Organic Morality: Our Intuitive Inheritance
In a new book, the Harvard evolutionary psychologist argues that all humans share an innate sense of right and wrong.
Published March 1, 2007
By Laura Buchholz
Academy Contributor
You are in control of a switch at a railroad station. An empty out-of-control train is racing toward five people walking on the tracks. It will hit and kill them unless you pull a lever to switch the train to another track—but there it will kill one person standing on the track. Do you pull the lever? Why? Or why not?
You are an emergency room doctor. Five of your patients urgently need organ transplants in order to live. In the waiting room is a healthy young man with all of the organs necessary to save these five people. Would you sacrifice the life of the man to save your five patients? Why? Or why not?
If you answered “yes” in one case and “no” in the other, what is the difference between the two cases?
Marc D. Hauser, professor of psychology, organismic and evolutionary biology, and biological anthropology at Harvard University, explores how we answer questions like these in his new book, Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong. On January 11, 2007, as part of The New York Academy of Sciences’ (the Academy’s) Readers & Writers series, Hauser explained that moral decision-making may not flow entirely from experience and education, but instead may have a significant biological aspect that has been shaped, like all human traits, by the forces of evolution.
Instinctive Morality
“We are endowed with a moral faculty evolved to generate intuitive judgments of right and wrong,” says Hauser, adding that the principles underlying those intuitive judgments are unconscious, and therefore, may be immune to cultural influence. In other words, Hauser suggests that the influence of Sunday school may pale in comparison to the effect of thousands of years of genetic programming.
Hauser, who directs the Cognitive Evolution Laboratory at Harvard, collects some of his evidence from the Moral Sense Test—a Web site his lab developed, presenting visitors with “artificial dilemmas” designed to test their moral instincts. Working with a data set of responses from 250,000 subjects from 120 different countries, with ages ranging between 13 and 70, and inclusive of all varieties of religion, Hauser’s lab finds some patterns emerging.
Hauser identifies three principles of automatic moral reasoning that transcend religion, geography, age, and culture. The first is the Intention Principle: That is, most people judge it morally worse when harm is intended as a means to an end as compared with when an equivalent harm is foreseen but as a side effect. When Joe intentionally hits John we tend to hold him more responsible than when Joe strikes an object with the foreseen consequence that this object will fall and hit John. According to Hauser, the Intention Principle operates at an unconscious level: When people judge based on this principle, they are not able to say why they made the judgment.
The second principle Hauser calls the Action Principle, and it states that harm caused by action is worse than exactly the same harm caused by omission.
Consider Two Scenarios:
#1: A man intends to kill his young nephew, who stands to inherit all the family wealth. The uncle goes up to the bathroom where the boy is taking a bath, and drowns the boy in the tub.
#2: A man intends to kill his young nephew, who stands to inherit all the family wealth. The uncle goes up to the bathroom where the boy is taking a bath, and finds the nephew drowning face-down in the tub. The man does not intervene, and lets the boy drown.
The effect is the same, but would a jury find the uncle guilty of murder in the second scenario? Probably not. This principle is available at a conscious level, says Hauser, and may explain why societies generally find active euthanasia more morally troubling than passive euthanasia.
Third is the Contact Principle, which states that harm caused by contact is morally worse than equivalent harm caused by non-contact (e.g., when we hit someone vs. seeing an object fly across a room and hit somebody—or the difference between the two introductory scenarios). This third principle is partially available to human consciousness—about half and half, says Hauser.
Remarkably, Hauser notes that subjects who described themselves as highly religious delivered the same judgments as those who said they were not at all religious. These observations suggest that the system that unconsciously generates moral judgments is immune to religious doctrine. But what does this have to do with biology? Hauser draws a parallel between what he calls our “universal moral grammar” and Noam Chomsky’s linguistic theory of universal grammar.
Judgment and Emotions
In Chomsky’s concept, a child knows, in an unconscious sense, the set of principles for all the world’s languages, and the environment feeds her the sound patterns of the native language. Hauser contends that morality is similarly innate. But what are the neural underpinnings of moral judgment? Is there a dissociation between how we judge and how we act? And how did this system evolve?
Hauser points out that people with brain damage in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) have some problems with moral judgments, suggesting that this area may play a part in our evolved moral machinery. People with damage in this area, says Hauser, tended to judge in a more utilitarian manner when faced with personal moral dilemmas involving conflict between aversive actions (hitting someone) and positive gains (saving the lives of many). When faced with less personal or nonmoral dilemmas, their judgments are similar to those of people in control groups.
This suggests that people with damage to the vmPFC have largely preserved capacities to judge in both non-moral and moral situations, but for a selective class of moral dilemmas, they are strict utilitarians. As this region of prefrontal cortex is known to be involved in mediating the relationship between emotional processing and decision making, it seems possible that morality may have evolved in tandem with the emotions, perhaps a fortuitous advance for those who would reap the protective benefits of life in a group.
We Can’t Help It
“Understanding the biology of moral judgment will not dictate what we ought to do,” concedes Hauser, pointing to a split between a description of our judgments and a prescription of how we should act or how we actually act. (Go ahead, have another cookie, says a small invisible voice. And your hand reaches out …) But what it can do is to help societies craft policies that do not violate this universal, intuitive code. “If a law is not sensitive to our intuitive psychology,” says Hauser, “it will never go anywhere.”
How different societies deal with euthanasia illustrates how our intuitive principles interact—and sometimes conflict—with policy. In the case of euthanasia, most medical boards agree that it is better simply to withhold treatment than to be an active participant in the death of a patient. However, says Hauser, Belgium and the Netherlands no longer support a distinction between active and passive euthanasia. Nevertheless, there still exists in those countries a bias towards passive rather than active euthanasia.
In this case, says Hauser, “the law does not penetrate intuitive psychology, even though permission is explicit in the culture.” Hauser is hopeful that his findings will do more than help us craft better laws. “Appreciating the fact that we share a universal moral grammar, and that at birth we could have acquired any of the world’s moral systems, should provide us with a sense of comfort, a sense that perhaps we can understand each other. Deep in our past we might find some hints to our moral state and perhaps to our future.”
About the Author
Marc D. Hauser is professor of psychology, organismic and evolutionary biology, and biological anthropology at Harvard University, and is co-director of Harvard’s Mind, Brain, and Behavior program. His previous books include The Evolution of Communication (MIT); Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think (Henry Holt); and The Design of Animal Communication (with Mark Konishi) (MIT). His new book, Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong, is published by HarperCollins.