Jim Gilchrist: Radio listener

Published on Sunday 28 February 2010 10:36

Are our brains hard-wired to negotiate the moral maze? In THE MORAL CODE, Adam Rutherford discovers that morality is becoming an area of scientific enquiry rather than ethical debate, as investigators employ state-of-the-art brain-scanning technology to see exactly what goes on in the little grey cells when we wrestle with moral dilemmas.

It seems that investigators at Harvard are concluding that our sense of right and wrong is a human trait established over millions of years of evolution, rather than acquired in childhood. Nature rather than nurture, then, but how does this stand with the established moral and ethical sages of religion and philosophy? Rutherford asks ubiquitous philosophy pundit AC Grayling and the Dean of Guildford, Victor Stock, whether they think such complex issues as morality can be left in the hands of the boffins.

A moral dilemma, too, is the subject of Monday's AFTERNOON PLAY – Ashes To Antarctica, by Jim Eldridge, in which a widow, Jill Foster, determined to scatter her polar scientist husband's ashes on the Antarctic ice, meets with opposition from a Chilean scientist, who objects to her plans on environmental grounds. The play is informed by Eldridge's own visit to the icecap three years ago, when he was engrossed by the international scientific community's strenuous efforts to keep the unique environment as pristine as possible.

Foster's pilgrimage on a tourist vessel from South America to Antarctica, during which she is befriended by the Chilean scientist, Dr Prado, becomes a broader journey out of grief and into enlightenment.

Staying with the Afternoon Play, Tuesday's Pinkerton ventures to the turbulent 19th-century settlement of another continent, and follows Scots immigrant Allan Pinkerton, before he has set up his famous detective agency and is running a barrel-making business in 1840s Illinois. Forbes Masson plays Pinkerton, as he hones his hitherto unrealised investigative skills to outwit a counterfeiter threatening the economy of his small town.

This article was originally published in The Scotsman on 27 February 2010