The Brain’s Search for Innate and Universal Ethical Endowment

Abstract

Man has the capacity to make decisions and to choose an alternative that is deemed best because he does not possess the doggedness of animal behaviour. Neurosciences demonstrate which cerebral areas are active and inactive whilst people decide how to act when facing a moral dilemma ; in this way we know the correlation between determined cerebral areas and our human acts. We can explain how the “ethical endowments” of each person, common to all human beings, is “embedded” in the dynamic of cerebral flows. The outcome of man’s natural inclinations is on one hand linked to instinctive systems of animal survival and to basic emotions, and on the other, to the life of each individual human uninhibited by automatism of the biological laws, because he is governed by the laws of freedom. The capacity to formulate an ethical judgement is an innate asset of the human mind.