Control and morality — setpoint, gating, will, failure

Morality is re-grounded on verified control: an instinct is a hypothalamic setpoint held by negative feedback (fever = setpoint up; heatstroke = regulation failed). Kin care is oxytocin's selective re-tuning of thresholds, and will is energy-costly threshold maintenance whose failures are control-parameter lesions. Moral emotions are (mis)match computations; the subjective feeling itself is open, deferred to Mind.

A re-grounding of the morality taxonomy onto verified control. An instinct is a hypothalamic setpoint held by negative feedback — fever = setpoint ↑ (regulated), heatstroke = capacity exceeded (regulation failed). Kin care is oxytocin's selective re-tuning of thresholds: it suppresses pup-aggression while strengthening intruder-defence — a sharp target selectivity. Will is energy-costly threshold maintenance, and its failures are control-parameter lesions with distinct signatures. Moral emotions are computations of (mis)match under resource constraint; the subjective feeling itself — the quale — is open and deferred to Mind.

Setpoint

An instinct, at the base, is a regulated variable: a hypothalamic setpoint held by negative feedback, like a thermostat. The distinction this buys is sharp. Fever is the setpoint raised on purpose — regulation working toward a new target. Heatstroke is the opposite — the regulator's capacity exceeded, control lost. Same variable, opposite mechanism; the feedback frame separates them.

Selective gating

Kin care is not a blanket "be nicer" signal. Oxytocin re-tunes thresholds selectively and in multiple directions at once: in the parental case it suppresses pup-directed aggression while strengthening defence against an intruder. That two-way target selectivity is a sharp, falsifiable signature — a single "affiliation up" account would predict the wrong sign on intruder defence.

Will

Will is the top-down maintenance of a threshold against a competing drive, and it costs energy to hold. This frames "self-control" as an energy-limited control process rather than a moral essence — though the size of any "ego-depletion" effect is disputed and left open. The mechanism is threshold maintenance; the magnitude is not asserted.

Failure modes

If morality is control, its failures are control-parameter lesions. Damage to a specific part of the loop yields a distinct signature rather than a global "bad" — which is how the failure modes (the psychopathy pattern among them) come apart into separable deficits. These are multifactorial and explicitly not clinical claims; the circuit model offers a contributing mechanism only.

Moral emotion = computation

A moral emotion, in this frame, is a computation: a (mis)match between an expected and an actual state, evaluated under resource constraint. That much is re-grounded. What is not resolved is the felt quality — the quale — of the emotion: why the computation should feel like anything. That is open, and it is deferred to the companion paper, Mind (§9).