Essay: The Brain: How We Make Life-and-Death Decisions

Morality is more properly felt

By Robert Wright Monday, Jan. 29, 2007

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    Princeton philosopher Peter Singer cites Greene's work in arguing that we should re-examine our moral intuitions and ask not just whether these impulses still serve their original evolutionary logic, but whether that logic merits respect in the first place. Why obey moral impulses that evolved to serve what Richard Dawkins calls the "selfish gene"--such as sympathy that gravitates toward kin and friends? Why not worry more about people an ocean away whose suffering we could cheaply alleviate? Isn't it better to save 10 starving African babies than to keep your 90-year-old father on life support?

    Singer's radically utilitarian brand of moral philosophy has its work cut out for it. In the absence of arduous cranial wrestling matches, reason may indeed be, as Hume famously put it, "slave of the passions."

    Wright is a Schwartz senior fellow at the New America Foundation and author of Nonzero and The Moral Animal

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