An Introduction to Evolutionary Ethics (15 page)

Surprising as it may sound, psychopaths possess a rather specific deficit. Despite their larger-than-life personas, psychopaths are remarkably normal when it comes to most cognitive tasks. They can pass almost every psychological skills test you can pass, even tests designed to evaluate moral knowledge. Psychopaths have no more trouble identifying what's right (or wrong) than you do. What separates psychopaths from people like you and me is, at bottom, an
emotional
deficit. It's not so much what they don't
know
that make psychopaths psychopaths; it's what they don't
feel
. (Consider the title of a recent article in the journal
Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience
: “Psychopaths Know Right from Wrong But Don't Care.”) Psychopaths lack empathy. Unlike you and me, they are not disturbed by the distress that others feel, even though they correctly
believe
that their acts cause others distress. More specifically, psychopaths fail to recognize submissive cues, according to the cognitive neuroscientist James Blair (2005). When you (a non-psychopath, I'll assume) observe a grimace, a wince, or a look of sadness in another, it sets in motion a series of involuntary emotional events that serve to inhibit you (if only weakly) from harming him or her. Psychopaths miss these cues.
³
All the same, they're perfectly lucid about what they are doing. Their heads are clear. If anything, their hearts are clouded. Of course, in reality it has nothing to do with their hearts. Their brains are the problem.

Tania Singer (2007), a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Zurich, set out to identify the parts of the brain underlying empathy. Two areas of the brain appeared to stand out: the
anterior insula
and the
anterior cingulate cortex
. When a subject was given a mild electric shock, these two areas were active – in addition to the part of the brain that registers pain: the
somatosensory cortices
. When, instead, the subject's loved one was given the electric shock, the somatosensory cortices were quiet while the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex remained active. Independent studies have shown that these areas are critical for emotional regulation and conflict resolution, respectively. The neuropsychiatrist Laurence Tancredi (2005) describes the anterior cingulate as the brain's “Mediator” since it is responsible for problem-solving and emotional self-control. The anterior insula, deep inside the brain, alerts the organism to impending danger. From a neuroscientific perspective, then, empathy is the coordination of brain systems regulating emotion and decision-making. We get emotional information from cues in our environment (our spouse screams in pain), and this engages the rational part of the mind in forming a plan for action. In psychopaths, activity in these areas is decreased. Hence, their ability to process emotions is impaired; psychopaths are readily distracted and receive insufficient emotional input. The cues that psychopaths receive from the environment are not treated as emotional cues and so do not influence behavior in the way they do for the rest of us.
⁴

At the center of many neuroscientific discussions of morality is
inhibition
. Morally successful individuals can control themselves, even in particularly trying times. Psychopaths are notoriously deficient on this front. What studies of the brain reveal is that the ability to inhibit one's darker impulses comes from a delicate balance among several areas: among others, the hippocampus, the anterior cingulate cortex, and the amygdala. Like the anterior cingulate cortex, the hippocampus plays a critical role in regulating aggression. So if the hippocampus is damaged or is diminished in size, activity from the emotional centers of the brain goes unchecked, resulting in impulsive and sometimes aggressive behavior. This is true for much of the frontal lobe of the brain: it
damps down
signals from the emotional centers of the brain. On the other hand, unchecked aggression can be the result, not of a diminished hippocampus or frontal lobe, but an
overactive
amygdala. The amygdala, what Tancredi calls the brain's “Guard Dog,” assesses threats from the outside world. It governs the threat-response system, what we think of as the “fight or flee” response. Individuals with a hypersensitive amygdala, therefore, regularly perceive threats where the rest of us do not. Such individuals are generally more paranoid than the rest of us. At sufficient levels, perceived threats will overpower the inhibitory work of even developmentally normal frontal lobes.

