Which of the following people would you say is the
most admirable: Mother Teresa, Bill Gates or Norman Borlaug? And
which do you think is the least admirable? For most people, it’s an
easy question. Mother Teresa, famous for ministering to the poor in
Calcutta, has been beatified by the Vatican, awarded the Nobel Peace
Prize and ranked in an American poll as the most admired person of
the 20th century. Bill Gates, infamous for giving us the Microsoft
dancing paper clip and the blue screen of death, has been
decapitated in effigy in “I Hate Gates” Web sites and hit with a pie
in the face. As for Norman Borlaug . . . who the heck is Norman
Borlaug? Yet a deeper look might lead you to
rethink your answers. Borlaug, father of the “Green Revolution” that
used agricultural science to reduce world hunger, has been credited
with saving a billion lives, more than anyone else in history.
Gates, in deciding what to do with his fortune, crunched the numbers
and determined that he could alleviate the most misery by fighting
everyday scourges in the developing world like malaria, diarrhea and
parasites. Mother Teresa, for her part, extolled the virtue of
suffering and ran her well-financed missions accordingly: their sick
patrons were offered plenty of prayer but harsh conditions, few
analgesics and dangerously primitive medical care.
It’s not hard to see why the moral reputations of
this trio should be so out of line with the good they have done.
Mother Teresa was the very embodiment of saintliness: white-clad,
sad-eyed, ascetic and often photographed with the wretched of the
earth. Gates is a nerd’s nerd and the world’s richest man, as likely
to enter heaven as the proverbial camel squeezing through the
needle’s eye. And Borlaug, now 93, is an agronomist who has spent
his life in labs and nonprofits, seldom walking onto the media
stage, and hence into our consciousness, at all.
I doubt these examples will persuade anyone to
favor Bill Gates over Mother Teresa for sainthood. But they show
that our heads can be turned by an aura of sanctity, distracting us
from a more objective reckoning of the actions that make people
suffer or flourish. It seems we may all be vulnerable to moral
illusions the ethical equivalent of the bending lines that trick the
eye on cereal boxes and in psychology textbooks. Illusions are a
favorite tool of perception scientists for exposing the workings of
the five senses, and of philosophers for shaking people out of the
naïve belief that our minds give us a transparent window onto the
world (since if our eyes can be fooled by an illusion, why should we
trust them at other times?). Today, a new field is using illusions
to unmask a sixth sense, the moral sense. Moral intuitions are being
drawn out of people in the lab, on Web sites and in brain scanners,
and are being explained with tools from game theory, neuroscience
and evolutionary biology.
“Two things fill the mind with ever new and
increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we
reflect on them,” wrote Immanuel Kant, “the starry heavens above and
the moral law within.” These days, the moral law within is being
viewed with increasing awe, if not always admiration. The human
moral sense turns out to be an organ of considerable complexity,
with quirks that reflect its evolutionary history and its
neurobiological foundations.
These quirks are bound to have implications for
the human predicament. Morality is not just any old topic in
psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life. Moral
goodness is what gives each of us the sense that we are worthy human
beings. We seek it in our friends and mates, nurture it in our
children, advance it in our politics and justify it with our
religions. A disrespect for morality is blamed for everyday sins and
history’s worst atrocities. To carry this weight, the concept of
morality would have to be bigger than any of us and outside all of
us.
So dissecting moral intuitions is no small matter.
If morality is a mere trick of the brain, some may fear, our very
grounds for being moral could be eroded. Yet as we shall see, the
science of the moral sense can instead be seen as a way to
strengthen those grounds, by clarifying what morality is and how it
should steer our actions.
The Moralization Switch
The starting point for appreciating that there is
a distinctive part of our psychology for morality is seeing how
moral judgments differ from other kinds of opinions we have on how
people ought to behave. Moralization is a psychological state that
can be turned on and off like a switch, and when it is on, a
distinctive mind-set commandeers our thinking. This is the mind-set
that makes us deem actions immoral (“killing is wrong”), rather than
merely disagreeable (“I hate brussels sprouts”), unfashionable
(“bell-bottoms are out”) or imprudent (“don’t scratch mosquito
bites”).
The first hallmark of moralization is that the
rules it invokes are felt to be universal. Prohibitions of rape and
murder, for example, are felt not to be matters of local custom but
to be universally and objectively warranted. One can easily say, “I
don’t like brussels sprouts, but I don’t care if you eat them,” but
no one would say, “I don’t like killing, but I don’t care if you
murder someone.”
The other hallmark is that people feel that those
who commit immoral acts deserve to be punished. Not only is it
allowable to inflict pain on a person who has broken a moral rule;
it is wrong not to, to “let them get away with it.” People are thus
untroubled in inviting divine retribution or the power of the state
to harm other people they deem immoral. Bertrand Russell wrote, “The
infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to
moralists — that is why they invented hell.”
We all know what it feels like when the
moralization switch flips inside us — the righteous glow, the
burning dudgeon, the drive to recruit others to the cause. The
psychologist Paul Rozin has studied the toggle switch by comparing
two kinds of people who engage in the same behavior but with
different switch settings. Health vegetarians avoid meat for
practical reasons, like lowering cholesterol and avoiding toxins.
Moral vegetarians avoid meat for ethical reasons: to avoid
complicity in the suffering of animals. By investigating their
feelings about meat-eating, Rozin showed that the moral motive sets
off a cascade of opinions. Moral vegetarians are more likely to
treat meat as a contaminant — they refuse, for example, to eat a
bowl of soup into which a drop of beef broth has fallen. They are
more likely to think that other people ought to be vegetarians, and
are more likely to imbue their dietary habits with other virtues,
like believing that meat avoidance makes people less aggressive and
bestial.
Much of our recent social history, including the
culture wars between liberals and conservatives, consists of the
moralization or amoralization of particular kinds of behavior. Even
when people agree that an outcome is desirable, they may disagree on
whether it should be treated as a matter of preference and prudence
or as a matter of sin and virtue. Rozin notes, for example, that
smoking has lately been moralized. Until recently, it was understood
that some people didn’t enjoy smoking or avoided it because it was
hazardous to their health. But with the discovery of the harmful
effects of secondhand smoke, smoking is now treated as immoral.
Smokers are ostracized; images of people smoking are censored; and
entities touched by smoke are felt to be contaminated (so hotels
have not only nonsmoking rooms but nonsmoking floors). The desire
for retribution has been visited on tobacco companies, who have been
slapped with staggering “punitive damages.”
At the same time, many behaviors have been
amoralized, switched from moral failings to lifestyle choices. They
include divorce, illegitimacy, being a working mother, marijuana use
and homosexuality. Many afflictions have been reassigned from
payback for bad choices to unlucky misfortunes. There used to be
people called “bums” and “tramps”; today they are “homeless.” Drug
addiction is a “disease”; syphilis was rebranded from the price of
wanton behavior to a “sexually transmitted disease” and more
recently a “sexually transmitted infection.”
This wave of amoralization has led the cultural
right to lament that morality itself is under assault, as we see in
the group that anointed itself the Moral Majority. In fact there
seems to be a Law of Conservation of Moralization, so that as old
behaviors are taken out of the moralized column, new ones are added
to it. Dozens of things that past generations treated as practical
matters are now ethical battlegrounds, including disposable diapers,
I.Q. tests, poultry farms, Barbie dolls and research on breast
cancer. Food alone has become a minefield, with critics sermonizing
about the size of sodas, the chemistry of fat, the freedom of
chickens, the price of coffee beans, the species of fish and now the
distance the food has traveled from farm to plate.
Many of these moralizations, like the assault on
smoking, may be understood as practical tactics to reduce some
recently identified harm. But whether an activity flips our mental
switches to the “moral” setting isn’t just a matter of how much harm
it does. We don’t show contempt to the man who fails to change the
batteries in his smoke alarms or takes his family on a driving
vacation, both of which multiply the risk they will die in an
accident. Driving a gas-guzzling Hummer is reprehensible, but
driving a gas-guzzling old Volvo is not; eating a Big Mac is
unconscionable, but not imported cheese or crème brûlée. The reason
for these double standards is obvious: people tend to align their
moralization with their own lifestyles.
Reasoning and Rationalizing
It’s not just the content of our moral judgments
that is often questionable, but the way we arrive at them. We like
to think that when we have a conviction, there are good reasons that
drove us to adopt it. That is why an older approach to moral
psychology, led by Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, tried to
document the lines of reasoning that guided people to moral
conclusions. But consider these situations, originally devised by
the psychologist Jonathan Haidt:
Julie is traveling in France on summer vacation
from college with her brother Mark. One night they decide that it
would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. Julie was
already taking birth-control pills, but Mark uses a condom, too,
just to be safe. They both enjoy the sex but decide not to do it
again. They keep the night as a special secret, which makes them
feel closer to each other. What do you think about that — was it
O.K. for them to make love?
A woman is cleaning out her closet and she finds
her old American flag. She doesn’t want the flag anymore, so she
cuts it up into pieces and uses the rags to clean her bathroom.
A family’s dog is killed by a car in front of
their house. They heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up
the dog’s body and cook it and eat it for dinner.
Most people immediately declare that these acts
are wrong and then grope to justify why they are wrong. It’s not so
easy. In the case of Julie and Mark, people raise the possibility of
children with birth defects, but they are reminded that the couple
were diligent about contraception. They suggest that the siblings
will be emotionally hurt, but the story makes it clear that they
weren’t. They submit that the act would offend the community, but
then recall that it was kept a secret. Eventually many people admit,
“I don’t know, I can’t explain it, I just know it’s wrong.” People
don’t generally engage in moral reasoning, Haidt argues, but moral
rationalization: they begin with the conclusion, coughed up by an
unconscious emotion, and then work backward to a plausible
justification.
The gap between people’s convictions and their
justifications is also on display in the favorite new sandbox for
moral psychologists, a thought experiment devised by the
philosophers Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thomson called the
Trolley Problem. On your morning walk, you see a trolley car
hurtling down the track, the conductor slumped over the controls. In
the path of the trolley are five men working on the track, oblivious
to the danger. You are standing at a fork in the track and can pull
a lever that will divert the trolley onto a spur, saving the five
men. Unfortunately, the trolley would then run over a single worker
who is laboring on the spur. Is it permissible to throw the switch,
killing one man to save five? Almost everyone says “yes.”
Consider now a different scene. You are on a
bridge overlooking the tracks and have spotted the runaway trolley
bearing down on the five workers. Now the only way to stop the
trolley is to throw a heavy object in its path. And the only heavy
object within reach is a fat man standing next to you. Should you
throw the man off the bridge? Both dilemmas present you with the
option of sacrificing one life to save five, and so, by the
utilitarian standard of what would result in the greatest good for
the greatest number, the two dilemmas are morally equivalent. But
most people don’t see it that way: though they would pull the switch
in the first dilemma, they would not heave the fat man in the
second. When pressed for a reason, they can’t come up with anything
coherent, though moral philosophers haven’t had an easy time coming
up with a relevant difference, either.
When psychologists say “most people” they usually
mean “most of the two dozen sophomores who filled out a
questionnaire for beer money.” But in this case it means most of the
200,000 people from a hundred countries who shared their intuitions
on a Web-based experiment conducted by the psychologists Fiery
Cushman and Liane Young and the biologist Marc Hauser. A difference
between the acceptability of switch-pulling and man-heaving, and an
inability to justify the choice, was found in respondents from
Europe, Asia and North and South America; among men and women,
blacks and whites, teenagers and octogenarians, Hindus, Muslims,
Buddhists, Christians, Jews and atheists; people with
elementary-school educations and people with Ph.D.’s.
Joshua Greene, a philosopher and cognitive
neuroscientist, suggests that evolution equipped people with a
revulsion to manhandling an innocent person. This instinct, he
suggests, tends to overwhelm any utilitarian calculus that would tot
up the lives saved and lost. The impulse against roughing up a
fellow human would explain other examples in which people abjure
killing one to save many, like euthanizing a hospital patient to
harvest his organs and save five dying patients in need of
transplants, or throwing someone out of a crowded lifeboat to keep
it afloat.
By itself this would be no more than a plausible
story, but Greene teamed up with the cognitive neuroscientist
Jonathan Cohen and several Princeton colleagues to peer into
people’s brains using functional M.R.I. They sought to find signs of
a conflict between brain areas associated with emotion (the ones
that recoil from harming someone) and areas dedicated to rational
analysis (the ones that calculate lives lost and saved).
When people pondered the dilemmas that required
killing someone with their bare hands, several networks in their
brains lighted up. One, which included the medial (inward-facing)
parts of the frontal lobes, has been implicated in emotions about
other people. A second, the dorsolateral (upper and outer-facing)
surface of the frontal lobes, has been implicated in ongoing mental
computation (including nonmoral reasoning, like deciding whether to
get somewhere by plane or train). And a third region, the anterior
cingulate cortex (an evolutionarily ancient strip lying at the base
of the inner surface of each cerebral hemisphere), registers a
conflict between an urge coming from one part of the brain and an
advisory coming from another.
But when the people were pondering a hands-off
dilemma, like switching the trolley onto the spur with the single
worker, the brain reacted differently: only the area involved in
rational calculation stood out. Other studies have shown that
neurological patients who have blunted emotions because of damage to
the frontal lobes become utilitarians: they think it makes perfect
sense to throw the fat man off the bridge. Together, the findings
corroborate Greene’s theory that our nonutilitarian intuitions come
from the victory of an emotional impulse over a cost-benefit
analysis.
A Universal Morality?
The findings of trolleyology — complex,
instinctive and worldwide moral intuitions — led Hauser and John
Mikhail (a legal scholar) to revive an analogy from the philosopher
John Rawls between the moral sense and language. According to Noam
Chomsky, we are born with a “universal grammar” that forces us to
analyze speech in terms of its grammatical structure, with no
conscious awareness of the rules in play. By analogy, we are born
with a universal moral grammar that forces us to analyze human
action in terms of its moral structure, with just as little
awareness.
