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David Kaufmann
Neuroscientific Research on Moral Judgement
In my research project at GSN I intend to investigate the overt and covert philosophical
conceptual premises of the neuroscientific approach to investigating moral judgement and
the importance of these premises for interpreting neuroscientific results in philosophical
terms as well as in ordinary language. The first step in order to do this would be to
investigate the links between philosophical, psychological and neuroscientific concepts
employed in the explanation of moral judgement and their characteristic role in their
theories of origin. For the seminar “Current Issues in philosophy and neurosciences” I’d
like to propose to give a short introduction on one issue about the neuroscientific research
on moral judgement that this first step could shed some light on and which I consider
especially interesting: It has been a striking feature of neuroscientific experiments on
moral judgements that they’re most often „nothing but“ psychological experiments
performed in an fMRI scanner – and their results are most often „only“ used to back up
already quite well confirmed psychological theories on moral judgement. When it comes
to a philosophical or common language interpretation of these neuroscientific findings we
must find that from a philosophical point of view they seem quite boring. They just
confirm stuff that is already “known” from psychological research. The question that
arises in regard of this matter is whether the situation that neuroscientific research on
morality doesn’t seem to give great philosophical insights is owed to „structural“ reasons
(for example due to conceptual constraints) or whether the reasons for that frustrating
situation are just „coincidental“ (due to the fact that just occasionally nobody happened to
do research otherwise).
What does “conceptual constraints” mean here? I’d like to speak of “conceptual
constraints” when we can’t talk in philosophical terms or ordinary language about what
the neurosciences tell us about morality in their own scientific jargon. This could mean
concretely that neuroscientific statements cannot be „translated“ in common ways of
speaking but by „going the long way“ and being first translated into psychological terms –
as a mere confirmation of already existing psychological hypotheses. According to this line
of thought, anything that neuroscience can offer apart from the assertion of psychological
hypothesises would be „lost in translation“.
This would not only be a pity for the interested lay person, but also for the neuroscientist
engaged in the investigation of moral judgement: It would be quite a blow if she would not
be able to explain her findings to laymen apart from what can be proven by her efforts in
psychological research.
As a philosopher I see it as a thrilling task to investigate whether such constraints exist by
examining the links between philosophical, psychological and neuroscientific concepts
that play a role in the philosophical interpretation of neuroscientific results on moral
judgement. The resulting findings could in the best case tell us whether and to what extent
a direct philosophical or ordinary language interpretation of neuroscientific results is
possible – and in how far taking “the long way” would really leave everything that doesn’t
derive from psychological hypothesises in limbo. If such a translation (direct or indirect)
should be possible, it will be an even more fascinating next step to check where there is
room for misunderstandings and misinterpretations of which I daresay that there will be
plenty of. But this will be a different story. My short talk or my poster would give an
account of how such constraints could look like in theory, my reasons for thinking that
they are at least limited, an outlook what I expect to find and possible next steps. I would
set these matters in context of an overall presentation of my dissertation project.
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