05.28.07
Neural morality?
Neuroscientists find basis for morality in brain biology: this is interesting research, but there is not a causal theory of morality. The Kantian flavor of these neurological discoveries has been sanitized to ignore the dilemma.
Marc Hauser, another Harvard researcher, has used cleverly designed psychological experiments to study morality. He said his research has found that people all over the world process moral questions in the same way, suggesting that moral thinking is intrinsic to the human brain, rather than a product of culture. It may be useful to think about morality much like language, in that its basic features are hard-wired, Hauser said. Different cultures and religions build on that framework in much the way children in different cultures learn different languages using the same neural machinery.