make different decisions in cases where the facts are identi-
cal but presented in different ways. These framing effects are
Neuroscience and
Morality
by bernard gert
Editor’s Note: Bernard Gert died on December 24, 2011, shortly
after this essay was accepted, making the essay one of the last items
in his long and illustrious career in bioethics. Gert died before the
essay was prepared for publication, and it appears now with the
assistance of Joshua Gert. The essay has been edited only lightly.
I
n 2009 I participated in a symposium, “Toward a Com-
mon Morality,” held at the United Nations Building in
New York, that reflected the growing interest among
scientists and philosophers in showing that science—par-
ticularly neuroscience—provides a foundation not only for
understanding morality, but also for improving it. In this es-
say I shall examine three books that are part of this trend:
Experiments in Ethics, by Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Moral
Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, by
Sam Harris, and Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about
Morality, by Patricia S. Churchland.1
These three books are quite different from one another in
both style and content. However, they do share some interest-
ing similarities. All three authors think highly of John Stuart
Mill and try to show that he would look with favor on the
views that they are putting forward. All three are far more
critical of John Rawls than is common among moral philoso-
phers. All three are critical of moral intuitions and are im-
pressed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s account of
the importance of framing effects—for example, that people
Bernard Gert, “Neuroscience and Morality,” Hastings Center Report 42, no. 3
(2012): 22-28. DOI: 10.1002/hast.36
22 HASTI N G S C E N T E R R E P ORT
quite remarkable, but it is not clear what their significance is
for the nature of morality. None of the authors discuss the
work done in bioethics or, more generally, in applied ethics,
which is quite significant, for they criticize philosophers for
their failure to realize the importance of getting all the facts
without discussing those philosophers to whom this criticism
does not apply.
s s s
I
n Experiments in Ethics, Appiah tries to show that the
present distinction between philosophy and the scienc-
es—including psychology, physics, and anthropology—is
the result of “forgetting” the empirical work that was done
by those who are regarded as the great philosophers of the
past—Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, and Mill. He
shows that an Anglo-American view of philosophy as con-
ceptual analysis is a result of forgetting, or choosing selected
portions of, what these philosophers did, and discarding the
rest as irrelevant to philosophy. What is now called natural-
ism in philosophy has brought science back into philosophy.
For naturalists, it is necessary to show how philosophical ac-
counts of morality can be derived from scientific accounts of
how morality develops. Even those who do not accept natu-
ralism—that is, who do not think that morality can be de-
rived from science—now accept that philosophical accounts
of morality must be consistent with scientific findings about
related matters.
Appiah shows how psychology presents a challenge to
those who rely on intuition in forming their moral theories.
He criticizes Sir David Ross, who claimed that “the moral
convictions of thoughtful and well-educated people are
the data of ethics just as sense-perceptions are the data of a
natural science” (quoted on p. 752). He also regards Rawls’s
method of refining our moral intuitions by trying to reach an
equilibrium between our intuitive moral judgments and our
moral theories as seriously flawed. He points out that when
Rawls talks about shared intuitions, he never tells us who the
persons are that share these intuitions. Appiah cites the work
of Kahneman and Tversky to show how framing effects lead
many to have different moral intuitions about identical situ-
ations; he also cites other criticisms of intuition that are sup-
ported by scientific findings.
Appiah makes an important distinction between ethics
and morality. “I’ll generally follow Aristotle,” he writes, “in
using ‘ethics’ to refer to questions about human flourishing,
about what it means for a life to be well lived. I’ll use ‘mo-
rality’ to designate something narrower, the constraints that
govern how we should and should not treat other people” (p.
37, see also pp. 63, 168). However, describing morality as be-
ing concerned only with constraints (obligations) ignores his
earlier distinction between what is morally praiseworthy and
what is morally obligatory.