Research on the brain does not, in itself, settle the question of morality's evolution. What it does show is that the brain contains systems that appear to be necessary for registering the distress of others, and this seems necessary for successful moral behavior (at least for creatures like us). Emotions or affective responses matter. According to Joshua Greene, “there is an important dissociation between affective and ‘cognitive’ contributions to social/moral decision-making and that the importance of the affective contributions has been underestimated by those who think of moral judgment primarily as a reasoning process” (2005: 341–2). As we know, the development of these systems depends in large part on one's genes. This does not mean that one's environment has no influence on brain structure; in point of fact, early childhood experiences (most notably, traumatic experiences) can alter critical brain connections in ways that can last a lifetime. Still, a child does not
learn
to grow an amygdala or
choose
not to develop fully her anterior cingulate cortex. The genetic code, written into every nucleus of every cell of her body, instructs her body to produce quite specific structures responsible for quite specific tasks. When these instructions are garbled or misinterpreted, the results are telling. A 2002 study by the National Institute of Health (Miller 2002), for example, demonstrated that a single gene alteration can alter the brain's response to emotionally charged situations by altering the performance of the amygdala. Individuals with the genetic variant experience greater levels of fear, the response to which is either excessive withdrawal or excessive aggression.

As I hinted above, distress-sensitivity by itself only vaguely resembles the mature moral sense. For one thing, my feeling bad in response to
your
feeling bad is perfectly compatible with not caring about your welfare; after all, if I don't want to feel bad any more, I can just remove myself from your presence! But this is hardly what we think when we think of empathic responses.

What's missing here is a sense of what things are like
for you
– that is, how things are from your perspective. To achieve this feat, however, requires the ability to grasp (among other things) the fact that you have beliefs and feelings and desires not unlike the beliefs and feelings and desires that I have. We take this for granted now. It's second nature for you and I to think that people do things for
reasons
, where these involve things like beliefs and desires. For example, we might explain Beatrice's getting up and going to the refrigerator and taking out an apple and eating it by appealing to Beatrice's
desire
for an apple and her
belief
that the fridge contains an apple. (What else could explain Beatrice's action if it isn't some combination of beliefs and desires? Alien mind control?) Though this kind of “mind-reading” comes easy for you and I, we can't let this blind us to the fact that, at some point, we
developed
this ability. It's doubtful we popped out of the womb all wet and warm, pondering the profound sense of awe our parents must have been experiencing at that moment.

5.2 Mind-Reading As it turns out, “mind-reading” is a skill that develops quite naturally in children around the age of 4. We know this because kids at that age – but not typically before – can pass what's known as the “false belief test.” In the classic version of the test (Wimmer and Perner 1983), a child watches Maxi the Puppet place a piece of chocolate in a hatbox and then leave. While Maxi is away, Maxi's mother moves the chocolate from the hatbox to the cupboard. When Maxi returns, the show is interrupted and the child is asked: Where will Maxi look for the piece of chocolate? If a child is younger than 4, she will most likely say
the cupboard
, exhibiting a failure to grasp that Maxi has beliefs (in this case, at least one false one) that are different from her own. For a child younger than 4, the world is typically seen through only one set of eyes: her own. But 4 years of age appears to mark a turning point: 4-year-olds tend to give the correct answer:
the hatbox
. This indicates that a child has come to distinguish her own beliefs from the (apparent) beliefs of another. She realizes that others can think and presumably feel differently than her. She develops, in short,
a theory of mind
, a theory that explains the behavior of others.

This in turn opens up the range of responses a child can have to the people around her. Prior to this realization, there is no real meaning to what a child is responding to; it's as if others emit an electric signal that distresses the child. But with the realization that others have feelings (and desires and beliefs) like her own, a child can suddenly give meaning to what she's feeling: I feel bad
because he feels bad
. And this can be achieved without confusing who is feeling what. Moreover, the ability to grasp what others are thinking and feeling sharpens a child's evaluations of more complicated moral situations, as the following example demonstrates.

