Medical Ethics and the New Science of Moral Cognition

This article provides a brief overview of some of the recent developments in the new science of moral cognition and examines what relevance they might have for the field of medical ethics. Included here are descriptions of Mikhail and Hauser’s work on a universal moral grammar (UMG), Greene’s fMRI studies of emotional engagement in moral judgment, and Haidt’s crosscultural research on the psychological foundations of morality. It is argued that recent research results in these and other areas exposes a gap between medical ethics and common morality, between some of the methodologies and results of medical ethics on the one hand and the moral judgments and values of ordinary people on the other. This disconnect is explained, in part, in terms of a misunderstanding or misuse of the naturalistic fallacy, which serves to insulate medical ethics from advances in the scientific understanding of morality.