Neuroscience of Morality
Science
SELF-ESTEEM, SELFISHNESS, AND MORAL BEHAVIOR
Selfishness and morality are not opposites. Instead, some forms of selfishness motivate moral behavior. Specifically, this paper will present the self-concept maintenance hypothesis of moral behavior, which states that selfish desires to improve our perception of ourselves motivate moral behavior. This paper will present behavioral and neurophysiological research that support this hypothesis. This paper will show that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) is involved in both self-concept maintenance and moral decision making, and that these two functions interact. Desires to maintain positive self-concept motivate moral behavior and immoral behavior leads to negative updates in our self-concept. This process is inherently selfish because we want to uphold our perception of our moral selves for our own sakes. However it is also moral because our desire to be good is moral in and of itself. Thus, some forms of selfishness are not the opposite of morality, but actually strengthen morality.
- Introduction
There exists a common conception in moral reasoning that selfishness and morality are, and need to be, mutually distinct. While moral standards benefit society by encouraging trust and cooperation between individuals, selfishness threatens these fabrics of society. Selfishness, in its extreme, encourages individuals to harm others for personal gain, which leads to distrust and alienation. Thus while we tend to see morality as necessary for society, we treat selfishness as a danger. In this view, it is reasonable for us to treat these concepts as diametrically opposed, where selfishness is the evil opposite of the good of morality.
This distinction between selfishness and morality is not always clear. Sometimes, one’s moral action may also benefit oneself. For example, people may contribute to charities because it makes them appear good to the public. Others may console a crying child because the cries of the child irritate them. Although these actions are beneficial to society, we tend to not regard these actions as truly moral since they are motivated by selfishness. Here, selfish motivation negates morality. This view allows us to preserve our distinction of morality and selfishness.
The more we learn about the behavioral and neural underpinnings of morality, we are forced to ask ourselves whether any of our moral actions actually stem from truly selfless altruism. Studies in reciprocity suggest that we sometimes act generously because we expect generous behavior in return. Other studies in empathetic distress suggest that we have a biological desire to reduce how much we witness another person’s pain. Thus, the more we learn about innate human desires that encourage moral behavior, the more we begin to question whether there are any good deeds that we do that are not self-serving. If all moral behavior stems from selfish desires, can we ever truly be moral? If the answer is no, then this threatens to paint a rather bleak representation of humanity.
I believe that it is possible to argue for a much more optimistic interpretation of human morality. However, in order to do this, it is necessary to re-examine the distinction between morality and selfishness. Not all forms of selfishness are indeed the opposite of morality. When we pass up the urge to cheat on an exam, we are selfishly upholding a moral self-image of ourselves. Yet this decision is certainly the moral option.
The forms of morality that we will be concerned with in this paper are decision making in personal moral dilemmas. Personal moral dilemmas, as proposed by Josh Greene, include the self as an input to moral decision making. When considering what to do in these dilemmas, you not only consider the outcomes of the people around you, but how your actions will align with your own character and values (Greene 2001). This contrasts with impersonal moral dilemmas, in which your decision only involves the outcomes of the people around you, but is removed from your sense of self. In impersonal moral dilemmas, a decision can be reached using utilitarian calculations. This is not the case for personal moral dilemmas. Personal moral dilemmas are much more self-involved and engage emotional areas of the brain as compared to impersonal moral dilemmas.
In this paper I propose the self-concept maintenance hypothesis, a model of moral behavior where our selfish desire to maintain a positive self-image within ourselves motivates our moral decision making in personal moral dilemmas. The self-concept maintenance hypothesis blurs the lines of selfishness and morality as it shows that selfish desires to feel good about ourselves motivate moral actions. I will explore the self-concept maintenance model of moral behavior and its possible neural underpinnings in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). I will show that this brain region is not only involved in both self-concept maintenance and in moral decision making, but that these processes are intertwined. Lastly, I will provide behavioral evidence that suggests that humans have a desire to maintain their self-concept, implying that our moral actions stem from a selfish motivation to see ourselves as moral.
We may be fundamentally selfish, but that doesn’t make us incapable of acting in a moral way that deserves respect. According to the self-concept maintenance hypothesis, selfishness serves to strengthen, rather than negate morality, by holding us to the high moral standard we wish upon ourselves.
