The Nature of Evil

Interview Transcripts

Marc Hauser

Interview 7/21/06 by John Rieger

Part One

Professor Hauser, moral codes are such a universal feature of human social groups that it’s really hard to imaging what a human society would even be without them. So why has morality been such a puzzle for evolutionary theory?

I think morality’s been a puzzle for evolutionary theory because it leans in the direction of group selection arguments. So, to put it simply, in the kind of early days of Darwinian thought and certainly the social sciences, people were thinking about adaptation in terms of what would be good for the group or good for the species.

So why does the bird give an alarm call—it gives an alarm call so that it can save its group. And those were very, very powerful arguments. They had sort of a long staying power.

And then, really in the mid-sixties to early seventies, people began to realize that in some ways the group selection-type arguments were no longer really tangible, because you could imagine a group of birds again where one animal gives an alarm call so to speak to save its group; the other guy sees a predator, saves his own skin, lets everybody else get eaten. So rapidly a cheater could invade the population and basically blow away all the cooperative altruistic individuals. So the evolutionary biologists were really focused on how you can get something like altruism to evolve, and the idea is that you basically allocate altruistic behavior towards your kin, or if there are no kin you do it in such a way that you can reciprocate with others.

Now where the field right now is moving to a large extent is to look very carefully at the psychological mechanisms, and here is where work in kind of moral philosophy, which has not had a history of being empirically motivated, has come into contact with both the cognitive sciences on the one hand and the neurosciences on the other, trying to put some empirical meat on some of the deep philosophical questions that have perplexed scholars and philosophers for hundreds of years.

Quite a bit of energy has been expended on the study of other primates looking for evolutionary antecedents to human moral behavior. What have we learned from studying primate societies?

I think the thing that we’ve learned the most in recent times from studies of primates is looking at social dynamics. Primates—monkeys and apes—are very social in some of the same ways that humans are social. So, for example, the ethologist Franz de Waal was able to show in a series of different species of both monkeys and apes that following an aggressive interaction between two individuals, what the subordinate and dominant often do is engage in reconciliation. So rather than continue to sort of gnaw at each other and be aggressive, they try to sort of reduce the levels of stress and reconcile their differences so that they can both move on.

So that’s one kind of behavior. In addition we see a whole host of coalitionary behavior, where one animal, let’s say rank number two, will get together with another individual, rank number three, and together go ahead and try to overthrow the alpha male or the king of society. So coalitionary, cooperative types of behavior. We see a whole host of ways in which animals seem to deal with transgressions, let’s say within the hierarchy. If a subordinate tries to take food from a dominant, they’re often attacked for that transgression.

So I think within the realm of hierarchies, coalitionary behavior, reconciliation of differences, cooperation in both warfare and in helping, those begin to sort of put into play some of the substrates for thinking about the evolution of morality. Where things I think are really wide open are some of the more critical psychological mechanisms, including both emotions—like do animals have some of the moral emotions like guilt and empathy and loyalty and shame. Secondly, do they understand distinctions like an intended act vs. an accidental act?

What insights did evolutionary psychology bring to the table?

I think what evolutionary psychology has tried to do is take views of modularity and innateness that somebody like Noam Chomsky has greatly promoted in the area of language knowledge, and blend that with Darwinian evolutionary theory. And where I think they’ve basically made some very nice contributions is in thinking about the ways in which certain kinds of abilities are basically specialized for solving certain kinds of problems that we evolved to solve in our past. So the critical thing was to have psychologists think about problems that we may have been designed solve, in order to look for specializations of the mind.

So, of course, you know, an example that people like to bring up are cases of logical reasoning where in general we’re pretty bad at it. “If P then Q” type arguments most people are quite atrocious at. But when you put the logic of an argument like “If P then Q” into the context of something like a social contract, where if you take a benefit, then you must pay a cost, people are very good at seeing whether the logic falls apart or not. And the argument here is that we’ve evolved a special kind of skill in the social domain, that basically are opaque to us when we’re looking at it consciously, but ultimately make it very easy for us to reason from principles to consequences.

Now your own work in this field, in the field of evolutionary ethics, is interesting in part because it takes its inspiration, not entirely from previous empirical work, but also in part from the work of a philosopher, John Rawls.

