ETHICS OF PERSONAL RELATIONS AND NEUROSCIENCE

Abstract

In the area of applied ethics a separate chapter is dedicated to the report between morality and personal relationships. Are they in conflict or not, so that you can not be morally up to the end when it comes to people with whom you have a personal experience? Morality is a universally valid standard of behavior or, in fact, there are several levels of morality or even more types of morality. The paper analyses this conflict by taking into account a short episode of Plato's dialogues and then by comparison with more recent contributions to this subject. There is, therefore, a philosophical, biological and philosophical perspective, and finally the way in which today's neuroscience can further clarify this dispute.

Full text

ETHICS OF PERSONAL RELATIONS AND
NEUROSCIENCE
Dragoș Grigorescu
Petroleum-Gas University of Ploiești (Romania)
E-mail: dragos.grigorescu@drd.unibuc.ro
Abstract
In the area of applied ethics a separate chapter is dedicated to the report between morality and personal
relationships. Are they in conflict or not, so that you can not be morally up to the end when it comes to
people with whom you have a personal experience? Morality is a universally valid standard of behaviour
or, in fact, there are several levels of morality or even more types of morality. The paper analyses this
conflict by taking into account a short episode of Plato's dialogues and then by comparison with more
recent contributions to this subject. There is, therefore, a philosophical, biological and philosophical
perspective, and finally the way in which today's neuroscience can further clarify this dispute.
Keywords: ethics, applied ethics, personal relations, neuroscience, biology.
Applied ethics are built on the boundaries of standard ethics or, more preferably, on
failed tests of great ethical theories. The picture that can clarify us about the relationship
between ethics and applied ethics is that of a circle. Near the center lies the great ethical
theories, ethics of virtues, rationalist ethics, deontology, etc. and each occupies a sector
in this circle, but what is most important is that the periphery of the circle is diffused,
with no clear edges. From here on, the applied ethics begins, the ethics that give equal
moral value to contradictory situations. Our moral comfort is being put to the test by the
applied ethics because although very clear situations are being considered, such as
abortion, for example, we can not reach a satisfactory agreement that will allow us to
decide whether or not to do that is a good thing or bad. After all, ethics have been
invented by philosophers to help us have a good and doubtless life if we do the right
thing with it. Ethics has an intrinsic role as a lens, it helps you better see the difference
between good and evil when it is not seen with the naked eye. Most of the time we do
not need ethical glasses, we see far away that a deed, such as theft or murder, is bad. But
there are situations where, although we look almost at a deed, we fail to establish its
affinity either for good deeds or for bad deeds. A telling example is given by Plato in the
Euthyphron Dialogue in which the character of the same name goes to entrust the justice
to his father who committed a crime:

Dragoș Grigorescu
Euthyphro: It is ridiculous, Socrates, for you to think that it makes any
difference whether the victim is a stranger or a relative. One should only watch
whether the killer acted justly or not; if he acted justly, let him go, but if not, one
should prosecute, if, that is to say, the killer c shares your hearth and table. The
pollution is the same if you knowingly keep company with such a man and do
not cleanse yourself and him by bringing him to justice. The victim was a
dependent of mine, and when we were farming in Naxos he was a servant of
ours. He killed one of our household slaves in drunken anger, so my father
bound him hand and foot and threw him in a ditch, then sent a man here to
inquire from the priest what should be done. During that time he gave d no
thought or care to the bound man, as being a killer, and it was no matter if he
died, which he did. Hunger and cold and his bonds caused his death before the
messenger came back from the seer. Both my father and my other relatives are
angry that I am prosecuting my father for murder on behalf of a murderer when
he hadn’t even killed him, they say, and even if he had, the dead man does not
deserve a thought, since he was a killer. For, they say, it is impious for a son to
prosecute e his father for murder. But their ideas of the divine attitude to piety
and impiety are wrong, Socrates1.
Plato argues that good should be treated and transposed into facts as a general rule
against which concessions are not admissible, but he also shows that this is not an easy
one, if not impossible. In Euthyphro, the discussion advances towards reporting just
behavior to superior instance, divinity. However, Plato's dialogue makes it easy to see
that there are other instances besides the divine, for example the emotional nature of the
human soul, that is, affective or family relations. In short, can morality be divided? Are
there more types of morality in relation to the degree of emotional involvement with the
people involved? Even though from Plato and then from Aristotle the ethical ideal of
impartial morality was the almost exclusive field on which moral concepts developed,
doubts about the legitimacy of this ideal were felt.
What are personal relationships?
Personal relationships are those that involve us personally, where feelings play an
important role in human behavior. This is about my behavior towards those I love, such
as my wife, mother, child, friend, etc. To them, morality loses its absolute and impartial
character. It is natural to be more careful with them, to be more tolerant and even to be
better with them than with all other people. It even seems to me to be natural and as
commendable as this differentiated and favored behavior towards the people in my
intimate circle. Socrates's hesitation and wonder of young Euthyphro’s intention to
denounce his father's murder seems reasonable when he says it is a stranger, not a close
relative. In relation to people with whom we do not have a personal moral relationship,
it generally works smoothly, which justifies us not only to believe that the morgue
works between emotionally non-emotionally related individuals, but that since it works
1 Plato, Euthyphro, in Five Dialogues. Second Edition Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
Indianapolis/Cambridge, p.5.