- Functions of the vmPFC: Morality and the Self
The self-concept maintenance hypothesis claims that our selfish desire to maintain a positive self-image within ourselves motivates our moral decision making in personal moral dilemmas. The vmPFC offers a possible neurological basis for this hypothesis. I propose that the vmPFC is involved in making moral decisions under the constraints of self-concept. In order to make this claim, it is necessary to show the following.
- The vmPFC is involved in both self-concept maintenance and moral decision making.
- Self-concept maintenance and moral decision making are related functions.
In this section we will prove claim (1). The following subsections present behavioral, fMRI, and lesion studies that support the claim that the vmPFC is involved in both self-concept maintenance and moral decision making.
- The vmPFC and Self-Concept Maintenance
The vmPFC stores information about one’s self concept. When people consider various personality traits, activity in the vmPFC increases when they believe that a certain trait describes them and when they hold an investment in that particular self-view. Specifically, when individuals are asked to judge the self-descriptiveness of 240 traits, answering the question “to what extent does this trait describe you?”, their medial prefrontal cortex exhibits greater activity when considering self-descriptive traits as opposed to descriptive traits that do not describe them. Additionally, one’s certainty that a specific trait describes herself (epistemic involvement) is correlated with greater activity in the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex and the extent that one believes that it is important to possess a particular trait (emotive involvement) is associated with more extensive activation in the vmPFC (D’Argembeau 2011). Thus, the medial prefrontal cortex and the vmPFC specifically confer degrees of value to self-conceptions. This provides a possible neurophysiological blueprint for self-concept maintenance as a motivation for moral behavior. If we have a concept of ourselves and a perception of what traits are important, we may be inclined to behave in a way so that our self-concept aligns with these desirable traits. The more one finds a particular trait important, the more moral judgment is motivated to align with it.
There exists a possible counter argument that the vmPFC does not store information about self-concept, but instead, stores information about traits with high emotive value. The vmPFC then uses these rules of what traits are important to make moral decisions, without concern for maintaining self-concept. Activation measured in the vmPFC from the D’Argembea et al. study above would then be the result of individuals comparing their traits against a moral standard, and not from thinking about self-concept. If this is the case, then the vmPFC should display similar levels of activation when considering the traits of others. This however, is not the case. When participants were asked to evaluate adjectives for how well they described either themselves or then-current US President, George W. Bush, a sizable region of the medial prefrontal cortex differentiated self vs. other responses regardless of whether the adjective was a stable personality trait, a mental state, or a physical trait. Specifically, activation in the region was greater when contemplating one’s personality traits and mental states, as compared to contemplating one’s physical traits (Jenkins 2011). Thinking about one’s own personality trait is associated with greater response in the MPFC than when thinking about the personality traits of another person. Thus, there is indeed something self-centered about the nature of activation of the vmPFC. Activation in the vmPFC is not just the result of comparing personality traits to some standard of important values. Activation is the result of considering one’s own personality traits and the value one assigns to them.
The vmPFC does not just store information about self-concept, but it is involved in altering self-concept. Activity in the vmPFC correlates with updates in how we perceive ourselves, especially when receiving positive and negative feedback about our character. This is vital for implicating the vmPFC in the self-concept maintenance hypothesis of morality. If the region is involved in altering our self-concept, it may be invoked whenever we make moral decisions that affect our perception of our character. In one study, participants received approval and disapproval feedback on their online character profiles from 184 strangers. Activity in the brain was measured using fMRI while participants were given a rater, guessed whether they would be approved, and then received an actual approval rating in the form of a thumbs up or a thumbs down. After every second or third peer judgment, participants reported their current level of self-esteem by answering how good they felt about themselves in that exact moment. Results indicated the valence of rater’s responses and negative social prediction errors (expected approval and received disapproval) were able to predict changes in measured self-esteem. These updates of self-worth correlated with activity in a cluster of the vmPFC. (Will 2017). This research implies that the vmPFC not only stores self-concept, but is involved in updating self-concept in real time. This further implicates the region for self-concept maintenance. The vmPFC may be a feedback mechanism that constantly incorporates experiences to form a dynamic representation of self-concept.
