Marc Hauser's "Moral Minds"

Discover magazine has interviewed Marc Hauser about his book Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong. The magazine opened up its website to non-subscribers for a limited time, so you can read the interview here.

Hauser's thesis is that empirically observable facts about human moral reasoning show that evolution has hard-wired us for moral reasoning, much of it on an unconscious level:

"Millions of years of natural selection have molded a universal moral grammar within our brains that enables us to make rapid decisions about ethical dilemmas."

Hauser bases this on:

• Near-universal cross-cultural agreement on solutions to certain ethical dilemmas

• Evidence that much ethical reasoning happens on an unconscious level

• Evidence that some kinds of moral decisions are readily amenable to authoritarian influence, and others are not

• Certain moral principles--the Golden Rule in one form or another--seem to be held almost universally

• Statistically, there is no difference between religions in how people answer objective tests of moral reasoning

• A parallel can be drawn with Noam Chomsky's ideas of a universal, hard-wired-in-the-brain basis for linguistic grammar

What's fascinating about this is that C. S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity, used almost exactly the same kind of data (except the last point) as evidence we all have a universal moral sense given by God.

It seems plausible that moral universals must lead us to either one conclusion or the other: evolution or God. They must come from somewhere. Hauser seems to have validated what Lewis also believed, that cultural transmission cannot be the whole answer. Now, many of us come to this with our opinions already in place. I'm convinced that God is real, so I'm very skeptical of Hauser's explanations. A committed evolutionist almost has to take the opposite position: evolution explains everything, so it must explain this as well; and Hauser's contribution amounts to a fascinating refinement of theory, not anything revolutionary.

But in my case it was questions like these that helped lead me to believe in Jesus Christ. I was a freshman at college, newly freed from my parents' oversight, able for the first time to do pretty much whatever I wanted. I had no church commitments or even any leanings toward church. In fact, my whole experience in the church where I grew up was fairly rotten through my high school years. I had tried being a Christian, it wasn't working for me, and I wasn't seeing anything particularly attractive in it for me.

I was free to be whatever kind of person I chose to be. It hit me that if there was no God, then there really were no limits at all to what I could choose, just as long as I could manage the consequences. I wasn't about to do anything that would get me jailed or kicked out of school. But without a God, the only restraints I had would be things like jail and expulsion. There was nothing transcendent to rule me; and whatever internal rules I set for myself, whatever I had from my upbringing, I could decide to change any time I wanted.

Without a God, there could be no right or wrong, only consequences. And that didn't make sense. After years since then of study in various approaches to ethics, it still doesn't. Let's go back to the Hauser interview and see how that plays out once again.

Hauser tells the interviewer, Josie Glausiusz, about studies showing that schoolchildren take it in stride if the teacher says, "Today you don't need to raise your hand; just ask your question. In France they don't raise their hands, and for us today that will be okay." But they object--they say it's wrong--if the teacher says, "Today if you're annoyed by the child next to you, just punch him. That's what they do in France." The students just don't accept it.

Glausiusz pushes Hauser a few steps further. She asks him about societies that allow intentional murder, like honor killings of adulterous wives. Hauser can't say it's wrong. In some cultures,

"there are rules for permissible killing. Who does the killing is simply a parameter in that space of permissibility.

...

"Let's go back to language. You're a speaker of English. In French, the world [sic] 'table' is feminine. Why? Isn't that weird? Isn't that incomprehensible?... Yet are the French weird? THey're not weird. They speak another language.

"The analogy to language is to me very profound and important. When you say, 'Look, it's weird that a culture would actually kill someone for infidelity,' it's no different than us making a language that's got these really weird quirks."

The question of honor killing is no different than whether "table" ought to be feminine. By extension, slavery is also no different. Terrorism is no different. Hauser's theory offers no distinction between these levels of moral choices.

Someone is likely to respond here, "Well, the Bible allows killings for reasons we wouldn't approve of today. The Bible condones slavery." Those are interesting and important discussions, and they can be complex, but they're not the subject this time. If it seems like they are, then I haven't been clear enough, so I'm going to make sure that I make the correct point. It's not (in the current discussion) what constitutes right and wrong. It's whether there is any such thing as right and wrong. If honor killing, slavery, and terrorism are on the same level as grammar, then there is no right and wrong.

We've been through this discussion here before, where some have said, "that's fine." I admit that I can't prove from this direction of inquiry that there is a right or a wrong. I can only say that if you believe there is such a thing as right and wrong, then you cannot settle for an explanation on Hauser's level.

And if you ever catch yourself saying of some act of terrorism, rape, murder, theft, discrimination, or whatever, "That's wrong!" then I submit that you actually do believe there is such a thing as right and wrong.

Posted: Tue - May 15, 2007 at 01:33 PM |

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson getCategoryName("<$CategoryUUID$>");

Marc Hauser's "Moral Minds"

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson