Abstract
Patricia Churchland’s neurophilosophy merges neuroscience with philosophy, using Quine’s naturalism and Sellars’s philosophy to argue that folk‑psychological concepts should be revised or eliminated when neuroscience offers better explanations. She proposes that conscience and moral intuition arise from evolved brain systems for attachment, caregiving, and social bonding. Understanding neurobiological and social mechanisms suggests practical interventions to cultivate prosocial behavior and improve moral regulation.
Context
Philosophers have long been unwilling to accommodate empirical neuroscience evidence in their approach to the workings of the mind.
A major turning point in philosophers’ interest in neuroscience came with the publication of Patricia Churchland’s Neurophilosophy (1986). In her book she is unapologetic about her intent to introduce philosophy of science to neuroscientists and neuroscience to philosophers. Nothing could be more obvious, she insisted, than the relevance of empirical facts about how the brain works to concerns in the philosophy of mind. Her term for this interdisciplinary method was “co-evolution” (borrowed from biology).
Her method seeks resources and ideas from anywhere on the theory hierarchy above or below the question at issue. Standing on the shoulders of philosophers like Quine and Sellars, Churchland insisted that specifying some point where neuroscience ends and philosophy of science begins is hopeless because the boundaries are poorly defined. Neurophilosophers would pick and choose resources from both disciplines as they saw fit.
Willard Quine’s methodological naturalism, arguing in Two Dogmas of Empiricism that philosophy should be continuous with empirical science and that no sharp analytic–synthetic split exists, paved the way for Churchland’s attack on folk psychology. Quine claimed our beliefs form a single web open to revision by experience. Churchland uses that idea to say folk-psychological terms (like “belief” or “desire”) should be kept only if they help explain behaviour. If neuroscience gives a better explanation, those terms should be revised or eliminated.
Quine allowed any belief could, in principle, be revised, but he did not push for eliminating everyday mental concepts. Churchland goes further: she defends eliminative materialism (discarding common‑sense mental states like beliefs, desires, pains, etc). She argues that neuroscience, not folk theory, should determine which mental entities we accept. In short, Quine provided the methodological basis; Churchland applied it decisively to replace folk psychology with neurobiology when warranted.
Wilfrid Sellars’s rejection of the “myth of the given” and his distinction between the manifest image and the scientific image strongly influenced Churchland’s appeal to neuroscience as the corrective to folk psychology. Sellars argued that raw sensory “givens” cannot furnish non‑inferential epistemic justification and that what we call knowledge is inferential and theory‑laden. He distinguished the manifest image (our everyday ontology of persons, beliefs, intentions, and appearances) from the scientific image, composed of theoretical entities and explanations produced by mature science. Where these images conflict, the scientific image can revise or supplant the manifest image.
Churchland adopts this Sellarsian framework and treats folk psychology as part of the manifest image that must be assessed against a developing scientific image grounded in neuroscience. In Churchland’s view, ordinary propositional attitudes (beliefs, desires, pains) are manifest‑image posits whose epistemic status depends on their explanatory power within an overall theory of cognition. If neuroscience produces a more systematic, empirically successful account of mental phenomena, then those folk categories should be revised, reduced, or eliminated in favour of neurobiological constructs that instantiate the scientific image.
Sellars’s anti‑foundationalism, that nothing in the manifest image enjoys immunity from empirical revision, aligns with Churchland’s insistence that philosophical claims about mind be continuous with empirical science. Whereas Sellars spoke abstractly of the sciences collectively generating the scientific image, the Churchlands specify neuroscience as the decisive science for mental phenomena and press a positive research programme. This consists of developing neuroscientific theories that explain cognition well enough to render folk psychological categories redundant.
Critics warn that replacing manifest‑image categories with neural descriptions risks losing normativity, intentionality, and first‑person features central to everyday experience. Churchland replies that neuroscience can, in principle, provide naturalistic accounts of these features or show how they emerge from brain mechanisms. If it succeeds, the loss is not a diminution but a rectification of our ontology in light of a more accurate scientific image.
