Remember
from Chapter 1 that many words for cleanliness and dirt are also words for virtue and sin pure, unblemished, tainted, and so on).
Steven-Pinker-The-Blank-Slate 1
80
In social psychology experiments, people consistently overrate their own skill, honesty, generosity, and autonomy. They overestimate their contribution to a joint effort, chalk up their successes to skill and their failures to luck, and always feel that the other side has gotten the better deal in a compromise. 81 People keep up these self-serving illusions even when they are wired to what they think is an accurate lie-detector. This shows that they are not lying to
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? the experimenter but lying to themselves. For decades every psychology student has learned about "cognitive dissonance reduction," in which people change whatever opinion it takes to maintain a positive self-image. 82 The cartoonist Scott Adams illustrates it well:
If the cartoon were completely accurate, though, life would be a cacophony of spoinks.
Self-deception is among the deepest roots of human strife and folly. It implies that the faculties that ought to allow us to settle our differences -- seeking the truth and discussing it rationally -- are miscalibrated so that all parties assess themselves to be wiser, abler, and nobler than they really are. Each party to a dispute can sincerely believe that the logic and evidence are on his side and {266} that his opponent is deluded or dishonest or both. 83 Self-deception is one of the reasons that the moral sense can, paradoxically, often do more harm than good, a human misfortune we will explore in the next chapter.
~
The many roots of our suffering illuminated by Trivers are not a cause for lamentations and wailings. The genetic overlaps that unite and divide us are tragic not in the everyday sense of a catastrophe but in the dramatic sense of a stimulus that encourages us to ponder our condition. According to a definition in the Cambridge Encyclopedia, "The fundamental purpose of tragedy. . . was claimed by Aristotle to be the awakening of pity and fear, of a sense of wonder and awe at the human potential, including the potential for suffering; it makes an assertion of human value in the face of a hostile universe. " Trivers's accounts of the inherent conflicts within families, couples, societies, and the self can reinforce that purpose.
Nature may have played a cruel trick by slightly mistuning the emotions of people who share their flesh and blood, but in doing so she provided steady work for generations of authors and playwrights. Endless are the dramatic possibilities inherent in the fact that two people can be bound by the strongest emotional bonds in the living world and at the same time not always want the best for each other. Aristotle was perhaps the first to note that tragic narratives focus on family relations. A story about two strangers who fight to the death, he pointed out, is nowhere near as interesting as a story about two brothers who fight to the death. Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Oedipus and Laius, Michael and Fredo, JR and Bobby, Frasier and Niles, Joseph and his brothers, Lear and his daughters, Hannah and her sisters . . . As cataloguers of dramatic plots have noted for centuries, "enmity of kinsmen" and "rivalry of kinsmen" are enduring formulas. 84
In his book Antigones, the literary critic George Steiner showed that the Antigone legend has a singular place in Western literature. Antigone was the daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta, but the fact that her father was her brother and her sister was her mother was only the beginning of her family troubles. In defiance of King Creon, she buried her slain brother Polynices, and when the king found out, he ordered her buried alive. She cheated him by killing herself first, whereupon the king's son, who was madly in love with her and unable to get her a pardon, killed himself on her grave. Steiner observes that Antigone is widely considered "not only the finest of the Greek tragedies, but a work of art nearer to perfection than any other produced by the human spirit. "85 It has been performed for more than two millennia and has inspired countless variations and spinoffs. Steiner explains its enduring resonance:
It has, I believe, been given to only one literary text to express all the principal constants of conflict in the condition of man. These constants are {267} fivefold: the confrontation of men and of women; of age and of youth; of society, and of the individual; of the living and the dead; of men and of god(s). The conflicts which come of these five orders of confrontation are not negotiable. Men and women, old and young, the individual and the community or state, the quick and the dead, mortals and immortals, define themselves in the confiictual process of defining each other. 86. . . Because Greek myths encode certain primary biological and social confrontations and self-perceptions in the history of man, they
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? endure as an animate legacy in collective memory and recognition. 87
? The bittersweet process of defining ourselves by our conflicts with others is not just a subject for literature but can illuminate the nature of our emotions and the content of our consciousness. If a genie offered us the choice between belonging to a species that could achieve perfect egalitarianism and solidarity and belonging to a species like ours in which relationships with parents, siblings, and children are uniquely precious, it is not so clear that we would choose the former. Our close relatives have a special place in our hearts only because the place for every other human being, by definition, is less special, and we have seen that many social injustices fall out of that bargain. So, too, is social friction a product of our individuality and of our pursuit of happiness. We may envy the harmony of an ant colony, but when Woody Allen's alter ego Z complained to his psychiatrist that he felt insignificant, the psychiatrist replied, "You've made a real breakthrough, Z. You are insignificant. "
Donald Symons has argued that we have genetic conflict to thank for the fact that we have feelings toward other people at all. 88 Consciousness is a manifestation of the neural computations necessary to figure out how to get the
rare and unpredictable things we need. We feel hunger, savor food, and have a palate for countless fascinating tastes because food was hard to get during most of our evolutionary history. We don't normally feel longing, delight, or fascination regarding oxygen, even though it is crucial for survival, because it was never hard to obtain. We just breathe.
