Morality and Emotions

"It was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race." - Mark Twain

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Morality and Emotions

"Psychopaths shed light on a crucial subset of decision-making that's referred to as morality... They are missing the primal emotional cues that the rest of us use as guides when making moral decisions...

Psychopaths never feel bad when they make other people feel bad... Hurting someone else is just another way of getting what he wants, a perfectly reasonable way to satisfy desires...

The modern legal system still subscribes to this antiquated set of assumptions and pardons anybody who demonstrates a 'defect in rationality' - these people are declared legally insane, since the rational brain is supposedly responsible for distinguishing between right and wrong. If you can't reason, then you shouldn't be punished...

When you are confronted with an ethical dilemma, the unconscious automatically generates an emotional reaction. (This is what psychopaths can't do.) Within a few milliseconds, the brain has made up its mind; you know what is right and what is wrong. These moral instincts aren't rational...

It's only after the emotions have already made the moral decision that those rational circuits in the prefrontal cortex are activated. People come up with persuasive reasons to justify their moral intuition. When it comes to making ethical decisions, human rationality isn't a scientist, it's a lawyer. This inner attorney gathers bits of evidence, post hoc justifications, and pithy rhetoric in order to make the automatic reaction seem reasonable. But this reasonableness is just a facade, an elaborate self- delusion. Benjamin Franklin said it best in his autobiography: 'So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.'"

--- How We Decide / Jonah Lehrer