Summary
Wired to care
Patricia Churchland opens Conscience: the origins of moral intuition (2019) by arguing that moral capacities are rooted in evolved neural systems that support social bonding and caregiving. She frames conscience not as a supernatural endowment but as a brain-built capacity that grows from mammalian attachment biology. Infants’ dependence for survival created strong selection pressure for neural mechanisms, hormones (especially oxytocin), reward circuits, and affective systems that promote caregiving, trust, and reciprocal cooperation. These neural substrates extend the “self” to include offspring and close others, making concern for others both biologically proximate and motivationally salient.
Churchland emphasises that moral feelings are composite and distributed rather than a single faculty. Empathy, distress at others’ pain, reward from social approval, and aversion to social rejection interact to produce prosocial dispositions. She stresses that developmental plasticity and early carer responsiveness shape attachment and the calibration of these systems, so culture and learning sculpt biologically grounded tendencies into particular moral norms. The chapter contrasts mammalian sociality with solitary animals (e.g., salamanders) to show that being “wired to care” is a mammalian trait with clear evolutionary benefits for offspring survival and group cohesion.
Churchland cautions against simplistic genetic determinism: genes create propensities, not fixed moral scripts. Churchland also warns that the same social wiring that produces care can generate in-group preference, moral exclusion of outsiders, and hatred, so evolved mechanisms have both constructive and destructive potentials.
Finally, she previews the book’s project: to trace how neurobiology, development, and social practice together explain conscience and moral intuition, replacing metaphysical accounts with a naturalistic, empirically informed picture.
The snuggle for survival
Patricia Churchland argues that moral intuition is rooted in evolved neural and affective systems that promote social bonding and cooperation. Close affiliative interactions (the “snuggle”) serve as proximate mechanisms that foster trust, reciprocity and group cohesion, which over evolutionary time was built into broader moral norms.
She shows how neurobiology (especially brain systems mediating attachment and reward), developmental processes, and cultural transmission interact so that “affective plumbing” produces felt obligations that we call conscience. Moral judgments are thus intelligible as “adaptive social responses” rather than purely abstract principles. Churchland stresses that grounding morality in biology and social practice does not dismiss moral reasoning but explains its origins and limits.
Getting attached
Patricia Churchland explains how early caregiver–infant bonding and the brain’s attachment systems lay the groundwork for moral capacities. She describes attachment as a set of evolved neurochemical and behavioural mechanisms (oxytocin, endogenous opioids, dopamine circuits, and patterned caregiving) that generate trust, comfort, and a bias to protect and cooperate with close others. These proximate systems produce motivational states and dispositions (empathy, distress at separation, preferential altruism) that are later generalised by learning and culture into broader moral norms:
“attachment provides the emotional glue that makes cooperation feel compelling”.
Moral sentiments emerge when those glued bonds are extended beyond immediate kin.
Churchland traces developmental pathways: consistent, responsive caregiving builds secure attachment, which tunes stress regulation and social learning circuits. Insecure or disrupted attachment alters affective expectancies and reduces the ease with which empathy and trust generalise.
She argues that neuroscience links (neurochemistry, neural circuitry) show why attachment yields felt obligations rather than mere calculation. Moral feeling is rooted in embodied affective plumbing:
“the brain’s affective plumbing makes the difference between acting because you must and acting because you care.”
She emphasises that attachment-based mechanisms are shaped by natural selection for group survival but are refined by culture and reasoning, so moral intuition is both biologically grounded and socially elaborated. Moral norms are “built on top of attachment”, not arbitrary, but historically and biologically intelligible.
Learning and getting along
Patricia Churchland argues that much of human moral competence arises through learning mechanisms that tune evolved social capacities to local social life. Early childhood experience, contingent caregiving, responsive attachment, and social interaction, shape neurochemical systems (oxytocin, dopamine, HPA axis) and neural circuits (prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate, amygdala), so children learn whom to trust, how to interpret others’ signals, and how to regulate impulses. Sensitive caregiving fosters secure attachment, which supports exploration, social learning, and internalisation of norms. Neglect or unpredictable care raises stress reactivity and undermines trust and self-control.