The same may be true of conflicts over kin, mates, and friends. I mentioned that if a couple were guaranteed to be faithful, to favor each other over their kin, and to die at the same time, their genetic interests would be identical, wrapped up in their common children. One can even imagine a species in which every couple was marooned on an island for life and their offspring dispersed at maturity, never to return. Since the genetic interests of the two mates are identical, one might at first think that evolution would endow them with a blissful perfection of sexual, romantic, and companionate love.
But, Symons argues, nothing of the sort would happen. The relation between the mates would evolve to be like the relation among the cells of a single body, whose genetic interests are also identical. Heart cells and lung cells don't
{268} have to fall in love to get along in perfect harmony. Likewise, the couples in this species would have sex only for the purpose of procreation (why waste energy? ), and sex would bring no more pleasure than the rest of reproductive physiology such as the release of hormones or the formation of the gametes:
There would be no falling in love, because there would be no alternative mates to choose among, and falling in love would be a huge waste. You would literally love your mate as yourself, but that's the point: you don't really love yourself, except metaphorically; you are yourself. The two of you would be, as far as evolution is concerned, one flesh, and your relationship would be governed by mindless physiology. . . . You might feel pain if you observed your mate cut herself, but all the feelings we have about our mates that make a relationship so wonderful when it is working well (and so painful when it is not) would never evolve. Even if a species had them when they took up this way of life, they would be selected out as surely as the eyes of a cave-dwelling fish are selected out, because they would be all cost and no benefit. 89
The same is true for our emotions toward family and friends: the richness and intensity of the feelings in our minds are proof of the preciousness and fragility of those bonds in life. In short, without the possibility of suffering, what we would have is not harmonious bliss, but rather, no consciousness at all.
<< {269} >> Chapter 15
The Sanctimonious Animal
One of the deepest fears people have of a biological understanding of the mind is that it would lead to moral nihilism. If we are not created by God for a higher purpose, say the critics on the right, or if we are products of selfish genes, say the critics on the left, then what would prevent us from becoming amoral egoists who look out only for number one? Wouldn't we have to see ourselves as venal mercenaries who cannot be expected to care for the less fortunate? Both sides point to Nazism as the outcome of accepting biological theories of human nature.
The preceding chapter showed that this fear is misplaced. Nothing prevents the godless and amoral process of natural selection from evolving a big-brained social species equipped with an elaborate moral sense. 1 Indeed, the problem with Homo sapiens may not be that we have too little morality. The problem may be that we have too much.
What leads people to deem an action immoral ("Killing is wrong") as opposed to disliked ("I hate broccoli"),
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? unfashionable ("Don't wear stripes with plaids"), or imprudent ("Avoid wine on long flights")? People feel that moral rules are universal. Injunctions against murder and rape, for example, are not matters of taste or fashion but have a transcendent and universal warrant. People feel that others who commit immoral acts ought to be punished: not only is it right to inflict harm on people who have committed a moral infraction, it is wrong not to, that is, to "let them get away with it. " One can easily say, "I don't like broccoli, but I don't care if you eat it," but no one would say, "I don't like killing, but I don't care if you murder someone. " That is why pro-choice advocates are missing the point when they say, in the words of the bumper sticker, "If you're against abortion, don't have one. " If someone believes abortion is immoral, then allowing other people to engage in it is not an option, any more than allowing people to rape or murder is an option. People therefore feel justified in invoking divine retribution or the coercive power of the state to enact {270} the punishments. Bertrand Russell wrote, "The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists -- that is why they invented hell. "
Our moral sense licenses aggression against others as a way to prevent or punish immoral acts. That is fine when the act deemed immoral truly is immoral by any standard, such as rape and murder, and when the aggression is meted out fairly and serves as a deterrent. The point of this chapter is that the human moral sense is not guaranteed to pick out those acts as the targets of its righteous indignation. The moral sense is a gadget, like stereo vision or intuitions about number. It is an assembly of neural circuits cobbled together from older parts of the primate brain and shaped by natural selection to do a job. That does not mean that morality is a figment of our imagination, any more than the evolution of depth perception means that 3-D space is a figment of our imagination. (As we saw in Chapters 9 and 11, morality has an internal logic, and possibly even an external reality, that a community of reflective thinkers may elucidate, just as a community of mathematicians can elucidate truths about number and shape. ) But it does mean that the moral sense is laden with quirks and prone to systematic error -- moral illusions, as it were -- just like our other faculties.
Consider this story:
Julie and Mark are brother and sister. They are traveling together in France on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the beach. They decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. At the very least it would be a new experience for each of them. Julie was already taking birth control pills, but Mark uses a condom too, just to be safe. They both enjoy making love, but they decide not to do it again. They keep the night as a special secret, which makes them feel even closer to each other. What do you think about that; was it OK for them to make love?
The psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues have presented the story to many people. 2 Most immediately declare that what Julie and Mark did was wrong, and then they grope for reasons why it was wrong. They mention the dangers of inbreeding, but they are reminded that the siblings used two forms of contraception. They suggest that Julie and Mark will be emotionally hurt, but the story makes it clear that they were not. They venture that the act would offend the community, but then they recall that it was kept secret. They submit that it might interfere with future relationships, but they acknowledge that Julie and Mark agreed never to do it again. Eventually many of the respondents admit, "I don't know, I can't explain it, I just know it's wrong. " Haidt calls this "moral dumbfounding" and has evoked it by other disagreeable but victimless scenarios: {271}
A woman is cleaning out her closet, and she finds her old American flag. She doesn't want the flag anymore, so she cuts it up into pieces and uses the rags to clean her bathroom.
A family's dog was killed by a car in front of their house. They had heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog's body and cooked it and ate it for dinner.
A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a dead chicken. But before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he cooks it and eats it.
Many moral philosophers would say that there is nothing wrong with these acts, because private acts among consenting adults that do not harm other sentient beings are not immoral. Some might criticize the acts using a more subtle argument having to do with commitments to policies, but the infractions would still be deemed minor compared with the truly heinous acts of which people are capable. But for everyone else, such argumentation is beside the point. People have gut feelings that give them emphatic moral convictions, and they struggle to rationalize the convictions after the fact. 3 These convictions may have little to do with moral judgments that one could justify to others in terms of their effects on happiness or suffering. They arise instead from the neurobiological and evolutionary design of the organs we call moral emotions.
? ? ? ? ? ? ~
Haidt has recently compiled a natural history of the emotions making up the moral sense. 4 The four major families are just what we would expect from Trivers's theory of reciprocal altruism and the computer models of the evolution of cooperation that followed. The other-condemning emotions -- contempt, anger, and disgust -- prompt one to punish cheaters. The other-praising emotions -- gratitude and an emotion that may be called elevation, moral awe, or being moved -- prompt one to reward altruists. The other-suffering emotions -- sympathy, compassion, and empathy -- prompt one to help a needy beneficiary. And the self-conscious emotions -- guilt, shame, and embarrassment -- prompt one to avoid cheating or to repair its effects.
Cutting across these sets of emotions we find a distinction among three spheres of morality, each of which frames moral judgments in a different way. The ethic of autonomy pertains to an individual's interests and rights. It emphasizes fairness as the cardinal virtue, and is the core of morality as it is understood by secular educated people in Western cultures. The ethic of community pertains to the mores of the social group; it includes values like duty, respect, adherence to convention, and deference to a hierarchy. The ethic of divinity pertains to a sense of exalted purity and holiness, which is opposed to a sense of contamination and defilement. {272}
The autonomy-community-divinity trichotomy was first developed by the anthropologist Richard Shweder, who noted that non-Western traditions have rich systems of beliefs and values with all the hallmarks of moralizing but without the Western concept of individual rights. 5 The elaborate Hindu beliefs surrounding purification are a prime example. Haidt and the psychologist Paul Rozin have built on Shweder's work, but they have interpreted the moral spheres not as arbitrary cultural variants but as universal mental faculties with different evolutionary origins and functions. 6 They show that the moral spheres differ in their cognitive content, their homologues in other animals, their physiological correlates, and their neural underpinnings.
Anger, for example, which is the other-condemning emotion in the sphere of autonomy, evolved from systems for aggression and was recruited to implement the cheater-punishment strategy demanded by reciprocal altruism. Disgust, the other-condemning emotion in the sphere of divinity, evolved from a system for avoiding biological contaminants like disease and spoilage. It may have been recruited to demarcate the moral circle that divides entities that we engage morally (such as peers) from those we treat instrumentally (such as animals) and those we actively avoid (such as people with a contagious disease). Embarrassment, the self-conscious emotion in the sphere of community, is a dead ringer for the gestures of appeasement and submission found in other primates. The reason that dominance got melded with morality in the first place is that reciprocity depends not only on a person's willingness to grant and return favors but on that person's ability to do so, and dominant people have that ability.