- The vmPFC as a Moral Integration Center
In order to support the self-concept maintenance hypothesis of morality, the vmPFC, in addition to self-concept maintenance, must also be involved in moral decision making. If the activity in the region corresponds to both of these functions, it could imply that both of these functions are related – moral decision making involves self-concept maintenance.
Personal moral dilemmas often involve both emotional and utilitarian moral reasoning which must be combined in order to yield a moral choice. Sometimes, this combination is easy. Emotional and utilitarian moral reasoning both support the same moral choice – the option we feel better about doing is the option that will produce better results. These types of moral dilemmas are low-conflict. In other cases, however, the combination of emotional and utilitarian moral reasoning is difficult. The emotional and utilitarian reasoning conflict. The option we feel better about doing is not the option that will produce the better results. These types of personal moral dilemmas are high-conflict personal moral dilemmas.
Behavioral evidence supports the existence of parallel, yet separate emotional and utilitarian processing for both high conflict and low conflict personal moral decision making. When individuals are asked to judge the moral acceptability of two options in a personal moral dilemma, both emotional assessments (“which option do you feel worse about doing?”) and utilitarian assessments (“which option do you think will produce better results?”) are highly significant predictors of moral acceptability ratings and in opposite directions (Shenhav, 2014). Thus, it is reasonable to predict that utilitarian and emotional reasoning originate from separate regions of the brain that participate in parallel, simultaneous, but distinct lines of reasoning. If this is the case, there must exist a third region that integrates these evaluations into a single moral choice. I argue that this region is the vmPFC.
The vmPFC receives inputs from brain regions typically associated with utilitarian and deontological reasoning and combines these inputs to make a moral choice. Neurophysiological evidence supports this claim. When individuals were asked to perform an emotional appraisal task of moral dilemmas, emotional appraisals were correlated positively with BOLD responses in the anterior cingulate cortex, right superior temporal gyrus, and marginally in the mid-insula. When individuals were asked to perform a utilitarian appraisal task of moral dilemmas, utilitarian appraisal tasks were positively correlated with BOLD responses in different regions, specifically in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, and the right tempo-parietal junction (Hutcherson, 2015). These results indicate that emotional and utilitarian processing of moral dilemmas indeed occur in parallel, yet distinct brain regions, further supporting the necessity for an “integrator” region – one which combines these different neural inputs into a final moral decision. The same experiment supports the case that this “integrator” region is the vmPFC. When individuals were asked to perform an overall moral judgment for the same moral dilemmas, the sum of neural activity in emotional and utilitarian appraisal areas correlated with activity in the vmPFC just before the moment of the moral decision response (Hutcherson, 2015). One appraisal alone (emotional or utilitarian) could not predict this vmPFC activity. This provides evidence that emotional and utilitarian reasoning are inputs into a moral decision making process that occurs within the vmPFC.
Lesion studies offer further evidence that the vmPFC functions as an integrator region for moral judgment by showing that the vmPFC is necessary for certain moral judgements. It has been shown that patients with focal bilateral damage to the vmPFC produce an abnormally utilitarian pattern of judgements when making high-conflict personal moral judgements. In an experiment, participants with adult onset vmPFC lesions, other brain damage, and no brain damage were presented with personal and impersonal moral dilemmas. One example of these dilemmas involved two versions of the trolley problem. The impersonal version involved pulling a switch so that one person was killed by the moving trolley, instead of five people. The personal version involved physically pushing someone in front of the trolley, and thus, killing them, in order to save five people on the track. This personal dilemma would force the individual to contemplate physically harming someone in order to maximize the greater good, and thus is a high-conflict personal dilemma. Although lesion participants exhibited similar patterns of moral judgements as healthy individuals when making non-moral, impersonal, and low-conflict personal moral choices, they exhibited large differences in the number of utilitarian choices for high-conflict personal moral dilemmas. While control patients accepted the utilitarian judgment in a personal moral dilemma approximately 20% of the time, vmPFC patients accepted the utilitarian judgment approximately 50% of the time (Koenigs, 2007). Koenigs et al suggest, based on these results, that vmPFC damage impacts the integration of social emotion into moral decision making. They note that patients with vmPFC damage still have knowledge of explicit social and moral norms. In the absence of emotional inputs, they rely on these social norms to make a decision which leads to a significantly higher rate of utilitarian judgements. The question – “how will my decision make me feel?” – is not considered, leading to utilitarian moral decisions. Thus, damage to the vmPFC impacts the integration of emotional reasoning into moral judgements, and leads to utilitarian moral judgements. This suggests that the region is necessary for integrating emotional and utilitarian inputs into moral decisions.
