The revolution that recognizes minds as brains requires us to abandon familiar and valued concepts
such as immortality and free will. But ethical ideas about right, wrong, and moral responsibility can
survive in altered forms. We can even maintain the old idea of conscience, as long as it is understood
as a brain process rather than as a communication from God to soul. Judgments about right and wrong
are instances of emotional consciousness, produced by interactions among multiple brain areas that
combine cognitive appraisal with bodily perception. Such moral intuitions might appear to us as
direct perceptions of right and wrong, but they are actually very complex brain processes arising from
past experiences, both personal and educational. Moral intuitions by themselves are not evidence that
something is right or wrong, and must be evaluated as to whether they reflect objective moral
concerns or merely previous biased experience or coercive and arbitrary inculcation by bogus moral
authorities. The idea of sin as a free act against a divine being must be abandoned as based on false
assumptions about souls and gods. But social emotions such as guilt and shame and the consonant idea
of moral responsibility can still be appropriate, if they contribute to the vital needs of all those
concerned. Consideration of vital psychological needs such as competence, relatedness, and
autonomy provides an explanation and justification for the proposition that the meaning of life is love,
work, and play.
According to neural naturalism, moral objectivity does not rest on theological prescriptions, a
priori truths, moral universal grammar, or reflective equilibrium. The basis for morality is that people
have objective vital needs without which they would be harmed in their ability to function as human
beings. Actions have consequences that affect the needs of people; an action is right to the extent that
it furthers those needs, and wrong to the extent that it damages them. Moral judgments are inherently
emotional in that we feel approval toward what we take to be right and disapproval toward what we
take to be wrong. Like emotional experience in general, moral judgments have an element of cognitive
appraisal that should include assessment of the consequences of an action for the needs of the people
involved. The assessment is not just a cold calculation of costs and benefits, but should include an
element of caring about those who are affected. Such caring enlists the physiological aspects of
emotions and the functioning of mirror neurons.
Neuroscience is just beginning to use brain scans and other technologies to acquire evidence
concerning how brains make ethical judgments: the relevant research dates back only to 2000. A
fuller account of ethical brains will have to take into account such fascinating findings as these:
Patients with damage to the prefrontal cortex can become flagrantly immoral.
Brain scans of people given moral dilemmas to solve reveal different kinds of neural activity
that correspond to different moral intuitions depending on whether they engage in personal or
impersonal judgments.
People can be induced to trust others by nasal sprays of the hormone oxytocin, which affects the
brain to increase feelings of affiliation.
This chapter has not attempted to give a full theory of moral psychology, but has pointed to some of
the key factors such as mirror neurons and emotional consciousness that are relevant to an
understanding of the nature of ethical judgments in the brain.
This understanding does not leap across the fact/value barrier by any deductive inference, but
rather assembles many kinds of psychological, neurological, and anthropological evidence that
cohere or fail to cohere with philosophical theories about right and wrong. You cannot derive an
ought from an is, but you can appreciate that some proposed oughts fit much better than do others
with what we know about minds, brains, and cultures. Consequentialism about vital needs is coherent
with biological and psychological knowledge, and therefore provides a better approach to normative
ethics than do alternatives such as theological and Kantian ethics. Indeed, moral objectivity is
possible because there are psychological, neurological, and social facts about what humans need to
function and thrive. For moral progress, we need to appreciate the needs of other people
intellectually and also to care about them emotionally. Our brains' ability to discern right from wrong
is consonant with their ability to know reality, feel emotions, make decisions, and pursue meaningful
lives. In the concluding chapter, I will summarize how these abilities fit together, and will suggest
answers to other questions, such as what kind of government people need, and why there is something
and not nothing.