by University of Zurich | May 29, 2020 | Society, Top Rated Theories, What is the relationship (if any) between money and morality
“Our actions are guided by moral values. However, monetary incentives can get in the way of our good intentions. Neuroeconomists at the University of Zurich have now investigated in which area of the brain conflicts between moral and material motives are resolved. Their findings reveal that our actions are more social when these deliberations are inhibited. When donating money to a charity or doing volunteer work, we put someone else’s needs before our own and forgo our own material interests in favor of moral values. Studies have described this behavior as reflecting either a personal predisposition for altruism, an instrument for personal reputation management, or a mental trade-off of the pros and cons associated with different actions.
Impact of electromagnetic stimulation on donating behavior
A research team led by UZH professor Christian Ruff from the Zurich Center for Neuroeconomics has now investigated the neurobiological origins of unselfish behavior. The researchers focused on the right Temporal Parietal Junction (rTPJ) — an area of the brain that is believed to play a crucial role in social decision-making processes. To understand the exact function of the rTPJ, they engineered an experimental set-up in which participants had to decide whether and how much they wanted to donate to various organizations. Through electromagnetic stimulation of the rTPJ, the researchers were then able to determine which of the three types of considerations — predisposed altruism, reputation management, or trading off moral and material values — are processed in this area of the brain.
Moral by default, money by deliberation
The researchers found that people have a moral preference for supporting good causes and not wanting to support harmful or bad causes. However, depending on the strength of the monetary incentive, people will at one point switch to selfish behavior. When the authors reduced the excitability of the rTPJ using electromagnetic stimulation, the participants’ moral behavior remained more stable.
“If we don’t let the brain deliberate on conflicting moral and monetary values, people are more likely to stick to their moral convictions and aren’t swayed, even by high financial incentives,” explains Christian Ruff. According to the neuroeconomist, this is a remarkable finding, since: “In principle, it’s also conceivable that people are intuitively guided by financial interests and only take the altruistic path as a result of their deliberations.”
Brain region mediates conflicts
Although people’s decisions were more social when they thought that their actions were being watched, this behavior was not affected by electromagnetic stimulation of the rTPJ. This means that considerations regarding one’s reputation are processed in a different area of the brain. In addition, the electromagnetic stimulation led to no difference in the general motivation to help. Therefore, the authors concluded that the rTPJ is not home to altruistic motives per se, but rather to the ability to trade off moral and material values.
Experimental set-up
In the experimental set-up, the participants received money and were then presented with the opportunity to donate a varying sum to a charitable cause, at a cost to themselves, or donate a sum to an organization that supports the use of firearms, in which case they were rewarded. Some of these decisions were taken while other participants were watching, whereas others were taken in secret.
The researchers then analyzed the decisions the participants took, determining the monetary thresholds at which the participants switched from altruistic to selfish behavior. They compared these findings in settings with and without magnetic stimulation of the rTPJ area.
Story Source:
Materials provided by University of Zurich. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Journal Reference:
- Ignacio Obeso, Marius Moisa, Christian C Ruff, Jean-Claude Dreher. A causal role for right temporo-parietal junction in signaling moral conflict. eLife, 2018; 7 DOI: 10.7554/eLife.40671
by Nelson J | May 29, 2020 | Society, What is the relationship (if any) between money and morality
“All money tends to corrupt, and absolute money corrupts absolutely. This is an ancient message. You can find it in the Bible (“the love of money is the root of all evil”), in the writings of ancient Greek philosophers and Renaissance moralists, and more recently in the Occupy movement that set up camp last year outside St Paul’s Cathedral. This Wednesday, the cathedral was packed for a rather more sedate explanation of the same ideas featuring the Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel.
Sandel, currently plugging his new book What Money Can’t Buy, has been difficult to avoid in recent days. His central thesis is twofold. Firstly, when you put a price on something you alter its intrinsic properties, and this can be morally corrosive. Secondly, the past few decades have seen a market economy replaced by a “market society” in which “everything is up for sale”. Markets, he says, “are not neutral instruments, they crowd out values worth caring about” – values like altruism, human dignity and the common good. As a result we have seen a great hollowing-out of communality and public political discourse.
He asks such questions as: is it right to create a market in blood, rather than rely on altruistic donors? Should unhealthy people be given financial incentives to adopt healthier lifestyles? Should school pupils be “bribed” to read books or achieve higher marks? To all these questions Wednesday’s audience answered an emphatic “no”, which suggests that Sandel is, at least in terms of public opinion, pushing at an open door.
This may explain the tremendous popularity he now enjoys. (The Guardian described him the other day as “currently the most effective communicator of ideas in English” and suggested that his latest book “should be the bedside companion of every Miliband aide”.) The free market “experiment” of the past few decades has led to rising inequality and an economic disaster, the only beneficiaries of which would seem to be a handful of already wealthy bankers. We should not be surprised if Sandel’s deeply traditional complaints about the corrosive effect of money on the human soul find a ready echo, especially when voiced in a cathedral whose history and location give it a somewhat ambiguous relationship with wealth.
