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The Nature of EvilFeatured AudioMarc Hauser: Exploring the Moral Instinct
Part One: The puzzle of the evolution of morality; John Rawls and the analogy to Chomsky’s linguistics. Listen | Read Transcript Part Two: An outline of Marc Hauser’s empirical approach; the Moral Sense Test. Listen | Read Transcript Part Three: How fixed are the rules of “moral grammar”? Local tweaking: how different societies develop different moral systems. Listen | Read Transcript Part Four: Does evolutionary ethics lead to moral relativism? Do moral rules come from God? Does Hauser’s empirical account really satisfy our sense of right and wrong? Listen | Read Transcript
Morality is a universal feature of human societies, yet our moral codes divide us as surely as do language and religion. Where one society declares that adulteresses must be killed; another declares they must not. Some permit infanticide or the selling of children. Others forbid it. All insist on the difference between right and wrong. In his new book, Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong, evolutionary psychologist Marc Hauser proposes that, beneath our moral diversity, humans share an innate moral faculty, part of our evolutionary standard equipment, which sets the rules and constraints for any moral system. It is neither God nor Reason that makes us moral, but instinct. Philosophers have argued for centuries about the basis of moral judgment. Kant, and for that matter Moses, held that moral action consists in obedience to certain universal laws. Utilitarians, from John Stuart Mill to Star Trek’s Mr. Spock, believe that the right action is the one that produces the greatest good for the greatest number. But real-life moral judgments typically don’t require abstract reasoning—they draw on our intuitive sense of right and wrong. Like pornography, as Justice Stewart observed, we know it when we see it, even if we can’t explain it. In his landmark 1971 book, A Theory of Justice, philosopher John Rawls suggested that an innate moral faculty, analogous to the faculty of language, might account for our moral intuitions. Just as the language faculty allows us to speak grammatically without thinking about the rules, the moral faculty produces intuitive moral judgments without abstract reasoning. Intrigued by this model, Hauser decided to use empirical techniques to explore the deep structure of moral judgment. Among the tools he devised was the Moral Sense Test, an ingenious online experiment that asks volunteers to judge a series of abstract moral problems (if you wish to take the Moral Sense Test, stop reading here). Though participants vary widely in their cultural, demographic and religious backgrounds—Hauser has even presented versions of the test to modern day hunter-gatherers—their moral judgments are remarkably similar; yet most are unable to give a coherent justification for their pattern of judgments. Equally intriguing, traditional moral arguments, whether of a religious or Kantian, or a utilitarian character, also cannot make sense of these patterns of judgments. Hauser believes he has begun to uncover the underlying principles of any human moral system. Intended harms are worse than accidental ones. Harms caused by action are worse than harms caused by inaction. Harms involving personal contact are worse than harms caused by impersonal acts. Just as all the world’s languages obey certain universal, underlying rules and constraints, says Hauser, all human moral systems are governed by these basic rules. There’s news here of particular interest to religion. Hauser found that religious believers do not differ significantly from non-believers in their answers. Both are equally moral. But Hauser’s results may also leave us wondering about moral relativism. The moral faculty appears to be indifferent to which moral system one will acquire, just as the language faculty doesn’t determine whether one will be a speaker of English, Chinese or Tagalog. Is one culture more moral than another? The scientific answer appears to be no. | ||||||||||||||
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