The idea that the moral sense is an innate part of
human nature is not far-fetched. A list of human universals
collected by the anthropologist Donald E. Brown includes many moral
concepts and emotions, including a distinction between right and
wrong; empathy; fairness; admiration of generosity; rights and
obligations; proscription of murder, rape and other forms of
violence; redress of wrongs; sanctions for wrongs against the
community; shame; and taboos.
The stirrings of morality emerge early in
childhood. Toddlers spontaneously offer toys and help to others and
try to comfort people they see in distress. And according to the
psychologists Elliot Turiel and Judith Smetana, preschoolers have an
inkling of the difference between societal conventions and moral
principles. Four-year-olds say that it is not O.K. to wear pajamas
to school (a convention) and also not O.K. to hit a little girl for
no reason (a moral principle). But when asked whether these actions
would be O.K. if the teacher allowed them, most of the children said
that wearing pajamas would now be fine but that hitting a little
girl would still not be.
Though no one has identified genes for morality,
there is circumstantial evidence they exist. The character traits
called “conscientiousness” and “agreeableness” are far more
correlated in identical twins separated at birth (who share their
genes but not their environment) than in adoptive siblings raised
together (who share their environment but not their genes). People
given diagnoses of “antisocial personality disorder” or
“psychopathy” show signs of morality blindness from the time they
are children. They bully younger children, torture animals,
habitually lie and seem incapable of empathy or remorse, often
despite normal family backgrounds. Some of these children grow up
into the monsters who bilk elderly people out of their savings, rape
a succession of women or shoot convenience-store clerks lying on the
floor during a robbery.
Though psychopathy probably comes from a genetic
predisposition, a milder version can be caused by damage to frontal
regions of the brain (including the areas that inhibit intact people
from throwing the hypothetical fat man off the bridge). The
neuroscientists Hanna and Antonio Damasio and their colleagues found
that some children who sustain severe injuries to their frontal
lobes can grow up into callous and irresponsible adults, despite
normal intelligence. They lie, steal, ignore punishment, endanger
their own children and can’t think through even the simplest moral
dilemmas, like what two people should do if they disagreed on which
TV channel to watch or whether a man ought to steal a drug to save
his dying wife.
The moral sense, then, may be rooted in the design
of the normal human brain. Yet for all the awe that may fill our
minds when we reflect on an innate moral law within, the idea is at
best incomplete. Consider this moral dilemma: A runaway trolley is
about to kill a schoolteacher. You can divert the trolley onto a
sidetrack, but the trolley would trip a switch sending a signal to a
class of 6-year-olds, giving them permission to name a teddy bear
Muhammad. Is it permissible to pull the lever?
This is no joke. Last month a British woman
teaching in a private school in Sudan allowed her class to name a
teddy bear after the most popular boy in the class, who bore the
name of the founder of Islam. She was jailed for blasphemy and
threatened with a public flogging, while a mob outside the prison
demanded her death. To the protesters, the woman’s life clearly had
less value than maximizing the dignity of their religion, and their
judgment on whether it is right to divert the hypothetical trolley
would have differed from ours. Whatever grammar guides people’s
moral judgments can’t be all that universal. Anyone who stayed awake
through Anthropology 101 can offer many other examples.
Of course, languages vary, too. In Chomsky’s
theory, languages conform to an abstract blueprint, like having
phrases built out of verbs and objects, while the details vary, like
whether the verb or the object comes first. Could we be wired with
an abstract spec sheet that embraces all the strange ideas that
people in different cultures moralize?
The Varieties of Moral Experience
When anthropologists like Richard Shweder and Alan
Fiske survey moral concerns across the globe, they find that a few
themes keep popping up from amid the diversity. People everywhere,
at least in some circumstances and with certain other folks in mind,
think it’s bad to harm others and good to help them. They have a
sense of fairness: that one should reciprocate favors, reward
benefactors and punish cheaters. They value loyalty to a group,
sharing and solidarity among its members and conformity to its
norms. They believe that it is right to defer to legitimate
authorities and to respect people with high status. And they exalt
purity, cleanliness and sanctity while loathing defilement,
contamination and carnality.
The exact number of themes depends on whether
you’re a lumper or a splitter, but Haidt counts five — harm,
fairness, community (or group loyalty), authority and purity — and
suggests that they are the primary colors of our moral sense. Not
only do they keep reappearing in cross-cultural surveys, but each
one tugs on the moral intuitions of people in our own culture. Haidt
asks us to consider how much money someone would have to pay us to
do hypothetical acts like the following:
Stick a pin into your palm.
Stick a pin into the palm of a child you don’t
know. (Harm.)
Accept a wide-screen TV from a friend who received
it at no charge because of a computer error.
Accept a wide-screen TV from a friend who received
it from a thief who had stolen it from a wealthy family. (Fairness.)
Say something bad about your nation (which you
don’t believe) on a talk-radio show in your nation.
Say something bad about your nation (which you
don’t believe) on a talk-radio show in a foreign nation.
(Community.)
