Are We Hardwired To Be Moral?

Lightkeeper · #1 (**permalink**) 9th March 2007, 12:04 AM

Quote:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/31/he...gy/31book.html

October 31, 2006
Books on Science
An Evolutionary Theory of Right and Wrong
By NICHOLAS WADE
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.

What do you think?

**Rev. Kelly** · #2 (**permalink**) 9th March 2007, 12:54 AM

If morality is genetic, how come we have so many murders? rapists? theives? If morality is genetic how come some days it is a struggle to live morally? I don't think that morality is genetic, but it is something we strive to be.

scitsofreaky · #3 (**permalink**) 10th March 2007, 01:35 AM

I doubt that something like specific morals is genetic (I could be wrong, obviously). But we are social animals, and it is logical that we are genetically predisposed for social life, which includes morals.

ShyLady · #4 (**permalink**) 5th April 2007, 06:13 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rev. Kelly

If morality is genetic, how come we have so many murders? rapists? theives? If morality is genetic how come some days it is a struggle to live morally? I don't think that morality is genetic, but it is something we strive to be.

I don't think morality is genetic either. I just know too many bad people and children who grow up around bad situations and while they have some good in them and the wanna do good, they always wind up messing up and not being able to do the right thing. Me for one...

Eolas Pellor · #5 (**permalink**) 11th May 2007, 04:04 PM

Quote:

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?

So wrote Nicholas Wade, paraphrasing Dr Hauser....

The problem is, this is a bad example; it is an extreme case and extreme cases make for poor lessons. How many of us would ever be in such a situation? What are we to infer from a pronouncement made now, in the cool, clam, collected nature of a forum? And what are we to make of the instant decision (or, more likely, non-decision) made by some poor sap who finds himself in such a situation??

Morality and ethics cover the normal range of human experiences and situations, not the exceptional... in exceptional situations, exceptional decisions must be made, but we can infer nothing from those decisions about how we should live our lives or treat others in normal situations.

Now, as to whether or not we "naturally" possess a moral snes, I think we most likely do. Humans are a social ape and, like any social animal, we must conform to group expectations if we are to survive as part of the group. because our relationships and range of activity are somehwta more complicated than ants, for example, we call that normative aquiescence to group expectations morality, rather than instinct. But, in either case, it is an adaptive necessity for being a gregarious social species.

That the basic, instinctual if you will, morality can be refined is I think also obvious.... and not all refinements lead to the same end product. But that doesn't mean the predisposition isn't there.

MCrusader5 · #6 (**permalink**) 17th July 2007, 11:57 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rev. Kelly

If morality is genetic, how come we have so many murders? rapists? theives? If morality is genetic how come some days it is a struggle to live morally? I don't think that morality is genetic, but it is something we strive to be.

No I think morality is genetic. Genetic predisposition is not slavery.

We are predisposed to be hungry and eat until we are full but some eat less and some eat more.

We are predisposed to care for children but some can abuse them. We are predisposed to want o mate but ome become celibate.

To understand this go to the top of a ver tall building and look over the edge that funny fear you get is genetics. But marveling at it is th mind controllling genetics.

I think following our drive to be moral despite pressures against it IS something we strive for. I think if we werent at least somewhat predisposed to be moral then we would ALL frequently be takaing the path of least resistence and the world would be EVEN uglier than it has been.

Many other evils would have never been abolished in my country(US) because frankly they served the interests of the perpretrators.

I think the idea that morality does NOT have a gentic component slumps towards hobbeism.

**RevKathyV** · #7 (**permalink**) 18th July 2007, 02:10 AM

We are predisposed to being loving and kind because of who we are...hiers of God...we have God within so we are born with those qualities within us.. Through life we just get buried by crap which makes us lose sight of who we are and what we have inside us....

aged hippy · #8 (**permalink**) 19th July 2007, 11:28 AM

I'm not sure if we're hardwired to be moral, it seems to me that morality is a human judgement, in that we decide what is moral and what is immoral, and some of us have pretty narrow definitions.

I do feel that altruism is an intrinsic part of us, though, in the sense of helping another creature of our own, or another species, whether or not it results in any form of gain for ourselves.
But that's not morality. It's called "doing the right thing".

Peace, Love, & Light

vivamis123 · #9 (**permalink**) 19th July 2007, 01:12 PM

I don't know if we are born with moral, but there is something born inside of us that helps us to discern between good and bad. Why does helping others feel good? Why does love feel good? Why do we hurt when we see others being hurt?

I think if a child were brought up by robots, he/she would be much less emotional, so some behavior is adapted from those around us. I don't believe thiefs, murderers, rapists are born into this world that way, I think it has to do with their upbringen and the conclusions they arrive to from their upbringen.

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