That’s right. In the 1970’s, John Rawls basically derived an argument built upon an analogy to human language, and in particular the kind of formulation that Noam Chomsky had been famous for at the time, which was to think about language as a system of knowledge that is basically unconscious and inaccessible to our reflection, but nonetheless guides our language production and our language perception and comprehension.

This is the Chomskian view?

This is the Chomskian view. And what John Rawls did is say, look, maybe one way to think about or moral psychology is that we bring to bear in our evaluation of moral situations this kind of unconscious knowledge that allows us to judge spontaneously what’s morally right or wrong. That view does not deny that there is some role to be played for conscious reasoning. It simply says our first cut on a moral dilemma will be an intuitive process that’s driven by something like a kind of grammar of knowledge for what’s right or wrong.

Now, you’re not saying that everybody has the same moral beliefs or “speaks the same moral language,” so to speak. You’re saying that there’s something more fundamental we all share, this “universal moral grammar.”

Yeah, so the idea is that just like in language, where there seem to be universal principles, and then parameters or switches that can be turned on or off within a given language to create the variation we see among languages, the idea here for morality is that there are a universal set of moral principles that cohere for our species; each culture then has options about how they can set things in terms of whether harming is permitted in this case but not in this one.

So, for example, intended harms are perceived as worse than foreseen harms; harms caused by action are seen as worse than harms caused by omission. That seems to be the universal part. What seems to be culturally variable is the way in which some of those principles get deployed in specific contexts. For example, in a preliminary study of the Kuna Indians in Panama, they see a difference between intended and foreseen harms, but they seem to permit possibly greater permissibility to intended harms than we might. Among the Kuna there seems to be a greater permissibility for infanticide, an intended harm.

Well now, what’s the prima facie appeal of taking that strategy, of reasoning in that way?

I think for me the great appeal of making the analogy at this point at least is it sort of sets up a series of questions that to me haven’t yet been answered at all. I was actually very, very surprised when I first started thinking about the analogy to language. I had been doing some writing with Chomsky on aspects of language evolution, and actually recalled reading John Rawls’ Theory of Justice when I was in High School/College, and remembered the analogy, and thought, well, geez, I wonder what’s happened in moral psychology. I hadn’t been trafficking in that literature for awhile.

So I went digging around with some questions in mind. Like, for example, have people talked about a critical period for acquiring your moral knowledge? And the answer is, no, the question’s not even raised in the field. What about the way in which you acquire your native moral system? Is it like acquiring your native language—it’s fast, spontaneous, it’s not taught? Then when you go on to acquire a second moral system the way you would acquire a second language later in life, is it as hard, rote-based, difficult to grasp, slow, laborious? Answer: no one knows. So at each juncture, once you begin to put into play the kinds of questions that are raised for language to the domain of morality, you find this world of open empirical turf, that for me as a scientist is a terrific sort of playground in which to go play.

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Part Two

How have you gone about investigating this hypothesis? What are the different threads you’ve been following?

So what I’ve been doing over the last few years since we started thinking about the problem is together with a couple of my students and then several collaborators is approaching it from a truly broad empirical framework, and I would say there are sort of five prongs to our approach.

The first has been to really try to provide a set of descriptive principles that can account for the kinds of judgments that adults make when they’re confronted with moral dilemmas. So what are the principles that underlie, unconsciously, our moral judgments. That’s first. And we’ve done that by setting up a website where we present a series of moral dilemmas, often the kinds of dilemmas that moral philosophers have engaged with. People log onto the website, they give us information about their background, religious (sic), education, their age and so forth, and then they proceed to answer a series of moral dilemmas, describing what is permissible, what is not, and then in some cases justify their answers. That’s prong one.

From prong one we than ask the developmental question: given that we’ve uncovered some principles, how are they acquired? And to study that we look at young children and in some cases even young infants, beginning to ask the question, when infants or young children confront certain moral dilemmas how do they respond to these? Are they showing the same kind of signatures in terms of relevant principles that adults do. That’s prong two.

Prong three is looking for cross-cultural variation as well as universality. So, based on our web research we are limited in what we can conclude. What about small hunter-gatherer societies? Do they show the same kinds of judgments and justifications as do people in parts of the developed world? So a cross cultural component, that’s prong three.