Slap a friend in the face, with his permission, as
part of a comedy skit.
Slap your minister in the face, with his
permission, as part of a comedy skit. (Authority.)
Attend a performance-art piece in which the actors
act like idiots for 30 minutes, including flubbing simple problems
and falling down on stage.
Attend a performance-art piece in which the actors
act like animals for 30 minutes, including crawling around naked and
urinating on stage. (Purity.)
In each pair, the second action feels far more
repugnant. Most of the moral illusions we have visited come from an
unwarranted intrusion of one of the moral spheres into our
judgments. A violation of community led people to frown on using an
old flag to clean a bathroom. Violations of purity repelled the
people who judged the morality of consensual incest and prevented
the moral vegetarians and nonsmokers from tolerating the slightest
trace of a vile contaminant. At the other end of the scale, displays
of extreme purity lead people to venerate religious leaders who
dress in white and affect an aura of chastity and asceticism.
The Genealogy of Morals
The five spheres are good candidates for a
periodic table of the moral sense not only because they are
ubiquitous but also because they appear to have deep evolutionary
roots. The impulse to avoid harm, which gives trolley ponderers the
willies when they consider throwing a man off a bridge, can also be
found in rhesus monkeys, who go hungry rather than pull a chain that
delivers food to them and a shock to another monkey. Respect for
authority is clearly related to the pecking orders of dominance and
appeasement that are widespread in the animal kingdom. The
purity-defilement contrast taps the emotion of disgust that is
triggered by potential disease vectors like bodily effluvia,
decaying flesh and unconventional forms of meat, and by risky sexual
practices like incest.
The other two moralized spheres match up with the
classic examples of how altruism can evolve that were worked out by
sociobiologists in the 1960s and 1970s and made famous by Richard
Dawkins in his book “The Selfish Gene.” Fairness is very close to
what scientists call reciprocal altruism, where a willingness to be
nice to others can evolve as long as the favor helps the recipient
more than it costs the giver and the recipient returns the favor
when fortunes reverse. The analysis makes it sound as if reciprocal
altruism comes out of a robotlike calculation, but in fact Robert
Trivers, the biologist who devised the theory, argued that it is
implemented in the brain as a suite of moral emotions. Sympathy
prompts a person to offer the first favor, particularly to someone
in need for whom it would go the furthest. Anger protects a person
against cheaters who accept a favor without reciprocating, by
impelling him to punish the ingrate or sever the relationship.
Gratitude impels a beneficiary to reward those who helped him in the
past. Guilt prompts a cheater in danger of being found out to repair
the relationship by redressing the misdeed and advertising that he
will behave better in the future (consistent with Mencken’s
definition of conscience as “the inner voice which warns us that
someone might be looking”). Many experiments on who helps whom, who
likes whom, who punishes whom and who feels guilty about what have
confirmed these predictions.
Community, the very different emotion that prompts
people to share and sacrifice without an expectation of payback, may
be rooted in nepotistic altruism, the empathy and solidarity we feel
toward our relatives (and which evolved because any gene that pushed
an organism to aid a relative would have helped copies of itself
sitting inside that relative). In humans, of course, communal
feelings can be lavished on nonrelatives as well. Sometimes it pays
people (in an evolutionary sense) to love their companions because
their interests are yoked, like spouses with common children,
in-laws with common relatives, friends with common tastes or allies
with common enemies. And sometimes it doesn’t pay them at all, but
their kinship-detectors have been tricked into treating their
groupmates as if they were relatives by tactics like kinship
metaphors (blood brothers, fraternities, the fatherland), origin
myths, communal meals and other bonding rituals.
Juggling the Spheres
All this brings us to a theory of how the moral
sense can be universal and variable at the same time. The five moral
spheres are universal, a legacy of evolution. But how they are
ranked in importance, and which is brought in to moralize which area
of social life — sex, government, commerce, religion, diet and so on
— depends on the culture. Many of the flabbergasting practices in
faraway places become more intelligible when you recognize that the
same moralizing impulse that Western elites channel toward
violations of harm and fairness (our moral obsessions) is channeled
elsewhere to violations in the other spheres. Think of the Japanese
fear of nonconformity (community), the holy ablutions and dietary
restrictions of Hindus and Orthodox Jews (purity), the outrage at
insulting the Prophet among Muslims (authority). In the West, we
believe that in business and government, fairness should trump
community and try to root out nepotism and cronyism. In other parts
of the world this is incomprehensible — what heartless creep would
favor a perfect stranger over his own brother?
The ranking and placement of moral spheres also
divides the cultures of liberals and conservatives in the United
States. Many bones of contention, like homosexuality, atheism and
one-parent families from the right, or racial imbalances, sweatshops
and executive pay from the left, reflect different weightings of the
spheres. In a large Web survey, Haidt found that liberals put a
lopsided moral weight on harm and fairness while playing down group
loyalty, authority and purity. Conservatives instead place a
moderately high weight on all five. It’s not surprising that each
side thinks it is driven by lofty ethical values and that the other
side is base and unprincipled.
