Beautiful Souls: The Courage and Conscience of Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times Highlight

Greene has shown, the parts of the brain that are associated with rational decision-making light up on an MRI scanner. When the subject is contemplating the second scenario, areas related to the emotions are activated. Subjects hesitate because of a natural, perhaps even evolutionary aversion to harming someone directly, and this gives them pause. According to Greene, the dilemma in the first scenario is “impersonal,” whereas in the second it is “personal,” which makes it far more difficult to stomach. For a moral violation to register as personal “requires that the victim be vividly represented” and that the resulting harm spring “in a vivid way from an agent’s will.”