If It Feels Good to Be Good, It Might Be Only Natural

Washington Post by Shanker Vedantam | May. 28, 2007 (News Report)

The more researchers learn, the more it appears that the foundation of morality is empathy. Being able to recognize -- even experience vicariously -- what another creature is going through was an important leap in the evolution of social behavior. And it is only a short step from this awareness to many human notions of right and wrong, says Jean Decety, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago.

The research enterprise has been viewed with ... Full Story »

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2.7
 by Michael D. Lowe - May. 30, 2007

All in all a sloppy piece of writing but there are some nuggets you can extract with careful reading. The author mixes up mechanism with expression in the clinical sense. The mechanism of morality in the brain is described by the research. The way any specific moral problem is solved is complex interplay of emotion & intellectual processes in the brain. However this research does not speak any particular moral framework cultural or ordained it only addresses the mechanism. The author on the other hand freely & inaccurately mixes the mechanism described with specific moral outcomes. He then tosses in some supposed concerns of "philosophers and theologians" but does not attribute theses concerns to anyone.

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