Reassigning an activity to a different sphere, or
taking it out of the moral spheres altogether, isn’t easy. People
think that a behavior belongs in its sphere as a matter of sacred
necessity and that the very act of questioning an assignment is a
moral outrage. The psychologist Philip Tetlock has shown that the
mentality of taboo — a conviction that some thoughts are sinful to
think — is not just a superstition of Polynesians but a mind-set
that can easily be triggered in college-educated Americans. Just ask
them to think about applying the sphere of reciprocity to
relationships customarily governed by community or authority. When
Tetlock asked subjects for their opinions on whether adoption
agencies should place children with the couples willing to pay the
most, whether people should have the right to sell their organs and
whether they should be able to buy their way out of jury duty, the
subjects not only disagreed but felt personally insulted and were
outraged that anyone would raise the question.
The institutions of modernity often question and
experiment with the way activities are assigned to moral spheres.
Market economies tend to put everything up for sale. Science
amoralizes the world by seeking to understand phenomena rather than
pass judgment on them. Secular philosophy is in the business of
scrutinizing all beliefs, including those entrenched by authority
and tradition. It’s not surprising that these institutions are often
seen to be morally corrosive.
Is Nothing Sacred?
And “morally corrosive” is exactly the term that
some critics would apply to the new science of the moral sense. The
attempt to dissect our moral intuitions can look like an attempt to
debunk them. Evolutionary psychologists seem to want to unmask our
noblest motives as ultimately self-interested — to show that our
love for children, compassion for the unfortunate and sense of
justice are just tactics in a Darwinian struggle to perpetuate our
genes. The explanation of how different cultures appeal to different
spheres could lead to a spineless relativism, in which we would
never have grounds to criticize the practice of another culture, no
matter how barbaric, because “we have our kind of morality and they
have theirs.” And the whole enterprise seems to be dragging us to an
amoral nihilism, in which morality itself would be demoted from a
transcendent principle to a figment of our neural circuitry.
In reality, none of these fears are warranted, and
it’s important to see why not. The first misunderstanding involves
the logic of evolutionary explanations. Evolutionary biologists
sometimes anthropomorphize DNA for the same reason that science
teachers find it useful to have their students imagine the world
from the viewpoint of a molecule or a beam of light. One shortcut to
understanding the theory of selection without working through the
math is to imagine that the genes are little agents that try to make
copies of themselves.
Unfortunately, the meme of the selfish gene
escaped from popular biology books and mutated into the idea that
organisms (including people) are ruthlessly self-serving. And this
doesn’t follow. Genes are not a reservoir of our dark unconscious
wishes. “Selfish” genes are perfectly compatible with selfless
organisms, because a gene’s metaphorical goal of selfishly
replicating itself can be implemented by wiring up the brain of the
organism to do unselfish things, like being nice to relatives or
doing good deeds for needy strangers. When a mother stays up all
night comforting a sick child, the genes that endowed her with that
tenderness were “selfish” in a metaphorical sense, but by no stretch
of the imagination is she being selfish.
Nor does reciprocal altruism — the evolutionary
rationale behind fairness — imply that people do good deeds in the
cynical expectation of repayment down the line. We all know of
unrequited good deeds, like tipping a waitress in a city you will
never visit again and falling on a grenade to save platoonmates.
These bursts of goodness are not as anomalous to a biologist as they
might appear.
In his classic 1971 article, Trivers, the
biologist, showed how natural selection could push in the direction
of true selflessness. The emergence of tit-for-tat reciprocity,
which lets organisms trade favors without being cheated, is just a
first step. A favor-giver not only has to avoid blatant cheaters
(those who would accept a favor but not return it) but also prefer
generous reciprocators (those who return the biggest favor they can
afford) over stingy ones (those who return the smallest favor they
can get away with). Since it’s good to be chosen as a recipient of
favors, a competition arises to be the most generous partner around.
More accurately, a competition arises to appear to be the most
generous partner around, since the favor-giver can’t literally read
minds or see into the future. A reputation for fairness and
generosity becomes an asset.
Now this just sets up a competition for potential
beneficiaries to inflate their reputations without making the
sacrifices to back them up. But it also pressures the favor-giver to
develop ever-more-sensitive radar to distinguish the genuinely
generous partners from the hypocrites. This arms race will
eventually reach a logical conclusion. The most effective way to
seem generous and fair, under harsh scrutiny, is to be generous and
fair. In the long run, then, reputation can be secured only by
commitment. At least some agents evolve to be genuinely high-minded
and self-sacrificing — they are moral not because of what it brings
them but because that’s the kind of people they are.
