ASEBL Journal – Volume 10 Issue 1, January 2014
B O O K
R E V I E W S
Patricia Churchland. Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Morality.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 2011. 288 pgs. $24.95US Hardcover. ISBN: 9780691156347
Questions at issue: 1. Where do moral sentiments come from? 2. Are the biological
origins of moral sentiments relevant in evaluating moral norms and the motivated
reasoning of moral authorities?
“We need a critique of moral values, the value of these values themselves must first
be called in question – and for that there is needed a knowledge of the conditions and
circumstances in which they grew, under which they evolved and changed.”
Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, 6.
Critical investigation into the disturbingly non-transcendent origins of morality is not
new. Evolutionary and neurological investigations have been trickling out of the
academy and into the popular press for a couple of decades. However, these have so
far produced more reaction than consideration, both in the general public and among
academics. If anything, prevailing beliefs about the origins of morality have been
wrapped in anti-scientific rhetorical defenses, most of which deny out-of-hand that
science could make any contribution to the formulation of personal ethics or public
policy.
No stranger to the bulwarks constructed to shield the humanities from empiricism,
neurophilosophy pioneer and academic blockade-runner Patricia Churchland offers
perhaps the strongest and most concise defense of the interdisciplinary study of
human morality. Churchland’s 2012 book Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us
about Morality focuses on the deceptively simple question of where values come
from. Though the question is not significantly different from that posed by Nietzsche,
its 21st century incarnation cannot be answered by speculative aphorisms. To refine
the question and establish a methodology for answering it, Churchland constructs two
mutually-reinforcing arguments, one scientific and the other philosophical. In the
scientific argument, Churchland proposes that our feelings about social responsibility,
self-restraint, etc. may have emerged from the neurochemical reward system that
ensures parent-child bonding in all mammals. The philosophical argument, equally
important and skillfully interwoven with the scientific argument, is that rhetorical
attempts to exorcise science from the discussion of moral norms and public policy are
logically indefensible.
Neuro-Morality
The second, third, and fourth chapters of Braintrust contain the groundwork for a
hypothesis of brain-based pro-social behavior. Churchland points out the nontrivial
point that morality is inherently social. While I may like to believe that I would act
according to a particular ethos even if no one was watching, the fact that I want other
people to applaud my integrity manifests its social utility. Living in a group is
34