Relativists might interpret the three spheres of morality as showing that individual rights are a parochial Western custom and that we should respect other cultures' ethics of community and divinity as equally valid alternatives. I conclude instead that the design of the moral sense leaves people in all cultures vulnerable to confusing defensible moral judgments with irrelevant passions and prejudices. The ethic of autonomy or fairness is in fact not uniquelv Western; Amartya Sen and the legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon have shown that it also has deep roots in Asian thought. 7 Conversely, the ethic of community and the ethic of divinity are pervasive in the West. The ethic of community, which equates morality with a conformity to local norms, underlies the cultural relativism that has become boilerplate on college campuses. Several scholars have noticed that their students are unequipped to explain why Nazism was wrong, because the students feel it is impermissible to criticize the values of another culture. 8 (I can confirm that students today reflexively hedge their moral judgments, saying things like, "Our society puts a high value on being good to other people. ") Donald Symons comments on the way that {273} people's judgments can do a backflip when they switch from autonomy- to community-based morality:
If only one person in the world held down a terrified, struggling, screaming little girl, cut off her genitals with a septic blade, and sewed her back up, leaving only a tiny hole for urine and menstrual flow, the only question would be how severely that person should be punished, and whether the death penalty would be a sufficiently severe sanction. But when millions of people do this, instead of the enormity being magnified millions-fold, suddenly it becomes "culture," and thereby magically becomes less, rather than more, horrible, and is even defended by some Western "moral thinkers," including feminists. 9
The ethic of community also includes a deference to an established hierarchy, and the mind (including the Western mind) all too easily conflates prestige with morality. We see it in words that implicitly equate status with virtue -- chivalrous, classy, gentlemanly, honorable, noble -- and low rank with sin -- low-class, low-rent, mean, nasty, shabby, shoddy, villain (originally meaning "peasant"), vulgar. The Myth of the Noble Noble is obvious in contemporary celebrity worship. Members of the royalty like Princess Diana and her American equivalent, John E
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Kennedy Jr. , are awarded the trappings of sainthood even though they were morally unexceptional people (yes, Diana supported charities, but that's pretty much the job description of a princess in this day and age). Their good looks brighten their halos even more, because people judge attractive men and women to be more virtuous. 10 Prince Charles, who also supports charities, will never be awarded the trappings of sainthood, even if he dies a tragic death. People also confuse morality with purity, even in the secular West.
Remember from Chapter 1 that many words for cleanliness and dirt are also words for virtue and sin pure, unblemished, tainted, and so on). Haidt's subjects seem to have conflated contamination with sin when they condemned eating a dog, having sex with a dead chicken, and enjoying consensual incest (which reflects our instinctive repulsion toward sex with siblings, an emotion that evolved to deter inbreeding).
The mental mix-up of the good and the clean can have ugly consequences. Racism and sexism are often expressed as a desire to avoid pollutants, as in the ostracism of the "untouchable" caste in India, the sequestering of menstruating women in Orthodox Judaism, the fear of contracting AIDS from casual contact with gay men, the segregated facilities for eating, drinking, bathing, and sleeping under the Jim Crow and apartheid policies, and the "racial hygiene" laws in Nazi Germany. One of the haunting questions of {274} twentieth-century history is how so many ordinary people committed wartime atrocities. The philosopher Jonathan Glover has documented that a common denominator is degradation: a diminution of the victim's status or cleanliness or both. When someone strips a person of dignity by making jokes about his suffering, giving him a humiliating appearance (a dunce cap, awkward prison garb, a crudely shaved head), or forcing him to live in filthy conditions, ordinary people's compassion can evaporate and they find it easy to treat him like an animal or object. 11
The peculiar mixture of fairness, status, and purity constituting the moral sense should make us suspicious of appeals to raw sentiment in resolving difficult moral issues. In an influential essay called "The Wisdom of Repugnance," Leon Kass (now the chair of George W. Bush's Council on Bioethics) argued that we should abandon moral reasoning when it comes to cloning and go with our gut feelings:
We are repelled by the prospect of cloning human beings not because of the strangeness or novelty of the undertaking, but because we intuit and feel, immediately and without argument, the violation of things that we rightfully hold dear. Repugnance, here as elsewhere, revolts against the excesses of human willfulness, warning us not to transgress what is unspeakably profound. Indeed, in this age in which everything is held to be permissible so long as it is freely done, in which our given human nature no longer commands respect, in which our bodies are regarded as mere instruments of our autonomous rational wills, repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity. Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder. 12
There may be good arguments against human cloning, but the shudder test is not one of them. People have shuddered at all kinds of morally irrelevant violations of standards of purity in their culture: touching an untouchable, drinking from the same water fountain as a person of color, allowing Jewish blood to mix with Aryan blood, tolerating sodomy between consenting men. As recently as 1978, many people (including Kass) shuddered at the new technology of in vitro fertilization, or, as it was then called, "test-tube babies. " But now it is morally unexceptionable and, for hundreds of thousands of people, a source of immeasurable happiness or of life itself.
The difference between a defensible moral position and an atavistic gut feeling is that with the former we can give reasons why our conviction is valid. We can explain why torture and murder and rape are wrong, or why we should oppose discrimination and injustice. On the other hand, no good reasons can be produced to show why homosexuality should be suppressed or why the races should be segregated. And the good reasons for a moral position are not {275} pulled out of thin air: they always have to do with what makes people better off or worse off, and are grounded in the logic that we have to treat other people in the way that we demand they treat us.
