be able to manage impulse control in quite the same way that an adult can.
Do you think that neuroscience could ever have an impact on our understanding of specific moral issues?
It's hard for me to see that it can,
because I think many of the problems that we deal with in the moral domain involve incredibly complex social problems.
And so for something like When is a war just war?
I can't really quite imagine that there would be any discovery about the neurobiology
of humans that would help us to understand and to answer that question.
Imagine we could put oxytocin in the food supply somehow,
and it produced a big effect on people that they're much more likely to cooperate, much less likely to be violent to each other.
That would seem to be the direction that this sort of discussion of neuroscience is going in.
Should we do it? Well, we don't really have the power to intervene.
One problem is that oxytocin plays an important role in all aspects of the body and in females it regulates oestrus.
So if we put it in the food supply and we dysregulated female reproductive functions, then I think you have a problem.
There are experimental procedures where people are administering oxytocin.
I would say the results so far are really complicated in the sense that we don't really know what we've got.
But the other really more simple point, I think,
is that we have a fairly good idea of how at a behavioural level to enhance cooperation and to reduce violence.
And what we sometimes need is the will to do it.
The shortcut through a particular molecule is I think, both unrealistic technically,
but it doesn't really make as much sense as doing the other things behaviourally, which we know we can do.
There are lots of studies regarding children and how to enhance cooperation.
Role playing in simple games is one of the easiest and has.
A big effect. So I think there are really good behavioural ways of achieving those ends.
But it's just not likely in the foreseeable future that something like spraying oxytocin in a room is going to give you what you want.
Pat Churchland, thank you very much. Thank you. Nigel It's been a pleasure.
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