The Normative Insignificance of Neuroscience

reasoning, it should come as no surprise if we have innate responses to personal violence that are powerful but rather primitive. That is, we might expect humans to have negative emotional responses to certain basic forms of interpersonal violence. ... In contrast, when a harm is impersonal, it should fail to trigger this alarmlike emotional response, allowing people to respond in a more "cognitive" way, perhaps employing a cost-benefit analysis.60 Similarly, Singer writes, For most of our evolutionary history, human beings have lived in