The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,307

mind, including self-control, sympathy to others, and sensitivity to norms and conventions. For all that, the orbital cortex is a fairly primitive part of the cerebrum. We saw it in the lowly rat, and its inputs are literally and figuratively from the gut. The more deliberative and intellectual modulators of violence rely on other parts of the brain.

Consider the process of deciding whether to punish someone who has caused a harm. Our sense of justice tells us that the perpetrator’s culpability depends not just on the harm done but on his or her mental state—the mens rea, or guilty mind, that is necessary for an act to be considered a crime in most legal systems. Suppose a woman kills her husband by putting rat poison in his tea. Our decision as to whether to send her to the electric chair very much depends on whether the container she spooned it out of was mislabeled DOMINO SUGAR or correctly labeled D - CON: KILLS RATS—that is, whether she knew she was poisoning him and wanted him dead, or it was all a tragic accident. A brute emotional reflex to the actus reus, the bad act (“She killed her husband! Shame!”), could trigger an urge for retribution regardless of her intention. The crucial role played by the perpetrator’s mental state in our assignment of blame is what makes the Moralization Gap possible. Victims insist that the perpetrator deliberately and knowingly wanted to harm them, while perpetrators insist that the harm was unintended.

The psychologists Liane Young and Rebecca Saxe put people in an fMRI scanner and had them read stories involving deliberate and accidental harms. 70 They found that the ability to exculpate harm-doers in the light of their mental state depends on the part of the brain at the junction between the temporal and parietal lobes, which is illuminated in figure 8–3 (though it’s actually the counterpart of this region in the right hemisphere that lit up in the study). The temporoparietal junction sits at a crossroads for many kinds of information, including the perception of the position of one’s own body, and the perception of the bodies and actions of other people. Saxe had previously shown that the region is necessary for the mental faculty that has been called mentalizing, intuitive psychology, and theory of mind, namely the ability to understand the beliefs and desires of another person.71

There is another kind of moral deliberation that goes beyond the gut: weighing the consequences of different courses of action. Consider the old chestnut from moral philosophy: a family is hiding from the Nazis in a cellar. Should they smother their baby to prevent it from crying and giving away their location, which would result in the deaths of everyone in the family, baby included? How about throwing a fat man in front of a runaway trolley so that his bulk will stop it before it slams into five workers on the track? A utilitarian calculus would say that both killings are permissible, because they would sacrifice one life to save five. Yet many people would balk at smothering the baby or heaving the fat man, presumably because they have a visceral reaction against harming an innocent person with their bare hands. In a logically equivalent dilemma, a bystander to the runaway trolley could save the five workers by diverting it onto a side track, where it would kill just one. In this version, everyone agrees that it’s permissible to throw the switch and save five lives at a cost of one, presumably because it doesn’t feel like you’re really killing anyone; you’re just failing to prevent the trolley from doing it.72

The philosopher Joshua Greene, working with Cohen and others, has shown that the visceral reaction against smothering the baby or throwing the man in front of the train comes from the amygdala and orbital cortex, whereas the utilitarian thinking that would save the greatest number of lives is computed in a part of the frontal lobe called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, also illuminated in figure8–3.73 The dorsolateral cortex is the part of the brain that is most involved in intellectual, abstract problem-solving—it lights up, for example, when people do the problems on an IQ test. 74 When people consider the case of the crying baby in the cellar, both their orbital cortex (which reacts to the horror of smothering the baby) and their dorsolateral cortex (which calculates lives saved and lost) light up, together with a third part of the brain that deals