Disorders of Morality and Empathy: Neurological understandings of morality gone awry
The Cognitive Neuroscience of Callous and Unemotional Traits
James Blair
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In the study of individuals with psychopathy, or high levels of callous and unemotional traits, James Blair reports that reduced functioning and interaction of two regions of the brain impair the development of basic moral reasoning. In healthy individuals, the amygdala, critical to stimulus reinforcement learning, judges the goodness or badness of an action and passes the information to the orbitofrontal cortex, which assigns a value to the action in order to make a decision about it. In people with psychopathy, there is less functional connectivity between these two regions of the brain resulting in poorer learning about the badness of an action and poorer decision-making on the basis of information from the amygdala. The impairment appears to affect only harm-based moral transgressions. Social disorder-based transgressions are processed by a separate neural system and thus not affected.
Blair also shows how individuals with psychopathy have more difficulty interpreting expressions of fear, a more ambiguous emotion than anger, which is a prerequisite to the development of basic aspects of moral reasoning.
James Blair is chief of the unit on Affective Cognitive Neuroscience in the Mood and Anxiety Disorders Program at the National Institute of Mental Health. His primary research interest involves understanding the neuro-cognitive systems mediating affect in humans and how these become dysfunctional in mood and anxiety disorders. Previously, he helped form and co-lead the Developmental Disorders group at the Institute of Cognitive Research, University College London, where he was named senior lecturer.
Reason, Emotion, and Receptivity to Morality
Jeanette Kennett
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Philosopher Jeanette Kennett uses psychopathy as a litmus test in the meta-ethical debate of rationalism versus sentimentalism. Are they mutually exclusive? While the impairment of emotional processing and the lack of empathy among psychopaths make a strong case for sentimentalism, Kennett argues that certain rational capacities are also essential to moral agency. Psychopaths' insensitivity to cognitive dissonance, which leads to inconsistencies and contradictions in their justifications of moral judgments and behaviors, indicates a lack of receptivity to reason and a failure to grasp moral concepts. Thus, she suggests that both sentimentalist and rationalist perspectives are needed to fully explain the moral failures of individuals with psychopathy.
Jeanette Kennett recently joined the faculty of the Philosophy Department and the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. She is the author of Agency and Responsibility: A Common-Sense Moral Psychology (Clarendon Press, 2001). Previously, she was principal research fellow in The Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the Australian National University and also at Charles Sturt University.