Prong four is to ask about the neurobiological architecture underlying the moral judgments, and here what we do is a variety of different methods, primarily we’ve been focusing on patients where a part of the brain has been damaged, and we can then ask about its causal relevance in forming certain types of moral judgments; or developmental disorders like autism, where there’s a selective deficit for certain social, cognitive abilities: how does that bear on people’s moral judgments? That’s prong four.

Prong five is the evolutionary question, which is to what extent are the principles driving adult judgments in moral dilemmas shared with other species? I referred earlier to the idea that in human moral judgments, a distinction between an accident and an intention is fundamental, otherwise you rely strictly on consequences. Do animals make those distinctions? If so, it puts them in the running for giving us the building blocks evolutionarily upon which our moral system was built. So that’s five prongs, and we’re now basically proceeding to begin to tackle those pieces. It’s a lifetime of work, and hopefully by the time my life ends we’ll have some answers.

Now the Moral Sense Test has some wonderful hypothetical problems in it, and I would love it if you would describe a couple of them to us.

Sure. Maybe my favorite example is a threesome, and it’s a nice example in part because I gave it to my father who’s a very smart physicist, who early on in my career when I expressed interest in going on into philosophy, said “Nice hobby, bad career.” At one point about three or so years ago he asked me what I was up to and I said, “Oh, I’ve gotten back to philosophy.” He goes well, what do you mean. And I said, ok, I want to give you a couple of dilemmas and see what you think.

So the first dilemma I gave him is a total classic in moral philosophy, it’s one that many people are familiar with by now, and it’s called the trolley problem. And the basic idea is you have this runaway trolley that’s going down a track, and it’s about to hit and kill five people who are on the track if it continues. But you, a bystander walking nearby, comes upon a switch that if you flip the switch you can turn the trolley onto a side track where it will kill one person on the side track. And the question here is, is it permissible. Is it morally permissible to flip the switch? So my father says yes.

Ok. So now I give him a second example, another trolley problem. Here you are a bystander, and you’re standing next to a man who is very, very heavy. And you have the option of pushing this man onto the trolley tracks, whereupon the trolley will hit the heavy man, his weight will stop the trolley, and the five will be saved. And the question is, is that permissible, upon which my father also says, yes. Now this was surprising, because in our web-based studies, the first case, the bystander case, is judged by most people, about 90% of a very large sample of subjects, as morally permissible. The second case, with the heavy man, is judged almost completely the opposite way, as morally impermissible.

So given that my father was giving at least some differences, I pushed on to a third example. The third example goes like this: there’s a hospital; five people have been rushed in, in critical care, to the hospital; each one needs an organ. The nurse comes up to the surgeon and says, look, five people have come in, we don’t have time to send out for organs, but this man just walked in, completely healthy, we can take his organs, save the five, but he’ll die. Should we do it? Now, my father says no, you can’t do that. I said, why not? He said, you can’t just pull a person off the street and kill them. I said, but you just destroyed the fat guy in the last example! He goes, ok, well you can’t do that one either. I said, well what about the bystander? Can’t do that either. And the whole thing unravels.

And the beauty of these three cases is that, for any given moral dilemma one can readily both give a coherent answer and justify it. But once you begin to pit different dilemmas against each other, straightforward arguments that have typically been invoked in both moral philosophy and common sense just don’t work. So, for example, take those three cases I just gave. If you were a strict utilitarian, paying attention only to the consequences of what’s going on—the overall good—you should answer yes to all three of those cases, because it’s always one versus five. Saving five lives is always better than saving one.

This would be the Mr. Spock principle—the many over the one?

That’s right, but people aren’t like this. Even fairly strict utilitarians aren’t like this, right? So there’s a case where utilitarianism doesn’t work. But the opposite position (sic) doesn’t work either. If you leaned towards non-consequentialist views or deontological views, you would argue for a principle like “killing is wrong.” But in all three of these cases you’re doing some killing.

This is a Kantian position, where the intention is really critical to the assessment of the act?

