There is a great article over on the New York Times about recent psychological studies of moral impulses. Perhaps the most interesting point in the piece was the observation that people’s emotions strongly demand they make distinctions they can’t rationally justify and appear not to really be rationally justifiable at all but that individuals with damage to the relevant emotional centers in the brain revert to being utilitarians. This is interesting because the sort of unjustified moral antipathy toward things like consequence free incest, using parts of an American flag as a bathroom rag or directly (as opposed to indirectly) killing one to save others bear a great resemblance to the moral judgements of earlier ages we now repudiate. It’s the same type of disgust we have at consequence free incest that makes others demonize homosexuality or (at least in the past) interracial marriage and the same distaste we might feel at using the American flag to wipe toliets still gives rise to laws against insulting the prophet in much of the muslim world.

Now the only reason we shouldn’t toss moral philosophy out as useless is that we believe that by formulating simple unifying theories about what’s moral we can refine our judgements. In other words moral theorizing only makes sense if you believe that by rational considerations we can identify and discard the sort of things we now recognize as moral superstitions (like objecting to autopsies). Yet if we know that the same unjustified instinctive reactions that demand punishment without deterrent value or cringe at pure hedonic pleasure are responsible for the misguided morals of the past surely these sorts of emotional pulls must be discounted in our moral theorizing. Given the further evidence that people fall back to being utilitarians once the misleading effect of these emotional reactions has been swept aside it would seem that utilitarianism is the only real candidate for a good moral theory.

In other words if we believe in moral philosophy at all and join with the rest of society in rejecting many of the odious moral notions of the past we must explain what caused these prior moral beliefs to go bad and avoid applying the same methods in the present. If the scientific work shows that what the beliefs we now find objectionable had in common was their grounding in this emotional part of the brain this gives us good reason to discount these emotions as a basis for our current moral theories. If science also tells us that in the absence of these misguiding emotions we end up being utilitarians then it seems we must either repudiate moral philosophy as a reasonable inquiry or accept some form of utilitarianism.