Additional lesion studies provide further support that the vmPFC is necessary for integrating emotional and utilitarian damage into moral judgements. Damage to the vmPFC leads to decreased emotional judgment and reaction in personal moral dilemmas. In a study exploring the emotional distress in high conflict personal moral dilemmas, individuals with in-tact and lesioned vmPFC were presented with impersonal and personal moral dilemmas similar to those in the Koenigs et al. study above. As participants provided judgements for moral dilemmas, response time and skin conductance (a proxy for emotional distress) were measured. Results of the study indicated that while control subjects exhibited decreased utilitarian moral decision making for personal moral dilemmas, vmPFC patients continued to exhibit high unwavering levels of utilitarian judgment in both personal and impersonal moral dilemmas. Additionally, while control subjects showed increased skin conductance when making personal moral decisions, lesioned subjects did not (Moretto, 2009). This indicates that the moral decision making of subjects with vmPFC damage does not elicit strong emotional response. Emotional lines of reasons are not being properly integrated within the vmPFC. Lastly, results show that controls indicated a significantly slower response time to personal moral dilemmas as compared to impersonal moral dilemmas. Patients with vmPFC damage however, indicated equivalent response times for both impersonal and personal moral dilemmas, in line with the response time for impersonal dilemmas in healthy controls (Moretto, 2009). Increased response time in healthy controls indicates that the personal moral dilemma was challenging for healthy judgment calculation. The emotional and utilitarian reasoning supported opposite moral judgements and thus, greater deliberation was required. The lack of increased response time in vmPFC lesion patients indicates that there was no emotional and utilitarian conflict for these patients. A possible explanation for this event is that when the vmPFC is damaged, there is no conflict between utilitarian and emotional information in moral decision making. Therefore, one can easily integrate incoming information and stick to efficient and simplistic utilitarian decision making without any feeling of emotional distress.
In this section, I have provided evidence that the vmPFC is implicated in storing and updating self-concept and that the vmPFC is implicated in integrating emotional and utilitarian reasoning to make moral decisions. This evidence supports the self-concept maintenance hypothesis of morality as it shows that there is a brain region that is involved in both self-concept maintenance and moral decision making – when we make moral decisions, we may be motivated to make decisions that align with our self-concept. However, this evidence, alone, is not enough to support this claim. It could be the case that the vmPFC is large and contains two distinct areas that are responsible for self-concept maintenance and moral decision making without any interaction between the two regions or functions. However, in the next section I will provide behavioral and neurological evidence that suggests that self-concept maintenance and moral decision making are connected and that self-concept maintenance motivates moral decision making. This in turn supports the claim that selfishness and morality are not separate and that selfishness strengthens morality.
- The vmPFC uses Self-Concept Maintenance to Integrate Utilitarian and Deontological Moral Reasoning
I have shown above that the vmPFC is implicated in self-esteem maintenance and in integrating utilitarian and deontological evaluations into moral decisions. Given that the region is responsible for both, I believe that there exists a linkage between self-concept and moral decision making. Specifically, I believe that the vmPFC is involved in integrating emotional and utilitarian judgements under the constraints of self-concept in such a way that the moral decision maintains or increases self-esteem. If this is the case, then desires to maintain self-esteem influence morality, which blurs the distinction between selfishness and morality.
- Behavioral Evidence
Behavioral research provides preliminary evidence for the link between self-concept maintenance and moral behavior. If self-concept is malleable and imposes moral limits on behavior, then the more we pay attention to our self-concept, the more moral we should behave. Behavioral research suggests that a nuanced change of wording from “don’t cheat” to “don’t be a cheater” is enough to activate self-concept awareness and to encourage moral behavior. In both personal and anonymous experimental settings, when participants were given the opportunity to cheat for monetary reward without any moral reminder, they did. Importantly, when participants were asked not to cheat (in verb form), this did not decrease their cheating behavior. However, when participants were asked not to be a cheater (in self-relevant noun form) this diminished cheating entirely (Bryan, 2013). This suggests that implicating the self, not just moral standards, has an impact on moral behavior. Once a participant believes that his self-concept as an honest person is at stake, the participant is more likely to behave honestly in order to maintain his self-concept. This study provides preliminary evidence that self-concept and moral behavior are linked, as self-concept maintenance motivates honest behavior in situations where it is possible to cheat.
