Moral values are dependent on right hemisphere intuition and empathy, rather than left hemisphere abstract reasoning

Another area where analytic retrospection misleads us as to the nature of what we are seeing, since it reconstructs the world according to left hemisphere principles, is that of morality. The left hemisphere sees things abstracted, isolated, and stripped of context, and the left hemisphere deals with conscious explicit linear reasoning, and the right with implicit unconscious deductive reasoning. Moral values are not something that we work out rationally on the principle of utility, or any other principle, for that matter, but are irreducible aspects of the phenomenal world, like color. Moral value is a form of experience irreducible to any other kind, or accountable for on any other terms. Such values are linked to the capacity for empathy, not reasoning; and moral judgments are not deliberative, but unconscious and intuitive, deeply bound up with our emotional sensitivity to others. Empathy is intrinsic to morality.

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References

• Mcgilchrist, Iain. (2010). The Master and His Emissary Chapter 2 What Do the Hemispheres Do (p. 171). London, UK: Yale University Press.

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Type:🔴 Tags: Biology / Neuroscience / Neuropsychology Status:☀️