Churchland emphasises reinforcement and predictive learning: carers reward cooperative behaviour and signal approval. Children learn action, outcome contingencies, expectable norms, and reputational consequences. Mirror-like and affective-resonance systems allow vicarious learning, simulating others’ feelings, so empathy, imitation, and social referencing guide moral development. She stresses that learning is interactive and evolved through culture. Language, stories, rituals, and explicit instruction shape which instincts are extended beyond kin to wider social circles.
Institutions and social practices (reputation management, norms, punishment, and third-party enforcement) stabilise cooperation in larger groups by making prosocial behaviour predictable and costly to violate. Churchland notes limits and biases in learned morality, stronger concern for kin and friends, in-group favouritism, and selective empathy, but argues these can be mitigated by social structures and education that broaden moral concern.
Norms and values
Churchland argues that norms and values are socially learned patterns that stabilise cooperative behaviour by aligning individual motivations with group expectations. Norms arise from repeated interactions where predictable rewards and sanctions create expectations about appropriate behaviour. Values are internalised dispositions shaped by caregiving, reinforcement, and cultural practices. Together they transform raw affective responses — empathy, attachment, reward — into organised moral guides that operate automatically as intuitions in many situations.
She explains the learning mechanisms: predictive reinforcement, reputational signalling, and socialisation through language, stories, and ritual. Children acquire norms when carers reward compliance and model rule-following. Communities enforce norms via gossip, praise, shame, and formal punishment, which make cooperation reliable even among non-relatives. Neural systems for valuation and decision-making (prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate, amygdala, dopamine circuits) integrate affective inputs with learned expectations, so norms become felt reasons for action rather than merely instrumental calculations.
Churchland highlights variability: different cultures instantiate distinct norms and prioritise different values, yet share functional similarities, promoting trust, reducing conflict, and facilitating coordination. She warns that norms can also perpetuate injustice when built on biased instincts (in-group favouritism, exclusion), so moral progress requires changing practices and institutions that shape learning. The chapter concludes that norms and values are neither purely subjective nor wholly innate but are stable, learned dispositions rooted in neurobiology and social practice.
I'm just that way
Churchland examines the common intuition that moral disposition is a fixed personal trait — “I’m just that way” — and explains how that intuition mixes stable tendencies with malleable development. She shows that genes and early neurobiology create predispositions (temperament, sensitivity to reward or distress, impulse control), but these predispositions are shaped, and can be reshaped, by experience, learning, and social practice. What feels like an immutable character trait is often the result of long-standing patterns of reinforcement, attachment histories, and repeated social contexts that have tuned neural circuits:
“Genes provide propensities, not fixed destinies.”
The chapter details mechanisms of change: synaptic plasticity, reinforcement learning, and habit formation turn repeated behaviours into automatic responses. Likewise, new learning, altered environments, or targeted interventions (parenting changes, education, or institutional reform) can modify those automatic patterns. Churchland stresses responsibility without fatalism: recognising biological influences explains tendencies but does not excuse harmful actions, because mechanisms exist for remediation and moral improvement.
She also explores social attribution. People use “I’m just that way” to excuse behaviour or resist change. Churchland argues that understanding the developmental and neural roots of disposition supports both empathy and strategies for change, tailoring interventions to capacities and histories rather than blaming. The chapter notes limits. Deep-seated patterns require sustained, structured change to shift, and some biological constraints (e.g., severe impairments) limit plasticity, but most ordinary dispositions remain responsive to experience.
Conscience and its anomalies
Churchland examines cases where conscience seems to fail or behave oddly (psychopathy, akrasia (weakness of will), moral blindness, compulsions, and culturally sanctioned cruelty) in order to show how anomalies illuminate normal moral mechanisms. She argues that these deviations arise from disruptions or imbalances in the neural and developmental systems that produce moral intuition, such as atypical affective resonance, impaired empathy, dysregulated reward and punishment signaling, faulty prediction/error-processing, or maladaptive learning histories. Studying anomalies clarifies which processes normally underpin conscience (affective response, learning, valuation, self-control) and how their breakdowns produce distinctive moral deficits.