May-June 2012
 Apart from those who do applied and professional eth-
ics, Appiah is the only philosopher I know who recognizes
that whether a situation is an emergency is relevant to what
the appropriate moral decision ought to be (pp. 96ff ). Those
who do bioethics are quite clear that doctors in real emergen-
cies should act in ways that are not permissible in the normal
practice of medicine. Normally a doctor is not supposed to
leave one patient in order to treat another patient who has
a more serious medical problem. However, in a plane crash
or other emergency situation, a doctor is supposed to prac-
tice triage—that is, to treat those patients who will benefit
most from medical treatment even when that means leaving
one patient to treat another.
Also, although in standard
practice doctors must ob-
tain informed consent before
treating a patient, when life
Because science is our best
is at stake in an emergency,
physicians can treat without method for finding out
obtaining informed consent
from the patient.
The distinction between
truths about events and
harming someone intention-
ally and only doing so know-
states of the world and our
ingly is also morally relevant.
A public policy allowing the brains, Harris holds that it is
former is more likely to have
overall bad consequences
than a public policy allowing
the best method for finding
the latter. This explanation
does not depend on any sci-
out truths about well-being.
entific discoveries, but simply
recognizes that morality is
a system that applies to vul-
nerable, fallible, and biased persons. This fact about moral-
ity explains why it is morally unacceptable to violate a moral
rule unless one is willing for everyone to know that they are
allowed to violate the rule in circumstances with the same
morally relevant features. Not everyone will agree on a public
policy about how much harm has to be prevented in order to
justify harming someone; some, like Peter Singer, may hold
that saving five lives is enough to justify killing one, but most
others will demand a far higher number. However, when the
number of people saved is sufficiently large, almost all people
would favor a public policy that allows intentionally causing
harm to one to save many, rather than a prohibition on ever
intentionally causing harm.
Appiah puts forward a limited role for experimentalists—
those who do “experimental work that seems to bear on our
moral makeup” (p. 3). “The contributions of the method are
partly negative, chastening some assumptions about what’s
‘obvious’; and partly positive, shining a light on anomalies
of our moral folk psychology, and connecting them to philo-
sophical arguments” (pp. 192-93). He is skeptical about us-
ing science to provide a decision procedure: “Anyone looking
for decision procedures, a way of ranking values or a set of
May-June 2012
rules for choosing among them, should be warned that a
‘naturalized ethics’ is never going to get us there” (p. 193).
Although no decision procedure can provide a unique cor-
rect answer to every moral question, people do use some kind
of decision procedure when their moral decisions or judg-
ments are challenged. They try to discover all the morally
relevant features of the situation, and they consider whether
they would be willing for everyone to know that they can act
in the same way in that situation. Although different people
using this kind of procedure may arrive at different answers,
all of these answers should be within the range of morally ac-
ceptable answers.
Impartiality is morally re-
quired when violating a moral
rule—for example, when
causing harm, deceiving, or
cheating. One must estimate
the consequences of everyone
knowing that the rule may be
violated under certain mor-
ally relevant conditions and
decide whether those conse-
quences are better or worse
than the consequences of ev-
eryone knowing that such a
violation is not allowed. This
estimation is supposed to
guarantee the required kind
of impartiality. But impartial-
ity does not guarantee agree-
ment; impartial persons can
disagree. They may disagree
concerning their estimates of
the consequences. They may
disagree about morally relevant features of a situation, such
as whether it is an emergency, and they may even disagree
about whether there is a violation of a moral rule—whether
dyeing one’s hair is an example of deceiving. And some of
these disagreements may be unresolvable. And there also may
be unresolvable disagreements about the ranking of the ba-
sic harms—death, pain, disability, loss of freedom, and loss
of pleasure—and about whether the group that is impar-
tially protected by morality includes fetuses and nonhuman
animals.
