The Moral Brain

Depending on the type of brain professional you ask, they will often give you different answers on just how the brain works. A psychologist might say that a person's past experiences that shape their brain in terms of retention, feelings and morality. A neurophysiologist will sternly disagree to this sentiment and state that it is the limbic system of a human brain that makes them tick--specifically the amygdala, where the fight-or-flight mechanism is regulated. Ask a humanist and they'll tell you that that morality is something inherent, and what all human beings are born with. So with all these definitions of what makes us moral, which one do we believe?

These articles give us a good insight on just how complicated the issue of morality is. It forces us to question what we consider moral and what other people considered moral. I am especially struck in the article entitled "The Moral Mind" where psychologists constructed several scenarios and asked subjects their opinions on it, or how they feel towards it. The train scenario is one of the situations that certainly got my attention. As a rather indecisive character, I personally would not know what to do when put in this situation. But it also got me thinking as to why one situation is more moral than the other? Does the number of human lives truly matter? In my mind, I pictured the experiment in a different light: what if it was someone's mother or father that was the one person who was about to get run over rather than an unsuspecting stranger? Would it be more moral to spare the lives of 5 people we don't know rather than our own parents? Though we are hardly put in these situations, it is a good way to re-define our idea of morality.

The thought of considering other people's ideas as a part of morality also lingers in my mind. It is true what the article wrote that what's moral is usually defined by what the society we live in. For example, in some countries in Asia it is morally and socially acceptable for couples to have an arranged marriage with a person they barely know. Though it seems blasphemous and unnerving to us to spend the rest of our lives with a person we would have met not more than 2 months before a marriage, this was the case no more than 30 years before our time. To an Asian family a few years ago, this brought great pride, joy, and honor to a son or daughter's parents. In modern times, this type of marriage is no longer acceptable.

Overall, the issue of morality has been brought up, argued, and will continued to be a hot-topic issue in a humane society. But on the same wavelength of morality, we have to consider what is good and evil. Would there necessarily be good without evil?