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Brains & Minds

Ethics On The Brain

Vincent Di Norcia theorizes how morality is generated by how the brain works.

“The time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized.”
Edward O.Wilson, Sociobiology – A New Synthesis

Why do animals have brains? In order to survive in uncertain, often threatening environments. Conscious sentience is helpful when they have to deal with “situations that require a novel, non-stereotyped response for planning and choices among multiple courses of action,” writes Christof Koch in The Quest For Consciousness (2004). Indeed, as Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote in his classic work, Evolution, Genetics and Man (1955), “there is scarcely any doubt that the development of brain power, of intelligence, was the decisive force in the evolutionary process, because brain power confers enormous adaptive advantages.

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