~
Another strange feature of the moral emotions is that they can be turned on and off like a switch. These mental spoinks are called moralization and amoralization, and have recently been studied in the lab by Rozin. 13 They consist in
flipping between a mindset that judges behavior in terms of preference with a mindset that judges behavior in terms of value.
There are two kinds of vegetarians: those who avoid meat for health reasons, namely reducing dietary fat and toxins, and those who avoid meat for moral reasons, namely respecting the rights of animals. Rozin has shown that compared with health vegetarians, moral vegetarians offer more reasons for their meat avoidance, have a greater emotional reaction to meat, and are more likely to treat it as a contaminant -- they refuse, for example, to eat a bowl of soup into which a drop of meat broth has fallen. Moral vegetarians are more likely to think that other people
? ? ? ? ? ? ? should be vegetarians, and they are more likely to invest their dietary habit with bizarre virtues, like believing that meat eating makes people more aggressive and animalistic. But it is not just vegetarians who associate eating habits with moral value. When college students are given descriptions of people and asked to rate their character, they judge that a person who eats cheeseburgers and milkshakes is less nice and considerate than a person who eats chicken and salad!
Rozin notes that smoking has recently been moralized. For many years the decision of whether to smoke was treated as a matter of preference or prudence: some people simply didn't enjoy smoking or avoided it because it was hazardous to their health. But with the discovery of the harmful effects of secondhand smoke, smoking is now treated as an immoral act. Smokers are banished and demonized, and the psychology of disgust and contamination is brought into play. Nonsmokers avoid not just smoke but anything that has ever been in contact with smoke: in hotels, they demand smoke-free rooms or even smoke-free floors. Similarly, the desire for retribution has been awakened: juries have slapped tobacco companies with staggering financial penalties, appropriately called "punitive damages. " This is not to say that these decisions are unjustified, only that we should be aware of the emotions that may be driving them. At the same time, many behaviors have been amoralized, switching (in the eyes of many people) from moral flaws to lifestyle choices. The amoralized acts include divorce, illegitimacy, working motherhood, marijuana use, homosexuality, masturbation, sodomy, oral sex, atheism, and any practice of a non-Western culture. Similarly, many afflictions have been reassigned from the wages of sin to the vagaries of bad luck and have been redubbed accordingly. {276} The homeless used to be called bums and tramps; sexually transmitted diseases were formerly known as venereal diseases. Most of the professionals who work with drug addiction insist that it is not a bad choice but a kind of illness. To the cultural right, all this shows that morality has been under assault from the cultural elite, as we see in the sect that calls itself the Moral Majority. To the left, it shows that the desire to stigmatize private behavior is archaic and repressive, as in H. L. Mencken's definition of Puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. " Both sides are wrong. As if to compensate for all the behaviors that have been amoralized in recent decades, we are in the midst of a campaign to moralize new ones. The Babbitts and the bluenoses have been replaced by the activists for a nanny state and the college towns with a foreign policy, but the psychology of moralization is the same. Here are some examples of things that have acquired a moral coloring only recently:
advertising to children ? automobile safety ? Barbie dolls ? "big box" chain stores ? cheesecake photos ? clothing from Third World factories ? consumer product safety ? corporate-owned farms ? defense- funded research ? disposable diapers ? disposable packaging ? ethnic jokes ? executive salaries ? fast food ? flirtation in the workplace ? food additives ? fur ? hydroelectric dams ? IQ tests ? logging ? mining ? nuclear power ? oil drilling ? owning certain stocks ? poultry farms ? public holidays (Columbus Day, Martin Luther King Day) ? research on AIDS ? research on breast cancer ? spanking ? suburbia ("sprawl") ? sugar ? tax cuts ? toy guns ? violence on television ? weight of fashion models
Many of these things can have harmful consequences, of course, and no one would want them trivialized. The question is whether they are best handled by the psychology of moralization (with its search for villains, elevation of accusers, and mobilization of authority to mete out punishment) or in terms of costs and benefits, prudence and risk, or good and bad taste. Pollution, for example, is often treated as a crime of defiling the sacred, as in the song by the rock group Traffic: "Why don't we . . . try to save this land, and make a promise not to hurt again this holy ground. " This can be contrasted with the attitude of economists like Robert Frank, who (alluding to the costs of cleanups) said, "There is an optimal amount of pollution in the environment, just as there is an optimal amount of dirt in your house. " Moreover, all human activities have consequences, often with various degrees of benefit and harm to different
parties, but not all of them are conceived as immoral. We don't show contempt to the man who fails to change the batteries in his smoke alarms, takes his family on a driving vacation (multiplying their risk of accidental death), or moves to a rural area (increasing pollution {277} and fuel use in commuting and shopping). Driving a gas-guzzling SUV is seen as morally dubious, but driving a gas-guzzling Volvo is not; eating a Big Mac is suspect, but eating imported cheese or tiramisu is not. Becoming aware of the psychology of moralization need not make us morally obtuse. On the contrary, it can alert us to the possibility that a decision to treat an act in terms of virtue and sin as opposed to cost and benefit has been made on morally irrelevant grounds -- in particular, whether the saints and sinners would be in one's own coalition or someone else's. Much of what is today called "social criticism" consists of members of the upper classes denouncing the tastes of the lower classes (bawdy entertainment, fast food, plentiful consumer goods) while considering themselves egalitarians.
