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Chapter 17

Mirror Neurons and Morality

Antonio Malo

1. The Discovery of Mirror Neurons

irror neurons were discovered in 1988 by researchers at the University of Parma (Italy), who, under the direction of Gia-como Rizzolatti, studied neuronic activity in hand-action con-

trol. The scientists placed electrodes in the inferior frontal cortex of a ma-caque, allowing it to grasp pieces of food, to take hold of them, and to ma-nipulate them. With each experiment, they recorded the activity of neurons in the various movements of the monkey’s hands. A certain part of the premotor cortex, they discovered, contained neurons which reacted only when the monkey performed complex goal-directed actions, such as grasp-ing, manipulating, holding, or ripping apart certain things. The significance of the discovery was accentuated by the fact that at the time neurons in the premotor cortex were thought to concern only elementary movements which later coalesced into complex actions (Rizzolatti and Arbib 1998, 188-194).

Further investigation of these neurons not only confirmed the original results, but also led to an even more bewildering discovery: some of the neurons fired in the same way when the monkey picked up the food, and when it witnessed a person performing the same action.

The novelty of this discovery is the fact that, for the first time, a neural mechanism that allows for a direct connection between the visual description of an action and its execution has been identified. Such a matching system constitutes a parsimonious solution to the problem of translating the results

M

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of the visual analysis of an observed action into an account that the individ-ual is able to understand. (Rizzolatti and Fogassi 2001, 662)

The conclusion was clear: these neurons could respond to observed actions, i.e., they could ‘mirror’ the others’ actions (Rizzolatti et al. 1996, 131!141). Mirror neurons are both motor and sensory neurons.

Similar studies using less invasive methodologies later demonstrated the same mirroring process of brain activation in humans (Iacobon et al. 1999).

Since the date of the discovery, research in the field of mirror neurons continued to produce new results. Mirror neurons were further divided into two categories: “strictly congruent” and “broadly congruent” neurons. “Strictly congruent” neurons are those in which the observed and the exe-cuted action coincide (precision grip by both participant and observer). “Broadly congruent” neurons are those in which the action is similar but not identical (whole hand grasping or precision grip by experimenter or observer).

The congruence found between the visual and motor responses of mirror neurons suggests that every time an action is observed, there is an activation of the motor circuits of the observer coding a similar action. According to this interpretation, strictly congruent mirror neurons are probably crucial for a detailed analysis of the observed action. In contrast, broadly congruent neurons appear to generalize across different ways of achieving the same goal, thus probably enabling a more abstract type of action coding. (Gallese and Fogassi 2002, 19)

The distinction between the two kinds of mirror neurons may bear significance on animal and human behavior, above all on the spontaneity of personal relationships. The neurobiological difference between “strictly congruent” and “broadly congruent” seems to allow these neurons to have a double function: “strictly congruent” neurons may enable animals

to appropriately react within a social environment, where normally under-standing the actions made by conspecifics is crucial for survival. (Gallese and Fogassi 2002, 19)

“Broadly congruent” neurons may enable them

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to communicate, responding with gestures to other individual gestures. In both cases what is crucial for any individual belonging to a social group is to understand and discriminate the different types of action made by another conspecific in order to react appropriately. When a monkey observes another monkey throwing an object away, the former can react by grasping the same object. When a monkey of higher hierarchical rank performs a threatening gesture when facing another monkey of lower rank, this latter will not re-spond with the same gesture but, for example, with a gesture of submission. All these different types of social behaviors could benefit from a mechanism such as those instantiated by broadly congruent mirror neurons. In fact, these neurons “recognize” one or more observed actions, and produce an output that can be ethologically related to them. (Gallese and Fogassi 2002, 19)

It is clear, therefore, that the functional significance of mirror neurons pertains to inseparable facets of complex social interaction, like imitation, action representation, interpretation, and communication.

Do mirror neurons, however, essentially pertain to morality? Ulti-mately, no. For one would otherwise be compelled to conclude that mon-keys are moral subjects because their mirror neurons can produce such activities.

