Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong

Marc D. Hauser sums up a wealth of findings on our moral status quo collected by evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology and developmental psychology and he does this in a very readable manner. Then and now he also throws a sidelong glance on culturally determined varieties of morals. Altruistic impulses and behavior can be proved to have a far-reaching cross-cultural statistical homogeneity. On request we come up with moral judgments and decisions spontaneously following intuitions. Rational deliberation and justification limps behind - as far as individuals are able to provide it at all. Thus we are allowed to assume a universal moral grammar in analogy to linguistic universal grammar. From the fact that we are natural moral beings Hauser concludes that the "marriage between morality and religion is not only forced but unnecessary, crying out for a divorce." (p. XX) On the other hand he presents experiments which demonstrate that moral reactions and norms originating in bygone sociocultural conditions (as those of a nomadic or livestock herders society) keep influencing behaviour for generations after fundamental change in society has occurred. A warning for all euphorics of enlightenment and rapid political progress. But on the whole the book tilts a little bit to much to the optimistic side as far as moral naturalism is concerned. Hausers point of view is somewhat concentrated on the lab perspective. He describes the well-known harrowing Milgram experiments on authority. But he doesn't really take into account that aggression and violence can grasp whole societies under unfavourable conditions. A critical stadium of such a development passed there remains no adequate reward for peaceful behaviour and altruism. And all this is also part and consequence of our nature, our "moral minds". Hauser hardly touches the psychology of historic moral catastrophes. A comparable good book on the sociocultural status quo of our morals widely considering history would still have to be written by somebody who is able to take into account evolutionary psychology as well. This would provide a still broader and more realistic overview of our human "Is of the Ought". And beyond begins the task of philosophy (which no doubt religion is unable to complete): To which extent can empirically tested dispositions of our universal grammar be justified? How do we justify our choice among the various offers and claims of "ought"?

If an ethical theory is to be useful and applicable to everyday life, its foundations must be drawn from human experiences, from what a human being has actually faced and might face in the real world. If this is not done, then it is merely a philosophical construction, and will lose itself in the gigantic conceptual spaces constructed by philosophical speculation. Ethical thought experiments are therefore to be avoided at all costs, as they complicate the issues at hand and make it appear that ethical reasoning is only proper in literary or verbal channels. It may be interesting or fun to debate hypothetical ethical dilemmas, but if there is not even one historical example that illustrate these dilemmas, their value for ethics is completely vitiated. The author of this book unfortunately makes use of several hypothetical ethical dilemmas to assist in building his case for a theory of ethics that could, following the same nomenclature in linguistics, be described as `generative'. Therefore, moral reasoning, like language, is the result of a particular ability of the human mind (brain) and as such is universal in its grammatical patterns, even though these patterns can vary over geographical location and be parametrized by different cultures. Morality is instinctual, the author argues, and it is unaffected by the dictates of both religion and governmental institutions. The moral grammar that the author discusses, and his arguments to support it, is of course very analogous to the generative grammar of Chomskian linguistics. He even gives an analogue of the famous `poverty of the stimulus' argument of Noam Chomsky, in that he asks whether the environment contains enough information to construct a moral grammar. This hypothesis may at first sight appear radical, and in the jacket of the book and in the author's prologue it is advertised as such. But given the advances in cognitive neuroscience that have taken place in the last fifteen years, it now seems that an ethical theory based on scientific principles is within reach. The author claims that his is such a theory, and he endeavors to justify it with what is known in evolutionary psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and related areas. It is refreshing to hear that the author wants to finally divorce morality and religion, and he feels a sense of urgency in proposing a different outlook on morality. The traditional ones have caused us great trouble, he states emphatically. In general the author presents a fair case for his conception of morality, but there are problems with his approach. The first deals with his use of thought experiments and his insistence, sometimes merely implicit, of the superiority of the moral philosophy of John Rawls. The author views Rawls as being one of the most important contributors to the problem of justice and fairness. The moral/ethical conceptions of Rawls are contrasted with those of Immanuel Kant and David Hume, with the Kantian conception being one characte

