Just Babies (23 page)

The fall of reason is particularly dramatic in the study of moral psychology. This is in large part due to the work of the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who in
a classic 2001 paper argued that “moral reasoning does not cause moral judgment; rather, moral reasoning is usually a post hoc construction, generated after a judgment has been reached”; he
claimed that moral intuitions drive moral reasoning “just as surely as a dog wags its tail.”

While nobody is insisting that reason is entirely impotent—Brooks is clear that we can sometimes use our intelligence to override our gut, and Haidt concedes that some experts (such as professional philosophers) do sometimes engage in moral deliberation—the upshot here is that reason is a bit player on the moral stage. This conclusion connects contemporary psychology with an important faction within moral philosophy,
one whose rallying cry comes from David Hume: “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”

I will concede that there is something true about Hume’s claim. As we discussed earlier, without some initial spark of caring, we wouldn’t be moral beings in the first place. Furthermore, some of our moral judgments (like those we explored in
chapter 5
, having to do with disgust and purity) are plainly not the result of reason, and, as Haidt has observed, our explanations for such judgments are often nothing more than post hoc justifications. More generally, many factors influence our judgments and our actions without our even realizing it:
Washing our hands (a reminder of purity) makes us more morally disapproving, and so does the sight of a messy room or the whiff of fart spray.
We are more willing to help others if there is the smell of fresh bread in the air or if we have just found a small sum of money.

But none of this shows that reason is irrelevant. After
all, many moral intuitions
can
be justified. People are not tongue-tied when asked why drunk driving is wrong, or why it is a good thing to hold the door open for someone on crutches. We are not at a loss when asked why it is worse to kill someone than to yell at them, or why it would be wrong for an employer to pay the black workers less than the white ones. If challenged on these points—by a child, say—we would justify them by reference to concerns about harm, fairness, and equity.

And such reasoning does make a difference in the real world. This has been chronicled by various scholars, such as Robert Coles, who studied
the struggles faced by black and white children in the American South during the civil rights movement, and Carol Gilligan, who interviewed
young women deciding whether to get an abortion. Reading their work, we can observe people working to resolve moral problems and can see how this reasoning sometimes drives them toward conclusions that conflict with the views of those around them. Interview studies find that
individuals who are vegetarians for moral reasons have little problem articulating the rationale for their decision, sometimes giving arguments based on the infliction of harm (“Once my eyes were opened to the widespread sadism and torture inflicted upon farm animals, I could never eat another creature again”) and sometimes drawing upon the language of rights (“In all fairness, the rights of animals to live and enjoy their lives must take precedence over our ‘right’ to eat whatever we desire”). When the psychologists Karen Hussar and Paul Harris interviewed forty-eight
six- to ten-year-olds
who became vegetarians in nonvegetarian households, they found that
all
of the children gave moral justifications for their decision.

This sort of deliberation is the stuff of life. Nobody who has ever watched children interact could miss the enthusiasm with which they debate everyday moral dilemmas, arguing about whether a teacher was being cruel when she punished a student or whether it is right to download music without paying for it. And adults, of course, ruminate and worry and argue all the time about the right thing to do—not just when it comes to abortion, capital punishment, and other grand questions of morality and politics, but about more local issues as well: How should we handle our colleague with the drinking problem? What do I do about the relative who is apparently not intending to pay me back the money she owes me? How bad is it if I don’t get my book manuscript to my editor on time?

Moral deliberation is ubiquitous, but psychologists typically overlook it. This is in part because everybody loves counterintuitive findings. Discovering that individuals have moral intuitions that they struggle to explain is exciting and can get published in a top journal. Discovering that individuals have moral intuitions that they can easily explain, such as the wrongness of drunk driving, is obvious, uninteresting, and unpublishable. It is fascinating to discover that individuals who are asked to assign a punishment to a criminal are influenced by factors that they are unaware of (like the presence of a flag in the room) or that they would consciously disavow (like the color of
the criminal’s skin). It is boring to find that individuals’ proposed punishments are influenced by rational considerations such as the severity of the crime and the criminal’s previous record. Interesting: We are more willing to help someone if there is the smell of fresh bread in the air. Boring: We are more willing to help someone if he or she has been kind to us in the past.

We sometimes forget that this bias in publication exists and take what is reported in scientific journals and the popular press as an accurate reflection of our best science of how the mind works. But this is like watching the nightly news and concluding that rape, robbery, and murder are part of any individual’s everyday life—forgetting that the nightly news doesn’t report the vast majority of cases where nothing of this sort happens at all.

T
HE
capacity for reason takes time to emerge, so the moral life of a baby is necessarily limited. A baby will possess inclinations and sentiments; he or she might be motivated to soothe another in pain or to feel angry at a cruel act or to favor someone who punishes a wrongdoer. But a lot is absent; most of all, the baby lacks a grasp of impartial moral principles—prohibitions or requirements that apply equally to everyone within a community.

Such principles are at the foundation of systems of law and justice. Peter Singer points out that
explicit statements of impartiality show up in every religion and every moral philosophy. They are expressed in the various forms of the Golden Rule, as in Christ’s command, “As you would that
men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise,” or Rabbi Hillel’s statement, “What is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor; that is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary thereof.” When Confucius was asked for a single word that summed up morality, he responded, “Is not reciprocity such a word? What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.” Immanuel Kant proposed as the core of morality: “Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” Adam Smith appealed to the judgment of an impartial spectator as the test of a moral judgment, and Jeremy Bentham argued that, in the moral realm, “each counts for one and none for more than one.” John Rawls suggested that when ruminating about a fair and just society, we should imagine that we are behind a veil of ignorance, not knowing which individual we will end up as, and Henry Sidgwick wrote that “the good of any one individual is of no more importance, from the point of view of the Universe, than the good of any other.”