Appiah admits that science cannot always provide a unique
correct answer about the morally best way to act. Nonethe-
less, almost everyone would judge a normal case of cheating
on a test to be morally unacceptable, even if the consequenc-
es of the particular action are better than not cheating. All
would agree about this because all would estimate the conse-
quences of everyone knowing that cheating is allowed to be
far worse than those of a public policy that disallowed cheat-
ing. Although no one explicitly uses any kind of procedure
when making their moral decisions and judgments, there is
such overwhelming agreement on most moral decisions and
judgments that they are not even discussed (consider the
H AS TI N GS C EN TE R RE P O RT 23
question whether one may hit a person simply because one
does not like him). This overwhelming agreement suggests
overwhelming implicit acceptance of something like the pro-
cedure described above. However, as indicated above, this
procedure allows for unresolvable disagreements in all con-
troversial moral cases.
According to Appiah, naturalism “denies that the explora-
tion of value must proceed without reference to the phenom-
ena that scientists study, the causal systems of the material
world, the framings of our nature” (p. 184). Appiah holds
that ethics is closely related to morality, which is about how
we should and should not treat other people, but he still
holds that morality is less dependent on scientific findings
than is ethics. Morality is primarily concerned with avoid-
ing causing harm to others, and with preventing or relieving
harm, and there is almost complete agreement about what
counts as harm. Although being a pastry chef is a completely
acceptable occupation, and may add to human flourishing, it
is not, as medicine sometimes is, considered a moral calling
because it is not concerned with minimizing harm to others.
Appiah holds that science is relevant to morality because sci-
ence provides reliable information about what ways of acting
are better at avoiding causing harm and at preventing and
relieving it. I do not know of anyone who would deny that
science is relevant to morality in this way, however.
s s s
H
arris takes a much stronger view about the relation-
ship between science and morality. Harris says that
his argument “rests on a very simple premise: hu-
man well-being entirely depends on events in the world and
on states of the human brain” (p. 2). Because science is our
best method for finding out truths about events and states
of the world and about events and states of the brain, Harris
holds that science is our best method for finding out truths
about human well-being. His emphasis on the importance of
neuroscience to ethics and morality is made clear by his state-
ment, “the primacy of neuroscience and the other sciences of
mind on questions of human experience cannot be denied”
(p. 8). However, as the book progresses, it seems that neuro-
science has no greater relevance to morality than any other
science related to human beings.
Unlike Appiah, Harris makes no distinction between eth-
ics and morality. He says, “‘Ethics’ and ‘morality’ (I use the
terms interchangeably) are the names that we give to our de-
liberate thinking about these matters [human cooperation]”
(p. 55), and the index entry for “ethics” says, “See morality;
value; and headings beginning with moral.” Harris does not
make such a distinction because he holds that maximizing
well-being is the only thing that can be reasonably valued, so
it must be the goal of morality. Sometimes Harris says that
morality is concerned only with human well-being, and at
other times he takes a view similar to that of Peter Singer,
that morality is concerned with the well-being of all sentient
24 HASTI N G S C E N T E R R E P ORT
beings. His view is probably best expressed by the following
remarks: “Practically speaking, I think that we have some very
useful intuitions on this front. We care more about creatures
that can experience a greater range of suffering and happi-
ness—and we are right to, because suffering and happiness
(defined in the widest possible sense) are all that can be cared
about” (p. 198, n. 8).
This is a quite plausible view, but in the same note, Har-
ris goes on to say, “Are all human lives equivalent? No. . . .
However, it also seems quite rational for us to collectively act
as though all human lives were equally valuable. Hence, most
of our laws and social institutions generally ignore differences
between people. I suspect that this is a very good thing. Of
course, I could be wrong about this—and that is precisely
the point. If we didn’t behave this way, our world would be
different, and these differences would either affect the totality
of human well-being, or they wouldn’t” (p. 199, n. 8). The
view that we should only act as if “all human lives are equally
valuable” if this would result in increasing the totality of hu-
man well-being is not quite such a plausible view. I would
not be surprised if many people were disturbed by this act-
consequentialist view.