Behavioral research also suggests that even when individuals do cheat, self-concept maintenance prevents individuals from cheating too much. Two different experiments presented half of a group of participants with moral reminders (recalling the Ten Commandments in experiment 1 and writing an Honor Code in experiment 2) and presented them with opportunities to cheat for monetary gain. In line with Bryan et al., participants with moral reminders exhibited no cheating whatsoever and participants without moral reminders did cheat. However, individuals who cheated only cheated by 6% and 13% respectively for the two moral reminder tasks. After controlling for factors like one’s fear of getting caught and one being unaware of his own cheating behavior, there was no relationship between one’s cheating and his self-reported rating of honesty (Mazar, 2008). This indicates that the relatively low amount of cheating can be an attempt for participants to profit from monetary gain without having to negatively update their self-concepts. Thus, even when self-concept is not explicitly engaged, it provides constraints on moral behavior. The more self-concept is implicated, the more strict constraints on moral behavior become. Thus, one’s attention to self-concept correlates with moral behavior.
So far, I have shown that self-concept maintenance encourages moral behavior. I will now show that immoral behavior leads to a downgrading of self-concept, indicating how both self-concept maintenance and moral decision making inform each other. In the study above, the fact that the low percentage of cheating did not impact self-reports of honesty indicated that self-concept was not impacted by small moral transgressions. However, evidence suggests that in the case of large moral transgressions, self-concept is indeed impacted. One study explored the relationship between ignoring morally fraught news broadcasts and self-concept. When individuals passively or actively chose to ignore alarming ads about famine on TV, they later reported that they cared less about the problem of famine as compared to control subjects. Most importantly, they reported that they cared less than individuals who paid attention to the ad and individuals who never saw the ad in the first place (Paluck, 2017). This indicates that people infer from their choice to ignore these accounts of famine, that they care less about the issue. Observing yourself not paying attention to certain moral issues can cause you to feel reduced moral urgency because you decide that your actions mean that you don’t care about these moral issues. Your actions impact your sense of moral self. In this case, larger moral transgressions do impact our moral self-concept. Thus, our self-concept is updated based on our behavior, strengthening the claim that we need to constantly maintain it by behaving morally.
- Neurophysiological Evidence
The behavioral evidence above shows that the desire to maintain self-concept motivates moral behavior. The following section will now combine this behavioral evidence with fMRI studies of the vmPFC. In this section, I will show that decreasing self-concept awareness correlates with decreased activation in the vmPFC and this in turn correlates with less moral decision making. This shows that self-concept maintenance and moral decision making are not just two separate unrelated processes within the vmPFC, but that they work together. The desire to maintain our self-concept motivates moral behavior, which supports my claim that we have an innate desire to act morally so that we feel good about ourselves.
Group versus individual studies provide an opportunity to study the relationship between self-concept and moral behavior. Since groups diffuse responsibility in decision making, one way to modulate attention to self-concept is to encourage group oriented decision making. Encouraging group identity, “can reduce spontaneous self-referential processing in the moral domain and in turn facilitate competitor harm” (Cikara, 2014). Thus, encouraged group-oriented thinking can dissociate individuals from their self-concept and potentially lead to different moral judgements.
