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Authors: Nicholas Wade

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Subjects were next asked to consider Fred’s dilemma. Fred is standing on a bridge above the railroad tracks. He can save the five people on the track ahead by throwing a heavy object down in the train’s path and slowing it. just such an object is standing beside him. It’s a thick-set man. Can Fred push the man in the train’s path, killing him to save the five?
Only 10 percent of the respondents to Hauser’s survey thought it was OK for Fred to kill the man.
Then came the interesting question: Why is Denise’s action OK but Fred’s not, when the practical outcome in both cases is identical—one life lost to save five?
Some 70 percent of the subjects were unable to give any plausible reason for the distinction. “The fact that most people have no idea why they draw a distinction between these cases reinforces the point that people tend to make moral judgments without being aware of the underlying principles,” Hauser writes.
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He also notes the problem posed by this result for those who think that all morality is taught. For if people cannot articulate the reasons for their moral decisions, how can they teach them?
The beauty of the trolley problems is that they capture moral intuition at work in ways for which the moral reasoning process
is unable to invent a plausible explanation. This gives a deep insight into the hidden rules by which the moral intuitive process operates.
Hauser and his colleagues have described three of these rules, which they call the contact principle, the intention principle and the action principle. (Philosophers have described them under other names.)
The contact principle is perhaps the most fascinating because it seems the most primitive. It is simply a taboo on causing bodily harm to anyone. It was presumably engraved in the mind’s neural circuits long before the invention of spears or arrows that allowed people to be killed at a distance. The contact principle may also underlie the reason why moral situations before our eyes are more compelling than those at a distance. If we see a child injured by the roadside, we know we must stop and help. But if we see an advertisement soliciting funds to repair a child’s harelip in faraway places, it’s permissible to turn the page.
The contact principle explains part of the reason why in Fred’s moral dilemma, people say it’s wrong for him to push the thick-set man onto the tracks to save the five. In Denise’s dilemma, her actions led to the death of the hiker on the side-track, but there was no personal contact between her and the person killed.
Another insight into the contact principle is to assume, in Fred’s dilemma, that all the people but Fred have been replaced with chimpanzees. Is it OK for Fred to push a fat chimp off the bridge to save five chimps on the track? Most people say it’s OK. The taboo of killing a person with one’s bare hands is no longer evoked. Curiously, when subjects were asked why they judged Denise’s action OK but not Fred’s, several mentioned the fact of physical contact but rejected it as sufficient reason for the distinction. “Subjects were typically able to articulate the relevant principle used, but unwilling to endorse it as morally valid,” Hauser writes.
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Another hidden rule of intuitive morality, the intention principle, can be discerned in Denise’s and Fred’s dilemmas. Denise foresaw that the hiker on the side-track would be killed, but didn’t intend it. The hiker’s death was a foreseen consequence but not the desired outcome of her action. Whereas Fred, if he pushes the thick-set man into the train’s path, intends the man’s death or, at the very least, must include the likelihood of the man’s death in his intended act. The moral intuitive process clearly makes a distinction between intended harm, which is not OK, and merely foreseen harm, which may be justifiable. The complexity of this distinction, which most people cannot articulate, suggests an innate rule at work, one to which the conscious mind has no more access than to the rules that generate grammatical sentences.
A third hidden rule, the action principle, is that harms caused by positive action are deemed worse than those caused by omission, or not acting. Suppose Fred has a lever that drops the thick-set man onto the tracks in front of the train. (The lever arrangement is to avoid triggering the intuitive contact principle.) Then there is Jeff, whose lever does t
he opposite—it prevents the thick-set man’s otherwise inevitable fall onto the tracks. Fred’s action in pulling the lever, and Jeff’s failure to do so, have precisely the same effect—the thick-set man is killed but the five are saved. Nonetheless, people judge Jeff’s omission far more acceptable than Fred’s action. In this case, however, most subjects can articulate the intuitive principle at work.
