A science of ethics?

One of the most interesting intellectual phenomena of recent years has been an increasing tendency to study ethics with the methods of the natural sciences, and the life-sciences in particular. From E.O. Wilson's call to remove ethics from the hands of philosophers and “biologicize” it, this “scientization” of ethics has become widespread in research programmes that study human morality according to a fully evolutionary paradigm, that is, those disciplines looking at the evolutionary antecedents and biological bases of human morality such as: evolutionary psychology, moral psychology, primatology, and above all the new born field of the neurosciences of morality.

Our research aims to understand the social and cultural implications, both for ethics and the life-sciences, of these attempts to make morality a fully biological phenomenon. In particular, we will examine whether this mutation in the relationship between ethics and biology results not only, as is already evident, in a change in the image of ethics (now “biologicized”) but also in the representation of biology and nature themselves.

Highlights

In the context of a three-year research programme called "The Seductive Power of the Neurosciences” (Marie Curie European Reintegration Grant: June 2011 – May 2014), which focuses on the increasing intellectual authority of the neurosciences in previously humanistic fields of investigation, one specific case study will be dedicated to the recent emergence of the neurosciences of morality.

This exciting new discipline aims to explore the ‘repertoire of emotions with a strong moral content’ (Sinnott-Armstrong 2008) in the human brain that constitute the pre-conditions of morality. The present research will focus on this new neuroscientific literature regarding human morality (from Damasio to Changeux, and from Gazzaniga to J. Greene), and in particular on the emergence of the idea of the brain as an organ endowed with an innate ethical system (Gazzaniga 2005) and a kind of “congenital neurobiological wisdom” (Damasio 2003).

Expertise

Dr Maurizio Meloni is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Science and Society, School of Sociology and Social Policy, where he was previously a Marie Curie Fellow. He is a philosopher and a social theorist whose current research focuses on the political and moral dimension of contemporary naturalism, evolutionism, and neuroscience. He has published parts of this work in journals such as Economy and Society, Subjectivity, Telos, and the Rivista Italiana di Psicoanalisi, in the edited volume Neurocultures (edited by F. Ortega and F. Vidal, Peter Lang, 2011), and in a recent collection on neuroscience and political theory (Neuroscience and Political Theory: Thinking the