Harris’s reply to a standard criticism of consequentialism
is the following, “Can the disparity between our commit-
ment to fulfilling our selfish desires and our commitment to
alleviating the unnecessary misery and death of millions be
morally justified? Of course not. These failures of ethical con-
sistency are often considered a strike against consequential-
ism. They shouldn’t be. Who ever said that being truly good,
or even ethically consistent, must be easy?” (p. 82). Like other
act consequentialists, Harris makes no distinction between
avoiding causing harm (what I call obeying moral rules) and
preventing and relieving harm (what I call following moral
ideals). Thus, he has no moral foundation for condemning
the enslavement of a few members of a disliked minority in
order to provide strong feelings of pleasure, relief, and safety
to the vastly larger number of people in the majority. Nor
can he condemn, without seeing the results on total human
well-being (defined in the widest possible sense), the decep-
tion involved in medical experiments done on poor, vulner-
able populations in order to provide benefits to a much larger
group of more valuable people. Harris is primarily concerned
with persuading the reader that science provides a far better
guide for morality than religion, but by adopting an unso-
phisticated act-consequentialist position, he actually makes
people more afraid of basing morality on science.
Harris agrees that morality has to be universal, but because
of his failure to distinguish between moral rules and mor-
al ideals, he mistakenly holds that morality always requires
impartiality. He does not realize that impartiality is moral-
ly required only when considering the violation of a moral
rule—causing someone pain—and not when following mor-
al ideals, such as when deciding which charity to donate to.
His failure to distinguish between obeying moral rules and
following moral ideals is also why he regards someone who
May-June 2012
does not always act to maximize well-being as morally incon-
sistent. We are always morally required to obey moral rules,
but both Kant and Mill agree that we can choose when to
act on moral ideals, so there is no moral inconsistency in not
always acting to maximize well-being. Harris does not make
a distinction between moral rules and ideals because he may
hold that only academics are interested in this distinction,
and they are not his intended audience.
The subtitle of Harris’s book is “How Science Can Deter-
mine Human Values.” But he does not even attempt to show
how science can do this. His view that human or sentient
well-being (in the deepest sense) is the ultimate value is not a
scientific discovery, but simply one version of act consequen-
tialism. Science can show
what sort of activities, laws,
and practices have the best
chance of promoting human
or sentient well-being, but
Science can show what
science does not determine
what counts as human or sen-
sort of activities, laws, and
tient well-being. Harris does
not appreciate that there is far practices have the best chance
more agreement about what
counts as harms to humans
and other sentient beings
of promoting well-being, but
than on what counts as their
well-being. Everyone agrees
science does not determine
that death, pain (including
mental pain and suffering), what counts as well-being.
disabilities, loss of freedom,
and loss of pleasure are harms.
Everyone avoids all of these
harms unless they are thereby
avoiding, preventing, or relieving another one of these harms,
or gaining the corresponding goods for themselves or others.
Indeed, we regard a person as acting irrationally if she does
not avoid these harms, unless she has an adequate reason for
not avoiding them.
This agreement on the list of harms is shown by the fol-
lowing examples. Nothing counts as a malady (that is, a
disease or injury) unless the person is suffering one of these
harms or is at increased risk of suffering one of them. Also,
nothing counts as a punishment unless it involves inflicting
one of these harms on a person. What counts as harm is a fac-
tual matter, and Harris holds that it is pointless to distinguish
between facts and values. However, agreement on the harms
does not depend on science, and science cannot change what
counts as harm. It is rational for individuals to consent to
suffering serious harm, as in boxing and football, in order to
make money, but without consent it is morally unacceptable
to cause serious harm to one person in order to make money
or give pleasure to others, no matter how much money or
pleasure is involved.