2. Are mirror neurons a full explanation of morality?

In spite of their differences, some authors (Haidt 2001; Hauser 2006; De Waal 2006; Damasio 2003) coincide in giving perhaps an excessive weight to biology in their approach to ethical issues, while others go a little further by trying to reduce ethics to biology. Ramachandran (2000, 29), for instance, believes that mirror neurons could explain human morality com-pletely. Morality would no longer require a religious justification (or any non-materialist explanation), since moral ideas are based on sympathy, and the origin of sympathy is imitation – which is caused by mirror neurons.

This thesis contains both a neurobiological inaccuracy and a philoso-phical mistake. The inaccuracy consists in trying to separate mirror neu-rons from the whole functioning brain, while the mistake consists in a double reduction, the reduction from morality to sympathy, and the latter to a physical process.

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I think Ramachandran’s opinion is more a personal belief than a scien-tific thesis. It is clear that we are deeply related to other people through sympathy and that in this relationship our brains have an important role, since they shape our different experiences and at the same time brains are shaped by those experiences. Ramachandran creates a new mythology in attempting to explain good or bad human relations through the function-ing of mirror neurons.

2.1 Mirror neurons cannot be separated from the functioning brain

Recent studies have shown that a single type of cell, or even a system of cells, cannot alone account for specific movements or experiences. For more than 40 years, scientists used electrodes to record individual neurons in the visual system of cats. They found a group of cells that distinctly re-sponded to certain kinds of shapes, and they called them “edge detectors”. Some scientists concluded that cats see edges because they have “edge de-tectors” that fire in their brains. But decades of research have revealed the real explanation to be more complicated. Something so simple as seeing an edge requires a very complex pattern of interactions among hundreds of different types of neurons. So it is difficult to imagine how many types of interacting neurons are involved in a sympathetic relation (Gopnik et al. 2000).

Ascribing movements, experiences, and behaviors to different neu-rons originates, perhaps, from the belief that they are located precisely in the parts of the brain where neurons are expected to fire. But this observa-tion applies to animals, not to humans. Unlike the electrode experiments in monkeys, brain-imaging studies do not measure the electrical activity of individual neurons, but the levels of oxygen used by sections of the brain with many hundreds of thousands of individual neurons. It is true that there are many parts of the brain that use up oxygen when we see another person performing an action, and many parts that use up oxygen when we perform that action ourselves. The imaging studies reveal that there is some overlap between these two patterns of activation. Some different parts of the brain work hard in both situations. The same seems true for seeing and producing emotional expressions, and for seeing and feeling pain, for instance. Iacoboni found out that the core social imitation system


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is formed by frontal mirror neuron systems interacting with parietal mirror neuron systems, which in turn interact with both frontal and superior tem-poral regions (Iacoboni et al. 2005). The conclusion is that these areas are part of the “mirror systems”.

This conclusion, however, does not mean that our ability to feel com-passion depends on the activation of these areas, nor that these areas of the brain alone cause our social behavior. Other studies have shown that the “mirror systems” are quite separate from the parts of the brain that are ac-tivated in language. It would be better to say, therefore, that functions and connections of the whole brain – not only mirror neurons – are involved in human behavior.

2.2 Morality cannot be reduced either to sympathy or to a functioning brain

The argument that sympathy is the source of morality is not new. Adam Smith, who noted it best (Smith 2000), considers sympathy (like its opposite, rivalry) completely natural. We have sympathy with those who are weak and rivalry with those who are strong and powerful. Sympathy, like its opposite, comes from egoism – that is, from self-interest. I feel sym-pathy with weak people because if I were in their situation I’d like to be an object of the same feeling. In Smith there is an idea of the self as funda-mentally egoist, and at the same time as a subject able to enter in relation with others through special feelings. Morality depends on being able to evaluate the action of the other in itself, that is, without thinking of recip-rocity. According to Smith, if I want the other to behave towards to me as I behave towards him, I am an egoist. The golden rule, therefore, would be the worst kind of egoism (Liggio 1982).

