Morality and the Brain….

Once again, Antonio Damasio and his colleagues have found a creative way to illustrate the effects of specific brain damage, in this case the ventromedial prefrontal cortex or VMPC. Participants with damage to the VMPC due to aneurysm or tumor growth, healthy participants, and participants with brain damage in areas outside the VMPC were asked to respond to a number of moral dilemmas reminiscent of Kohlberg’s research on moral development.

Here is one of the scenarios. What would you do?

“You are the captain of a military submarine travelling underneath a large iceberg. An onboard explosion has caused you to lose most of your oxygen supply and has injured one of your crew who is quickly losing blood. The injured crew member is going to die from his wounds no matter what happens.

The remaining oxygen is not sufficient for the entire crew to make it to the surface. The only way to save the other crew members is to shoot dead the injured crew member so that there will be just enough oxygen for the rest of the crew to survive.

Would you kill the fatally injured crew member in order to save the lives of the remaining crew members?”

The participants with VMPC damage were more likely to say that they would kill the injured crew member than the healthy controls or people with damage to other brain areas. In contrast, people with VMPC damage were equally likely as other participants to agree that a vaccine that saves a lot of people should be used even if it produces adverse effects in a few individuals. Damasio and his colleagues argue that the latter scenario is relatively unemotional and impersonal, whereas the submarine scenario requires personal action.

Given the role of the VMPC in producing normal social emotions, these results indicate that typical moral judgments are not a matter of pure logic. Instead, emotions play an important role in our sense of right and wrong.