Science wakes up to morality

摘要

A Lucid dream has three phases. First you experience the dream as reality. Then you recognise it as a product of your mind. Finally, you gain the power of control. Morality is proceeding along similar lines. We have long thought of moral laws as fixed points of reality, self-evident truths rooted in divine command or in some Platonic realm of absolute rights and wrongs. But new research is offering an alternative, explaining moral attitudes in the context of evolution, culture and the neural architecture of our brains. This apparent reduction of morality to a scientific specimen can seem threatening, but it needn't. Rather, by unmasking our minds as the authors of morality, we may be better able to bend its narrative arc towards a happy end.