Presentation Abstracts

Paul Bloom | "Just Babies"

I argue that we are born with a rich moral sense. Even young babies distinguish between good and bad acts, and they instinctively prefer good characters over bad ones. They start off with altruistic impulses-they feel pain at the pain of others, and are motivated to help them. But this innate moral sense is sharply limited. It is narrow; we naturally care about our family and friends, but we are indifferent -- or worse -- toward distant strangers. Certain important moral views that we now share, such as the wrongness of slavery or the value of human equality, are the product of our intelligence and our imagination. They are not in our genes.

Click here to see a related New York Times article by Paul Bloom OR here to see a Nature article by Paul Bloom

Samuel Bowles | "The sophisticated legislator’s dilemma: Optimal taxes and subsidies when incentives affect preferences"

I will address the problem facing a sophisticated legislator who is aware that incentives designed to alter the economic costs and benefits of the target's behaviors may also affect preferences, with the result that incentives are sometimes ineffective or even counterproductive. We address the case where explicit incentives such as subsidies, taxes, and fines crowd out social preferences that internalize the effects of ones' actions on others or diminish ethical or intrinsic motivation to contribute to the public good. Evidence from behavioral experiments indicates that crowding may take two forms: categorical (the effect on
values depends only on the presence or absence of the incentive) or marginal (the effect depends on the extent of the incentive). These effects arise for two reasons: incentives frame decisions by providing cues of appropriate behavior information, in which case preferences are state-dependent (or equivalently “situation-dependent”) and incentives may affect the process by which people learn new preferences in which case preferences are endogenous. I characterize the differences in the incentives deployed by the sophisticated legislator and his naive counterpart (who is unaware of the crowding out phenomenon) and show that crowding out (of either the categorical or marginal kind) may call for the greater use of incentives rather than the opposite, as is commonly assumed.

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Robert Boyd | "What can evolution tell us about morality?"

There is a long history of deriving lessons about human morality from thinking about human life in the state of nature.  Over the last decades there have been major advances in our knowledge of the evolutionary forces shaping the behavior of social mammals, the timing and nature of events during the evolution of the human lineage, and the scale and complexity of social life among foragers. In this talk I will review these advances and what they mean for inferences about the evolution of human morality.

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Ray Jackendoff | "Morality in the context of human social cognition"

Contemporary cognitive science asks the question of how the human brain generates our experience and our action. Two central domains of cognition are our understanding of the physical world and our understanding of social relations and social interactions among individuals. In each case it is of interest to investigate what aspects of our understanding arise through learning and what aspects are “wired in” by virtue of our evolutionary heritage.

The sense of morality is an important component of social cognition. It is one of a set of normative domains, along with religious norms, laws, and customs. Cultures differ in what actions are regarded as moral or immoral, so some aspects of morality must be learned. On the other hand, the capacity for making moral judgments concerning culture- specific norms does appear to be a human universal, closely tied to the logic of group membership.

Can a scientific study of the human moral capacity shed light on what morals we should adopt? An open and troubling question.

Click here to see a related paper by Ray Jackendoff OR here to see another paper by Ray Jackendoff

Marcel Kinsbourne | Morally constrained behavior: Where from, and who decides?"

I will offer some ideas about the evolutionary and developmental origin of moral convictions, and why, although they are so notoriously diverse among cultures, they are so hard to dislodge. Then I will discuss the identity of the moral agent: the conscious mind or the preconscious brain. Finally I will draw conclusions about the relevance of the above to legal practices.

Click here to see a related paper by Marcel Kinsbourne

John Mikhail | "‘Any Animal Whatever’: Harmful Battery and its Elements as Building Blocks of Human and Nonhuman Moral Cognition"

