Stipulating some unknown entity in the brain that produces a moral tempate brings to mind Gilbert Ryle's "ghost in the machine". Any time there is a perfectly good behavioral or phenomenological reason for a social event, someone comes along and tries to find the resource in the brain that causes it. Naturally the moral template does not exist in the way that the visual cortex does or even the linguistic headband. If it did, we would already know all about it, and even if it did, it would not explain the issue.

For one, no children have ever been known to have moral values that had not been raised in society where they learned them. So there is no way to come up with a control group to test the hypothesis.

Two, the moral template idea fails to account for cultural, social, and intellectuals differences in moral notions and temperament. If it is just a place in the mind where the capacity to understand morality resides, in the way that the linguistic capacity does, it still says nothing about morality on the ground: how do you get it, what does it consist in, where and when does it operate, and why do you need it?

Three, adhering strictly to the hypothesis as a scientific fact rather than a sociological metaphor entails one of two suppositions. Either the moral template is a neural body controlling moral impulses, i.e., physiological determinism; or if it is not a neural body, it is part of an infinite regress: morals come from the template, the template comes from the pre-template, the pre-template comes from the potential pre-template, and so on. It doesn't get you anywhere. Both possibilities reduce morality to a bodily function of one kind or other.

All of these sociobiological arguments are circular, in any case, just like Chomsky's transformational grammar. The certainty that we express morals means they came from somewhere. If we identify that place, then we can track with scientific accuracy what is moral and what is not. Since we cannot do that, and yet we cannot deny that morals exist, therefore the place where they came from must exist in the mind. Morals are the proof of its existence.

Moral theory is tricky enough without concocting some obscure unprovable explanation of them. Even if it were true, it would already be built into the social foundation and evolution of morals as they are practiced. So we don't need to know because we already understand it. If it is true, it couldn't have worked any other way.

A synthetic a priori proposition.

1a) Two Words: Spam King

1b) control group: twin studies

2) Sure it does, the metaphor of morals to language handles your objections neatly. To add another, morals and language are like software. You can install several different possible languages and moral systems on a brain which conform to wetware specs, and it's going to be really hard to imagine a moral system that doesn't conform, because you're trying to do that using the same brain that can't. And yet those wetware specifications say quite a lot about any possible moral and linguistic system that may be installed.

3) Mrs Yoff is supporting the hypothesis, not adhering to it. And your dualistic premise is poorly supported, being unable to think of a third possibility is hardly an arguement against its existence.

Name me a twin study of sufficient size that has morality as the issue and an adequate methodology to discourage foregone conclusions.

The brain is not digital. The brain and the mind are not the same thing. The mind is of a whole different order of being; to speak of digital or non-digital makes no sense.

Morality and language are social entities. You don't need to understand the surface structure of the brain that gives the plastic capacity for language in order to hold a conversation. It is there, however. No moral template has ever been identified. There has never been any good cause for finding one, unless you are unwilling to accept morality's social genesis and function.

Identifying morality as a neural function vitiates its justification for existing. It becomes simply another autonomous function of the human beast and not a reason why or why not to do things.

That's okay if that's how one sees it but it renders the concept of morality meaningless.

No moral template has ever been identified.

I think we've could come pretty close just by looking at multiple societies and seeing what they have in common. This is seriously not my field, but as far as I know all societies have pretty similar views on murder (bad), marriage (it exists), theft (bad), adultery (bad), defending children (good), & helping each other (good but not usually required).

Identifying morality as a neural function vitiates its justification for existing.

Nonsense. More knowledge is a good thing. Understanding how and why we need food *increased* our ability to deal with hunger.

it renders the concept of morality meaningless.

Society is always going to have rules and rule breakers. Morality is what lets us function as a society. A greater understanding of ourselves is a good thing, it will help us when passing laws and the like.

By taking it as more or less axiomatic that moral norms are culturally congruent, you are assuming what you need to prove. It becomes an illegitimate argument when you go on to offer this congruence as evidence of a locus in the brain where moral authority resides. This is the question addressed in the article. Is the brain hard-wired from evolutionary conditioning to generate a moral code? The existence of a moral capacity falls short of answering this question, just as the existence of a linguistic capacity fails to prove that an innate grammar exists deep in the brain.

These hypotheses assume that if you dig deep enough into neural mechanics, you will find individual coded commands for specific direct action. In other words, if you know how to find it, you will discover the neural subset for 'be kind to thy neighbor' or 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you'.

On this subject, here's what Niels Bohr had to say: "In fact, according to the generalized interpretation of the psycho-physical parallelism, the freedom of the will is to be considered as a feature of conscious life which corresponds to functions of the organism that not only evade a causal mechanical description but resist even a physical analysis carried to the extent required for an unambiguous application of the statistical laws of atomic mechanics."

The brain does not act alone. It is not a main-frame analyzing digital data and spitting out answers. To give the impression that it does is to conflate software and hardware. The brain has an integral design. Its mechanics cannot be divorced from its content. Physiologically, it is not simply the center of the neural order; it is the executive body of the neuro-endocrine system. For its functioning it must receive the chemical input from numerous non-neural glands. Again, it does not act alone, and decoding cranial neurons is a misguided aim, even if it were possible.

By taking it as more or less axiomatic that moral norms are culturally congruent, you are assuming what you need to prove.

I think you're reversing cause and effect. By looking at the similarities that multiple cultures have, we try to get an idea of "why" they have these things in common.

Granted, there is an element of evolution to this, i.e. do all cultures dislike murder and have rituals and rules for preventing it, or is it just the successful ones?

At the same time it's hard to imagine a culture defining as "normal" a person casually going to his mother and saying, "Mom, I killed my brother today. No special reason, I just felt like it. No big deal, right?"

You're dodging the question again. What are the cultural similarities that you're talking about? These are real-world entities, not something in your imagination. As a matter of fact, there are cultural norms which are considerably more bizarre than your hypothetical. What you're describing there we in this society would considerable pathological, sociopathic, rather than immoral. And again, more bizarre pathologies related to sociopathy are known than that.

In any case, I'm not talking about cause and effect. You are. I'm not ascribing a cause but relating a description. You are saying the evidence defines the cause without describing the evidence itself. 'What must be' according to your view of logic does not constitute what is.

You're dodging the question again. What are the cultural similarities that you're talking about?

Listed up top.

What you're describing there we in this society would considerable pathological, sociopathic, rather than immoral...

And do all cultures consider that behavior to be "pathological, sociopathic, etc"? Can you name one culture that would call it acceptable behavior?

This isn't a rhetorical question. There are animals that *do* that sort of thing. Birds where the first to hatch often kill their nest mates, etc. If every human culture world wide puts something on "must not do" list, then it raises the question of what's driving that.

Once again, I submit that you haven't established your argument. Listing two or three hypothetical possibilities of cultural confluence does not a catalog make. Only a damn fool would accept such a paltry offering.

Some cultures accept behavior as perfectly normal that we would consider horrifying, most likely criminal. On the other hand, there are a whole host of behaviors that harm no one which are considered immoral by many peoples. The harm arises out of the revulsion and the backlash. We in the West have since the Middle Ages differentiated between insanity and immorality. Of course, criminal insanity cannot be tolerated, the question is how to deal with it. This is a different issue evolutionarily from morality because it is not usual to say that insanity could be the norm. It leaves aside the question how morality arose, for which I have so far made no representations.

What you seem to know least about is your main contention.

Bye.