Moral Judgment – Emotion vs. Reason
David Brooks had a recent article in the New York Times titled The End of Philosophy. In the article, Brooks addresses the evolution of moral judgment. Moral judgment, he argues, is more a product of emotion than reason.
Michael Gazzaniga writes in his 2008 book, “Human,” is that “it has been hard to find any correlation between moral reasoning and proactive moral behavior, such as helping other people. In fact, in most studies, none has been found.”
Brooks says, “Seeing and evaluating are not two separate processes. They are linked and basically simultaneous.”
As Steven Quartz of the California Institute of Technology said during a recent discussion of ethics sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation, “Our brain is computing value at every fraction of a second.
According to Brooks, “Moral judgments are rapid intuitive decisions and involve the emotion-processing parts of the brain.”
Following his line of reasoning, Brooks says that emotions precede moral reasoning and he goes on to say that evolution is shaping our moral judgment from the action of cooperation, not competition.
The piece that Brooks seems to miss, in my opinion, is conditioning. We may be making moral judgments instantaneously at a pre-conscious or unconscious level, but much of that emotional, mental and psychic process is more heavily influenced by childhood conditioning than evolution. We may choose cooperation, but the choice we make toward competition or cooperation is definitely more of an emotional decision, than mental because the emotional conditioning is deeper than our cognitive process. Deeper still are the tension patterns in the body and the self-images we hold that are in alignment with these fixated energetic patterns.
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