Harris is so concerned with showing that science is a bet-
ter guide to moral behavior than religion that he does not
appreciate that there is universal agreement on what counts
May-June 2012
as harm. He does not see that the function of science is not to
determine human values, but to provide a reliable guide on
how to minimize the harms. Some religions also offer useful
guides on how to minimize the harms, but a well-established
religious guide, unlike a well-established scientific guide, need
not be a reliable guide. Further, many religious guides are not
even primarily concerned with minimizing harms. Like other
act consequentialists, Harris does not recognize that morality
is more concerned with minimizing harms than with maxi-
mizing well-being. He does not realize that by concentrat-
ing on maximizing well-being and ignoring the distinction
between rules and ideals, he raises the fear that science allows
harming some for the greater well-being of others. It is unfor-
tunate that his contempt for
academic philosophy makes
his support of science as the
source of morality far less per-
suasive than it would other-
wise be.
s s s
P
atricia Churchland is
a professional philoso-
pher, so one would ex-
pect a greater sophistication
about philosophical matters
than is shown by Harris. This
expectation is only minimally
met. Also, since the subtitle of
the book is “What Neurosci-
ence Tells Us about Morality,”
one would expect that neuro-
science does tell us something about the kind of morality we
should have, but unfortunately that expectation is not met
at all.
Chapter two is titled “Brain-Based Values,” but the values
Churchland discusses could be discussed with no mention of
the brain at all. To make it seem as if the brain is central to her
discussion, she writes sentences like the following: “Where do
values come from? How did brains come to care about oth-
ers?” (p. 12). Later, though, she expresses herself more clearly:
“Why do we, and other social mammals, care for others?” (p.
13); and the next chapter starts out with the more promising
question, “What is going on in the brain such that an animal
cares about others, or expresses social values?” (p. 27). No lon-
ger are brains caring for others, but something is going on in
the brains of animals that care about others. It is quite inter-
esting what is going on in the brain that explains why animals
care about others, and Churchland has some nice diagrams
and pictures to illustrate her discussion. She also points out
very clearly and persuasively that evolution is not a sufficient
explanation for much of what is special about human beings.
She makes the point that if mammals are to pass on their
genes, they must care about their offspring, sometimes even
to the extent of sacrificing themselves to save their children
H AS TI N GS C EN TE R RE P O RT 25
(p. 31). But she is clear that “The first and most fundamen-
tal part of the story concerns self-preservation. All nervous
systems are organized to take care of the basic survival of the
body they are part of . . . Animals that fail at self-preserving
behavior have no chance to pass on their genes” (p. 27). It is
biology, especially evolution, that explains human and mam-
malian social behavior; neuroscience simply provides the
mechanism whereby evolution leads to the evolutionarily ap-
propriate behavior. Understanding this mechanism is impor-
tant when trying to discover the causes of aberrant behavior
and trying to treat it, but neuroscience does not add anything
significant to our knowledge or understanding of morality.
Churchland makes the interesting point that “deferring
gratification typically involves consciousness” (p. 42). In the
book on human nature that I have been writing for the last
couple of decades, I speculate that emotional behavior is a
natural response to circumstances, and that consciousness is
a later development that occurs when the natural emotional
responses no longer reliably lead to beneficial results. Animals
that become aware of how they are about to behave, that is,
feel the emotion and are able to suppress overt harmful be-
havior and act in a way that is less likely to have harmful
consequences. When people do this, we call their behavior
“rational”; when they do not suppress the harmful behavior
but act on their emotions, then we say that they are “acting
out.” That is why “reason” is often thought to be opposed
to the emotions. But, as Churchland points out, our natural
responses to circumstances are still appropriate most of the
time.
Surprisingly, there is no entry in the index for “reason,”
“reasons,” “rational,” or “rationality.” This may be due to the
fact that Churchland accepts the still dominant modified Hu-
mean view of rationality as purely instrumental. She criticizes
Christine Korsgaard for saying “only humans are genuinely
rational, morality depends on rationality, and hence nonhu-
man animals are not moral” (p. 26). She argues, instead, that
“Because many species of birds and mammals display good
examples of problem-solving and planning, this claim about
rationality looks narrow and uninformed.” Because many
animals engage in social behavior that Churchland regards
as very similar to her account of what humans call ethics or
morality, she does not want to engage in linguistic disputes
about whether marmosets have a morality. She says that hold-
ing that only humans have human morality is “a tedious tau-
tology” (p. 26). Churchland has no problem talking about
“marmoset morality” (p. 26). As she uses the term “morality,”
it need have no relationship to universality or impartiality.
