The Social Brain:Deriving an Ought From an Is and the Future of Moral Reasoning

摘要

This special issue of AJOB Neuroscience features a collection of essays and open peer commentaries devoted to "the social brain." The authors explore a variety of philosophical, neuroscientific, and clinical dimensions of the brain's social and relational programs, but I want to focus this editorial on the article contributed by Drs. Jean Decety, our guest editor, and Jason Cowell. Decety and Cowell (2015) argue that empathic competence-and they could have included other affectively mediated capacities of our social brains such as the "moral emotions" of disgust, pity, compassion, anger, shame, and so forth-are hardly proxies for moral reasoning and therefore require moral reasoning to ultimately justify moral behaviors, decisions, and practices.