She explains psychopathy as a condition with reduced affective response to others’ distress, intact cognitive understanding of norms and impaired reinforcement from social approval, producing knowing but unmotivated rule violations. Akrasia is framed as a failure of top‑down executive control (prefrontal systems) to override stronger immediate incentives coded by subcortical reward circuits. Cultural anomalies (norms that permit cruelty) are treated as socially learned overrides where institutions and practices canalise behaviour away from empathic constraints. Churchland stresses that anomalies are informative, not mysterious: they map onto identifiable neural circuits and developmental trajectories that can, in many cases, be modified.
She cautions against simplistic moralising or purely punitive responses. Understanding mechanisms suggests targeted interventions (therapy, education, changed incentives, social remediation) rather than only blame. Anomalies highlight moral psychology’s plural causes — biology, development, learning, and social context — and support the book’s broader claim that conscience is an empirically tractable phenomenon.
What's love got to do with it?
Churchland argues that attachment and caregiving, the affective bonds often labelled “love”, provide the foundational motives and neural architecture for moral concern. Love, in the biological sense (parental care, pair bonds, close friendships), recruits neurochemical systems, oxytocin, vasopressin, dopamine, and reward circuits that make others’ welfare intrinsically salient. These systems extend the self to include dependent others, creating empathic responsiveness, trust, and motivation to protect and cooperate. Thus love grounds many of the dispositions we call conscience.
She traces how early caregiving shapes attachment patterns that influence later sociality. Secure attachment fosters exploration, social learning, and internalisation of norms, while disrupted caregiving can produce mistrust, heightened stress responses, or diminished empathic resonance. Love also gives support to moral learning. Caregivers model concern, reward prosocial acts, and provide emotional feedback that trains predictive valuation systems so that helping others becomes rewarding and norm-following feels right.
Churchland emphasises that love-based mechanisms are double-edged: they favour kin and close associates, producing in-group partiality and potential exclusion of outsiders. Cultural practices, institutions, and conscious reflection are therefore needed to widen circles of concern beyond immediate attachments. She concludes that recognising love’s neural role dissolves romantic myths. Conscience is not a pure abstract faculty but a set of affectively charged, love-rooted capacities that can be cultivated or harmed by social environments.
The practical side
“If conscience is built from learnable systems, we can design practices and institutions that cultivate it.”
Churchland turns from descriptive accounts of conscience to practical implications: how understanding neural, developmental and social mechanisms lets us design better practices and institutions to cultivate moral behaviour. She argues that because conscience relies on learnable systems, attachment, reinforcement, reputation, and predictive value learning, we can shape environments (parenting, schools, law, workplaces) to reward cooperation, reduce harmful cues, and build self‑control. Practical measures include promoting contingent caregiving, consistent discipline that pairs rules with predictable consequences, early childhood education emphasising social skills, and institutional designs that reduce anonymity and increase accountability.
She emphasises policy realism: small, targeted changes (improving caregiver support, structuring incentives, reducing stressors that impair self‑regulation) often yield large benefits because they act on sensitive developmental periods and leverage feedback loops in social systems. Churchland warns against simplistic fixes. Moral education alone without supportive social structures or punitive measures without rehabilitation is insufficient and she advocates mixed strategies: preventative investment, building support and calibrated enforcement that reinforces norms without crushing empathy.
The chapter also addresses moral disagreement and plural values. Practical efforts should aim to expand circles of concern and reduce harmful biases while respecting cultural differences where they do not violate core harms. She recommends using empirical evaluation such as pilot programs, randomised trials and outcome measures to iteratively refine interventions. Churchland concludes that conscience is improvable. Understanding mechanisms makes moral improvement an engineering and policy project rather than merely a matter of exhortation.