The most dangerous question Charles Darwin implied [but didn't ask] was what Nature imposed on humans. It was bad enough for Victorians to be confronted with the idea of an ape-like ancestor. If this was so, what did it say about our sense of values? Whatever else Darwin challenged about our fixed notions of who we are, that one remains in central place. There have been several attempts recently to address the question. Marc Hauser's is not only the most recent, but perhaps the most thorough, of these efforts. In this gracefully written account, he takes us through his reasoning and the evidence supporting it. Following his earlier "Wild Minds" on other animals, Hauser turns to what makes up human values and how they're achieved. To anyone understanding the process of natural selection, the idea of "morals" as the product of evolution should be a given. Unsatisfied with assumptions, Hauser collects a wealth of information in support of how we derive our values. He sets the data against some "standard" views of what is right and proper behaviour. Drawing on well-known thinkers, he synopsises their views into fabricated entities: the Kantian, Humean, and Rawlsian "creatures". Each represents a different approach in determining what is "fair" and just in the works of Immanuel Kant, David Hume and John Rawls [Hauser provides little cartoon figures as visual aids to help remember these. The publisher had the wit to keep these minimally sized.]. As might be expected, none of these stances are absolutes, and Hauser often confronts us with amalgamations of the positions. What's important isn't the melding itself, but why it has taken place. As humans, we can avoid absolutes and do so on a daily basis. There is, however, a mechanism that was built up over the millennia of our evolutionary track, providing the common foundation for these decisions and our ability to rationalise them. "Morality", he argues derives from what humans consider "fair" in our interactions with each other. Making the judgement of what is "fair" is an example of how humans break rigid biological bonds which is, in large part, what distinguishes us from others in the animal kingdom. There are fundamentally common aspects to our sense of what is "moral", but there are also variants, generally culturally based. The commonalities we observe are related, in Hauser's view, to Noam Chomsky's "language module". Dubbing it a "moral organ", he's careful not to assign it specific location or even clear function, but it must be an aspect of how our brains consider the world and our place in it. The pivotal element in his analysis is "The Trolley Test". This classic example pits the lives of five people against one. How are the five to be saved? Are you responsible for the one if you divert the trolley that takes her life? What optional versions provide further insights into what we consider valuable in our interpersonal relations? And, for this study, what is the un

When Darwin discovered natural selection, he was quick and remarkably insightful as to how this might affect our understanding of our own species, Homo sapiens. Alfred Russel Wallace, the impressive co-discover of the theory, never agreed to its application to humans. He considered our mental faculties far too advanced to be accounted for by the same forces that gave rise to pond scum and even chimpanzees. The debate continues to this very day, and will not be resolved in the forseeable future. Nevertheless, there is now little doubt but that we share many of our mental faculties with other species, including, as Marc Hauser shows us in this fine volume, some of our moral capacities. Even those we do not share with our evolutionary relatives, he claims, are clearly the product of biological evolutionary forces. I think his argument accurately reflects our current state of knowledge, and is impressive indeed. Sociobiology, which was roundly rejected and indeed excoriate by most behavioral scientists when first proposed by Edward O. Wilson in 1975, has been fully vindicated. The past decade has seen a strong push for the notion that ethics is a part of science, and the philosophy of ethics, in principle, ought not to be that different from the philosophy of physics. In particular, our ethical notions do not come from some rarified Platonic realm, or the capacity to perceive synthetic a prioris, or our superior informational processing power, but rather from our evolution as a species that has spend most of its history living in small bands of mobile, propertyless, stateless, hunter-gatherers. Hauser deals with our current understanding of virtally all aspects of the mental life of humans, cognitive, affective, and moral, and he consistently weaves an intellectual web in which the mental capacities of animals and humans are inextricably interwoven. His specific claim, and unique to my knowledge, is that we can understand human morality in much the same manner as we have come to understand human language, based on the work of Chomsky and his coworkers. Humans are genetically endowed with a universal moral grammar, a tool kit for building specific human moralities, the latter being the product of cultural specificity. Thus, just as we cannot understand a foreign tongue, so we cannot appreciate a foreign morality, even though we know it springs from the same basic human capacities. I think the analogy of ethics with language is a fruitful one, and well argued by Hauser on the basis of the facts (e.g., people cannot defend their ethical beliefs any more than they can explain the rules of grammar that they follow, unless they have been trained to do so). I am less sure that it is true. This is because the actual content of ethical principles is largely the same across all societies, and certainly across major religious and cultural groups (see Donald Brown, Human Universals, and Hauser's discussion of religion, pp. 421ff). We humans certainly can amp