Darwin’s (1871) observation that evolution has produced in us “certain emotions responding to right and wrong conduct, which have no apparent basis in the individual experiences of utility” is a useful springboard from which to clarify an important problem in the cognitive science of moral judgment.  The problem is whether a certain class of moral judgments is constituted or driven by emotion (e.g., Greene 2008; Greene & Haidt 2002) or merely correlated with emotion while being generated by unconscious computations (e.g., Huebner et al. 2007; Mikhail 2007).  Although the point has escaped notice until now, all 25 of the “personal” vignettes used by Greene and colleagues (2001) in their fMRI study of emotional engagement in moral judgment describe well-known crimes or torts.  Specifically, 22 of these scenarios describe actions that satisfy a prima facie case of purposeful battery and/or intentional homicide (i.e., murder).  Two other cases describe acts that constitute rape and sexual battery, while the final case describes a prima facie case of negligence.  With one exception, then, what Greene actually did in the “personal” condition of his experiment was to put subjects in the scanner and ask them to respond to a serious of violent crimes and torts.  By contrast, only 5 of 19 cases in Greene's “impersonal” condition are batteries, and only one of these batteries is purposeful.  The other four batteries involve foreseeable but non-purposeful harmful contact, at least two of which admit of a clear necessity defense.  The remaining 14 “impersonal” scenarios are a hodgepodge of cases that raise a variety of legal issues: fraud, tax evasion, insider trading, public corruption, theft, unjust enrichment, and necessity as a defense to trespass to chattels, among others.  Finally, 5 of these residual cases describe risk-risk tradeoffs in the context of vaccinations and environmental policy.

The upshot is that Greene's initial fMRI experiments did not really test two patterns of moral judgment-one “deontological” and the other “consequentialist”—as much as different categories of potentially wrongful behavior.  The basic cleavage he identified in the brain was not Kant versus Mill, but purposeful battery, rape, and murder, on the one hand, and a disorderly grab bag of theft crimes, regulatory crimes, torts against non-personal interests, and risk-risk tradeoffs, on the other.  Moreover, his finding that the MPFC, PCC, STS, and amygdala are recruited for judgment tasks involving purposeful battery, rape, and murder does not undermine the traditional rationalist claim that moral rules are engraved in the mind (e.g., Grotius, 1625; Kant 1788; Leibniz 1705).  On the contrary, Greene's evidence largely supports that thesis.  Crimes and torts have elements, and the relevant pattern of intuitions is best explained by assuming that humans possess tacit knowledge of legal rules.  Naturally, violent crimes and torts are more emotionally engaging than insider trading or environmental risk analysis, but it does not follow that emotion "constitutes" or "drives" the judgment that the former acts are wrong.  Rather, what drive these intuitions are the unconscious computations that characterize these acts as battery, rape, or murder in the first place.  By mischaracterizing his own stimuli, Greene and other researchers (e.g., Koenigs et al. 2007) have misinterpreted their own findings and misunderstood the nature of the problem.

Returning to Darwin, the main questions for cognitive science going forward include (1) how the brain computes unconscious representations of battery, murder, rape, negligence, and other forms of harmful trespass, and (2) how these computations and the negative emotions they typically elicit are related to the complex socio-emotional capacities that humans share with nonhuman animals.  Future research should focus more squarely on these topics and move beyond misleading pseudo-problems such as how emotion and reason “duke it out” in the brain.

Click here to see a related paper by John Mikhail OR here to see a second paper by John Mikhail

Laurie Santos | "Are Monkeys Moral?"

In my talk, I'll review recent empirical studies exploring whether non-human primates share human-like moral norms. Do humans alone possess a sense of fairness, prosocial motives, and punishment norms? Or are these capacities shared with our closest living relatives? As my talk will reveal, the empirical picture to date is a bit complicated:  although non-human primates appear to share some human-like moral intuitions, such propensities appear limited by context and self-interest.  I'll then use these new empirical findings to review what our emerging picture of "primate moral sense" suggests about the origins of human moral intuitions and the extent to which our own moral sense might be uniquely human.

Click here to see a related article by Laurie Santos OR here to see a second article by Laurie Santos

Click here to see a review of Laurie Santos' recent work

Stephen Stich | “The Definition of Morality: Why it matters ... and why it might not exist”

For over 60 years, philosophers have been debating how to define terms like ‘morality’, ‘moral judgment’ and ‘moral rule’. Since many psychologists and evolutionary biologists who study moral cognition suspect the debate is a waste of time, I’ll begin by illustrating why the issue is important for those interested in the empirical study of morality. I’ll then consider two strategies for defending proposed definitions. The first assumes that moral judgments or moral rules are a natural kind and attempts to discover the essential features of that kind. This strategy has been pursed most notably by Elliot Turiel and his followers, who claim to have discovered the crucial features of both moral and conventional rules. I’ll argue that, while Turiel’s ideas have been very influential (particularly among philosophers) his conclusions are untenable. The second strategy seeks to analyze the commonsense concept of moral judgment. However, recent work on the psychology of concepts encourages the speculation that there might not be any such concept. I’ll end the talk with a brief discussion of some ongoing research aimed at testing that speculation and exploring its implications.

Click here to see a related paper by Stephen Stich OR here to see another paper by Stephen Stich