An evolved universal morality

A new book:

Moral Minds
The Nature of Right and Wrong
by Marc D. Hauser
Publisher: HarperCollins | Date published: 09/04/2007
ISBN: 9780061494505


Description
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In his groundbreaking book, Marc Hauser puts forth a revolutionary new
theory: that humans have evolved a universal moral instinct,
unconsciously propelling us to deliver judgments of right and wrong
independent of gender, education, and religion. Combining his cutting-
edge research with the latest findings in cognitive psychology,
linguistics, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, economics, and
anthropology, Hauser explores the startling implications of his
provocative theory vis-à-vis contemporary bioethics, religion, the
law, and our everyday lives.

Excerpt
1
WHAT'S WRONG?
You first parents of the human race...who ruined yourself for an apple,
what might you have done for a truffled turkey?
--BRILLAT-SAVARIN
HUNDREDS OF SELF-HELP BOOKS and call-in radio stations, together with
the advice of such American ethic gurus as William Bennett and Randy
Cohen, provide us with principled reasons and methods for leading a
virtuous life. Law schools across the globe graduate thousands of
scholars each year, trained to reason through cases of fraud, theft,
violence, and injustice; the law books are filled with principles for
how to judge human behavior, both moral and amoral. Most major
universities include a mandatory course in moral reasoning, designed
to teach students about the importance of dispassionate logic, moving
from evidence to conclusion, checking assumptions and explicitly
stating inferences and hypotheses. Medical and legal boards provide
rational and highly reasoned policies in order to set guidelines for
morally permissible, forbidden, and punishable actions. Businesses set
up contracts to clarify the rules of equitable negotiation and
exchange. Military leaders train soldiers to act with a cool head,
thinking through alternative strategies, planning effective attacks,
and squelching the emotions and instincts that may cause impulsive
behavior when reasoning is required to do the right thing.
Presidential committees are established to clarify ethical principles
and the consequences of violations, both at home and abroad. All of
these professionals share a common perspective: conscious moral
reasoning from explicit principles is the cause of our moral
judgments. As a classic text in moral philosophy concludes, "Morality
is, first and foremost, a matter of consulting reason. The morally
right thing to do, in any circumstance, is whatever there are the best
reasons for doing."

This dominant perspective falls prey to an illusion: Just because we
can consciously reason from explicit principles--handed down from
parents, teachers, lawyers, or religious leaders--to judgments of right
and wrong doesn't mean that these principles are the source of our
moral decisions. On the contrary, I argue that moral judgments are
mediated by an unconscious process, a hidden moral grammar that
evaluates the causes and consequences of our own and others' actions.
This account shifts the burden of evidence from a philosophy of
morality to a science of morality.

This book describes how our moral intuitions work and why they
evolved. It also explains how we can anticipate what lies ahead for
our species. I show that by looking at our moral psychology as an
instinct--an evolved capacity of all human minds that unconsciously and
automatically generates judgments of right and wrong--that we can
better understand why some of our behaviors and decisions will always
be construed as unfair, permissible, or punishable, and why some
situations will tempt us to sin in the face of sensibility handed down
from law, religion, and education. Our evolved moral instincts do not
make moral judgments inevitable. Rather, they color our perceptions,
constrain our moral options, and leave us dumbfounded because the
guiding principles are inaccessible, tucked away in the mind's library
of unconscious knowledge.

Although I largely focus on what people do in the context of moral
conflict, and how and why they come to such decisions, it is important
to understand the relationship between description and prescription--
between what is and what ought to be.

In 1903, the philosopher George Edward Moore noted that the dominant
philosophical perspective of the time--John Stuart Mill's utilitarianism
--frequently fell into the naturalistic fallacy: attempting to justify
a particular moral principle by appealing to what is good. For Mill,
utilitarianism was a reform policy, one designed to change how people
ought to behave by having them focus on the overall good, defined in
terms of natural properties of human nature such as our overall
happiness. For Moore, the equation of good with natural was
fallacious. There are natural things that are bad (polio, blindness)
and unnatural things that are good (vaccines, reading glasses). We are
not licensed to move from the natural to the good.

A more general extension of the naturalistic fallacy comes from
deriving ought from is. Consider these facts: In most cultures, women
put more time into child care than men (a sex difference that is
consistent with our primate ancestors), men are more violent than
women (also consistent with our primate past), and polygamy is more
common than monogamy (consistent with the rest of the animal kingdom).
From these facts, we are not licensed to conclude that women should do
all of the parenting while men drink beers, society should sympathize
with male violence because testosterone makes violence inevitable, and
women should expect and support male promiscuity because it's in their
genes, part of nature's plan. The descriptive principles we uncover
about human nature do not necessarily have a causal relationship to
the prescriptive principles. Drawing a causal connection is
fallacious.