Themes
The neuroscience of morality
Patricia Churchland argues that moral intuition is best understood as a product of ordinary brain processes rather than a separate, mysterious moral faculty. She maintains that emotions, reward systems, and social-cognition networks work together to generate rapid moral judgments. She affirms that moral responses are not the product of some isolated moral organ, but of the way brains are wired to care, predict, and evaluate outcomes. This perspective reframes moral knowledge: instead of coming from pure reason or a disembodied conscience, moral sense emerges from neural mechanisms that evolved to handle social living.
The authoress focuses on specific brain systems implicated in moral behaviour. The prefrontal cortex, especially the ventromedial and orbitofrontal regions, integrates emotional and value-related information to guide decisions. The amygdala signals salience and emotional strength. The insula is tied to empathy and disgust, reward circuitry (including dopamine pathways) reinforces prosocial choices. She notes that when these systems cooperate, we feel obligations and act on them; when they are disrupted, character and judgment can fail. Experimental evidence from lesion studies, neuroimaging, and psychopharmacology, such as altered moral judgments after prefrontal damage or changes in trust following oxytocin administration, supports the claim that morality is neurally instantiated.
A key point Churchland stresses is the primacy of affective processes. Emotions often come first and reasoning follows to justify or refine those inclinations. She observes that reason is typically a slow, deliberative add-on to rapid, affect-laden moral intuitions. This aligns with findings from social neuroscience showing split-second neural responses to moral scenarios and later cognitive reappraisal. Churchland uses this evidence to challenge strict moral rationalism and to promote a naturalistic account where ethical behaviour is rooted in evolved neural capacities for empathy, care, and social learning.
Churchland also underscores the practical implications. Understanding the neural bases of moral intuition can inform interventions, therapeutic, educational, and legal, that aim to strengthen prosocial tendencies and rehabilitate offenders. She cautions, though, that neuroscience does not by itself dictate moral norms, rather, it reveals the machinery that makes norms possible and changeable. As she puts it, discovering the neural underpinnings of conscience gives us tools to cultivate better behaviour without invoking metaphysical moral sources.
Critique of moral rationalism and dualism
Churchland mounts a sustained critique of moral rationalism, the view that moral knowledge primarily arises from abstract reasoning, and of dualistic accounts that posit a nonphysical soul. She argues that treating moral judgment as the output of pure, detached reason ignores the empirical facts about how humans actually decide right from wrong. As she maintains, morality is not the product of some incorporeal faculty set apart from the ordinary machinery of the brain. This insistence reframes ethical inquiry and instead of seeking timeless moral truths accessible by reason alone, we should examine the biological and developmental systems that give rise to moral dispositions.
Churchland criticises dualism for consigning moral explanation to metaphysical speculation rather than to testable science. Positing a separate moral soul, she contends, creates an explanatory gap. It explains superficially but blocks investigation into proximate mechanisms and causes. She emphasises that appeals to an immaterial conscience do not illuminate how particular moral feelings such as empathy, guilt or righteous anger, are generated, nor how they vary across individuals and cultures. Her alternative is a naturalistic framework that seeks causal, mechanistic accounts grounded in neuroscience and evolutionary biology.
Against moral rationalism specifically, Churchland presents evidence that affective processes typically precede deliberate reasoning in moral judgment. She points to neuroscience and psychology studies showing rapid emotional responses and later rationalisations, arguing that reason often serves instrumental, secondary roles: validating, elaborating, or calibrating preexisting intuitions. She warns that overemphasising abstract moral reasoning can mislead moral philosophy into constructing ideals that are detached from human psychological capacities. She believes that reason alone cannot generate the motivational force we call moral obligation. It must be grounded in the neural architectures that make us care.
