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Social sciences

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Social sciences

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Humanities and social sciences --- Social sciences --- Law.

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Humanities and social sciences --- Humanities and social sciences --- Social sciences --- History --- European. --- Social sciences --- History --- Modern.

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Although history of science paid much attention to the biology of ethics, the neurology of morality remains largely neglected. Since modern psychiatry has recently rediscovered this topic (Raine, Damasio), this untold story has gained in importance. This study covers the scientific enterprise to localize a moral organ or ethical centre in the human brain during the nineteenth and early-twentieth century. From the phrenological era to the encephalitis epidemic in the 1920s a wide range of European and American scientists (neurologists, psychiatrists, anthropologist and criminologists) speculated and discussed about the location of a genuine moral sense that could be found in the cortex. Encouraged by medical discoveries and distressed by fearful phenomena like crime or moral insanity even renowned neurologists such as Moritz Benedikt, Paul Flechsig or Constantin von Monakow tried to localize morality in the human body. Although unsuccessful and highly controversial, this enterprise was considered as the final transformation of an old-fashioned philosophical and religious concept, namely conscience, into a biological and neurological one. In the first part of this dissertation the author sketches the different stages of this transformation process (moral sense, moral instinct) that led to a medical localization of morality. In the second and most voluminous part all contributions to this relatively unknown topic are treated and put in their historical and scientific context. Original sources in English, French, German and Italian are used. In the final part the author focuses on the ideological and social consequences of this enterprise (eugenics) and offers an explanation for the some bold trials to localize morality in the brain despite the overwhelming dismissing or sceptical comments from colleagues. Bibliography and illustrations in supplement.

Humanities and social sciences --- Social sciences --- History of science.