I do not want to defend Korsgaard’s Kantian account of
rationality, but I do want to challenge Churchland’s modified
Humean instrumental account of rationality. Since Church-
land regards self-preservation as the basic value, it is surprising
that she does not follow Hobbes and challenge the prevailing
philosophical view of rationality as purely instrumental. If,
as is generally acknowledged, it is irrational to fail to avoid
harms without some adequate reason—that is, a belief that
you or someone else will avoid equal or greater harms or gain
26 HASTI N G S C E N T E R R E P ORT
compensating goods—then it is quite clear that the Humean
view of reason is incorrect. What we call rational behavior of-
ten does involve problem-solving and planning for the future,
but as Hobbes makes clear, this kind of behavior counts as ra-
tional only when it is not intended to achieve some irrational
end. Someone who makes elaborate plans to kill himself in
the most painful possible way and solves the many problems
involved in keeping himself conscious of intense pain until
he dies is acting rationally only on the absurd philosophical
instrumental account of rationality. Psychiatry would regard
such a person as mentally ill simply on the basis of this ex-
treme example of irrational behavior.
Irrationality is an objective concept in the same sense that
green is an objective concept. People who, without reasons,
do not avoid harms for themselves and those for whom they
care have a defect, in a way parallel to the defect in people
who do not see green leaves as green. We call the former ir-
rational and the latter color-blind; that their judgments differ
from the overwhelming majority of people does not affect
the objectivity of the concepts of rationality and green.3
Churchland herself contrasts the brains of psychopaths with
the brains of healthy controls (p. 40). To call an action irra-
tional is to claim that all morally responsible persons would
advocate that no one for whom they care, including them-
selves, act that way. However, as pointed out earlier, it is not
irrational to accept harms for oneself if one has an adequate
reason, so that making sacrifices for the benefit of others does
not count as irrational.
Her criticism of many of the standard philosophical ac-
counts of morality simply repeats criticisms that many philos-
ophers have made of these views. She says, “The Golden Rule
(‘Do unto others as you would have them due unto you’) is
very often held up as a judicious rule, an exceptionless rule,
and a rule that is universally espoused. Or very close to it” (p.
168). One would never guess that Kant made similar criti-
cisms of the Golden Rule. However, her discussion of Kant
and Mill acknowledges that they had some valuable things
to say about morality. “Like others before him, most notably
David Hume, Kant recognized that fairness is important in
morality. Hume’s point was that we cannot argue that some-
thing is right for me and wrong for you just because ‘I am me
and you are you.’ There has to be, at the very least, a morally
relevant difference between us” (p. 173). I take it that in this
passage, Churchland is not talking about morality in general,
whatever that is, but human morality, so I will confine my
discussion to this kind of morality.
Churchland acknowledges that Mill makes two impor-
tant points. “First, for Mill, the moral sphere is fundamen-
tally about conduct that injures, damages, or harms others or
their interests. Injurious conduct, such as assault and mur-
der, is wrong and is punishable. Conduct that falls outside
this domain should be neither restricted nor deemed wrong”
(p. 176). Second, for Mill, issues of self-defense—and hence
morality—are tightly tied to issues concerning acceptable re-
striction on personal liberty. She criticizes “maximizing con-
sequentialists, such as philosopher Peter Singer,” who “argue
May-June 2012
that maximizing happiness of all requires that we do much
more than consider the consequences of a plan for the hap-
piness of those near and dear” (p. 178). Churchland holds
that there are serious problems with maximizing consequen-
tialism, but she does not offer an alternative account of the
morally moderate views that she would accept.
