Moral Mentation: What Neurocognitive Studies of Psychopathy May Really Offer the Internalism/Externalism Debate

A persistent debate about moral capacity - and neuroethics - focuses upon the internalism-externalism controversy. Internalism holds that moral judgments necessarily motivate an agent's actions; externalism views moral judgments as not inherently motivating an agent to perform moral actions. Neuroethical discussions of the putative cognitive basis of moral thought and action would be better informed if neurocognitive research would yield data sufficient for validating one side or the other. Neuroscientific studies of psychopaths have been employed in this regard. However, it seems that neuroscientific investigations to date have been inadequate to wholly define the nature of moral knowledge, and thus fail to preferentially support (or foster) an exclusively internalist or externalist view. Thus, moving forward it will be necessary to carefully define questions that neuroscience is employed to address and answer, and to ensure that empirical findings are not distorted to support preconceived theoretical assumptions. In this way, neuroscientific investigations can be used in a conciliatory way to both balance views of processes operative in moral cognition, and raise ethical, legal, and social questions about what research findings actually mean, and what medicine - and societies - will do with such information and meanings.