~
? ? There is another bit of moral psychology that is commonly associated with primitive thinking but is alive and well in
modern minds: concepts of the sacred and the taboo. Some values are considered not just worthy but sacrosanct. They have infinite or transcendental worth, trumping all other considerations. One is not permitted even to think of trading them off against other values, because the very thought is self-evidently sinful and deserves only condemnation and outrage.
The psychologist Philip Tetlock elicited the psychology of the sacred and the taboo in the students of American universities. 14 He asked them whether people should be allowed to buy and sell organs for transplantation, auction licenses to adopt orphans, pay for the right to become a citizen, sell their vote in an election, or pay someone to serve in their stead in prison or the military. Not surprisingly, most of the students thought that the practices were unethical and should be outlawed. But their responses went well beyond disagreement: they were outraged that anyone would consider legalizing these practices, were insulted to have been asked, and wanted to punish anyone who tolerated them. When they were asked to justify their opinion, all they could say was that the practices were "degrading, dehumanizing, and unacceptable. " The students even sought to cleanse themselves by volunteering to campaign against a (fictitious) movement to legalize the auctioning of adoption rights. Their outrage was reduced a bit, but was still potent, after hearing arguments in favor of the taboo policies, such as that a market in orphans would put more children in loving homes and that lower-income people would be given vouchers to participate.
Another study asked about a hospital administrator who had to decide whether to spend a million dollars on a liver transplant for a child or use it on other hospital needs. (Administrators implicitly face this kind of choice all the time, because there are lifesaving procedures that are astronomically expensive and cannot be carried out on everyone who needs them. ) Not only did respondents want to punish an administrator who chose to spend the money on {278} the hospital, they wanted to punish an administrator who chose to save the child but thought for a long time before making the decision (like the frugal comedian Jack Benny when a mugger said, "Your money or your life").
The taboo on thinking about core values is not totally irrational. We judge people not just on what they do but on what they are -- not just on whether someone has given more than he has taken, but on whether he is the kind of person who would sell you down the river or knife you in the back if it were ever in his interests to do so. To determine whether someone is emotionally committed to a relationship, guaranteeing the veracity of his promises, one should ascertain how he thinks: whether he holds your interests sacred or constantly weighs them against the profits to be made by selling you out. The notion of character joins the moral picture, and with it the notion of moral identity: the concept of one's own character that is maintained internally and projected to others.
Tetlock points out that it is in the very nature of our commitments to other people to deny that we can put a price on them: "To transgress these normative boundaries, to attach a monetary value to one's friendships or one's children or one's loyalty to one's country, is to disqualify oneself from certain societal roles, to demonstrate that one just 'doesn't get it' -- one does not understand what it means to be a true friend or parent or citizen. "15 Taboo tradeoffs, which pit a sacred value against a secular one (such as money), are "morally corrosive: the longer one contemplates indecent proposals, the more irreparably one compromises one's moral identity. "16
Unfortunately, a psychology that treats some desiderata as having infinite value can lead to absurdities. Tetlock reviews some examples. The Delaney Clause of the Food and Drug Act of 1958 sought to improve public health by banning all new food additives for which there was any risk of carcinogenicity. That sounded good but wasn't. The policy left people exposed to more dangerous food additives that were already on the market, it created an incentive for manufacturers to introduce new dangerous additives as long as they were not carcinogenic, and it outlawed products that could have saved more lives than they put at risk, such as the saccharin used by diabetics. Similarly after the discovery of hazardous waste at the Love Canal in 1978, Congress passed the Superfund Act, which required the complete cleanup of all hazardous waste sites. It turned out to cost millions of dollars to clean up the last 10 percent of the waste at a given site -- money that could have been spent on cleaning up other sites or reducing other health risks. So the lavish fund went bankrupt before even a fraction of its sites could be decontaminated, and its effect on Americans' health was debatable. After the Exxon Valdez oil spill, four-fifths of the respondents in one poll said that the country should pursue greater environmental protection "regardless of cost. " Taken literally, that meant they were prepared to shut down all schools, hospitals, and police and {279} fire stations, stop funding social programs, medical research, foreign aid, and national defense, or raise the income tax rate to 99 percent, if that is what it would have cost to protect the environment.