That’s right. So what we’re uncovering is, basically a very very common set of patterns. On the one hand people tend to show very similar patterns of moral judgments across a wide variety of moral dilemmas, and on the other hand, when you ask people why is this case permissible and this case not permissible or forbidden, people don’t have a coherent answer. They say I don’t know, it was a hunch, or they give some answer and they reject it, they confabulate, but basically they don’t seem to be able to justify why they’re making different kinds of judgment, and this looks very much like language.

So they have a moral intuition which is statistically surprisingly uniform a cross a large body of respondents, but they can’t explain, they can’t justify their intuition?

That’s right. So across a wide variety of moral cases, the principles, that are unconscious, seem to be guiding a very, very uniform, universal form of judgment.

Now why does that look like language?

It looks like language in the following way. If you look at languages of the world, what you seem to find are certain kinds of principles that always appear. For example, all languages make a distinction between nouns and verbs. What goes into those things as nouns and verbs is free to vary—the content. Most languages have word order, but the order in which you put things varies between languages.

So the critical point here, and this is something that is so important not to get wrong, is that invoking the notion of a universal moral grammar, in the same way that invoking a universal grammar, these two types of constructs do not say that either morality or language is fixed, unchangeable, and that cultural variation is irrelevant. Not at all. What it says is, underlying the variation we see are a set of common principles that generates the possible range of variation with constraints. And now what the big job is, is to uncover what those principles are, and to figure out the moves that cultures can play by changing things a little bit here and there.

Now how are you going to discover these universal principles in some primitive hunter-gatherer society using problems about trolley cars?

So what we’ve done now is we now have a battery of moral dilemmas that can be used with some modifications for any kind of population, be they hunter-gatherers or patient populations that have certain kinds of deficits… So we have a battery, a battery that can be uniformly used by any kind of investigator, because the dilemmas themselves are very carefully controlled in terms of their wording.

So in the case of, let’s say, the Hadza in Tanzania that we’ve begun to test, that are a small hunter-gatherer population, of course they don’t know from trolleys at all. But, for example, they do know about Land Rovers. They also know about lions. And they also know about stampeding herds of elephants.

So, for example, instead of a trolley going to kill five people, you have a herd of stampeding elephants that will kill five people, and you are in your Land Rover, and if you drive your Land Rover towards the herd, the herd will go and kill one person. Now you have something that is directly analogous to our trolley problem, because it’s five vs. one, a bystander can do something to detour the initial threat away from the five and towards the one.

So do hunter-gatherers of various kinds see a distinction between intended and foreseen harms? Actions and omissions? Contact and no contact? So we can systematically move through different populations and ask about the extent to which they perceive these differences, and the extent to which they can be recovered in their justifications.

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Part Three

Now we might ask at this point just how malleable this moral intuition that we’re getting from the moral organ, just how malleable it is. In the case of language, as you’ve pointed out in your writings, knowing the rules of generative grammar does not allow us to violate them or change them in any way. If we understand the universal principles that underlie our moral judgments, will we be able to change ourselves morally?

I think the question of the malleability of the moral faculty is a great and a deep question, and it may in fact be one of the ways in which the moral system is quite different from the linguistic system. So, for example, until I started really working hard on this problem, the distinction between intended and foreseen was just not kind of a consciously accessible distinction. Now that I’m working on it, of course, I have great access to that. But here, I think, it’s important to make a very significant distinction between what we can learn about the moral faculty and how it operates, and the extent to which we use it in our day to day operations with the world.

So, for example, having read a fair amount of linguistics, there are certain principles I’m familiar with that can account for, for example, why we move “w-h” constructions—you know, what, where, when—to certain parts of a sentence when we have certain kinds of constructions. Ok, I know that. Do I think about that when I create a question? No, never.

Now the same may be true of morality, that there may be adaptive reasons why we want that stuff tucked away, locked away in the mind’s recesses so that we can do socially appropriate, adaptive behavior. My guess is, once you begin to uncover these principles, they certainly will become a part, more a part of people’s day-to-day awareness, but when it comes to a decision that’s needed quickly for a moral situation, my guess is that those things will not penetrate the intuitive judgment that comes forward quickly, spontaneously, involuntarily on a day-to-day basis.

And in that respect it looks very much like our experience of art and music, like our ability to recognize faces, or to quickly judge the costs and benefits of a financial transaction, or any other aspect of what could be lumped into the general category of common sense.

