An Evolutionary Theory of Right and Wrong

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[From NYT]October 31, 2006Books on ScienceAn Evolutionary Theory of Right and WrongBy NICHOLAS WADEWho 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.Many people cannot articulate the foreseen/intended distinction, Dr. Hauser says, a sign that it is being made at inaccessible levels of the mind. This inability challenges the general belief that moral behavior is learned. For if people cannot articulate the foreseen/intended distinction, how can they teach it?Dr. Hauser began his research career in animal communication, working with vervet monkeys in Kenya and with birds. He is the author of a standard textbook on the subject, “The Evolution of Communication.” He began to take an interest in the human animal in 1992 after psychologists devised experiments that allowed one to infer what babies are thinking. He found he could repeat many of these experiments in cotton-top tamarins, allowing the cognitive capacities of infants to be set in an evolutionary framework.His proposal of a moral grammar emerges from a collaboration with Mr. Chomsky, who had taken an interest in Dr. Hauser’s ideas about animal communication. In 2002 they wrote, with Dr. Tecumseh Fitch, an unusual article arguing that the faculty of language must have developed as an adaptation of some neural system possessed by animals, perhaps one used in navigation. From this interaction Dr. Hauser developed the idea that moral behavior, like language behavior, is acquired with the help of an innate set of rules that unfolds early in a child’s development.Social animals, he believes, possess the rudiments of a moral system in that they can recognize cheating or deviations from expected behavior. But they generally lack the psychological mechanisms on which the pervasive reciprocity of human society is based, like the ability to remember bad behavior, quantify its costs, recall prior interactions with an individual and punish offenders. “Lions cooperate on the hunt, but there is no punishment for laggards,” Dr. Hauser said.The moral grammar now universal among people presumably evolved to its final shape during the hunter-gatherer phase of the human past, before the dispersal from the ancestral homeland in northeast Africa some 50,000 years ago. This may be why events before our eyes carry far greater moral weight than happenings far away, Dr. Hauser believes, since in those days one never had to care about people remote from one’s environment.Dr. Hauser believes that the moral grammar may have evolved through the evolutionary mechanism known as group selection. A group bound by altruism toward its members and rigorous discouragement of cheaters would be more likely to prevail over a less cohesive society, so genes for moral grammar would become more common.Many evolutionary biologists frown on the idea of group selection, noting that genes cannot become more frequent unless they benefit the individual who carries them, and a person who contributes altruistically to people not related to him will reduce his own fitness and leave fewer offspring.But though group selection has not been proved to occur in animals, Dr. Hauser believes that it may have operated in people because of their greater social conformity and willingness to punish or ostracize those who disobey moral codes.“That permits strong group cohesion you don’t see in other animals, which may make for group selection,” he said.His proposal for an innate moral grammar, if people pay attention to it, could ruffle many feathers. His fellow biologists may raise eyebrows at proposing such a big idea when much of the supporting evidence has yet to be acquired. Moral philosophers may not welcome a biologist’s bid to annex their turf, despite Dr. Hauser’s expressed desire to collaborate with them.Nevertheless, researchers’ idea of a good hypothesis is one that generates interesting and testable predictions. By this criterion, the proposal of an innate moral grammar seems unlikely to disappoint.

That was quite an interesting read. I never did get what makes some people think atheists are immoral...my parents definitely werent the most religious people in the world, but i still turned out just fine, more or less. I remember getting the trolley question when I was a kid, but I dont remember the point the teacher or whoever askes us was trying to make.

This is not totally new - I recall a discussion many years ago about how evolutionary selection could select for moral codes, given that they would disadvantage individuals who have them over those who don't. The answer seemed to be group selection as mentioned here, and software simulations using large numbers of Prisoner's Dilemma interactions supported a code of "do-as-you-would-be-done-by" followed by "done-by-as-you-did" (borrowing terms from The Water Babies).These discussions implied a genetic moral code, so that's not a new idea.But it brings up a deeper issue. If one's moral code is merely the way one's brain pushes one, can the individual reasonably ignore it when it disadvantages him? I know the community will find it unacceptable, but suppose the community will never know. If my disapproval of the idea of murdering Aunt Ethel for her inheritance is merely inherited DNA, and an opportunity for murdering her undetectably arises, would doing so be similar to (say) deciding not to eat when I felt hungry?