In a study researching the effects of group competition on self-referential neural responses and moral behavior, it was found that group competition correlated with diminished activation in the mPFC in response to first person versus third person statements and with increased actions of competitor harm. Participants performed a competitive task either alone or in a group. The competitive task presented individuals with statement cues and asked them to push a button as fast as possible when a statement on the screen had to do with remote communication and to do nothing if it didn’t. Some of the statement cues were chosen to be self-relevant for each individual – they referred to traits that represented part of that individual’s moral self-concept. This task, as well as the task of identifying self-relevant statements, were done in an fMRI scanner. Throughout the tasks, spontaneous self-referential processing was indexed by looking at activations in a region of the mPFC identified to be involved in self-referential processing. Results indicated that participants in the group exhibited reduced activation in the mPFC when seeing self-relevant moral statements appear on the screen during the competitive task, as compared to individuals in the lone task. This indicated reduced self-referential responses in the group experiment which can be interpreted as less awareness to moral self-concept. After the fMRI task, researchers assessed participant willingness to “harm competitors” versus “harm” their teammates in such a way that would not impact the outcome of the competitive task. Results indicated that the decreased level of self-referential responses in the group competitive task predicted increases in competitor harm. Participants with reduced mPFC activation in response to descriptions of their own moral self-concept while competing in a group were more willing to harm competitors (Cikara, 2014). These results show that acting in a group may cause an individual to lose touch with their self-concept (as indicated by reduced mPFC activation), that could otherwise guide their behavior. This reduced self-concept awareness correlates with competitor harm, supporting the claim the vmPFC is the center where self-concept motivates moral behavior. Reduced attention to self-concept may lessen constraints on the vmPFC decision calculation and thus lead to a moral decision that is out of line with personal moral standards. Thus, the vmPFC may be involved in integrating moral judgment under the constraints of self-concept in order to make moral choices. The less one pays attention to self-concept however, the less self-concept constraints moral decision making, leading to more immoral judgments.
This section has provided behavioral and neurophysiological evidence that suggests that self-concept maintenance motivates moral behavior. Implicating self-concept leads to moral choices and immoral choices lead to changes in our self-concept. The vmPFC is a possible center where self-concept maintenance and moral decision making interact in this way. If self-concept and morality interact in this way, it implies that the desire to feel good about ourselves makes us moral. This selfish desire is not the opposite of morality, but actually strengthens our morality.
- Counterarguments to the Self-Concept Maintenance Theory of Moral Judgment
A counter argument to the self-concept maintenance hypothesis is that action aversion, not self-concept maintenance, motivates moral decision making in personal moral dilemmas. The action aversion model posits that “the likelihood of judging an action wrong is determined not by empathic concern for the victim, but by how upsetting you consider the action itself to be” (Miller, 2014). It has been shown that we tend to judge moral actions by imagining what it would feel like to perform the action rather than experience the consequences of the action (Miller, 2014). According to the action aversion hypothesis, we do the right thing not because it makes us feel good about ourselves, but because we find the immoral alternative repulsive.
Lesion studies help disprove this counter argument. They show that individuals with vmPFC lesions still exhibit action aversion while making increasingly utilitarian moral judgments. Thus, action aversion cannot be the motivator of moral decision making in personal moral dilemmas.
The personal moral dilemma batteries used in the majority of vmPFC lesion studies can be divided into dilemmas that each correspond to a specific elicited emotion in the agent making the moral choice. “Guilty victim” dilemmas involve making a decision to harm a person who is intending harm to others, and invoke anger in control subjects. “Fated victim” dilemmas involve making a decision to harm a person who is fated to die anyway (you do not stand to gain in either moral choice), and invoke sadness in control subjects. “Selfish reason” dilemmas are those in which the agent is among the threatened majority and invokes guilt in control subjects. Lastly, “purely utilitarian” moral dilemmas do not have any of these additional considerations and invoke less sadness and guilt than “fated victim” and “selfish reason” dilemmas respectively. It has been found that subjects with vmPFC lesions are significantly more likely to make the utilitarian moral choice in “fated victim” and “selfish reason” moral dilemmas; 74% of vmPFC patients approved the utilitarian choice as compared to 21% and 25% of brain damaged comparison patients and healthy controls respectively. Subjects with vmPFC lesions are also significantly more likely to make the utilitarian moral choice in “purely utilitarian” moral dilemmas, but to a lesser extent; only 40% of vmPFC patients approved the utilitarian choice as compared to 18% and 21% of brain-damaged comparisons and healthy controls (Rosas, 2014). Rosas et al. use these results to argue that patients with vmPFC lesions do not make purely utilitarian judgements. Instead they are more motivated by other factors such as selfish gain or anger, which may indicate that they do not refer to societal moral standards when making moral choices. This implies that the vmPFC may not be a moral integration center, but just a region where moral standards are stored. This is obviously another possible counter argument to the self-concept maintenance hypothesis of morality. However, I will now show why this is not the case and why the Rosas et al. study actually disproves the action aversion counter argument as well.