Ethics of Personal Relations and Neuroscience
at the level of society as a whole, then then it should also work in particular cases,
despite the feelings involved.
On the one hand, we have before us a logical and rational plan that operates ethics, on
the model of the whole-part report, general-particular and on the other a sentimental
plan of ethics. In the logical model of ethics, good is a value that is deductively
distributed from all men to each individual, regardless of the context of moral action, in
other words, a universal moral law (Kant) placed as imperative (must). In the
sentimental model of ethics, thinking the good is replaced by feeling the good. The
moral value of an action lies in our feelings of compassion, altruism, pity, the desire to
make others feel good. This model was described and named by its founder, I.Eibl-
Eibesfeldt, the model of natural morality. Natural morality replaces rational morality as
an explanatory model of morality in general. Of course, natural morality is rationally
grounded, even on a purely scientific, etholological model. Therefore, I think it is useful
to analyze the classic conflict of applied ethics between personal relationships and
morality from the biology perspective that describes human behavior
Moral philosophy of personal relations
Before analyzing the impact of biological sciences such as ethology or neuroscience on
ethics, we need to stop a little while on the philosophical analysis of personal
relationships. Philosophers like J. Rachels try to solve the conflict between personal
relatioships and morality from within, through the conceptual analysis of the idea of a
personal relationship. Rachels' approach proposes a review of the idea of a personal
relationship starting from relationships within the family, especially of parents to
children. Invoking old Chinese philosophical concepts, Rachels proposes a
reconsideration of the idea of universal love in which personal relationships are
particular cases of a universal morality. Rachels's proposal is to turn the personal
relationship into a less personal or at least personal one, to the extent that people's love
for the people should be equal, even if they are close relatives. I have to love my child
not because it's my baby, but because I have to love children, and my children are my
way to love children. We do not have to judge Rachels' idea too harshly, though it is
quite tempting. It really seems counterintuitive to accept that love for my child springs
not from being mine but because it's just a part of universal love, but Rachels reminds
us that if we start from such a universal love we can come to justify fundamental moral
concepts of society such as selfishness, racism, sexism and other injuries of human
dignity. How much we realize Rachels' universal love is a transformation of the idea of
love as a virtue of Plato, a sort of soul-like activity matched with reason. I have to, at
Rachels, becomes I get to love in the name of love.
It seems a masked deontological conception, which ultimately dissolves personal
relationships. If I still have a personal relationship is because I have not sunk in the
eternal ocean of universal love. It resembles Christian love or, in any case, the religious
way of understanding love.