Tetlock observes that these fiascoes came about because any politician who honestly presented the inexorable tradeoffs would be crucified for violating a taboo. He would be guilty of "tolerating poisons in our food and water," or worse, "putting a dollar value on human life. " Policy analysts note that we are stuck with wasteful and inegalitarian entitlement programs because any politician who tried to reform them would be committing political suicide. Savvy opponents would frame the reform in the language of taboo: "breaking our faith with the elderly," "betraying the sacred trust of veterans who risked their lives for their country," "scrimping on the care and education of the young. "
? ? ? ? ? In the Preface, I called the Blank Slate a sacred doctrine and human nature a modern taboo. This can now be stated as a technical hypothesis. The thrust of the radical science movement was to moralize the scientific study of the mind and to engage the mentality of taboo. Recall, from Part II, the indignant outrage, the punishment of heretics, the refusal to consider claims as they were actually stated, the moral cleansing through demonstrations and manifestos and public denunciations. Weizenbaum condemned ideas "whose very contemplation ought to give rise to feelings of disgust" and denounced the less-than-human scientists who "can even think of such a thing. " But of course it is the job of scholars to think about things, even if only to make it clear why they are wrong. Moralization and scholarship thus often find themselves on a collision course.
~
This ruthless dissection of the human moral sense does not mean that morality is a sham or that every moralist is a self- righteous prig. Moral psychology may be steeped in emotion, but then many philosophers have argued that morality cannot be grounded in reason alone anyway. As Hume wrote, " 'Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. "17 The emotions of sympathy, gratitude, and guilt are the source of innumerable acts of kindness great and small, and a measured righteous anger and ethical certitude must have sustained great moral leaders throughout history.
Glover notes that many twentieth-century atrocities were set in motion when the moral emotions were disabled. Decent people were lulled into committing appalling acts by a variety of amoralizing causes, such as Utopian ideologies, phased decisions (in which the targets of bombing might shift from isolated factories to factories near neighborhoods to the neighborhoods themselves), and the diffusion of responsibility within a bureaucracy. It was often raw moral sentiment -- feeling empathy for victims, or asking oneself the moral-identity question "Am I the kind of person who could do this? " -- that {280} stopped people in mid-atrocity. The moral sense, amplified and extended by reasoning and a knowledge of history, is what stands between us and a Mad Max nightmare of ruthless psychopaths.
But there is still much to be wary of in human moralizing: the confusion of morality with status and purity, the temptation to overmoralize matters of judgment and thereby license aggression against those with whom we disagree, the taboos on thinking about unavoidable tradeoffs, and the ubiquitous vice of self-deception, which always manages to put the self on the side of the angels. Hitler was a moralist (indeed, a moral vegetarian) who, by most accounts, was convinced of the rectitude of his cause. As the historian Ian Buruma wrote, "This shows once again that true believers can be more dangerous than cynical operators. The latter might cut a deal; the former have to go to the end -- and drag the world down with them. "18
<< {281} >>
HOT BUTTONS
ome debates are so entwined with people's moral identity that one might despair that they can ever be resolved by reason and evidence. Social S psychologists have found that with divisive moral issues, especially those on which liberals and conservatives disagree, all combatants are
intuitively certain they are correct and that their opponents have ugly ulterior motives. They argue out of respect for the social convention that one should always provide reasons for one's opinions, but when an argument is refuted, they don't change their minds but work harder to find a replacement argument. Moral debates, far from resolving hostilities, can escalate them, because when people on the other side don't immediately
1
capitulate, it only proves they are impervious to reason.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the topics I will explore in this part of the book. People's opinions on politics, violence, gender, children, and the arts help define the kind of person they think they are and the kind of person they want to be. They prove that the person is opposed to oppression, violence, sexism, philistinism, and the abuse or neglect of children. Unfortunately, folded into these opinions are assumptions about the psychological makeup of Homo sapiens. Conscientious people may thus find themselves unwittingly staked to positions on empirical questions in biology or psychology. When scientific facts come in they rarely conform exactly to our expectations; if they did, we would not have to do science in the first place. So when facts tip over a sacred cow, people are tempted to suppress the facts and to clamp down on debate because the facts threaten everything they hold sacred. And this can leave us unequipped to deal with just those problems for which new facts and analyses are most needed.
The landscape of the sciences of human nature is strewn with these third rails, hot zones, black holes, and Chernobyls. I have picked five of them to explore in the next few chapters, while necessarily leaving out many others
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? (for instance, race, sexual orientation, education, drug abuse, and mental illness). {282} Social psychologists have discovered that even in heated ideological battles, common ground can sometimes be found. 2 Each side must acknowledge that the other is arguing out of principle, too, and that they both share certain values and disagree only over which to emphasize in cases where they conflict. Finding such common ground is my goal in the discussions to follow.
? <<
{283} >> Chapter 16
Politics
I often think it's comical
How nature always does contrive That every boy and every gal, That's born into the world alive, Is either a little Liberal,
Or else a little Conservative! 1
? ? ? ? ? Gilbert and Sullivan got it mostly right in 1882: liberal and conservative political attitudes are largely, though far from completely, heritable. When identical twins who were separated at birth are tested in adulthood, their political attitudes turn out to be similar, with a correlation coefficient of .