Although not explicitly mentioned by Rosas et alAll personal “purely utilitarian” moral dilemma batteries (footbridge, vaccine, and vitamins) also involved high levels of adverse actions – i.e. pushing someone in front of a moving train or forcibly removing someone’s organs. The grotesque and violent nature of the “purely utilitarian” moral dilemmas may inspire action aversion in those making the moral decision which explains the significantly less utilitarian moral judgements in both vmPFC patients and controls. It is not the case that patients with vmPFC damage are not utilitarian, but that patients with vmPFC damage may still experience action aversion. Thus, the Rosas et al. study does not sufficiently disprove the claims that patients with vmPFC damage make significantly more utilitarian judgements. Additionally, the findings from Rosas et al. can actually suggest that action aversion may be neurologically separate from the vmPFC and thus vmPFC lesions do not correlate with decreased action aversion. Something else must motivate the change in moral judgment when the vmPFC is lesioned and self-concept maintenance is a viable alternative. Thus, action aversion may be neurologically separate from the vmPFC. This explains why Rosas et al. found decreased utilitarian responses in lesion patients for personal moral dilemmas with very adverse actions and shows that action aversion cannot fully motivate moral decision making in personal moral dilemmas.
- Self-Concept Maintenance as a form of Morality is Inherently Selfish
So far, I have provided evidence for the self-concept maintenance hypothesis of moral judgment and have shown that the vmPFC is possibly the region responsible. Within the vmPFC, self-concept maintenance motivates moral judgements and immoral judgements downgrade self-concept. This feedback mechanism encourages us to act morally because we want to see ourselves in the best possible light. I argue that if this method of motivating moral behavior is true, then it is inherently selfish, and thus some forms of selfishness strengthen morality. I claim that we have a self-serving desire to act in line with our self-concept. We exhibit physiological distress whenever our self-concepts are negatively updated and thus, we avoid scenarios that threaten to devalue our self-concept.
We exhibit physiological signs of distress when our self-concept is at stake. As indicated in Moretto et al., when healthy individuals were asked to make high conflict, personal moral dilemmas, they exhibited physiological signs of distress as measured by skin conductance. This can be explained by the self-concept maintenance hypothesis of moral behavior. If choosing a utilitarian moral judgment interfered with one’s self concept of being a non-violent and caring human being, this could lead to a downgrading of self-esteem. The anticipation of such an event could lead to the observed distress in healthy individuals.
Since the downgrading of self-concept leads to distress, individuals have a selfish desire to avoid these situations. Indeed, individuals do avoid situations in which self-concept threatens to be downgraded. It has been shown that self-esteem is impacted by the valence of others’ judgments of themselves (Will, 2017). Therefore if we have a selfish desire to maintain our self-esteem, we avoid situations in which we risk receiving disapproval from others. Studies on moral behavior during dictator games indicate this type of behavior. People are willing to forego overall economic gain for all parties in order to not violate other’s expectations of themselves. When individuals are given a monetary gift of $10 and an option to share it with someone else (a randomly assigned partner they have never met), they are willing to donate 20-30% of the money on average. However, if the individuals are then given the option to perform a quiet exit for $, that is take the remaining 9$, donate nothing, but ensure that their partner never finds out about the 10$ award and thus expects nothing, 40% of subjects choose to perform a quiet exit (Dana, 2004). Interestingly, the quiet exit option is a worse option than accepting $9 in the dictator game and giving $1 to the other participant and a worse option than accepting $10 in the dictator game and giving $0 to the other participant.
However, subjects must feel that these alternative options may make them appear selfish to the other participant. In an attempt to maintain a positive self-image, individuals will make the economically costly choice of avoiding the possibility of sharing entirely. Thus, when individuals are aware that someone is expecting a form of moral behavior, they are incentivized to behave generously. However, they will actually give up monetary gain, just so that they can escape expectations and behave selfishly. Thus, this experiment is able to quantify a possible cost of self-concept maintenance. People are willing to give up money to look good in front of others, and thus, to feel better about themselves. This supports the fact that there exists a selfish desire to maintain a positive moral self-concept. Self-concept maintenance is inherently selfish.
