Joy, Guilt, Anger, Love Read Online Free Page A

as fast as you can. You know that you could do this very easily, but you also realize that in doing so you would ruin the new designer suit that you bought for the occasion and that cost you over £2,000.
    For almost everyone, there is truly no hesitation. There is absolutely no item of haute couture that is worth the life of a child. It would be a morally terrible, hideous and deplorable act to let the child drown just to preserve a piece of clothing, however precious and elegant that may be. Letting a child die would make you feel guilty for the rest of your life and there is something inherently wrong in it.
    Now, consider the following. One evening when you come back home you find a letter from an international charity organization reminding you that, in some parts of Africa, children have no access to drinkable water. By donating a small sum of money – say around a couple of hundred pounds or less – you could easily save the life of at least one of these children. Again, you could rush to pull out your credit card and complete the online form on the charity’s website to send the money in the direction of the child in need. But again, you realize that by not making the donation you could put the money towards a trip to Bond Street to buy an Armani suit or other luxuries – unnecessary for your survival – you have always wanted to wear. What would you do in this second case?
    Moral philosophers point out that there is no moral difference between the two scenarios. In both cases, at stake is the life of a child. Yet, when confronted with the second set of choices, most people find it acceptable and morally impeccable to put the charity letter aside and ignore the plea to save a child in a remote part of the world. Most people can do that without experiencing a nagging sense of guilt. They might on occasion feel a sense of guilt after a wild shopping session, but usually this doesn’t prevent them from doing it again.
    The philosopher and neuroscientist Joshua Greene, who has used the above scenarios for his research, argues that the difference between them lies in how closely they touch us emotionally. Discovering the child in danger of drowning directly stimulates our emotions. Our proximity to the child, the immediacy and urgency of the risk of death, the fact that we hear her cry and see her waving her hands, that she is desperately asking for help, all send a direct message to our emotional networks in the brain. By contrast, receiving a letter in the post that tells us about children who are also in danger of dying, but who are far away, does move us, but probably not to the same extent. If we don’t donate the money, maybe someone else will.
    As we have seen, there is no doubt that emotion affects moral judgement.
    We learnt from the colourful stories recounted in the last chapter that damage to the prefrontal cortex, in areas overlapping the orbitofrontal and the ventromedial sections, makes individuals disinhibited and irresponsible, unable to control their social conduct, insensitive to social norms and standards of appropriateness and more prone to violations of values. In some cases, both among those where the damage is due to an incurred injury and those where it arises from developmental abnormality, these individuals can’t contain aggression and manifest violent behaviour. Some display sociopathic behaviour and are not capable of feeling remorse. The gambling experiment with the cards showed that emotion guides our actions and decisions.
    Greene and his colleagues used brain imaging to understand how the brain operates when people face dilemmas of this kind. The difference in the degree of ‘personal relevance’ and ‘emotional proximity’ showed up in the brain images they collected. Indeed, judgements over situations like the child drowning in the stream engaged brain areas that are associated with emotion, while decisions about situations like sending money to third-world countries did