Neuro-Scientific Moral Psychology; The Emotive Moral Judgment Boundaries to Evaluations of Collective Behavior

Hanover wrote-"Epistimological questions dealing with what do we "know," preceded our dependence upon the scientific method as a means to obtain knowledge. That is, we claimed to "know" things for 1000s of years before we employed "science" as it's known today. Even today, when we say we know something, we don't always mean that our knowledge is based upon scientific reasoning.

Whether various langauges once used the word "science" and "know" interchangeably, is an interesting artifact, but I don't think it's relevant to the OP's use of the term "science," as I suspect he was using a contemporary meaning."

If knowledge and science are synonyms one might take a more contemporary meaning of science as a specialized method of attaining knowledge of the universe and its composition. Theories of knowledge or episteme regarding knowledge about knowledge are subsequent to sentience and direct awareness-knowledge obviously.

I suppose one might regard direct individual sentience as a Sartrist kind of existentialist paradigm and large organizational science such as occurs in making a phoenix lander on the Martian northern polar ice cap margin to discover that the ice is mostly water-ice rather than co2 as is on the southern pole, or M-Theory researches or particle accelerators as collective social phenomena as Sartre described in the critique of dialectical reason-I believe these activities generally are good although they may produce obstructions to science too-an inherent danger of social bureaucratic ossification developing use truths for purposes of social rewards.

Reading in Stephen Hall's 2010 book 'Wisdom', there is a chapter on morality that regards the present elite University philosophical researches into morality as a neuro-cognitive phenomenon. Kantian individualism is classed with the emotional, deep proprietary side of moral judgment and utilitarianism with a more advanced abstract neurological processing capability occurring in the pre-frontal cortex (PFC). Moral judgments are based in organic responses to external stimuli such as food tastes/disgust and threats to personal survival.

I would stipulate that organic stimulus response judgments to the external world and food intake quality and survival may be deeply associated with moral judgments as good or bad, yet primary emotional judgments occurring quickly when not enough time exists for advanced creative reasoning about the values of worldly circumstances and suggested best responses are not necessarily wrong when applied to more abstract circumstances.

Innate moral judgments applied to generally have the potential for being wrong responses as well as fallibility in doing math problems can occur. It Is interesting that innate responses may develop with food readily, though one may also dissociate good taste from high food quality such as in junk food in which PFC thought is required to select the bad tasting Brussel Sprouts (to some) instead of the chocolate pudding. The Congress is presently selecting the chocolate pudding of tax cut extensions.

With a neuro-cognitive moral criterion for deciding the OP it is perhaps somewhat more complicated to find a true rather than a politically correct answer. The epistemological foundation of morality based in brain processing organic history, in which moral decisions of good and bad have a certain grounding in automatic associations to food intake or perhaps survival, present different criteria for deciding the effectiveness of science in advancing planetary interests. If science enables the destruction of life on Earth through innumerable means and even destines the destruction of life on Earth through global warming or biological war it is challenging to claim that knowledge/science is improving the planet.

This irony of eating of the Tree of knowledge is that intelligence arises following willful disobedience to the will of God. With all the knowledge gained in the history of mankind, sin and greed may doom mankind to destroy itself through the wrong use of that knowledge/science rather than ‘improve it.

Hall quotes Marc Hauser in his book ‘Moral Minds’ saying, “moral judgments are mediated by an unconscious process, a hidden moral grammar that evaluates the causes and consequences of our own and others’ actions”. Hall also mentions Leon Kass and his books ‘The Wisdom of Repugnance’ and “The Hungry Soul”.

While there may be simple historical existence challenges that become deeply grounded as recurrent experience of good or bad events, the early childhood learning of things such as fire burns, or the examples that Schopenhaur presented in ‘The Fourfold Roots of Reason’ that depth perception is learned offer some room to differ from complete acceptance of an organic foundation for morality that cannot be easily changed.

That modern neuro-philosophy finds evidence for the existence of a natural law of moral judgments that Cicero would have been happy with, when the external referents change character from bad to good as can happen in a new environment, conditioned quick or emotive responses may also change. In contemporary politics the immediate day to day political satisfaction of income takes prescience over longer range reasoning-in the PFC is set aside for the ‘up close and personal’ processing in emotional areas of the brain.

Neuroscientific moral psychology may be able to map out various brain functions-one would expect such, yet like mapping out a computer is does not map the operating system or conscious development of moral structures for evaluating the manifest world and the manifold of complexity presented in the modern world. There seems to be an implicit bias toward proprietary emotive evaluations of external circumstances including large science and other bureaucratic endeavors, yet one should blame that drift toward inefficient political and social management of scientific activities rather than upon innate emotive psychological determination of allocation of financial resources for funding science.