The moral intuitive process equips everyone with the neural machinery for making instant moral decisions, without review by the moral reasoning apparatus. It is easy to see how advantageous such a system would have been in days when our ancestors were hunter gatherers and had to make life-or-death decisions in a split second. This instantaneous process is useful in today’s societies too. The social fabric is surely stronger if everyone has immediate knowledge of what is right and wrong.
But doesn’t the possession of an instantaneous moral decision-making machinery, inaccessible to the conscious mind, make a person into a contemptible robot? Not really; an individual can always ignore the machinery’s prompting. Also, the moral intuitive process, as mentioned above, is shaped by culture, meaning the education and moral instruction a person receives in childhood. Religion plays a central role here, as described in the next chapter. So do a child’s peers and parents. All these influences are working to shape a set of innate moral behaviors to each society’s particular values.
These values are set by tradition and ultimately by the collective behavior required for each society to survive in its particular environment. They may therefore vary from one society to another. Human nature, generally thought of as being the same everywhere, must depend more on the constant features of every society’s moral behavior, and therefore on the innate moral behaviors. What are these behaviors and where do they come from?
The Origin of Moral Sentiments
Darwin, in his book
The Descent of Man,
published in 1871, devoted two chapters to the evolution of morality. His arguments were long dismissed by many biologists, but they anticipated much of what is current wisdom today.
Darwin argued that sociality arose as a defense against predators, and that animals that banded together for this purpose would need to moderate their behavior toward one another. “All animals living in a body, which defend themselves or attack their enemies in concert, must indeed be in some degree faithful to one another; and those that follow a leader must be in some degree obedient,” he wrote.
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The social instincts would develop from simple emotions like the parent-child bond, Darwin argued, and any social animal would
acquire morality once it had evolved sufficient intellectual powers. He saw no discontinuity between the social instincts in animals and in people but in human societies, he assumed, the instincts would be enhanced by people’s desire for the approval of their peers, and the “remorse, repentance, regret or shame” that follows on forfeiting the good opinion of one’s peers.
Darwin then raised the problem that an altruistic person who gave his life for his community would leave no children, or at any rate fewer than less heroic people. So how could the inherited character of altruistic behavior ever become more common?
The biologist William Hamilton answered the question a century later, at least for small communities of related individuals. In his theory of kin selection, Hamilton explained that getting your relatives’ genes into the next generation was just as advantageous, as far as natural selection is concerned, as passing on your own genes. So since your brother has on average half of the same genes as you do, you could get your genes for altruism into the next generation by saving two brothers’ lives just as well as by saving your own.
But Darwin’s answer, despite Hamilton’s more specific formulation, is still of great interest. First, Darwin wrote that “To do good unto others—to do unto others as ye would they should do unto you—is the foundation-stone of morality.” A man who sacrificed his life following this principle would be widely admired and inspire valor in other members of his tribe. “He might thus do far more good to his tribe than by begetting offspring with a tendency to inherit his own high character,” Darwin wrote.
The second part of Darwin’s answer raised an issue now known as group selection, the idea that genes can become more common if they confer a benefit on groups of people rather than just individuals. Darwin did not know of the existence of genes, so could not have formulated the problem to himselfin those specific terms. Nonetheless, he described a process which, if it occurs, shows immediately how the genes underlying morality and other aspects of human sociality could have become common.
But Darwin’s insight was dismissed for more than a century because of several intellectual blinders that have begun to fall only in recent years.
First, people did not want to abandon the idea that morality is the bright line that separates people from animals. Darwin’s idea that there was a continuum of the social instincts from social animals to man cut right through that line. Even biologists didn’t like the idea that morality had been shaped by natural selection. If morality had a genetic basis, it must have arisen as an unintended by-product of some other process, they argued. “I account for morality as an accidental capability produced, in its boundless stupidity, by a biological process that is normally opposed to the expression of such a capability,” wrote George Williams, a leading evolutionary biologist, in 1988.