- Conclusion
Throughout this paper, I have shown that selfishness and morality are not distinct. I have provided evidence for the self-concept maintenance hypothesis of morality that claims that selfish desires to maintain a moral self-concept motivates moral behavior. This conclusion goes directly against the argument that morality and selfishness are distinct. Instead, it implicates selfish desires for self-esteem gain as necessary for moral behavior. This supports the notion that we should not strive to achieve a version of morality that is devoid of the self and any personal gain, as it is the desire to feel good about ourselves that makes us good in the first place.
This conclusion can appear unsettling to some, as history and psychological studies often show that people are not the best at policing their own moral behavior. People tend to have highly biased opinions of themselves. We often see ourselves in an overly positive light and we tend to rationalize our behavior so that it appears moral. Thus, if self-concept maintenance does motivate moral behavior, it doesn’t always do a good job. However, I believe that the best way to encourage moral behavior, as suggested by the works of Bryan et al. and Mazar et al. is to encourage others to pay attention to their self-concept as often as possible. The more we explicitly ask others to care about their moral characters, the more they will pay attention to them, and the more they will act morally to uphold these self-views.
Written by Talia Pelts
Neuroscience of Morality
References
Bryan, C. J., Adams, G. S., & Monin, B. (2013). When cheating would make you a cheater: Implicating The self prevents unethical behavior. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 142(4), 1001 1005.
Cendri A. Hutcherson, Leila Montaser-Kouhsari, James Woodward and Antonio Rangel (2015). Emotional and Utilitarian Appraisals of Moral Dilemmas Are Encoded in Separate Areas and Integrated in the Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex. Journal of Neuroscience, 35 (36) 12593-12605.
Cikara, M., Jenkins, A. C., Dufour N. & Saxe, R. (2014). Reduced self-referential neural response during Intergroup competition predicts competitor harm. NeuroImage, 96, 36-43.
Dana, J., Cain, D.M. & Dawes, R.M. (2006). What you don’t know won’t hurt me: Costly (but quiet) exit in dictator games. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Process 100, 193-201.
D’Argembeau, A., Jedidi, H., Balteau, E., Bahri, M., Phillips, C., & Salmon, E. (2011). Valuing one’s self: medial prefrontal involvement in epistemic and emotive investments in selfviews. Cerebral cortex, 22(3), 659-667.
Greene, Joshua D., Sommerville, Brian R., Nystrom, Leigh E., Darley, John M., Cohen & Jonathan D. (2001). An fMRI Investigation of Emotional Engagement in Moral Judgment. Science, 294, 2105-2108.
Jenkins, A.C. & Mitchell, J.P. (2011). Medial prefrontal cortex subserves diverse forms of self-reflection. Social Neuroscience, 6(3), 211-218.
Koenigs, M., Young, L., Adolphs, R., Tranel, D., Cushman, F., Hauser, M. & Damasio, A. (2007). Damage to the prefrontal cortex increases utilitarian moral judgements. Nature, 446, 908 – 911.
Mazar, N., Amir, O., & Ariely, D. (2008). The dishonesty of honest people: A theory of self concept maintenance. Journal of marketing research, 45(6), 633-644.
Miller, R.M., Hannikainen, I. A., Cushman, F. A. (2014). Bad Actions or Bad Outcomes? Differentiating Affective Contributions to the Moral Condemnation of Harm. Emotion 14(3), 573-587.
Moretto, G., Làdavas, E., Mattioli, F., & Di Pellegrino, G. (2010). A psychophysiological investigation of moral judgment after ventromedial prefrontal damage. Journal of cognitive neuroscience, 22(8), 1888-1899.
Paluck, E.L., Shafir, E. & Wu, S.J. (2017). Ignoring alarming new brings indifference: Learning about the world and the self. Cognition, 1-13.
Rosas, A. & Koenigs M (2014). Beyond “utilitarianism”: Maximizing the clinical impact of moral judgment research. Social Neuroscience, 9(6), 661-667.
Shenhav, A., & Greene, J. D. (2014). Integrative moral judgment: dissociating the roles of the amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Journal of Neuroscience, 34(13), 4741-4749.Will, G., Rutledge R.B., Moutoussis, M. & Dolan, R.J. (2017). Neural and computational processes underlying dynamic changes in self-esteem. eLife 6, 1-21.
Neuroscience of Morality
