Victoria McGeer

Is morality unified? evidence that distinct neural systems underlie moral judgments of harm, dishonesty, and disgust

Much recent research has sought to uncover the neural basis of moral judgment. However, it has remained unclear whether “moral judgments” are sufficiently homogenous to be studied scientifically as a unified category. We tested this assumption by using fMRI to examine the neural correlates of moral judgments within three moral areas: (physical) harm, dishonesty, and (sexual) disgust. We found that the judgment of moral wrongness was subserved by distinct neural systems for each of the different moral areas and that these differences were much more robust than differences in wrongness judgments within a moral area. Dishonest, disgusting, and harmful moral transgression recruited networks of brain regions associated with mentalizing, affective processing, and action understanding, respectively. Dorsal medial pFC was the only region activated by all scenarios judged to be morally wrong in comparison with neutral scenarios. However, this region was also activated by dishonest and harmful scenarios judged not to be morally wrong, suggestive of a domain-general role that is neither peculiar to nor predictive of moral decisions. These results suggest that moral judgment is not a wholly unified faculty in the human brain, but rather, instantiated in dissociable neural systems that are engaged differentially depending on the type of transgression being judged.

The Art of Good Hope

What is hope? Though variously characterized as a cognitive attitude, an emotion, a disposition, and even a process or activity, hope, more deeply, a unifying and grounding force of human agency. We cannot live a human life without hope, therefore questions about the rationality of hope are properly recast as questions about what it means to hope well. This thesis is defended and elaborated as follows. First, it is argued that hope is an essential and distinctive feature of human agency, both conceptually and developmentally. The author then explores a number of dimensions of agency that are critically implicated in the art of hoping well, drawing on several examples from George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The article concludes with a short section that suggests how hoping well in an individual context may be extended to hope at the collective level.

Trust, hope and empowerment 1

Philosophers and social scientists have focussed a great deal of attention on our human capacity to trust, but relatively little on the capacity to hope. This is a significant oversight, as hope and trust are importantly interconnected. This paper argues that, even though trust can and does feed our hopes, it is our empowering capacity to hope that significantly underwrites—and makes rational—our capacity to trust.

The self-regulating mind

Abstract A system which is to count as minded must represent its environment and must act in pursuit of its goals as those representations make it right to act; or at least it must do this in favourable conditions. But a system may comply with representation-related constraints, simply because that is how it is designed at the subpersonal level to function. Or it may comply for that reason together with the additional fact that it has a special, personal-level ability to represent certain constraints as constraints and to regulate its performance so as to make their satisfaction more likely. This paper argues that the human mind belongs in the second category and then goes on to explore the implications of its being a self-regulating system.

Get the Message Punishment Is Satisfying If the Transgressor Responds to Its Communicative Intent

Results from three studies demonstrate that victims’ justice-related satisfaction with punishment is influenced by the kind of feedback they receive from offenders after punishment. In contrast to previous studies that found a discrepancy between anticipated and experienced satisfaction from punishment (Carlsmith, Wilson, & Gilbert, 2008), participants were able to accurately predict their satisfaction when made aware of the presence or absence of offender feedback acknowledging the victim’s intent to punish. Results also indicate that victims were most satisfied when offender feedback not only acknowledged the victim’s intent to punish but also indicated a positive moral change in the offender’s attitude toward wrongdoing. These findings indicate that punishment per se is neither satisfying nor dissatisfying but that it is crucial to take its communicative functions and its effects on the offender into account. Implications for psychological and philosophical theories on punishment motives as well as implications for justice procedures are discussed.

Autistic Self-Awareness

A currently popular view traces autistic cognitive abnormalities to a defective capacity for theorizing about other minds. Two prominent researchers, Uta Frith and Francesca Happé, extend this account by tracing further autistic abnormalities to impaired self-consciousness. This paper argues that Frith and Happés account requires a treatment of autistic self-report that is problematic on both methodological and philosophical grounds. However, the philosophical problems point to an alternative account of self-awareness and self-report in normal individuals; and this account gives us a methodologically more attractive approach to explaining autistic abnormalities.

Mind-making practices: the social infrastructure of self-knowing agency and responsibility

This paper is divided into two parts. In Section 1, I explore and defend a “regulative view” of folk-psychology as against the “standard view” (encompassing both theory-theory and simulation theory, as well as hybrid variations). On the regulative view, folk-psychology is conceptualized in fundamentally interpersonal terms as a “mind-making” practice through which we come to form and regulate our minds in accordance with a rich array of socially shared and socially maintained sense-making norms. It is not, as the standard view maintains, simply an epistemic capacity for coming to know about the mental states and dispositions already there. Importantly, the regulative view can meet and beat the standard at its own epistemic game. But it also does more. In Section 2, I show how the regulative view makes progress on two other problems that remain puzzling on the standard view: (1) the problem of “first-person authority” – accounting for the special features of self-knowledge; and (2) the problem of “reactive responsiveness” – accounting for our deep concern with calling one another to account for normatively untoward behaviour, both generally and in the moral domain.

Why neuroscience matters to cognitive neuropsychology

The broad issue in this paper is the relationship between cognitive psychology and neuroscience. That issue arises particularly sharply for cognitive neurospsychology, some of whose practitioners claim a methodological autonomy for their discipline. They hold that behavioural data from neuropsychological impairments are sufficient to justify assumptions about the underlying modular structure of human cognitive architecture, as well as to make inferences about its various components. But this claim to methodological autonomy can be challenged on both philosophical and empirical grounds. A priori considerations about (cognitive) multiple realisability challenge the thesis on philosophical grounds, and neuroscientific findings from developmental disorders substantiate that challenge empirically. The conclusion is that behavioural evidence alone is inadequate for scientific progress since appearances of modularity can be thoroughly deceptive, obscuring both the dynamic processes of neural development and the endstate network architecture of real cognitive systems.

Developing Trust on the Internet

Abstract Does the Internet provide an environment in which rational individuals can initiate and maintain relationships of interpersonal trust? This paper argues that it does. It begins by examining distinctive challenges facing would-be trusters on the net, concluding that, however distinctive, such challenges are not unique to the Internet, so cannot be cited as grounds for disparaging the rationality of Internet trust. Nevertheless, these challenges point up the importance of developing mature capacities for trust, since immature trusters are particularly vulnerable to the liabilities of Internet trust. This suggests that Internet trust can only be rational for those who have developed mature capacities for trust. But that suggestion ignores how trust on the Internet may also facilitate the development of such capacities.

The desirability and feasibility of restorative justice

Abstract The desirability of restorative justice in the criminal justice system, as well as in systems of correction more generally, is that it advances the freedom of actual victims, potential victims and convicted offenders. This becomes clear on at least the neo-republican conception of freedom as non-domination. But, contrary to some readings of recent research, restorative justice is psychologically feasible as well as institutionally desirable. It not only appeals to reason, it also answers to instinct.