Dragoș Grigorescu
Philosophers like B. Williams quickly drew attention to the fact that life itself is based
on personal relationships and impartial preferences. The choice of husband or wife is
not made in the name of a supposed moral obligation, but on the basis of long-term
preferences that justify me and even oblige them to grant further preferential treatment
to these persons. It is worth insisting on this change of perspective. Personal
relationships are kinship relationships. Obviously, not all personal relationships are
kinship relationships, but all personal relationships can be understood as relationships
that multiply in one way or another the relationship of kinship. Attraction, preference,
increased sensitivity to certain individuals or to others, reproduce us, confirm us, make
us feel together with someone other than ourselves. We mean an enriched self.
Euthyphro is embarrassed to denounce in his father's plan by the fact that if he does so,
he is like giving up on himself. This always confuses the serenity of the starry sky
above Kant, the relatives are our multiplications. Every person I love carries with me.
We are divided into all our friends. Perhaps that is why the idea of sharing is so present
today, even reaching the idea that if I do not share what I feel, I feel uncomfortably.
What's the point of feeling something or feeling in some way, if you're the only one who
knows it?
E. O. Wilson is the author who has described most clearly the importance of the concept
of kinship in relation to ethics:
This brings us to the central theoretical problem of sociobiology: how can
altruism, which by definition reduces personal fitness, possibly evolve by natural
selection? The answer is kinship: if the genes causing the altruism are shared by
two organisms because of common descent, and if the altruistic act by one
organism increases the joint contribution of these genes to the next generation,
the propensity to altruism will spread through the gene pool2.
Nearly a decade before Wilson, I.-E. Eibesfeldt spoke of the natural morality according
to that our moral behavior is encapsulated in the genes that characterize our behavior. In
other words, all ethics are based on personal realities, meaning family relations or
genetic relationships.
More clearly, on relationships that arise between individuals who share common genes.
In the face of these scientific data that lead to a naturalization ethics program, Wilson
adopts the path of genetic determinism that there is no free choice of ethical decisions.
Our moral behavior is one born and explained entirely by evolutionary biology.
A possible solution, or rather, a reconsideration of the conflict between personal and
morality, was indicated by P. Singer who prefers to build his speech on the ethics of
inter-human relationships, starting from the biology data provided by man. Even if
Singer argues in The Expanding Circle against E. O. Wilson's genetic determinism:
Although Wilson is clear that sociobiology should make a dramatic difference to
ethics, he is regrettably less clear about exactly what difference it makes. For the
next 560 pages of Sociobiology there is nothing to suggest how biology can
2 E. O Wilson, Sociobiology.The Abridged Editions, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
1980, p. 3.

Ethics of Personal Relations and Neuroscience
explain ethics "at all depths" until, in the final chapter of the book, Wilson
abruptly suggests that perhaps "the time has come for ethics to be removed
temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized.3
He opens the way to a useful argument for solving the conflict between personal and
moral realities. It is the idea of extending from the intrinsic morality of the human being
to a universal ethic, on a model close to utilitarianism. In short, Singer argues that ethics
can not be reduced to genetic evolutionism and that it is a product of culture that
responds to superior or further needs of man. Singer's model is that of the wider circle
of ethics, altruism and compassion.
Until now, we have analyzed the conflict between personal relationships and morality
following several tracks. One was Rachels who also proposes an extended circle of
universal love. A similar way belongs to P. Singer, who speaks of the impossibility of
reducing the whole field of ethics to genetics in the end, because ethics also means
social practices, ethical decisions, institutions, etc. In turn, biologist E. Wilson insists
that ethics based on free choice is an illusion, and that our genes will always favor those
with whom we divide to the detriment of those we do not share with. Turning to the
problem of Socrates, we can see a complementarity of morality areas of different
intensity.
An area of universal, principled, ideological morality, which is successfully applied to
all humanity and which can be normative established from the top down on the model
of the rational principle (imperative) followed by a particular deed, or from the bottom
up, from a strict preference subjective (the love of a certain person and the harm of all
other people) to the love of all people.
Of course, this demarcation of areas of ethics does not make anyone aware of
Euthypro's choice or how we should judge that choice. At the end of The Expanding
Circle P. Singer expresses its readiness to review the point that all ethics are written to
our genes before we are born, if new scientific knowledge will make us believe the
opposite: When we know more, we will be able to claim that weare no longer the slave
of our genes 4.. Let's see what he has to say the most vogue field about man at present:
neuroscience. It seems like a land of the promise of knowing this new field, so that
everyone could look at it as if it were able to elucidate our oldest doubts.
Neuroscience of altruism
When it comes to neuroscience, we need to be mindful of an essential thing about it:
Neuroscience is an interpretation of the measurements made with the aid of a magnetic
resonance device on a living human brain. Therefore, the acronym fMRI is the
functional magnetic resonance imaging. Certainly, neuroscience is not limited to an
imaging investigation, but it is the core of this promising field. This shows that
neuroscience is a process of interpretation, at least for the time being. It is undoubtedly
remarkable that we can look at the activity in our brains, but we still need a process of
validating the data obtained in some comprehensive theories. Therefore, we can hope
3 Ibidem, p. 55.
4 A. Marsh, Good for Nothing: From Altruists to Psychopaths and Everyone in Between, 2017.

