rATIONALISM IS PATHOLOGICAL:

Morality and moral intuitions reside firmly in the RH where we make direct contact with reality. LH damage does not impair one's moral sense and ability to make decent moral assessments and decisions, but RH damage does. RH damage, depending on its exact nature, results in someone ceasing to be moral. Tellingly, the person becomes a consequentialist. This means determining whether something is good or not solely by reference to its consequences. Jeremy Bentham, a major utilitarian theorist and thus a consequentialist, was, in fact, autistic. He should be the last person to be consulted on moral matters. Psychopathy is a problem also associated with RH deficiencies and psychopaths are also consequentialists. The original psychiatric name for a psychopath was "moral imbecile." If this were a matter of teams, the consequentialist "team" would consist of schizophrenics, a bunch of analytic philosophers, those suffering from autism, and psychopaths. On the other team would be the rest of us. Since the RH deals with what is unique, the LH viewpoint encourages treating people as interchangeable, replaceable, and having no special intrinsic worth. Consequentialists are moral monsters and should never be trusted. They will sacrifice you or anyone else if they think this will produce the most benefits. The LH deals with inanimate and mechanical things and that is how it treats people in its pseudo-moral reasonings.

McGilchrist cites a study involving inhibiting the function of first one brain hemisphere and then the other. Normal consciousness blends the contributions of both hemispheres, like a river being divided by an island and then rejoining itself. In the experiment, the same person is asked to evaluate two different moral scenarios. One is one in which someone accidentally poisons someone's tea, thinking he is adding sugar when in fact it was poison. In the other scenario, someone tries to kill another person by poisoning him, but he unwittingly uses sugar and the intended victim remains unharmed. When the LH is rendered inoperable, the person will correctly say that intending to kill someone but failing is the most immoral. When the RH is inhibited using a magnetic device, the same person will answer that killing someone accidentally is morally worse than trying and failing to kill him. This is because without the contributions of the RH they turn into a consequentialist who assesses action not by what was intended but by the actual result. Every normal person knows that trying to kill someone is morally worse than accidentally killing someone. This seems excellent evidence that the RH is the preeminently moral hemisphere and that the LH is not good at all concerning such matters.

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Some analytic philosophers have been so perverted by the LH emphasis of its school of thought that they are not fazed by such considerations. One in particular thinks that getting rid of fellow-feeling, empathy, compassion, and love from moral considerations would be a great boon. By eliminating the RH, he imagines that moral agents will finally be fully rational and this rationality will actually improve moral reasoning. Interestingly, Kant too wrote along these lines; one modern Kantian noted approvingly that Kant was interested in putting morality on a more rational basis. The contemporary person who expressed this same hope about becoming more rational actually favored consequentialism. Such a consequentialist would be more ruthless and immune to moral considerations than a Kantian, but both schools of thought suggest someone with a severe mental disorder. Both imagine that eliminating the part of the human brain and mind that makes us distinctively human would be a great improvement precisely for moral topics; and moral topics concern how we treat other people and why. The idea that deadening fellow feeling and treating other people as inanimate objects, as the LH does in fact do, would actually enhance moral outcomes is completely implausible. A normal person, one would hope, would, on the contrary, realize that this "rational" person will be a moral monster, so callous about human life that he would wipe out tens of millions of individual people without a second thought if he thought it would help his "moral" calculations. By using only the LH and focusing on consequences one is coming to resemble a morally imbecilic psychopath.

Since it is only the RH that deals with reality, and not mere categories, concepts and abstractions, the analytic philosopher who imagines divorce from emotions would be an improvement thinks that a man living in a world of abstractions, mental representations, and concepts, cut off from direct experience and familiarity with reality, will make a more moral agent. The chances of this being true are zero. Moral realism, which this person also embraces, like all perception of reality, requires a functioning and prioritized RH.

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