[Bodymind] Part 2: Questions about morality

[Editor’s Note: This is Part 2 of a previous column on “Questions about morality on Good Friday”]

I’d wanted to submit this column a week earlier sana, but your answers were pretty time consuming to collate. NB, I’m not complaining. Not only were there many more than I expected (yea!), but many were very well thought out, more personal and thus more nuanced than any columnist had a right to expect. Maraming salamat po.

Results:

Question 1 re the pet dog: the family did NO wrong. Many of you said that they, personally, would never do it, but that this harmed no one.

Question 2 re the dead chicken: Again, many said there was nothing wrong with what the man did. No harm was done since the store owner was paid, the chicken didn’t suffer (well, not any more than when he was killed) and the man not only had sex, but also a good meal after it.

Another result re the chicken, though perhaps not totally unexpected: Only women registered some disgust. Not every woman, but only women. 

Admittedly, this is not a column on gender differences, yet I can’t help formulating hypotheses to explain why only women reacted negatively:

1. Women are encouraged to be more expressive and are therefore less constrained when expressing their feelings, including disgust.
2. Women are more conservative about sex; and therefore find bestiality a little harder to take than men.
3. Women like dogs a whole lot better than chickens.

Let me focus on the above stories first, so as to compare you with your American counterparts: Most of you who answered the 2 stories are WEIRD. Or, rather, you would be if you were American-based and/or raised. That is, in all probability: White, educated, industrial, rich, Democrat. 

If you are Filipino, I reckon you would all be PECbR (privileged educated city-bred, and rich.) Alas, our political parties are still mainly personality-based with no platforms so I doubt we can safely conclude anything useful re. party affiliation.

But now I want to discuss Story 3 about the dead mother. Many of you found there was nothing wrong with what her daughter did. In fact, many of you could even relate, going as far as to say they would probably do the same thing. But even those who preferred to be alone rather than party, were able to put yourselves in the person’s shoes and thus did not judge him/her harshly. 

That, of course, was my bad. 

My personal feelings were involved when formulating the question and it was thus not similar to situations 1 and 2. If I had been more rational, the more accurate story 3 (because  as closely “emotionally equivalent” to stories 1 and 2) would have been:

A man and his mother were in a helicopter that crashed in the remote countryside. He survived, his mother didn’t. He needed protein to survive and, finding none, ate parts of his mother. Did he do wrong? Why or why not?

Do you know why it was so hard for me to formulate the mother story? It is because my ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) is intact. Studying patients whose vmPFC were damaged, Dr Antonio Damasio, currently professor of Neuroscience at the University of Southern California, discovered they lacked emotionality. 

He even wrote about it in his 1994 book, “Descartes’ Error.”Dr Damasio found that when patients suffered damage to just one specific part of their brain—the vmPCF—their lives fell apart even if damage to the vmPFC affected neither their IQs nor their objective analysis of moral reasoning (more on this in part 3).

Yet this damage led to poor decisions in their work and love lives, the only areas Sigmund Freud said needed to be successful for us to be considered normal.

Being a neuroscientist, Dr Damasio thus interpreted that gut feelings and bodily reactions are necessary parts of the process of making personal conscious decisions. Gut feelings were not, as Plato condemned them, distractions to rational decision-making. People cannot make rational decisions even regarding purely analytic and organizational matters because our emotions and passions are necessary to do even that.

This is why it took me so long to formulate the emotional equal to stories 1 and 2 when discussing my (or anyone’s) mother: feelings of horror and even terror (if I can do that, what other inhuman things am I capable of doing?!!?) come rushing in and stop my continuing along these lines.   

So where does that leave us then?

Insist that all politicians running for office May 13 take an MRI to make sure their vmPFCs are all intact?

Suggest to Heart Evangelista’s mother that, at the very least, Chiz Escudero and their daughter get their heads examined (literally)?

Or maybe just limit these tests to judges who have to determine child custody cases and TRO, especially when the person requesting said order is the sister of someone powerful enough to “encourage” the removal of the then current Supreme Court chief justice?

And is it really just the vmPFC that determines our sense of emotionality, especially when it has to do with good and bad? Where, in fact, does such an important aspect of the human condition come from? 

This is what my third and final (if you’re lucky 🙂 observations on morality will be about. It might be beneficial to read up on Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Development. If you are super masipag, you might even take a look at Carol Gilligan who wrote about the Ethics of Care in 1982 and Martin Hoffman, who wrote about the Development of Empathy, also in 1982. – Rappler.com