Dragoș Grigorescu
that through these theories we will overcome slavery to our own genes, as P. Singer
announced. For the ethics of personal relationships, it is enough to sum up the study of
altruism. Between altruism and morality we can put in the context of our discussion the
sign of equivalence. If we elucidate altruism, then we know everything about morality
in general. What do evolutionary biology, genetics, sociobiology and altruism have in
common? The answer is that altruism is at the center of ethics and biology of behavior
that defines the human being. Altruism is a culmination of moral virtue and the last
concept that evolutionary biology has to associate with genetic behaviors.
If biology succeeds in including altruism Wilson is right, if not, Singer gains and ethics
does not become the chapter of social biology and psychology. Recent studies focused
on altruism show that altruism is two-way, normal and exceptional. The normal one is in
its turn two ways: inclusive opportunity and mutual altruism. It is Abigail Marsh's merit
to integrate into the field of scientific research the exceptional altruism that strongly
provoked evolutionism because he had to explain in clear terms how it is possible for a
man to be so interested in the good of a similar in order to put without endangering his
life5. The Darwinian paradigm of comprehension of the living world highlighted the
priority of the principle of self-preservation and even of selfishness. Every living being
is ruled by the desire to remain alive. Survival is the purpose of life and any form of
life, regardless of the complexity of that being. Thus it seemed that selfishness is the
one that best defines the human being in evolutionary theory. This issue has even
preoccupied Darwin, but today we know that man is also dominated by other instincts
associated with survival, such as aggression (K. Lorenz) for example. By instinct is
meant here a fundamental inborn or pre-programmed genetic behavior.
Evolutionary biology has proposed to answer the question of the center of ethics: can
man be good? From a sociobiological point of view, it is the question of the conditions
in which man as a living being and being part of nature, if he can rise up to the level of
ethical greek ideal, for example? In other words, the question of the morality of the
human being can be transferred from the field of philosophy and conceptual thinking to
the field of descriptive science of the living world? Therefore, the issue of the
naturalization of ethics reappears with the help of social biology and psychology.
A. Marsh manages with fMRI-based neuroscience to explain in a convincing manner
the extreme altruistic behavior. Based on empirical research, it shows how distinct parts
of the brain, such as the amygdala, and the brain as a whole manifest itself when we are
dealing with extreme altruistic behavior. Through well-grounded correlations,
indisputable ties can be found between the size, density and activity of amygdala and
extreme altruistic behavior. Here, altruism is no longer a culmination of ideal ethics, but
a parametric correlation is a malfunctioning of the human brain. If the arguments put
forward by A. Marsh on the nature of altruism are correct, then P. Singer is in a position
to review the extension of the ethics circle, as announced above. Recent programs of
moral bio-improvement have in mind precisely controlling these predispositions for
therapeutic purposes. In this case, we can easily talk about a radical shift in the
importance of biology for ethics.
5 A. Marsh, Good for Nothing: From Altruists to Psychopaths and Everyone in Between, 2017.