So understood, natural sympathy, according to Smith, cannot be the source of morality because it is rooted in selfishness; morality should derive from another kind of sympathy, which might be called “rational sympa-thy”. Although rational sympathy is also an indirect identification with others, it comes from an impartial observer, not from an egotistical subject. When I see a person helping an old woman to cross the street, I feel sym-pathy for the helper because he is doing a good action. Hence, rational sympathy is the feeling we have regarding a moral good. Smith, however, thinks the evaluation of another’s action is possible only because we are not

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indifferent towards his/her action: we, for example, feel shame or pride in someone else’s action, as if those actions were our own. Identification with others, therefore, would be the source of morality, and this thesis seems to be confirmed with the conclusions about the “mirror system”.

There are, nevertheless, some difficulties for viewing the “mirror sys-tem” as the origin of morality. Can the functioning brain alone explain sympathy and morality? I do not think so. The brain’s activity can afford a neurobiological basis of our ability to imitate, interpret, and communicate through our bodies; it fails, however, to explain why we understand others and why we communicate personally with them. Such an explanation, as I shall show, demands that humans possess the potency to have rational in-tentions at the core of their actions.

It is necessary, first of all, to distinguish between empathy and sympa-thy. The former enables us to recognize someone else’s actions, sensations, and emotions as human. According to Stein, the other is experienced as another being related to ourselves through an appreciation of similarity. An important component of this similarity resides in the common experience of action. Empathetic awareness concerns some other individual who “is not given as a physical body, but as a sensitive, living body belonging to an ‘I’, an ‘I’ that senses, thinks, feels and wills” (Stein 1989, 5). In this sense, empathy is immediately rooted in the experience of our “lived body” – that is, a body belonging to this “I” which is characterized “both as subject and as object and indeed as a subject who is aware of herself as an object of awareness of other subjects” (McIntyre 2006, 77).

According to Scheler, sympathy is not a “shared feeling”, but it be-longs to “feeling-with”. In the case of sympathy, there are two distinct non-similar affective states. The only case in which a “feeling-with” is literally shared is the so called “immediate shared feeling” or “together-feeling” exemplified by the grief of two parents over their deceased child. Here, Scheler claims that it is really one feeling-token that is shared by more than one person (Scheler 1985). Sympathy is not a simple awareness of some other individual, but entails the capacity to feel-with the other, that is, to make another’s feelings his own. Accordingly, we not only recognize ac-tions, sensations, and emotions as human, but we can also share them with others. We do not, of course, feel the exact same sorrow or joy that the other feels, but that sorrow or joy can indeed become the object of our di-


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rect awareness. Sympathy, therefore, is not empathy, but a consequence of it.

Neither sympathy nor empathy, however, is properly moral, because those feelings are spontaneous and independent of our rational intentions. An embodied interpersonal link is automatically established when we ob-serve other acting individuals and when we face the emotions they show through their behavior. Empathy and sympathy are the lived experiences of this embodied interpersonal link.

The “mirror system”, furthermore, cannot adequately explain either empathy or sympathy. It only demonstrates the reason why animals with a developed brain-body system, like monkeys and humans, share emotions and actions in different ways. The activation of these parts of the brain, which is automatic and independent of the individual performing or ob-serving the action, is the neurobiological basis of an immediate and shared experience of an inter-specific or interpersonal link. If empathy and sympa-thy belong to the lived-body as a part of our experience, the “mirror sys-tem” belongs to the brain-body system. Morality cannot be reduced either to the lived-body of experience or to the brain-body system.

Human empathy and sympathy, moreover, cannot be phenomenologi-cally described as animal. In spite of being spontaneous, they penetrate human intentions. Spontaneously understanding and sharing human ac-tions, accordingly, is not the same as understanding other kinds of events or even animal actions. Meltzoff designed a mechanical device with arms and pincers that replicated a human actor’s actions with a dumbbell (Melt-zoff and Moore 1989, 954!962). Melzoff discovered that infants who wit-nessed the uncompleted act performed by a mechanical device were no more likely to infer and complete the target goal than infants who were simply exposed to the toy without a demonstration. Infants, apparently, do not attribute goals and intentions to inanimate objects because such things do not provide the precise information afforded by human actions.

