Alas, our cognitive systems don’t always work perfectly. Sometimes we misinterpret what we are seeing and hearing. That is, sometimes we assimilate the case at hand to a category or prototype of which it is not an instance, to which it positively does not belong. When that happens, you become the victim of the entire family of expected features, relations, developmental profile, and presumptively appropriate behavioral responses that automatically come with that prototype, but that fail to accurately characterize or suit the case at hand. Some dimensions of the activated prototype may fit (that’s why you deployed it in the first place), but others do not, as you slowly come to appreciate. As the case before you unfolds, and perhaps as you learn more about its initial stages, your prototype-driven expectations are violated and your cognitive dissonance grows. You have somehow failed to understand the situation correctly.
At some point, the accumulated new input or evidence may be sufficient to kick your brain’s activational activity out of the prototype-category that initially captured it and into a different and more appropriate prototype, one whose overall profile finally does fit the case at hand. At that point you may have the familiar “click” experience, where the problematic case suddenly re-presents itself in a new and coherent light, and you think to yourself, “Oh my god, I misunderstood what was happening.” You may then struggle to repair the social/moral damage that your automatic but ultimately inapt behavior may have produced.
This happens to all of us, and quite often. It reflects the fact that our moral cognition is not infallible. Happily, such mistakes can be corrected, and regularly they are, sometimes by oneself and sometimes with the help of others. Unhappily, sometimes they are not corrected. We are all familiar with people who have too quickly taken a superficial interpretation of some social/moral issue and then stubbornly refuse to respond to, or even to see, its failures to capture adequately the social/moral complexities that the issue presents.
When this happens, we have a typical case of moral conflict. If the issue is pressing, we may begin a round of moral reasoning and moral argument with the person or persons who take the competing interpretation of the issue, and who propose a problematic response or policy in light of it. Such arguments, it must be admitted, often begin with both sides citing some favored “moral” or other, a rule that supposedly compels us to take their response to the situation or to embrace their policy recommendation. But this rarely settles the conflict, since the real disagreement is usually about how we should interpret the situation in the first place.
Classic examples are right in front of us. The public debate over abortion involves a presumptive conflict between the rule “Any innocent human person has the moral right to continue living” and the rule “Any woman has the moral right to control her own internal reproductive activities.” But the debates typically focus on how these rules should be interpreted, what qualifications, if any, should limit their application, and which of these conflicting rules carries the greater authority. Ultimately, as both sides of the debate usually agree, the issue boils down to whether or not the fertilized egg and/or the early fetus that develops therefrom really is, or should be counted as, a human person in the first place. The right-to-life folks say “yes.” The defenders of choice say “no.”
Our point in rehearsing this issue is that, even in the case of this most celebrated of moral conflicts, the primary issue, once again, is not really about rules. It is about how we should interpret or categorize, rationally and accurately, the early fetus. One side will argue, “It’s just a clutch of unfolding stem cells, without a brain or nervous system, without any character or personal identity, without any will or consciousness, without any of the dimensions of genuine personhood. It is no more a person than a recently-planted acorn is already an oak tree.” The other side will argue, “Personhood begins at conception, at fertilization. That is when God places a human soul into the now-developing egg. Accordingly, that is when the right to life begins, a right not to be subsequently denied. (And by the way, acorns don’t have immaterial souls.)”
The first side will respond, “We don’t accept your utterly unverified theory of immaterial souls implanted by a divine being at conception, and we resist your attempt to thus impose your arbitrary and fantastical religious beliefs on the rest of us. (And by the way, modern science implies that humans don’t have immaterial souls either.)” To which the second side will counter, “Your position acknowledges no clear or well-defined point at which the developing fetus begins to acquire rights. If it is acceptable to terminate the life of the developing fetus, why isn’t it acceptable to terminate the life of a developing newborn baby? That would plainly be over the top, but the case of a fetus is different in no fundamental respect.”
And so it goes. Each side of the debate typically attempts to get the other side to see the problematic case “in a different light,” to interpret it as relevantly similar to a distinct but salient prototype whose moral status is not under dispute, to assimilate it to a category that is factually more adequate to the problematic case at hand. Thus the category “mindless clutch of cells” vies with the category “innocent and defenseless person” for our cognitive apprehension of the conceptus and early fetus. Arguments here are not conducted by repeatedly citing moral rules and deducing consequences therefrom. They are conducted by repeated attempts to highlight diverse factual similarities, and dissimilarities, between each of the contesting moral prototypes, on the one hand, and the conceptus/early fetus on the other.
I deploy this example of a moral disagreement and its typical discussion not to try to settle the issue in favor of either side here, but to illustrate the forms that moral disagreements and moral arguments typically display. It is, most assuredly, not the aim of this naturalistic and brain-focused essay to try to deduce any substantive moral rules from our growing understanding of how the brain conducts its moral cognition. Brains arrive at their moral wisdom by a long process of learning, often painful learning, whether in the lifetime of an individual or in the centuries-long development of a society, and there is no substitute for this learning process. It is rather like the development of scientific wisdom, if I may draw an optimistic analogy. At present, we are also learning how human brains engage in scientific cognition, but that does not obviate the need for our scientific communities to continue to generate theories and test them against our unfolding experience. Knowing how the brain works so as to generate and constantly improve our scientific understanding will not obviate the need to keep it working toward that worthy end, though it may help us to improve our pursuit thereof. Similarly, knowing how the brain works to generate and constantly improve our moral understanding will not obviate the need to keep it working toward that worthy end, though it may help us to improve our pursuit thereof. I will close on this hopeful note.