The idea that money has destroyed all vestige of civic virtue was hackneyed already in Roman times. For all Sandel’s current vogue on the progressive Left, his message is inherently a conservative one, in that it implicitly looks back to a Golden Age before money ruined everything. Another way of saying this is that there’s nothing new about the “market society”.
One of Sandel’s examples relates to privately-run prisons in California in which convicts with sufficient means can upgrade to a better cell. This was standard practice in 18th century London. Also popular in the 18th century was the “tontine”, a form of gambling in which a group of people pooled their resources and the last one left alive collected the jackpot: not too dissimilar, in essence, from the market in third-party life insurance that Sandel criticises today.
But then to talk about the 18th century is to realise just how much more thoroughgoing the marketisation of society used to be. From the horrors of the slave-trade and the near-slavery of indentured labour, to the open purchase of Parliamentary seats through “rotten boroughs”, almost everything was up for sale. Commissions in the British army and civil service appointments were bought, rather than given on merit, well into the 19th century. What we think of as basic public services such as policing and the upkeep of roads were wholly private or at best put out to tender. And it’s unlikely to be a coincidence that prostitution in the 18th century was vastly more extensive and exploitative than anything seen today.
The present-day “market society”, for all its deficiencies, is a pale shadow of the ruthless and money-driven world of two or three centuries ago. Sandel is squeamish about students hiring out their foreheads to advertisers or paying homeless people to stand all day in queues so that a richer and busier person can get into Congressional hearings. There used to be an actual trade in human beings. Things aren’t likely to get that bad again, however badly things go in Greece.
At least when something has a price it shows that someone puts a value on it. Not charging for goods or services can lead to problems of a different order. The BBC’s Stephanie Flanders, taking part in the debate at St Paul’s, pointed out that in the age of the internet, many goods and services which would in the past have been paid for are available for free. The thought struck me that perhaps not charging for a service, or expecting things to be free, can be at least as morally corrupting of basic goods as Sandel believes money is.
If people expect to, and can, receive their news and entertainment for free, why should they pay for it? And how can the producers make an honest living? The Bank of England’s Andrew Bailey contends that free banking distorts the market, is less transparent and leads to poorer service to consumers. It is at least an arguable case. And as regards to “free” internet services like Google and Facebook, it has well been said that the non-paying users are not the customers, but are themselves the product.
Is money the source of the problems Sandel identifies, or rather a convenient scapegoat for human beings who can’t bear too much reality? You can’t buy a friend, he points out, because if you know you’ve paid someone to be nice to you it ceases to be a “real” friendship. Has he never noticed that rich people tend to have more “friends” than poor ones? Sandel also raised the example of a professionally written wedding speech. Would the bride and groom feel quite the same way, he wondered, if they knew that the best man had spent $150 dollars on buying a speech rather than investing his heart and soul by writing it personally? Perhaps not, but it’s not obvious to me why the payment of money in itself is corrupting.
The problem, surely – if there is a problem – is that the speech is not the best man’s own; not that he has paid for it. I rather doubt that the newlyweds would be happier to learn that the best man had found the speech on a website and simply downloaded it for free.
Credit: https://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/lifestyle/2012/05/money-and-morality
by Chiron | May 3, 2020 | Society, What is the relationship (if any) between money and morality
“Morality has been established through history and has never worked. Humans had never found peace within themselves, their own kin and the environment. Morality is a failed effort of replicating basic virtues of humanity. If one is connected deeply into one’s essence beyond ideology, one will know how to be, naturally, as the choice of being happy is intrinsic in all beings. A flower, through its creative expression, naturally shares all of its resources (money) to all beings in the environment and in return, is deeply nourished.”
by Eva Lenore | May 2, 2020 | Society, What is the relationship (if any) between money and morality
“Most everyone in the world has developed an unhealthy relationship with money. It is seen as fundamentally good to make money and bad not to. We do not learn in school that making money is taking it from someone else – the system is a closed loop, not an open field. This naivete pervades society, to such an extent that billionaires hoard an unspendable amount of wealth while billions more live in poverty. As long as the economy circles around money, we will not have peace on Earth.”
by The Kid | May 2, 2020 | Society, What is the relationship (if any) between money and morality
“Money destroys morality, and that should not come as a surprise. From Judas, who betrayed Jesus for 30 pieces of silver, to Bernie Madoff, history is full of examples of money’s ability to corrupt. Money is a representation of wealth, power and success; Yet in reality, it is a glorified piece of paper or, these days, a piece of plastic or a number on a screen. Because of its vague, transcendent and mystical nature, money holds an unrealistically divine essence and corrupts everyone in its path.”
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