The human ability to act, therefore, may come from two factors: the ability to perform intentional actions and the capacity of finding this ability in others and in ourselves. Monkeys indeed possess the ability to imitate actions, but they do not imitate like humans do. Goals, intentions and mo-tives in human beings seem to organize the coordination of perception and action inherent in imitation at a much deeper level than surface behaviors,

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which corresponds to a natural intentionality (like grasping food or helping others to do so). This natural intentionality can be found in the execution of imitated behavior (Baars and Cage 2007, 339).

The two kinds of intentionality can, perhaps, help to explain why mir-ror brains, which allow complex goal-directed actions, are insufficient to give to these actions a moral status (a moral action is more than a complex goal-directed action). The intentionality of actions found among monkeys seems to be the result of the interaction between the brain-body system and the environment. This kind of intentionality ensures the survival of their own species. But a second degree of intentionality is necessary when actions have a goal not oriented to the survival of the species, but to the happiness of the agent, or to the realization of his or her flourishing. In other words, the second degree of intentionality belongs only to those be-ings who are able to know and to choose the goal of their own actions.

To attribute moral goals and rational intentions to someone is the same as understanding that the action he/she performs is neither a physical event nor a spontaneous interaction, but a human action. This attribution does not come from the brain as such, nor from empathy or sympathy, but from the reason and the will, because it requires the apprehension of an end as end and the means as means, as well as the capacity to put them into effect. The human brain as such, therefore, has nothing to do with ethics properly.

3. Human brain and otherness

I do not mean to say, however, that there is no relationship at all be-tween the human brain and morality. Studying the human brain (including the “mirror system” theory), helps us to better understand the anthropo-logical role of otherness’ acknowledgement in human behavior and, conse-quently, the importance of relationship in morality.

The mirror system is yet another scientific demonstration against Car-tesian dualism and postmodern individualism. In fact, the discovery of this and other brain systems provides a neurobiological explanation for the ba-sis of imitating and understanding others through our own body. The hu-man body is neither pure extension nor incommunicable individuality; it is


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marked by an openness of our self to the others and of the others to our self. The brain’s mirroring of other’s feelings, wishes, and intentions consti-tutes a basis for the effective interpretation and comprehension of others and of ourselves. Human understanding of the other does not need any kind of rational self-reflection because it is spontaneous. This means that human beings do not relate to others on the basis of internal representa-tions of an external world. Rather they enact a life in a human world in-separable from their own brain-body system.

This leads to another important anthropological point. The origin of our self-consciousness can be found in human relationships. Self-consciousness and awareness of the other are intimately united. The other’s presence is necessary to develop one’s awareness allowing him/her to achieve the degree of maturity necessary for his/her being self-consciousness; and the self is also necessary to grasp the other as other. The Cartesian cogito, with its solipsism, is an abstraction of human conscious-ness. The operating human self implies the other, and the knowledge of the other implies self-knowledge.

The mirror system is also a confirmation of the natural character of morality. A complete explanation of why relationship is at the origin of mo-rality is far beyond the aim of this paper. Two reasons derived from a phi-losophical consideration on the mirror system should suffice. The first concerns the distinction between physical pleasure and happiness; the sec-ond one regards the ethical value of compassion.

a) While physical pleasure is experienced individually before every human relationship takes place, happiness is experienced only in so far as one is able to feel another’s happiness. We experience happiness not only because we mirror gestures, emotions, and actions, but above all because we love and are loved by others as valuable-in-themselves. A person may experience pleasure when he/she eats something tasty, but his/her pleasure cannot be shared by another person, though his/her happiness can be. When someone feels pleasure, I may or may not recognize that he/she is feeling pleasure, I may indeed feel my own mirror version, but his/her pleasure remains strictly inalienable. The capacity to understand and share another’s happiness means that happiness is not a subjective feeling. It is a kind of human good characterized by a personal fulfillment. That is why happiness requires a high degree of self-consciousness.