Common morality meets Churchland’s desire for a mor-
ally moderate view that acknowledges the two points that she
cites from Mill and incorporates Kant’s concern with fairness.
Common morality, as Mill points out, is not about maximiz-
ing well-being but about minimizing harm. Common mo-
rality also distinguishes between moral ideals, which do not
restrict personal liberty, and moral rules that do, so that it does
not result in what Mill would
regard as an unacceptable re-
striction of personal liberty.
Common morality recognizes The fact that those who
the moral requirement of im-
partiality that Kant sought
to achieve by means of the
relate neuroscience to
Categorical Imperative; but
requiring that one wills that morality differ so radically
everyone act in the same way
imposes a stronger condition in their accounts of morality
for impartiality than morality
actually requires; impartiality
can be achieved by holding
suggests that neuroscience has
merely that an agent must be
willing that everyone knows nothing to add to our
that they are allowed to act in
the same way. That impartial- understanding of morality.
ity is required only when con-
sidering violations of moral
rules.
Because Churchland holds
that “Moral theories that leave room for exceptions to rules
have tended to seem incomplete” (p. 168), she considers and
criticizes only moral theories with exceptionless rules. She
does not even consider an account of morality that includes a
method for people to use when deciding whether a specified
violation of a moral rule is justified. This method, as men-
tioned in the discussion of Appiah, allows for considerable
disagreement in controversial cases, but provides a unique
correct answer for all noncontroversial cases. Churchland
does not present any objections to an account of this kind of
morality, for it incorporates all of the features that she puts
forward as desirable. Churchland has no criticism of a moral
system that incorporates rules if it also includes a procedure
for people to use when deciding whether they are justified in
violating a rule.
There is no difference, except in style, between an account
of morality that incorporates rules of this kind and an ac-
count of morality that lists the kinds of actions that people
regard as immoral except in special circumstances. Just as,
within limits, people can differ about whether an action is
of a kind that is immoral except in special circumstances, so,
May-June 2012
within the same limits, they can disagree about the interpre-
tation of a moral rule. Just as they can disagree about whether
these are the kind of special circumstances in which it is not
immoral to do an action of a certain kind, they can disagree
about whether the morally relevant features of the situation
are such that they would be willing for everyone to know that
they can violate the rule in the same circumstances.
The advantages of talking about rules and a procedure for
deciding on acceptable violations of them is that it leads to
a clearer account of what may be responsible for the moral
disagreement. One need not, as Churchland does, base dis-
agreement on the particular memories and experiences of
the people who disagree (p. 183). Churchland regards Owen
Flanagan’s criticism of John
Rawls as “one of the deep-
est discussions of why the
approach is flawed beyond
redemption, . . . Owen Fla-
nagan sums up, ‘There is no
such thing as universal ethical
intuitions at the level Rawls
was initially looking to locate
them’” (p. 183). This is an
important criticism of Rawls,
but it is significant to note
that Churchland herself holds
that there are universal ethi-
cal intuitions at the level that
common morality includes.
One needs to justify killing or
causing pain to another hu-
man being, for example.
A point of particular in-
terest to me is Churchland’s
criticism of my entry in the
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on the “Definition of
Morality.”4 Because I distinguish between descriptive uses
of “morality” and normative uses, Churchland accuses me
of holding that “The distinction between descriptions and
norms—between what is and what ought to be—is obvi-
ous and unbridgeable.” However, I say nothing about any
unbridgeable gap between what is and what ought to be; I
am making a claim about the use of the word “morality.” I
claim that when anthropologists talk about the morality of
some group, they are not endorsing that way of acting; they
are simply describing the code of conduct that this society
follows. Similarly, when Churchland talks about various re-
ligious moralities, she is not endorsing any of them; she is
simply describing the code of conduct that members of that
religion accept. But often people use the term “morality” nor-
matively; they are then endorsing that code of conduct. Phi-
losophers from Plato and Aristotle on use “morality” in this
normative sense. This is the sense of morality with which I
hope Churchland is also concerned.
