Skip to main content
Home

Main navigation

  • Home
  • Series
  • People
  • Depts & Colleges
  • Open Education

Main navigation

  • Home
  • Series
  • People
  • Depts & Colleges
  • Open Education

Neuroscience Can Tell Us About Morality

Series
Bio-Ethics Bites
Audio Embed
What can science tell us about morality? Many philosophers would say, 'nothing at all'. Facts don't imply values, they say. you need further argument to move from facts about us and about the world to conclusions about what we ought to do.
For example, most humans are altruistic - they genuinely care about the well-being of friends and family and to a lesser extent even of strangers - they'll give money to charity to help people they've never even met. Suppose science gives us a compelling scientific explanation for why we're altruistic. Does that tell us whether we should be altruistic?

More in this series

View Series
Bio-Ethics Bites

Brain Chemistry and Moral Decision-Making

Answers to moral questions, it seems, depend on how much serotonin there is flowing through your brain. In the future might we be able to alter people's moral behaviour with concoctions of chemicals?
Previous
Licence
Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/
Transcript Available

Episode Information

Series
Bio-Ethics Bites
People
Patricia Churchland
Keywords
neuroscience
morality
Department: Faculty of Philosophy
Date Added: 03/02/2012
Duration: 00:19:47

Subscribe

Apple Podcast Audio Audio RSS Feed

Download

Download Audio Download Transcript

Footer

  • About
  • Accessibility
  • Contribute
  • Copyright
  • Contact
  • Privacy
'Oxford Podcasts' Twitter Account @oxfordpodcasts | MediaPub Publishing Portal for Oxford Podcast Contributors | Upcoming Talks in Oxford | © 2011-2022 The University of Oxford