Ha, you fool! This theory is so flawed! It is based on the misguided belief in evolution, something that we disproved many many years ago and just don't have time to go over again...

No it's not a new idea, but the explanation through a "moral grammar", incorporating some of Chomsky's linguistic ideas, is new
@The Politically sensitive: For the politically sensitive: before Noam Chomsky became politically active, he did some fundamental, groundbreaking work in lingustics, with the introduction of universal (context-free) grammars. The idea has important application in human _and_ computer languages.
@Bob: You speak with the tongue of a Norse god.

this is a fascinating concept.I've always maintained that both religious and legal codes of conduct had more to do with inherant social wisdom than the word of god. To further extrapolate it as a group selected genetic trait makes some sense.

Has anyone ever read "Lord of the Flies"?

sure did. i had to for school. great book too

of course... it was an excellent work of fiction. A very good story

I'd ask anybody who claims morality is genetic and evolutionary to explains folks like Hitler. It seems that "morality" can be strongly influenced by just one person should said person decide to make an issue of it...and not always for the better (devolution?)

It is part of our genetics (and that of every creature that I know of) to sustain our own lives, yet we have people who commit suicide. It is in our DNA to grow legs, yet some people don't. There are genetic abnormalities and differences in everyone, sometimes they can be stringer or more obvious than others.And why do you keep highlighting works of fiction? "Lord of the Flies", "I, Robot", "The Island"...

wasn't Hitler a good church going lad?

...and what?

well, seriously, you can't just invoke the name of Hitler to prove that humans don't have a genetic moral code. Nor can I say that Hitler, being a religious man proves that relegion in inherently evil.

Hitler was just one example of how, in spite of genetic disposition one way or the other, social morals can be changed (when NOT rooted in something other than personal preference) as does the wind.Going to church does not make one a good Christian...or even, necessarily, religious. (Note that "Christian" and "religious" are not the same thing.) Following Christ and the Bible is what makes one a good Christian. BTW, I think Hitler was Catholic...though I might be wrong on that.

No comments on my last paragraph, Steve? I think it's an example of the philosophical is-ought problem.

all living creatures are subject to genetic abborations.actually, I'm not even 100% convinced of this genetic moral code theory, but it's fascinating. You can't honestly attribute all morality to religion, can you? Where do the kind athiests come from?

Hitler didn't so much change morals as he did give direction. He created a hatred towards other nationalities, convincing people that they were the enemies of the Germans, particularily Jews. It is natural for a person to show hatred and distrust of people they consider enemies, he just gave them a messed up idea of who their enemies are. He also rallied people together and made them feel united, inspiring hope in the German people and the idea of helping your group or clan extended to a nationalistic feeling of Germany as a united group of people, and thus these people's morals told them that all Germans (of German origin) were people of their own to be helped and trusted.He didn't change people's moral values, he just directed their morals by influencing their perceived goals, friends, and enemies through intellectual means like propaganda and rallies.

I don't know about that RobBob. Others would argue organised killing of people and treating them like something below animals is not within our current morals (or the morals of that time pre-war).For history this year I read a lot of first hand accounts of holocaust survivors (from Jews, Germans, Poles etc.). A lot of them did seem to justify themselves with the self-preservation argument. How truthful that is, who knows. But a lot of it did make sense, in that you have to kill someone to stay alive.

That's true, the self preservation part makes a lot of sense, but to go as far as to create camps for the purpose of eliminating massive numbers of people is very questionable morally, whether they're your enemy or not.Perhaps it's because the orders were passed down from individuals who didn't have to witness the atrocity or who had weak personal judgement, and the individuals committing the acts were driven by both their hate of a perceived enemy and because it's their order to do so. In the army, you may not want to run with an extremely heavy sack in the pouring rain, but you will do it anyway for fear of punishment and it's your job, and being seen as weak or not fitting into the group (probably less a reason in that case, but applicable in many other situations). The drive to do what the group does to fit in with your own group of people is definitely something that we feel very strongly, being a group oriented species like other mammals. If you think what you're doing is wrong but you see it happening all around you, and you fear that you'll be the only who feels that way, chances are you'll keep doing what you're doing. This would be especially true in an illiberal society where you fear for more than just your reputation.