That’s right, they fall under the general category of intuitive responses. It’s like when somebody tells a joke, either you laugh or you don’t laugh. If you don’t laugh, and the person says, well, why didn’t you think that was funny, you’re like: well, either you do or you don’t, I mean they’re not gonna convince you one way or the other. In this same way, the intuitive judgments people bring forward will have that kind of spontaneity and robustness. Now, where you’ll find the kind of mismatch, like in the case of humor, is across cultures. There’ll be certain kinds of judgments that will now have been tweaked by local cultural variation, where one culture will see it as funny, and the other culture will see it as not funny, and they’ll have a hard time reconciling those differences. Because it’s like Chinese and English—mutually incomprehensible.

You spoke of “tweaking” the moral intuition according to local conditions or local parameters. Could elaborate on the tweaking concept—the “local tweaking”?

Yeah. So, one example that I very much like is the extent to which we have in Peter Singer’s words kind of “expanded our moral circle.” So 30, 40 years ago, if you wanted to use a dog for some biomedical reason, you just kind of did it, and there were no real policies about how you treat the dog, how you need to give anesthesia or anything like that, because there was no view about animal pain, or there was a view about it, but nobody cared.

So over time, of course, and thanks to large to extent to Peter Singer’s arguments, the moral circle has expanded, and it’s now in people’s awareness. Not in every country, but in many countries, policies against harming animals are concrete, they’re explicit, if you violate them you can be punished for them, and so forth. So the target of our moral judgments has expanded.

So that’s a sense in which a cultural change can have a direct impact on certain aspects of our moral judgments, the targets of who we see as worthy of moral evaluation. Now, the extent to which other things can change, that’s much more debatable. So, for example, take honor killings, where a woman who violated the marital pact, having had intercourse with somebody else, was killed. Now, there’s an interesting difference between the East and the West in this case. In the “Old South,” it was up to the man to kill the spouse, whereas in the East in places like Jordan and Pakistan where honor killings have been quite significant, it’s the responsibility of the woman’s mother or sister. Unlike the West it’s definitely not the husband.

So what you have here is maybe a sort of common part of the principle which is that if there’s been a sexual violation, that person will be killed in certain cultures. Who kills is variable by culture, and whether that person is killed or not is also variable by culture. So here we have kind of multiple layers of the parameters that are getting set in different ways.

Now, people are trying to stop that kind of honor killing. How fast it changes—my guess is that these are gonna be very slow processes. The South in the United States is sort of still one where honor is very very dominant, and there’s been some beautiful studies by Dick Nisbett and Dove Cohen on what they call cultures of honor, where this kind of machismo carries through from the past, and it’s very very hard to get rid of, it has long, long staying power, and my guess is that much of morality would be like that, just in the same way that once a culture decides to change a parameter, like word order, it’s a very slow process.

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Part Four

Now, how can you speak of a universal moral faculty, when different societies so often hold contradictory views of what is moral and what is immoral?

I think the way that you can hold onto the notion of a universal moral grammar while allowing for variation between cultures is in the same way that you can hold to view of a universal grammar for language, but acknowledge that there’s Chinese, Korean, English, Spanish, French and Japanese. The basic idea is the universal component will be a shared set of principles. That does not mean that everyone speaks the same moral language. It means that underlying some of the variation are common principles. So there will be common principles about fairness, about harming others, but that each culture can set things slightly differently.

So one example I like very much is some of the work of Tetlock’s at Berkeley, where he argues for a sort of universal taboo against what he calls “secular/sacred trade-offs,” where each culture will have certain things that they absolutely block because they’re taboo, but the content of that trade-off is open to variation between cultures. So, for example, he does these very nice studies where he takes Californians or Americans into a lab and he says do you have children, and if the person says yes he says, Ok, look, I’ll give you a thousand bucks for your son. And the person says no, ridiculous! He says, alright, I realize that was not a good offer… a million dollars. and the person goes, that’s ridiculous! And he goes, alright, look, I’m loaded, I’ll give you a billion dollars. Now if the person wavers at all, so in other words their reaction time to respond, all of a sudden you get these kind of guilty feelings, because you shouldn’t have engaged that trade-off. It should have been an absolutely clear no.