Ethics of Personal Relations and Neuroscience
As I said normal altruism is either an inclusive opportunism or a mutual altruism.
Altruism as opportunism inclusive is responsible for influencing individuals to favor
genetic relatives. I especially help those with whom I share a common genetic dowry,
because that's how I protect my own genes or characters. It is as such a selfish
mechanism open to others. Not to everyone else, but to those who have the same genes
with me, not entirely, but enough to remove them from the anonymity of the rest of the
individuals. It is an egoism of genetic survival, but it is also for the benefit of my
relatives. My genes have bigger chances to move on if I co-operate with those who have
them. Here, survival and altruism can be found in Darwin's theory.
This mechanism of fostering a relative with me is present in many animal species on
Earth. The higher the degree of kinship, the more self-righteous the behavior increases,
as the fewer genes involved, the lesser the altruism decreases. Interesting in this form of
altruism is that it also explains the multitude of morals in relation to the universal
unique morality (Kant). I'm more moral with those with whom I share one or more
genes and less morally with strangers. Not in the sense of doing good to the friends and
evil of the enemies, as in the second definition of justice in the Republic of Plato, but in
being more sensitive and compassionate to the relatives.
The radius of the circle can change, expand, without always comparing it with an ideal
circle in which all people indistinctly enter. Mutual altruism is formulated by A. Marsh
in the spirit of sociobiology: help those who have helped you in the past or might help
you in the future6. Having a biologic foundation, mutual altruism in essence says that
recirculation is made between people who know each other and who have close
relationships, not necessarily related to each other. Therefore, it is no longer a gene
perpetuation directly, but it can be a perpetuation of groups, of the community.
Socialization is therefore an instinct or an innate behavior. The utilitarians will enjoy
mutual altruism, being very close to how they explain the preference of good and
cooperation when it comes to moral actions. But is mutually altruism an extended circle
in the sense of P Singer? Are we by mutual altruism get rid of the genetic determinism
of morality? We think not. Mutual altruism is also an adaptive biological mechanism for
the purpose of preserving one's own life, but only in this mission the others has a
positive role.As such, it is more beneficial for life to be altruistic, genetically or
mutually than not to be altruistic. And then, if neuroscience, produced by all canons of
social psychology scholars like A. Marsh, is today's successor to Darwin's old-age
evolutionary theory, it means that personal and moral relationships can be reconsidered.
First of all, personal relationships are fundamental to life and individual and enable it to
develop any social reality in general.
Then morality does not accept a universal standard, a universal moral law as Kant
wanted, because morality is in fact a behavior adapted to survival and well-being.
Society is the result of such personal biological behaviors, and morality is nothing but
the kind of relationship to develop. Famous ethologists like K. Lorenz or D. Morris, and
historians like N.Y. Harari, explains the evil in the world as possible in a dehumanizing
6 A. Marsh, Good for Nothing: From Altruists to Psychopaths and Everyone in Between, 2017, (the
Romanian translation), Baroque Books & Arts, 2018, p.147.

Dragoș Grigorescu
context of overpopulation that favors impersonal relationships among millions of
people. The adaptive biological response is to widen the circle of the known to one
nation. People can more easily hurt each other if they do not know and belong to
different groups. In conclusion, as we realize, neuroscience clearly clarifies the dispute
between personal relationships and morality, giving more justice to E.O. Wilson and I.
Eibl-Eibesfeldt. An Euthypro will hardly manage to get his father to trial. On the other
hand, slavery to our genes may generate at least a more functional moral than a rigid
ineffective deontology.
Bibliography
1. Plato, Euthyphro, in Five Dialogues, Second Edition Hackett Publishing
Company, Inc. Indianapolis/Cambridge, 2002.
2. Rachels, J., Can Ethics Provide Answers? Rowman & Littlefield, 1997.
3. Williams, B., Moral Luck, Cambridge University Press, 1981.
4. Wilson, E. O., Sociobiology. The Abridged Editions, The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 1980.
5. Singer, P., The Expanding Circle, Princeton University Press, 2011.
6. Marsh, A., Good for Nothing: From Altruists to Psychopaths and Everyone in
Between Baroque Books & Arts, Bucharest, 2018.