Introduction

These are the early days of what I hope will be a long and fruitful intellectual tradition, a tradition fueled by the systematic interaction and mutual information of cognitive neurobiology on the one hand and moral theory on the other. More specifically, it is the traditional subarea we call metaethics, including moral epistemology and moral psychology, that will be most dramatically informed by the unfolding developments in cognitive neurobiology. And it is metaethics again that will exert a reciprocal influence on future neurobiological research – more specifically, into the nature of moral perception, the nature of practical and social reasoning, and the development and occasional corruption of moral character.

This last point about reciprocity highlights a further point. What we are contemplating here is no imperialistic takeover of the moral by the neural. Rather, we should anticipate a mutual flowering of both our high-level conceptions in the domain of moral knowledge and our lower-level conceptions in the domain of normal and pathological neurology. For each level has much to teach the other, as this essay will try to show.

Nor need we resist this interaction of distinct traditions on grounds that it threatens to deduce normative conclusions from purely factual premises, for it threatens no such thing. To see this clearly, consider the following parallel. Cognitive neurobiology is also in the process of throwing major illumination on the philosophy of science – by way of revealing the several forms of neural representation that underlie scientific cognition, and the several forms of neural activity that underlie learning and conceptual change (see, e.g., Churchland 1989a, chapts. 9–11).