Singer suggests that the logic of impartiality is a discovery that arises over the course of human history from the need to justify one’s actions to other rational beings. If your explanation for hitting another person is simply “I wanted to,” this is just an expression of selfish desire and carries no weight. What’s so special about you that your pleasure should have priority over the other person’s pain? But responses such as “He hit me first” or “He stole my food” are actual justifications because they imply that anyone in the same situation (including the person you hit) could
have done the same. Singer approvingly quotes Hume here, who notes that someone who is offering a true justification has to “depart from his private and particular situation and must choose a point of view common to him with others.” This is what it means to offer a
reason.
As Pinker puts it, commenting on Singer’s proposal:
“As soon as you try to persuade someone to avoid harming you by appealing to reasons why he shouldn’t, you’re sucked into a commitment to the avoidance of harm as a general goal.”

We’ve been focusing on the specific case of harm, but the logic holds more generally. Individuals who benefit from working together on projects such as big-game hunting or shared child care need to coordinate their behavior, and some people will occasionally have to sacrifice for the greater good. This can succeed only if there are systems of reward and punishment that apply impartially within the community. The need for impartiality is most clear when it comes to the distribution of goods, such as food. If an individual tries to take everything, shouting, “I want it!” the situation devolves into a fight, and everyone is worse off. But statements such as “I want an even share” or “I want more because I worked harder” can be appreciated by rational beings, because, again, these standards, in principle, apply to all of us.

Under this account, impartiality emerges as a reasoned solution to the problem of coordinating the actions of rational and self-interested beings. But empathy might play a role as well. When you take the perspective of others, it becomes clear that your desires are not special. It’s not only that I
don’t want to be harmed, it’s also that
he
doesn’t want to be harmed, and
she
doesn’t want to be harmed, and so on. This can support the generalization that
nobody
wants to be harmed, which can in turn support a broader prohibition against harm.
Empathy and impartiality are often mutually reinforcing: the exercise of empathy makes us realize that we are not special after all, which supports the notion of impartial principles, which motivates us to continue to empathize with other people.

As an example of how empathy and reason work together, consider
parental behaviors that psychologist Martin Hoffman calls
inductions.
These occur when a child has harmed or is about to harm someone, and the parent urges the child to take the victim’s perspective, saying things like “If you throw snow on their walk they will have to clean it up all over again” or “He feels bad because he was proud of his tower and you knocked it down.” Hoffman estimates that children between the ages of two and ten receive about four thousand inductions a year. We can see these as empathetic prods, attempts to get children into the habit of taking the perspective of others. But they also serve as a repeated argument, making the point over and over again to the child:
You are not morally privileged.

Young children are not just passive recipients of moral arguments. They can also generate such arguments, and we see here a sort of recapitulation of how our ancestors might have been forced to appeal to reason to justify their actions. When the psychologists Melanie Killen and Adam Rutland recorded the interactions of a group of
three-and-a-half-year-olds playing alone in a room, with no adults present,
they captured this process of moral persuasion perfectly:

Ruth:
(holding up two Fisher-Price people) Hey, I want the green person. How about if we trade? Here, you can have this one (gives a blue person to Michael). And I can have the green one. Okay? (reaches for the green person that Michael is holding).

Michael:
No! We already did trade. I want this one (holds on to the green one). I want it now and you had it already.

Lily:
Hey, you can both have my spoons, if you want? (shows her spoons to Michael and Ruth).

Ruth:
No, I want the green person.

Michael:
I’m not trading any of mine (hovers over his toys).

Lily:
(sings) I’m not trading any of mine.

Ruth:
(sings) I’m not trading any of mine.

Lily:
Well, that’s not fair because
I
don’t have any people (pouts).

Michael:
(to Ruth) Give her one of them.

Ruth:
But you have three and she has none and I have one. So that’s not fair.

Lily:
Yeah, because I have none.

Ruth:
(to Michael) You know what? If you give me the green and then I’ll give her the red one and then we’ll all have one.

Michael:
Well, if you don’t give me the red one then I won’t invite you to my birthday party.

Lily:
But I don’t have any people.

Ruth:
Okay, I’ll give you this one (to Lily) and I’ll take this one from Michael and then we’ll all have one, okay?

Michael:
(gives orange person to Ruth) Okay, but can we trade again tomorrow?

Ruth:
(sings) Birthday party! (takes the orange person from Michael and gives the red person to Lily).

Lily:
(sings) Birthday party!

Michael:
(sings) Birthday party!

We know from the research reviewed earlier in this book that young children are stingy when asked to distribute resources. They might strongly endorse a principle of equal division when it comes to other people, but when they themselves are in a position to hand out resources, they tend to keep the lion’s share. But we see relatively little stinginess in the interaction between Ruth, Lily, and Michael. They deal well with one another—in large part because they have to. Like Singer’s hypothetical individuals from our distant past, they can’t get away with “I want to”: they are forced to provide, and live up to, objective justifications.