Now, as we very well know, in some cultures selling children is not something which is forbidden. It’s something you do to survive. So the critical point here is that there are trade-offs that the mind seems to evolve that are absolutely blocked, but the content of those can be filled by the local culture. And that looks very much like human language.

So the lexicon, our vocabulary—“toaster” isn’t innately in my mind, but that there is an arbitrary pairing between sound and meaning is part of the mind, it’s what allows us to create words—the content gets filled in by the local culture.

Well, now we don’t say that English is better than Chinese or Tagalog, it’s just different. If morality is just the expression of an innate faculty the way language is, then isn’t one morality just as good as another? I mean basically isn’t this whole scientific enterprise really a subtle argument for moral relativism?

The idea of a universal moral grammar with cultural variation, we must clearly distinguish between it as a description, versus it as a prescription. And this is where I think it’s very important to sort of navigate cautiously. When you ask the question, “is system A better than system B,” you’ve immediately jumped to the prescriptive level. So that’s why I think I’ve been very careful in the way I’ve put things, that I don’t say that this system is better than that system, because that would be like saying that English is better than Tagalog.

But if I say, “it’s wrong to sell children,” the correct scientific response would be, “only in your society”?

Well, that’s right, although again, the view that I’m putting forward has both elements of cultural variation and elements of universality. So here’s a kind of a prediction. I can’t imagine a society developing a principle that would go like this: harm people gratuitously whenever you please. Because A, it’s gonna be open to complete abuses, and it will not be stable. So the universal grammar provides a toolkit for building possible moral systems, but it also provides a system for blocking certain other kinds of systems, because they will be unstable. That’s not to say that certain kind of weird systems won’t arise over historical periods, but they will be unstable.

So one one hand it’s true that the moral grammar view allows for relativism, because it allows for cultural variation. It is not an argument against variation. But, unlike typical moves of moral relativism, it doesn’t say that anything goes, in the same way that a universal grammar also doesn’t say that anything goes. There are going to be constraints that are mind-internal that will block certain kinds of moral systems from happening. But we’re very far away from articulating what that looks like, in some of the same ways that the linguistic view is quite far away from articulating what will be the limiting conditions.

T. H. Huxley famously parted company with Darwin on the question of morality, and he held that it was somehow anchored elsewhere than in our evolved biology, that it was a force that could allow us to rise above and oppose our baser evolved nature—pull the weeds out of the garden, as it were. Many people in America today have what I would characterize as a very similar belief about morality, they believe that only a morality that comes from God can make us truly moral. These people undoubtedly believe that evolutionary ethics undermines morality. Can you comment on that conflict?

I think the conflict that many people perceive between our biology and our “non-biology”—whatever you want to call it—in some sense it both sets up the classic false dichotomy which most of us want to avoid—you know, biology/culture, nature/nurture, and blah, blah, blah—but it also puts a tinge on biology, which is that biology is kind of nasty and mean and non-cooperative. But I think that’s the wrong view on both levels, both in terms of the dichotomy, but also in terms of the meanness part.

One of the things that the biology of various organisms does for the organism is give them the tools, the psychological tools to cooperate. So writing at about the same time as Charles Darwin was the Russian Peter Kropotkin, who talked about mutualism and the notion of cooperation among animals. Now it wasn’t that Darwin didn’t talk about cooperation. Of course he did, but people tend to forget that in the same way that the brain has evolved to enable animals to be aggressive and nasty to other individuals, it also has evolved to give the brain the capacity to cooperate with other animals. So we’ve got both.

And I think this is where, for example, there have been some interesting tensions within the field of economics, such that the classic view of economics—the self-interest model, that we have a psychology designed to maximize our returns—has become to be kind of counterbalanced by a view that is also a cooperative view, that we have a strong feeling of fairness, that we engage in various kinds of bargaining games, that we are as likely to be mean and punishing as we are to be fair and equitable towards others. So it’s a mistake for those who want to give all of our moral virtues to religion to sort of see biology as kind of the opposition.

So that’s sort of the first point. The second one is, I think, an assumption that comes from many that have thought basically morality being synonymous with religion, which is that those who are religious are the ones who are moral in our society, and those who are atheists and agnostics are kinda the nasty people. And of course that equally is a poor characterization of both sides. There are nasty and mean people who are religious, and there are nasty and mean people who are not religious. And vice versa for the virtuous aspects of humans. So, that religion can give people rules and guidance is undebatable, but that people who have absolutely no connection with religion also have social conventions and rules by which they live I think is equally true.

This strikes me as an empirical question, in fact—one that could be addressed by the moral sense test.

Right, so one of the ways in which we actually have gone about trying to look at issues about whether religion has effects on certain aspects of our moral judgments is actually to use the battery of dilemmas that we’ve constructed and tap into this large database. And we’re only at the beginning of this kind of work, but we actually find very little evidence that religious background impacts upon people’s moral judgments in a variety of cases involving harming and helping others.

If you look for example at the trolley problems, where we have the bystander case, and pushing the fat man case, and a couple of other cases, and we simply ask, do people who report having some religious background, either in their upbringing or currently, versus people who claim to be atheists or agnostics, do they give different judgments in terms of their percentages? The answer is no, they do not. This is not a denial of the importance of religion in people’s lives, it’s simply asking a question: if you’ve had a religious upbringing, do you perceive, at an intuitive level, the world differently? The question here is an empirical question.

Now there is a problem, I think, for the view that it’s God or some divine power that basically handed off these universal principles, and that is, if you look at various different kinds of religious doctrine from Catholicism and Judaism, Buddhism and so forth, those doctrines cannot explain the pattern of judgments we see in our data.

Oh, so for example, “thou shalt not kill” doesn’t account for the acceptability of throwing the switch and sacrificing one to save five?

That’s right. That’s right.

Because religious principles look like the Kantian moral system?

That’s right, they’re very non-consequentialist. They’re basically very rule-based. And as we’ve been discussing, the rule-based systems can account for some of the dilemmas, but not give you a coherent story to tell once you’ve confronted various kinds of moral dilemmas.

But I think we want something else when we reflect on our own moral intuitions. We want to be able to say that, for example, the terrorists who flew the aircraft into the World Trade Center towers were not just heroic partisans of an opposing camp, but were actually wrongdoers. And yet, when we examine empirically the basis for our moral beliefs, I’m afraid we don’t get much support for that longing for moral certainty. It’s sort of the opposite of the person who says, gee, if I could just understand the reason for my shyness, I could overcome it: now that I understand the reason for my moral certainty, my moral certainty is gone.

Well, let me see if I can answer this by sort of shifting it a little bit.

So, the first thing that’s very important to keep in mind here, again, is that the account I’m trying to offer, the theoretical argument I’m trying to offer, is not an account of what people are gonna do on a day-to-day basis in an individual case. I’m not gonna explain why Gandhi was Gandhi and Mother Theresa was Mother Theresa, and why Hitler was Hitler and Idi Amin was Idi Amin. Terrorist bombings of 9/11, the fact that you’ve got part of the population that’s pro-choice, another part of the population which is pro-life—that variation is there.

In order for us to get traction on the principles, we have to extract ourselves from everyday common occurrences, and give people generic cases, where, for example, group information is removed from the story, because we know, and we didn’t need any of my arguments to tell us, this is a hundred years of social psychology: in-group/out-group biases are forever with us, and those are gonna intrude no matter what we do. This is why what we’ve had to do is step away from those very real and very rehearsed cases to create dilemmas that have the same psychological architecture, but are not familiar. And here is where my prediction would be that if you created a kind of a 9/11-type situation, but it was simply about can you harm some to same the many, you would get coherent judgments from everybody if you set it up in a way that did not engage in in-group/out-group distinctions.

So the critical point is that you invoke things like 9/11, the permissibility of harming in those kind of cases—if you invoke my group versus your group, you’re done, because the in-group/out-group bias is gonna swamp lots of the distinctions we’re talking about. So if we go back for example to the trolley problems, ultimately what we want to understand, which is what we’re doing right now, is how do you evaluate the trolley problem if you are the person flipping the switch, if you are a victim, the one or the five, if you are evaluating somebody who is the bystander, are you consistent across all those cases. Open question.

Marc Hauser, thank you very much.

Thank you very much.

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