Despite her critique, Churchland does not reject the importance of reflection or moral deliberation. Rather, she situates them within a broader, biologically informed picture. Moral reasoning can refine, extend, and constrain affect-driven responses, and cultural institutions can harness reasoning to shape norms. But for Churchland, any satisfactory account of morality must begin with how brains are organised to attend to others, feel concern, and respond to social contexts, thus making dualistic or purely rationalist explanations incomplete. Her call is for a scientifically informed ethics that recognises the explanatory power of neuroscience while respecting the roles of culture and deliberation.
The role of emotions
Churchland argues that emotions are central drivers of moral judgment and motivation rather than mere background noise for cold calculation. She notes that feelings such as empathy, guilt, shame and righteous anger supply the motivational energy that pushes agents to help, repair, or punish. As she puts it, moral feelings are the proximate springs of action and without them, abstract judgments lack the force to move us. This reframes morality: emotional responses are not irrational intrusions but the functional mechanisms that make moral norms actionable.
Neuroscientific evidence is marshalled to show how quickly affective responses arise in moral contexts and how they shape subsequent reasoning. Churchland points to studies where people exhibit near-instant neural and physiological reactions to moral violations, with slower cortical processes following to contextualise or justify the initial response. She notes that the fast, affect-laden responses often set the agenda for later reflection and that reasoning typically operates to refine or reconcile those responses rather than originate them. This ordering helps explain why moral intuitions often feel immediate and self-evident.
Churchland also stresses the diversity of emotional contributors to morality. Empathy motivates helping and care, guilt and conscience promote repair and restraint, shame and disgust underpin social norms and boundary enforcement. These emotions are rooted in evolved circuits for attachment, reciprocity, and hazard avoidance, shaped further by learning and culture. She observes that the patterns of attachment and care we learn early in life configure emotional dispositions that later become the building blocks of moral sentiments. Thus emotional architecture links developmental history to adult moral capacities.
Churchland underscores practical implications: recognising emotions as the engine of moral behaviour guides interventions, therapeutic, educational, and institutional, aimed at strengthening prosocial emotions and mitigating destructive ones. She cautions, however, that emotions can misfire by becoming biased, parochial, or manipulative, so deliberation and social structures are needed to channel feeling toward more impartial and just outcomes. She asserts that understanding emotional bases of morality gives us tools to cultivate better responses without assuming they are infallible.
Blame, punishment, and social regulation
Churchland presents blame and punishment as socially evolved mechanisms that promote cooperation by signalling norms, discouraging violations, and repairing trust. She argues these practices are not merely moral theatre but have concrete causal roles. They alter others’ incentives, shape reputations, and reinforce expectations of reciprocity. She observes that blame and punishment are tools of social regulation, mechanisms that stabilise cooperative arrangements by making violations costly. This frames retributive responses as functional parts of a system that maintains social order.
Neuroscience and evolutionary theory show how emotion and cognition combine in sanctioning behaviour. Feelings such as moral outrage and disgust motivate punitive impulses, while prefrontal systems evaluate context, intent, and proportionality. Churchland notes that punitive impulses arise quickly and powerfully, but they are often modulated by reflection about causality and future consequences. Lesion and imaging studies, showing altered punishment decisions after damage to emotion or reasoning-related regions, support the view that blame results from integrated neural processes rather than from a single moral module.
Churchland underlines the importance of distinguishing between punishment that fosters cooperation and punishment that degrades it. Adaptive social regulation targets restoration and deterrence. Reparative practices, calibrated sanctions, and reputation management can repair trust and reduce future harm. By contrast, indiscriminate or excessively punitive responses may entrench hostility, trigger cycles of retaliation, and harm social capital. She warns that untempered punitive zeal can undermine the very cooperation it purports to protect. She advocates for institutions that balance emotional drive with mechanisms for fairness and rehabilitation.
Finally, she explores legal and policy implications. Understanding the neural and social roots of blame suggests reforms emphasising rehabilitation, graduated sanctions, and restorative justice where appropriate. Churchland argues that a biologically informed perspective can help design interventions that reduce recidivism and cultivate prosociality without excusing responsibility. She believes that knowing how blame and punishment work gives us leverage to shape systems that curb harm while respecting human psychology.
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