I think many advocates of reason-based ethics would say that they’re not counting on psychopaths being persuaded to change their behavior based on abstract moral theories, but that you need reason to prove that what the psychopath is doing is wrong. The point of ethics is not simply to persuade others how to act but also have a code of how to act oneself.

A recent UCLA PhD had ideologues and nonideologues thinking about politics under an MRI, and found that they did use different parts of the brain, similar to this experiment.

But my particular brand of consequentialism says “Things go better if we follow a set of general rules than if we try to evaluate each situation on its own merits.” So I believe in a pretty strong form of rights because it makes stuff turn out better, because I’m a consequentialist. Which brings us back to Glen’s point: you compute general rules beforehand, and then don’t have to do too much analysis when you come to a specific set of circumstances. It might look like a gut reaction, or pure deontology, but it isn’t really.

It occurs to me as I write this that Rand had made a similar point: your emotions are often an expression of judgments that you’ve made intellectually and then internalized.

I think that’s probably true only of direct forms of consequentialism (like act utilitarianism). Indirect consequentialism can recommend rules that people internalize in much the same way you internalize your blackjack strategy. Some of the rules may even be internalized genetically. Perhaps the “gut reaction” responses that Greene documents actually reflect a kind of proto-utilitarian calculus based on more typical situations (as opposed to constructed thought experiments). Where does this lead? I suspect something like Will’s response above, in which he awards the laurels to Darwin-cum-Hume-and-Smith.

Training can assist someone to better make the snap judgement, and it’s probably that “better” in thise case means, “make it so that it would conform to the decision that would be made if more time were available for both perception and reflection.

I’ve heard a quote, “You hope that people will rise to the occasion, but usually they go to the level of their training.”

The trolley case can vary a lot, depending on whether you know any of the people involved, or, for example, if you are prejudiced against fat men. In real life situations, most people are simply going to do nothing.

http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~stich/Publications/publications2.htm

Kant, I’m sure, wouldn’t be impressed with brainscans of heteronomous motivation. Of course, the mystery for people looking for Kantian normative bindingness is how autonomous motivation would look any different. The mystery for utilitarians is to find computations of involving their peculiar philosophic conception of utility. Neither thing is happening.

This stuff is relevant in only an ought-implies-can sort of way. My sense is that the brainscan stuff refutes hard deontology and hard utilitarianism. The motivational and cognitive requirements of either theory are impossible for us to satisfy, and therefore not obligatory.

I think actual, effective, non-utopian morality–the sort of thing that actually does enable peaceful cooperative social order–involves culturally relative, but psychologically strict-seeming, norms that engender a sense of categorical deontic restriction and obligation. But different contexts elicit different norms. Paradoxes arise when we can’t resolve the context. Sometimes no norm is called. In the absence of a default deontic-seeming norm that internalizes and automates the calculation, on-the-spot prudential or consequentialist calculation may be called for.

My take reading the Greene, Haidt, etc., stuff is that the fight between Kant and Bentham is sort of irrelevant. The laurels go to a Darwinized version of Hume and Smith.