Of course, a theory that predicted that everyone
always sacrificed themselves for another’s good would be as
preposterous as a theory that predicted that no one ever did.
Alongside the niches for saints there are niches for more grudging
reciprocators, who attract fewer and poorer partners but don’t make
the sacrifices necessary for a sterling reputation. And both may
coexist with outright cheaters, who exploit the unwary in one-shot
encounters. An ecosystem of niches, each with a distinct strategy,
can evolve when the payoff of each strategy depends on how many
players are playing the other strategies. The human social
environment does have its share of generous, grudging and crooked
characters, and the genetic variation in personality seems to bear
the fingerprints of this evolutionary process.
Is Morality a Figment?
So a biological understanding of the moral sense
does not entail that people are calculating maximizers of their
genes or self-interest. But where does it leave the concept of
morality itself?
Here is the worry. The scientific outlook has
taught us that some parts of our subjective experience are products
of our biological makeup and have no objective counterpart in the
world. The qualitative difference between red and green, the
tastiness of fruit and foulness of carrion, the scariness of heights
and prettiness of flowers are design features of our common nervous
system, and if our species had evolved in a different ecosystem or
if we were missing a few genes, our reactions could go the other
way. Now, if the distinction between right and wrong is also a
product of brain wiring, why should we believe it is any more real
than the distinction between red and green? And if it is just a
collective hallucination, how could we argue that evils like
genocide and slavery are wrong for everyone, rather than just
distasteful to us?
Putting God in charge of morality is one way to
solve the problem, of course, but Plato made short work of it 2,400
years ago. Does God have a good reason for designating certain acts
as moral and others as immoral? If not — if his dictates are divine
whims — why should we take them seriously? Suppose that God
commanded us to torture a child. Would that make it all right, or
would some other standard give us reasons to resist? And if, on the
other hand, God was forced by moral reasons to issue some dictates
and not others — if a command to torture a child was never an option
— then why not appeal to those reasons directly?
This throws us back to wondering where those
reasons could come from, if they are more than just figments of our
brains. They certainly aren’t in the physical world like wavelength
or mass. The only other option is that moral truths exist in some
abstract Platonic realm, there for us to discover, perhaps in the
same way that mathematical truths (according to most mathematicians)
are there for us to discover. On this analogy, we are born with a
rudimentary concept of number, but as soon as we build on it with
formal mathematical reasoning, the nature of mathematical reality
forces us to discover some truths and not others. (No one who
understands the concept of two, the concept of four and the concept
of addition can come to any conclusion but that 2 + 2 = 4.) Perhaps
we are born with a rudimentary moral sense, and as soon as we build
on it with moral reasoning, the nature of moral reality forces us to
some conclusions but not others.
Moral realism, as this idea is called, is too rich
for many philosophers’ blood. Yet a diluted version of the idea — if
not a list of cosmically inscribed Thou-Shalts, then at least a few
If-Thens — is not crazy. Two features of reality point any rational,
self-preserving social agent in a moral direction. And they could
provide a benchmark for determining when the judgments of our moral
sense are aligned with morality itself.
One is the prevalence of nonzero-sum games. In
many arenas of life, two parties are objectively better off if they
both act in a nonselfish way than if each of them acts selfishly.
You and I are both better off if we share our surpluses, rescue each
other’s children in danger and refrain from shooting at each other,
compared with hoarding our surpluses while they rot, letting the
other’s child drown while we file our nails or feuding like the
Hatfields and McCoys. Granted, I might be a bit better off if I
acted selfishly at your expense and you played the sucker, but the
same is true for you with me, so if each of us tried for these
advantages, we’d both end up worse off. Any neutral observer, and
you and I if we could talk it over rationally, would have to
conclude that the state we should aim for is the one in which we
both are unselfish. These spreadsheet projections are not quirks of
brain wiring, nor are they dictated by a supernatural power; they
are in the nature of things.
The other external support for morality is a
feature of rationality itself: that it cannot depend on the
egocentric vantage point of the reasoner. If I appeal to you to do
anything that affects me — to get off my foot, or tell me the time
or not run me over with your car — then I can’t do it in a way that
privileges my interests over yours (say, retaining my right to run
you over with my car) if I want you to take me seriously. Unless I
am Galactic Overlord, I have to state my case in a way that would
force me to treat you in kind. I can’t act as if my interests are
special just because I’m me and you’re not, any more than I can
persuade you that the spot I am standing on is a special place in
the universe just because I happen to be standing on it.
Not coincidentally, the core of this idea — the
interchangeability of perspectives — keeps reappearing in history’s
best-thought-through moral philosophies, including the Golden Rule
(itself discovered many times); Spinoza’s Viewpoint of Eternity; the
Social Contract of Hobbes, Rousseau and Locke; Kant’s Categorical
Imperative; and Rawls’s Veil of Ignorance. It also underlies Peter
Singer’s theory of the Expanding Circle — the optimistic proposal
that our moral sense, though shaped by evolution to overvalue self,
kin and clan, can propel us on a path of moral progress, as our
reasoning forces us to generalize it to larger and larger circles of
sentient beings.
