An Evolutionary Theory of Right and Wrong---- By NICHOLAS WADE
The New York Times via Factiva
October 31, 2006
Who doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong? Yet that essential
knowledge, generally assumed to come from parental teaching or religious
or legal instruction, could turn out to have a quite different origin.
Primatologists like Frans de Waal have long argued that the roots of human
morality are evident in social animals like apes and monkeys. The animals’
feelings of empathy and expectations of reciprocity are essential
behaviors for mammalian group living and can be regarded as a counterpart
of human morality.
Marc D. Hauser, a Harvard biologist, has built on this idea to propose that
people are born with a moral grammar wired into their neural circuits by
evolution. In a new book, ‘‘Moral Minds’’ (HarperCollins 2006), he argues
that the grammar generates instant moral judgments which, in part because
of the quick decisions that must be made in life-or-death situations, are
inaccessible to the conscious mind.
People are generally unaware of this process because the mind is adept at
coming up with plausible rationalizations for why it arrived at a decision
generated subconsciously.
Dr. Hauser presents his argument as a hypothesis to be proved, not as an
established fact. But it is an idea that he roots in solid ground,
including his own and others’ work with primates and in empirical results
derived by moral philosophers.
The proposal, if true, would have far-reaching consequences. It implies that
parents and teachers are not teaching children the rules of correct
behavior from scratch but are, at best, giving shape to an innate
behavior. And it suggests that religions are not the source of moral codes
but, rather, social enforcers of instinctive moral behavior.
Both atheists and people belonging to a wide range of faiths make the same
moral judgments, Dr. Hauser writes, implying ‘‘that the system that
unconsciously generates moral judgments is immune to religious doctrine.’’
Dr. Hauser argues that the moral grammar operates in much the same way as
the universal grammar proposed by the linguist Noam Chomsky as the innate
neural machinery for language. The universal grammar is a system of rules
for generating syntax and vocabulary but does not specify any particular
language. That is supplied by the culture in which a child grows up.
The moral grammar too, in Dr. Hauser’s view, is a system for generating moral
behavior and not a list of specific rules. It constrains human behavior so
tightly that many rules are in fact the same or very similar in every
society – do as you would be done by; care for children and the weak;
don’t kill; avoid adultery and incest; don’t cheat, steal or lie.
But it also allows for variations, since cultures can assign different weights
to the elements of the grammar’s calculations. Thus one society may ban
abortion, another may see infanticide as a moral duty in certain
circumstances. Or as Kipling observed, ‘‘The wildest dreams of Kew are the
facts of Katmandu, and the crimes of Clapham chaste in Martaban.’’
Matters of right and wrong have long been the province of moral philosophers
and ethicists. Dr. Hauser’s proposal is an attempt to claim the subject
for science, in particular for evolutionary biology. The moral grammar
evolved, he believes, because restraints on behavior are required for
social living and have been favored by natural selection because of their
survival value.
Much of the present evidence for the moral grammar is indirect. Some of it
comes from psychological tests of children, showing that they have an
innate sense of fairness that starts to unfold at age 4. Some comes from
ingenious dilemmas devised to show a subconscious moral judgment generator
at work. These are known by the moral philosophers who developed them as
‘‘trolley problems.’’
Suppose you are standing by a railroad track. Ahead, in a deep cutting from
which no escape is possible, five people are walking on the track. You
hear a train approaching. Beside you is a lever with which you can switch
the train to a sidetrack. One person is walking on the sidetrack. Is it
O.K. to pull the lever and save the five people, though one will die?
Most people say it is.
Assume now you are on a bridge overlooking the track. Ahead, five people on
the track are at risk. You can save them by throwing down a heavy object
into the path of the approaching train. One is available beside you, in
the form of a fat man. Is it O.K. to push him to save the five?
Most people say no, although lives saved and lost are the same as in the first
problem.
Why does the moral grammar generate such different judgments in apparently
similar situations? It makes a distinction, Dr. Hauser writes, between a
foreseen harm (the train killing the person on the track) and an intended
harm (throwing the person in front of the train), despite the fact that
the consequences are the same in either case. It also rates killing an
animal as more acceptable than killing a person.
Many people cannot articulate the foreseen/intended distinction, Dr. Hauser
says, a sign that it is being made at inaccessible levels of the mind.
This inability challenges the general belief that moral behavior is
learned. For if people cannot articulate the foreseen/intended
distinction, how can they teach it?
Dr. Hauser began his research career in animal communication, working with
vervet monkeys in Kenya and with birds. He is the author of a standard
textbook on the subject, ‘‘The Evolution of Communication.’’ He began to
take an interest in the human animal in 1992 after psychologists devised
experiments that allowed one to infer what babies are thinking. He found
he could repeat many of these experiments in cotton-top tamarins, allowing
the cognitive capacities of infants to be set in an evolutionary
framework.
His proposal of a moral grammar emerges from a collaboration with Mr. Chomsky,
who had taken an interest in Dr. Hauser’s ideas about animal
communication. In 2002 they wrote, with Dr. Tecumseh Fitch, an unusual
article arguing that the faculty of language must have developed as an
adaptation of some neural system possessed by animals, perhaps one used in
navigation. From this interaction Dr. Hauser developed the idea that moral
behavior, like language behavior, is acquired with the help of an innate
set of rules that unfolds early in a child’s development.
Social animals, he believes, possess the rudiments of a moral system in that
they can recognize cheating or deviations from expected behavior. But they
generally lack the psychological mechanisms on which the pervasive
reciprocity of human society is based, like the ability to remember bad
behavior, quantify its costs, recall prior interactions with an individual
and punish offenders. ‘‘Lions cooperate on the hunt, but there is no
punishment for laggards,’’ Dr. Hauser said.
The moral grammar now universal among people presumably evolved to its final
shape during the hunter-gatherer phase of the human past, before the
dispersal from the ancestral homeland in northeast Africa some 50,000
years ago. This may be why events before our eyes carry far greater moral
weight than happenings far away, Dr. Hauser believes, since in those days
one never had to care about people remote from one’s environment.
Dr. Hauser believes that the moral grammar may have evolved through the
evolutionary mechanism known as group selection. A group bound by altruism
toward its members and rigorous discouragement of cheaters would be more
likely to prevail over a less cohesive society, so genes for moral grammar
would become more common.
Many evolutionary biologists frown on the idea of group selection, noting that
genes cannot become more frequent unless they benefit the individual who
carries them, and a person who contributes altruistically to people not
related to him will reduce his own fitness and leave fewer offspring.
But though group selection has not been proved to occur in animals, Dr. Hauser
believes that it may have operated in people because of their greater
social conformity and willingness to punish or ostracize those who disobey
moral codes.
‘‘That permits strong group cohesion you don’t see in other animals, which may
make for group selection,’’ he said.
His proposal for an innate moral grammar, if people pay attention to it, could
ruffle many feathers. His fellow biologists may raise eyebrows at
proposing such a big idea when much of the supporting evidence has yet to
be acquired. Moral philosophers may not welcome a biologist’s bid to annex
their turf, despite Dr. Hauser’s expressed desire to collaborate with
them.
Nevertheless, researchers’ idea of a good hypothesis is one that generates
interesting and testable predictions. By this criterion, the proposal of
an innate moral grammar seems unlikely to disappoint.
Drawings (Drawings by Harry Campbell)(pgs. F1, F6) Copyright 2006 The New
York Times Company. All Rights Reserved.