Churchland seems to think that the normative sense of
morality derives from what happens in the brain, but she has
H AS TI N GS C EN TE R RE P O RT 27
no way of distinguishing between those things that happen
in the brain that she wants to endorse and those that she does
not. For almost all philosophers, the normative sense of mo-
rality derives from rationality. Given that Churchland holds
that self-preservation is fundamental, it is clear why she does
not regard morality as deriving from Kantian rationality. It
is also clear that the Humean instrumental account of ratio-
nality does not provide a foundation for morality. Perhaps if
Churchland knew about the Hobbesian concept of rational-
ity, which takes the avoidance of harm to self as the basic
tenet of rationality, she might have been more sympathetic
to basing morality on rationality rather than simply on what
happens in the brain.
“Morality” in the normative sense refers to a code of con-
duct that all vulnerable, fallible, and biased persons who want
to avoid harm for themselves and those for whom they care
would put forward as the code of conduct if they were seek-
ing agreement with all other vulnerable, fallible, and biased
persons about what guide to behavior to adopt. “Morality”
in the normative sense is universal, so it cannot be based on
facts not known by everyone. However, even if everyone uses
only the same facts, because people disagree about several
matters including the rankings of the basic harms, morality
must allow for unresolvable disagreements. Because all people
who accept morality as their guide want to settle these dis-
agreements in a way that will result in the least amount of
harm, they would agree that moral disagreements be settled
by compromise, law, negotiation, and votes rather than by
violence and war. A full account of the nature and justifica-
tion of morality is contained in my book Morality: Its Nature
and Justification. I would be delighted to have a discussion
with Churchland about how neuroscience views this account
of morality.
s s s
A
ppiah, Harris, and Churchland put forward quite
different perspectives about the relationship between
science and morality. Appiah holds the moderate view
that science is useful in challenging common moral intuitions
and in helping us avoid the harms that we all want to avoid;
science does not provide us with new ends or values. Harris
28 HASTI N G S C E N T E R R E P ORT
claims that neuroscience shows that “suffering and happiness
(defined in the widest possible sense) are all that can be cared
about” and concludes that neuroscience supports a version of
act consequentialism very similar to that put forward by Peter
Singer. Churchland criticizes Harris for not recognizing that
what neuroscience shows about human beings might require
morality to be more complex than act consequentialism.
Both Appiah and Churchland differ from Harris in holding
that morality is more concerned with minimizing harm than
with promoting well-being. Churchland differs from both
Appiah and Harris in seeming to hold that neuroscience tells
us something about morality because it provides an explana-
tion of why human beings make the kinds of moral decisions
and judgments that they do. But Churchland does not relate
neuroscience to any of the features that she claims that any
adequate morality must have.
The fact that those who relate neuroscience to morality
differ so radically in their accounts of morality suggests that
neuroscience has nothing to add to our understanding of
morality as a code of conduct that everyone should follow.
However, neuroscience may help explain why some people
behave as they do in situations that call for moral decisions
or judgments.
Acknowledgments
I want to thank Daniel and Sydney Callahan for their help in
revising an earlier draft of this paper.
1. K.A. Appiah, Experiments in Ethics (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard University Press, 2010); S. Harris, The Moral Landscape: How
Science Can Determine Human Values (New York: Free Press, 2010);
P.S. Churchland, Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011).
2. Quotation is from W.D. Ross, The Right and the Good (Oxford,
U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1930).
3. For a fuller account of response-dependent concepts, see J. Gert,
Normative Bedrock: Response-Dependence, Rationality and Reasons (Ox-
ford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, in press).
4. B. Gert, “The Definition of Morality,” Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy, ed. E.N. Zolta. Entry first published April 17, 2002,
and revised March 14, 2011, at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/
morality-definition/.
May-June 2012
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