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b) Although the mirror system says nothing about what is right or wrong, or about the moral evaluation of human relationships, anyway it indicates a human predisposition to imitate others. The emotions and ac-tions of others are “imitated” at a neurobiological level before being imi-tated through an explicit behavior, and even before being imitated con-sciously and intentionally. Gestures, emotions, words, actions, and rela-tionships are imitated by children from the start of their lives. This imita-tion shapes their brains and personality. The mirror system tells us about our continued learning from others’ emotions and actions and also about others’ unconscious influence on our brains and behaviors. In this sense, imitation is relevant for the explanation of the growth of the self, and also for the explanation of some psychical diseases and moral virtues as well. Of course, virtues cannot be properly “imitated”, since the second kind of in-tentionality, which is present in any moral act, is original, unrepeatable, and inalienable in itself.

Nevertheless, there is a moral virtue – “compassion” – that seems to have an important relation to imitation, because it implies the ability to comprehend others’ personal situations (com-patire: “suffering-with”). In order to understand this relation, however, it is necessary to distinguish between compassion as a feeling and compassion as a virtue. Compassion as a feeling depends on the functioning of our brain-body system and the capacity of empathy and sympathy possessed by the subject. By contrast, the virtue of compassion depends also on the self’s intention to do the best to help the person for whom one feels compassion. The virtue of compas-sion entails not only feeling and sharing another’s suffering, but also behav-ing in relation to the suffering person as if both two were one and the same. Spontaneous imitation cannot explain this kind of compassion, since the latter needs a second kind of intention that cannot be simply imitated. The virtue of compassion, therefore, suggests the existence of a kind of voluntary identification with the other’s good as one’s own good – and this can only be called love. Love, which is at the core of happiness, unifies the own self and the other self without destroying their differences.


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4. Conclusion

The mirror system, understood in a wide sense, – as the whole brain mirroring emotions and actions – can explain the existence in human brains of a direct, automatic simulation mechanism, by means of which the self is able to recognize and imitate others’ behavior. According to this ex-planation, the human brain can be interpreted as an organ of modulation and transformation that mediates the cycles of an organism-world interac-tion, above all with other human beings (Fuchs 2008).

Nevertheless, the mirror system should not be confused (or identified) with empathy, sympathy and human rational intentions, otherwise we would introduce a confusion between two metaphysical categories: formal and material levels. Empathy, sympathy, and human intentions are different “forms” for which the mirror system is like the “matter”. Additionally, em-pathy and sympathy are not the same as human intentions, because the former two are a kind of spontaneous imitation of the others (interpreting or sharing feelings), while human intentions, as exemplified in the virtue of compassion, constitute a rational and voluntary identification with other persons.

Summarizing, we need to distinguish three levels in the structure of a human action. In the virtue of compassion, for example, we may identify: a) the neural mechanism which is at the base of empathy and compassion towards the person who suffers, and it is also present in a certain way in human intentions (the body system); b) the functional level of description (Gallese 2003, 171), or the phenomenological aspect of empathy, sympathy, and human intentions in helping the person who suffers (the lived body of experience); and, c) the communication level or the external aspect of be-havior, as for instance, when someone helps a person who suffers.

The core of morality depends on human intentions because it comes from the whole person and not only from the body system or the lived body of experience. Besides integrating the three levels (the same self mir-rors gestures and signs of the other’s sorrow, feels compassion, and acts according to his/her will of helping someone), human rational intentions establish a relationship between the own self and the other’s self. Morally, this relationship may be good or bad, depending on the kind of relation-ship and its positive or negative influence on the persons involved in it.

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Girard, for instance, stresses the importance of acquisitive mimesis in hu-man relationships (Girard 1987).

Neither the body system nor feelings like empathy and sympathy are able to evaluate when relationships are good and when they are bad. This can be done only thanks to individual and social virtues, love and happi-ness, which correspond to the personal fulfillment.

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Mirror Neurons and Morality