Moore's characterization of the naturalistic fallacy caused
generations of philosophers to either ignore or ridicule discoveries
in the biological sciences. Together with the work of the analytic
philosopher Gottlieb Frege, it led to the pummeling of ethical
naturalism, a perspective in philosophy that attempted to make sense
of the good by an appeal to the natural. It also led to an
intellectual isolation of those thinking seriously about moral
principles and those attempting to uncover the signatures of human
nature. Discussions of moral ideals were therefore severed from the
facts of moral behavior and psychology.

The surgical separation of facts from ideals is, however, too extreme.
Consider the following example:

FACT: The only difference between a doctor giving a child anesthesia
and not giving her anesthesia is that without it, the child will be in
agony during surgery. The anesthesia will have no ill effects on this
child, but will cause her to temporarily lose consciousness and
sensitivity to pain. She will then awaken from the surgery with no ill
consequences, and in better health thanks to the doctor's work.
EVALUATIVE JUDGMENT: Therefore, the doctor should give the child
anesthesia.
Here it seems reasonable for us to move from fact to value judgment.
This move has the feel of a mathematical proof, requiring little more
than an ability to understand the consequences of carrying out an
action as opposed to refraining from the action. In this case, it
seems reasonable to use is to derive ought.

Facts alone don't motivate us into action. But when we learn about a
fact and are motivated by its details, we often alight upon an
evaluative decision that something should be done. What motivates us
to conclude that the doctor should give anesthesia is that the girl
shouldn't experience pain, if pain can be avoided. Our attitude toward
pain, that we should avoid it whenever we can, motivates us to convert
the facts of this case to an evaluative judgment. This won't always be
the right move. We need to understand what drives the motivations and
attitudes we have.

The point of all this is simple enough: Sometimes the marriage between
fact and desire leads to a logical conclusion about what we ought to
do, and sometimes it doesn't. We need to look at the facts of each
case, case by case. Nature won't define this relationship. Nature may,
however, limit what is morally possible, and suggest ways in which
humans, and possibly other animals, are motivated into action. When
Katharine Hepburn turned to Humphrey Bogart in the African Queen and
said, "Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise
above," she got one word wrong: We must not rise above nature, but
rise with nature, looking her in the eye and watching our backs. The
only way to develop stable prescriptive principles, through either
formal law or religion, is to understand how they will break down in
the face of biases that Mother Nature equipped us with.

THE REAL WORLD
On MTV's Real World, you can watch twentysomethings struggle with
"real" moral dilemmas. On the fifteenth episode of the 2004 season, a
girl named Frankie kissed a guy named Adam. Later, during a
conversation with her boyfriend, Dave, Frankie tried to convince him
that it was a mistake, a meaningless kiss given after one too many
drinks. She told Dave that he was the real deal, but Dave didn't bite.
Frankie, conflicted and depressed, closed herself in a room and cut
herself with a knife.

If this sounds melodramatic and more like Ersatz World, think again.
Although fidelity is not the signature of this age group, the
emotional prologue and epilogue to promiscuity is distressing for
many, and for thousands of teenagers it leads to self-mutilation.
Distress is one signature of the mind's recognition of a social
dilemma, an arena of competing interests.

But what raises a dilemma to the level of a moral dilemma, and makes a
judgment a morally weighty one? What are the distinguishing features
of moral as opposed to nonmoral social dilemmas? This is a bread-and-
butter question for anyone interested in the architecture of the mind.
In the same way that linguists ask about the defining features of
speech, as distinct from other acoustic signals, we want to understand
whether moral dilemmas have specific design features.

Frankie confronted a moral dilemma because she had made a commitment
to Dave, thereby accepting an obligation to remain faithful. Kissing
someone else is forbidden. There are no written laws stating which
actions are obligatory or forbidden in a romantic but nonmarital
relationship. Yet everyone recognizes that there are expected patterns
of behavior and consequences associated with transgressions. If an
authority figure told us that it was always okay to cheat on our
primary lovers whenever we felt so inclined, we would sense unease, a
feeling that we were doing something wrong. If a teacher told the
children in her class that it was always okay to hit a neighbor to
resolve conflict, most if not all the children would balk. Authority
figures cannot mandate moral transgressions. This is not the case for
other social norms or conventions, such as those associated with
greetings or eating. If a restaurant owner announced that it was okay
for all clients to eat with their hands, then they either would or
not, depending on their mood and attachment to personal etiquette.

.