Doing Better by Knowing Ourselves
Morality, then, is still something larger than our
inherited moral sense, and the new science of the moral sense does
not make moral reasoning and conviction obsolete. At the same time,
its implications for our moral universe are profound.
At the very least, the science tells us that even
when our adversaries’ agenda is most baffling, they may not be
amoral psychopaths but in the throes of a moral mind-set that
appears to them to be every bit as mandatory and universal as ours
does to us. Of course, some adversaries really are psychopaths, and
others are so poisoned by a punitive moralization that they are
beyond the pale of reason. (The actor Will Smith had many historians
on his side when he recently speculated to the press that Hitler
thought he was acting morally.) But in any conflict in which a
meeting of the minds is not completely hopeless, a recognition that
the other guy is acting from moral rather than venal reasons can be
a first patch of common ground. One side can acknowledge the other’s
concern for community or stability or fairness or dignity, even
while arguing that some other value should trump it in that
instance. With affirmative action, for example, the opponents can be
seen as arguing from a sense of fairness, not racism, and the
defenders can be seen as acting from a concern with community, not
bureaucratic power. Liberals can ratify conservatives’ concern with
families while noting that gay marriage is perfectly consistent with
that concern.
The science of the moral sense also alerts us to
ways in which our psychological makeup can get in the way of our
arriving at the most defensible moral conclusions. The moral sense,
we are learning, is as vulnerable to illusions as the other senses.
It is apt to confuse morality per se with purity, status and
conformity. It tends to reframe practical problems as moral crusades
and thus see their solution in punitive aggression. It imposes
taboos that make certain ideas indiscussible. And it has the nasty
habit of always putting the self on the side of the angels.
Though wise people have long reflected on how we
can be blinded by our own sanctimony, our public discourse still
fails to discount it appropriately. In the worst cases, the
thoughtlessness of our brute intuitions can be celebrated as a
virtue. In his influential essay “The Wisdom of Repugnance,” Leon
Kass, former chair of the President’s Council on Bioethics, argued
that we should disregard reason when it comes to cloning and other
biomedical technologies and go with our gut: “We are repelled by the
prospect of cloning human beings . . . because we intuit and feel,
immediately and without argument, the violation of things that we
rightfully hold dear. . . . In this age in which everything is held
to be permissible so long as it is freely done . . . repugnance may
be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of
our humanity. Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to
shudder.”
There are, of course, good reasons to regulate
human cloning, but the shudder test is not one of them. People have
shuddered at all kinds of morally irrelevant violations of purity in
their culture: touching an untouchable, drinking from the same water
fountain as a Negro, allowing Jewish blood to mix with Aryan blood,
tolerating sodomy between consenting men. And if our ancestors’
repugnance had carried the day, we never would have had autopsies,
vaccinations, blood transfusions, artificial insemination, organ
transplants and in vitro fertilization, all of which were denounced
as immoral when they were new.
There are many other issues for which we are too
quick to hit the moralization button and look for villains rather
than bug fixes. What should we do when a hospital patient is killed
by a nurse who administers the wrong drug in a patient’s intravenous
line? Should we make it easier to sue the hospital for damages? Or
should we redesign the IV fittings so that it’s physically
impossible to connect the wrong bottle to the line?
And nowhere is moralization more of a hazard than
in our greatest global challenge. The threat of human-induced
climate change has become the occasion for a moralistic revival
meeting. In many discussions, the cause of climate change is
overindulgence (too many S.U.V.’s) and defilement (sullying the
atmosphere), and the solution is temperance (conservation) and
expiation (buying carbon offset coupons). Yet the experts agree that
these numbers don’t add up: even if every last American became
conscientious about his or her carbon emissions, the effects on
climate change would be trifling, if for no other reason than that
two billion Indians and Chinese are unlikely to copy our born-again
abstemiousness. Though voluntary conservation may be one wedge in an
effective carbon-reduction pie, the other wedges will have to be
morally boring, like a carbon tax and new energy technologies, or
even taboo, like nuclear power and deliberate manipulation of the
ocean and atmosphere. Our habit of moralizing problems, merging them
with intuitions of purity and contamination, and resting content
when we feel the right feelings, can get in the way of doing the
right thing.
Far from debunking morality, then, the science of
the moral sense can advance it, by allowing us to see through the
illusions that evolution and culture have saddled us with and to
focus on goals we can share and defend. As Anton Chekhov wrote, “Man
will become better when you show him what he is like.”
Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of
Psychology at Harvard University and the author of “The Language
Instinct” and “The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human
Nature.”
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
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