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Second, the idea that natural selection works at the level of groups has been rejected by most evolutionary biologists, largely under the influence
of George Williams. He argued that selection of genes through the individuals who carry them was far more likely and should be assumed as a matter
of principle unless there was strong evidence to the contrary.
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So though group selection might be theoretically possible, he contended that “group-related adaptations do not, in fact, exist.”
Darwin’s thesis about the evolution of morality raises a seriously disturbing possibility. He is saying that morality, viewed by some as man’s noblest achievement, arose from warfare, the least noble, and that the brisker the pace of warfare the more rapidly would morality have blossomed. This suggests that people were highly aggressive in the distant past, an implication that has raised a third mental block. Many social scientists are reluctant to believe that people were more violent in the past than they are today. Archaeologists, seeking to avoid glorification of war, have contrasted the carnage of modern wars to the peaceable behavior of human foragers before agriculture and the birth of cities. Only recently has a careful survey shown how constant and merciless was the warfare between pre-state societies, much of it aimed at annihilating the opponent.
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A fourth obstacle to understanding the evolutionary nature of m
orality has been the insistence by researchers who study animal
behavior that it was fallacious to attribute complex emotions to them, especially p
ositive ones. The primatologist Frans de Waal reports that in h
is studies of peacemaking among chimpanzees he was instructed t
o use dehumanized language. A reconciliation, sealed with a kiss, had to be describe
d as a “post-conflict interaction involving mouth-to-mouth contact.”
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Given the evolutionary closeness of humans and chimpanzees, de Waal considered that the two species were likely to have similar emotions. Excessive fear of anthropomorphism had long stifled research on animal emotions, in his view. It also prevented biologists from acknowledging the continuum of social instincts that Darwin recognized between social animals and people.
After decades of neglect because of these various intellectual road-blocks, the evolutionary origin of morality has been slowly resurrected as a fit subject of research. William Hamilton’s theory of kin selection explained how altruism could evolve in kin-based societies, like those of the social insects. Another biologist, Robert Trivers, showed how, even in groups of individuals who were not related to one another, natural selection could favor reciprocal altruism—doing someone a favor on the assumption it would be paid back later. These ideas were developed by Edward O. Wilson in his landmark 1975 book
Sociobiology
and extended from animals to people. “The requirement for an evolutionary approach to ethics is self-evident,” he wrote.
Sociobiology,
though intended by its author as merely a synthesis of new biological ideas, posed a political challenge to Marxists and much of the academic left. It showed how the human mind was not a blank slate, on which governments could write whatever ideological prescriptions they
wished in order to shape Socialist Man, but was already shaped or predisposed by evolution to behave in certain ways. Wilson’s book was assailed by Marxist colleagues at Harvard, such as the geneticist Richard Lewontin. Students disrupted Wilson’s lectures and harassed even Hamilton and Trivers. Researchers dared not use the word
sociobiology,
even if they agreed with its ideas, lest they be caught up in the furor. Sociobiology, as applied to people, is now pursued mostly under the name of evolutionary psychology.
Richard Alexander, after the storm over
Sociobiology
had settled, was one of the first biologists to resume the study of morality. Human
ancestors lived in groups, he argued in a book published in 1987, as a defense agai
nst other human groups, and warfare had been a major influence
in human evolution. Usually predators find it most efficient to live in small groups
(wolves, lions, killer whales) while it is prey animals that c
ongregate in large herds for defense. But humans departed from
this rule, probably because their most feared enemies were other human groups. Inces
sant warfare led to selection for greater social complexity and
intelligence, and the larger societies required ever greater self-constraint to avo
id infringing on other individuals’ interests, Alexander argued. “The function or
raison d’ être
of moral systems is evidently to provide the unity required to
enable the group to compete successfully with other human grou
ps. Only in humans is the major hostile force of life composed
of other groups in the same species,” he wrote.
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BOOK: The Faith Instinct
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