The Moral Superiority of Rats

An interesting tidbit from the world of neuroscience: brain scans of volunteers have shown that altruism lights up the part of the brain also activated by sex and food. Now, this is a very, very primitive part of the brain. What it suggests is that morality is not a product of “civilization” or religion but a species-benefiting instinct hardwired into the brain. And not just our brain, either. Studies have shown that if every time a rat is given food his fellow rat receives an electric shock, then the first rat will eventually give up eating.

It seems that the basis of morality is empathy. Patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex come up with cold “the end justifies the means” answers to moral dilemmas. Psychopaths, of course, typically feel no empathy or remorse. (I could say something here about American politicians, but I’ll resist.)

For some people, these findings have very disturbing philosophical and spiritual implications. They suggest (prove?) that morality is not something that elevates us above our baser impulses, nor is it something handed down to us by philosophers and gods. It is a natural, evolutionary development, like language.

In fact, difficult moral decisions—such as is it right to smother a crying child to prevent it from betraying the location of a busload of people hiding from a murderous enemy (as in the last episode of M.A.S.H.)—create a clash between the emotional part of our brain that tells us it’s wrong to kill a child and those parts of our brain that are involved in impersonal decision making. This area of the brain—the inferior parietal lobe—is relatively new, evolution-wise. Thus the triumph of cool reason over empathetic morality may be peculiarly human, or at any rate the result of a long evolutionary process (no one knows yet which other species share this trait).

Which brings us back to those poor rats suffering electric shocks. I find myself wondering, first of all, what kind of a morally deficient sadist engages in that kind of an experiment in the first place? Then I think about putting our sadistic scientist in a cage and giving his lab partner a shock every time our sadistic scientist gets food. Want to bet on the chances that our sadistic scientist would use his “human” reasoning ability to decide it was better for him to eat and survive than for him to starve?

Which means that the rat….