Deterrents are plentiful in every society and often take the form of codes of conduct and rules of membership that exclude some people. If you violate the codes and rules, you are punished with devices as simple as embarrassment, humiliation, ridicule and as complex as law suits, arrest and detention, economic sanctions and war.

Religious and political organizations assume moral authority to proscribe those attitudes and behaviors, which are innate but undesirable. The essential task is to encourage members not to harm other members of the group. There are different levels of harmful consequence from attacking a person's reputation to killing them. The ideals of love and tolerance professed by some religious organizations are difficult to achieve. The dismal historical record of Christian societies in achieving brotherly love and abstaining from killing is an example of failure of moral authority. This failure is multidimensional and involves a deep misunderstanding of human nature.

An ethical injunction such as “Thou Shalt not Kill” attempts to inhibit an innate human tendency and tends to fail. In 19^th century Europe, Church authority remained powerful and many believed that bloody anarchy would erupt if people realized that there was no God, no Devil and no Hell. Dosteoevsky declared: “If God is dead, then everything is possible!” The incorrect idea was that the threat of God’s punishment was an indispensable deterrent to wrongdoing. Wrathful Gods did vanish in the 20^th century in the minds of many smart and progressive humans. Bloody anarchy did erupt repeatedly in the 20^th century and Christian Churches were present on all sides actively supporting all combatants. God was on everyone's side.

Moral behavior turns out to be as innate as immoral behavior. God and the Devil turn out to be two competing aspects of the human mind. The threat of punishment for undesirable behavior is only a relative deterrent some of the time. The death penalty is not a definitive deterrent to murder just as locks are not definitive deterrents to theft. Humans lie, cheat, steal, injure and kill despite the threat of punishment. Some have argued that punishment is only a deterrent for good people and bad people simply ignore the threat and apply their ingenuity to avoiding punishment.

Codes of conduct, rules and laws expand on the innate tendencies to cooperate and set limits for harmful tendencies but do not change the destructive aspects of human behavior. The courts are overbooked and jails are full because laws and religious prohibitions fail as guides and deterrents, at least for some members of every group. Destruction and killing continue because humans cannot agree.

Books to Read

Groups and Ethics

Groups, Religion and Survival

Morality and Neuroscience

The idea that moral cognition as a collection of specialized brain functions is developed by neuroscientists. Morality is not viewed as a new, abstract entity, but as a collection of animal attributes that have evolved over hundreds of millions of years. Human morality is an expression of old social cognitions and motivations that have emerged as a less than perfect human version of primate tendencies such as caring for others while seeking dominance. In primates there is an innate sense of justice that forms the deep foundation of morality. 

Moral emotions are compassion, embarrassment, indignation, guilt, shame, pride, contempt, disgust, anger and gratitude. If you had to chose the most reasonable and pacific members of the primate family, it would be Orangutans or Bonobos, not humans.

Moll suggested that: “moral emotions” result from interactions among values, norms and contextual elements of social situations and are elicited in response to violations or enforcement of social preferences and expectations. Although the contextual cues that link moral emotions to social norms are variable and shaped by culture, these emotions evolved from prototypes found in other primates and can be characterized across cultures. The challenge for moral cognitive neuroscience is that it requires extensive cross-field integration of neuroscience, psychology, evolutionary biology and anthropology, among other areas. In setting the goals of scientific exploration in this field, some central issues should be considered. How does the human moral mind emerge from the interaction of biological and cultural factors? How can the context-dependent nature of moral cognition be explained by neuroscience? How does moral cognition relate to emotion and motivation, and what are their neural substrates?”  

Moral cognition involves several cortical regions: the prefrontal cortex (PFC), the medial and lateral orbitofrontal cortex (OFC and OFC), the anterior temporal lobes (aTL) and the superior temporal sulcus (STS) region, that is involved in social perception.  STS damage disrupts the ability to recognize socially relevant perceptual features of faces, body postures and movements.

Patients with frontal lobe damage display a range of social disabilities and antisocial behaviors. A lesion of the anterior PFC, for example, impairs moral evaluations that rely on predicting the long-term consequences of actions. Patients with OFC damage display socially inappropriate behaviors; they fail to modify behaviors that produce negative outcomes. One patient, for example, became aggressive and callous towards other people after OFC damage; he failed to recognize facial expressions of anger and disgust. Anterior temporal lobe damage disrupts awareness of more abstract social values that are learned and practiced.

Subcortical structures involved in moral cognition are the amygdala, ventromedial hypothalamus, septal area, basal forebrain, the walls of the third ventricle, rostral brainstem and tegmentum. The limbic system generates behaviors out of body needs and tends to override other regulators of behavior. If you are starving, you may steal or kill to obtain food. But if you are well-fed, you will obey the rules of supermarkets to obtain food.  Dysfunction in the limbic system is expressed as motivational disturbances with disorders of appetite, thirst, sexual drives, social attachment and aggressiveness. Studies of sociopaths reveal abnormalities in all these regions.