A stranger asks Jones how to get to a particular restaurant. Jones intends to give the stranger the
correct
directions, but accidentally sends the stranger in the wrong direction. When Smith is asked (by a different stranger) how to get to a particular restaurant, Smith intends to
mislead
the stranger, but accidentally sends the stranger in the correct direction. What's interesting is that, when children are asked who is “naughtier,” their answers vary according to their age – and, presumably, their maturing moral sense. 4-year-olds tend to judge that Jones is naughtier than Smith, apparently placing greater weight on the
consequences
of one's actions rather than on one's intentions. 5-and 6-year-olds progressively tend to say that Smith is naughtier than Jones. According to a recent team of Harvard psychologists, “what develops then is not just a ‘theory of mind,’ or the ability to represent the mental states of others, but the ability to integrate this information with information about consequences in the context of moral judgment” (Young
et al.
2007: 8235). For the developing child, right and wrong begins to go beyond what merely happens. It begins to involve what people
intend
to happen.

This same team of psychologists set out bolster these results by peering into the brain. Do the systems of the brain underlying belief attribution, they asked,
also
underlie moral judgment? Independent studies of the brain have revealed that the right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ) is critically involved in making assessments of others' mental states. Was the RTPJ also active when individuals judged that some act was right or wrong? Apparently so. If someone caused no harm but
intended
to cause harm (as Smith did), subjects' judgments were “harsh, made on the basis of [the actor's] beliefs alone, and associated with enhanced recruitment of circuitry involved in belief attribution.” When harm was unintentional, subjects did not exhibit the same pattern of brain activity. The authors conclude that: “Moral judgment may therefore represent the product of two distinct and at times competing processes, one responsible for representing harmful outcomes and another for representing beliefs and intentions” (Young
et al.
2007: 8239) This is in line with the rough picture that has so far been developing. From a very young age, children are attuned to the emotions of others (particularly those emotions associated with distress). Indeed, the brain appears to contain systems crucial to this ability, for when they malfunction, we observe (let's just say)
sub-standard
moral behavior. But mature moral judgments go beyond merely registering the distress of others. It appears that a crucial part of the moral puzzle is perspective-taking. Indeed, the philosopher Jonathon Deigh argues that a full grasp of right and wrong requires
mature empathy
, where this involves “taking this other person's perspective and imagining the feelings of frustration and anger” (1996: 175). Before a child comes to grasp the role that intentions play in moral judgment (which requires, among other things, a grasp of intentions themselves), the child tends to say that causing harm is sufficient for “being naughty.” As his understanding of other minds develops, however, he's more and more likely to take into account an actor's
intentions
, reflecting a growing tendency to integrate information about intentions with information about harm in generating moral judgments that approximate judgments adults make.

It might seem that this is the place to wrap up this neat and tidy little story. Unfortunately, things are not so neat and tidy. In fact, one of the most talked-about studies of childhood moral development complicates the account just offered. According to the work of philosopher Shaun Nichols (2004), a child's moral competency does
not
rely so critically on perspective-taking after all. In the next section, we consider why.

5.3 “Them's the Rules”

Consider for a moment all the rules that children are told to follow. “Don't talk with your mouth full.” “Share your toys.” “Don't hit your sister.” “Raise your hand in class if you want to speak.” “Don't pick your nose.” “Put your dishes in the sink.” “Keep your promises.” “Don't whine.” “Don't lie.” “Don't spit.” “Shoes off the bed.” “Elbows off the table.” “Be nice.” Caregivers direct these rules at their charges without any real regard to age or understanding. Moreover, they're directed at children with widely varying levels of intensity. Lying, spitting, whining, hitting – there's no telling how a parent will respond. Dropping their child off at daycare in the morning, parents pat their child on the head, sweetly telling him to
be nice
. But later that same day the parents treat food-throwing as the final straw, bursting into a rage and sending the child into “time out.” Caregivers make no attempt to separate rules into one kind or another. As far as kids are concerned, rules don't come with labels; kids are just expected to follow them.