In social psychology experiments, people consistently overrate their own skill, honesty, generosity, and autonomy. They overestimate their contribution to a joint effort, chalk up their successes to skill and their failures to luck, and always feel that the other side has gotten the better deal in a compromise. 81 People keep up these self-serving illusions even when they are wired to what they think is an accurate lie-detector. This shows that they are not lying to
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? the experimenter but lying to themselves. For decades every psychology student has learned about "cognitive dissonance reduction," in which people change whatever opinion it takes to maintain a positive self-image. 82 The cartoonist Scott Adams illustrates it well:
If the cartoon were completely accurate, though, life would be a cacophony of spoinks.
Self-deception is among the deepest roots of human strife and folly. It implies that the faculties that ought to allow us to settle our differences -- seeking the truth and discussing it rationally -- are miscalibrated so that all parties assess themselves to be wiser, abler, and nobler than they really are. Each party to a dispute can sincerely believe that the logic and evidence are on his side and {266} that his opponent is deluded or dishonest or both. 83 Self-deception is one of the reasons that the moral sense can, paradoxically, often do more harm than good, a human misfortune we will explore in the next chapter.
~
The many roots of our suffering illuminated by Trivers are not a cause for lamentations and wailings. The genetic overlaps that unite and divide us are tragic not in the everyday sense of a catastrophe but in the dramatic sense of a stimulus that encourages us to ponder our condition. According to a definition in the Cambridge Encyclopedia, "The fundamental purpose of tragedy. . . was claimed by Aristotle to be the awakening of pity and fear, of a sense of wonder and awe at the human potential, including the potential for suffering; it makes an assertion of human value in the face of a hostile universe. " Trivers's accounts of the inherent conflicts within families, couples, societies, and the self can reinforce that purpose.
Nature may have played a cruel trick by slightly mistuning the emotions of people who share their flesh and blood, but in doing so she provided steady work for generations of authors and playwrights. Endless are the dramatic possibilities inherent in the fact that two people can be bound by the strongest emotional bonds in the living world and at the same time not always want the best for each other. Aristotle was perhaps the first to note that tragic narratives focus on family relations. A story about two strangers who fight to the death, he pointed out, is nowhere near as interesting as a story about two brothers who fight to the death. Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Oedipus and Laius, Michael and Fredo, JR and Bobby, Frasier and Niles, Joseph and his brothers, Lear and his daughters, Hannah and her sisters . . . As cataloguers of dramatic plots have noted for centuries, "enmity of kinsmen" and "rivalry of kinsmen" are enduring formulas. 84
In his book Antigones, the literary critic George Steiner showed that the Antigone legend has a singular place in Western literature. Antigone was the daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta, but the fact that her father was her brother and her sister was her mother was only the beginning of her family troubles. In defiance of King Creon, she buried her slain brother Polynices, and when the king found out, he ordered her buried alive. She cheated him by killing herself first, whereupon the king's son, who was madly in love with her and unable to get her a pardon, killed himself on her grave. Steiner observes that Antigone is widely considered "not only the finest of the Greek tragedies, but a work of art nearer to perfection than any other produced by the human spirit. "85 It has been performed for more than two millennia and has inspired countless variations and spinoffs. Steiner explains its enduring resonance:
It has, I believe, been given to only one literary text to express all the principal constants of conflict in the condition of man. These constants are {267} fivefold: the confrontation of men and of women; of age and of youth; of society, and of the individual; of the living and the dead; of men and of god(s). The conflicts which come of these five orders of confrontation are not negotiable. Men and women, old and young, the individual and the community or state, the quick and the dead, mortals and immortals, define themselves in the confiictual process of defining each other. 86. . . Because Greek myths encode certain primary biological and social confrontations and self-perceptions in the history of man, they
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? endure as an animate legacy in collective memory and recognition. 87
? The bittersweet process of defining ourselves by our conflicts with others is not just a subject for literature but can illuminate the nature of our emotions and the content of our consciousness. If a genie offered us the choice between belonging to a species that could achieve perfect egalitarianism and solidarity and belonging to a species like ours in which relationships with parents, siblings, and children are uniquely precious, it is not so clear that we would choose the former. Our close relatives have a special place in our hearts only because the place for every other human being, by definition, is less special, and we have seen that many social injustices fall out of that bargain. So, too, is social friction a product of our individuality and of our pursuit of happiness. We may envy the harmony of an ant colony, but when Woody Allen's alter ego Z complained to his psychiatrist that he felt insignificant, the psychiatrist replied, "You've made a real breakthrough, Z. You are insignificant. "
Donald Symons has argued that we have genetic conflict to thank for the fact that we have feelings toward other people at all. 88 Consciousness is a manifestation of the neural computations necessary to figure out how to get the
rare and unpredictable things we need. We feel hunger, savor food, and have a palate for countless fascinating tastes because food was hard to get during most of our evolutionary history. We don't normally feel longing, delight, or fascination regarding oxygen, even though it is crucial for survival, because it was never hard to obtain. We just breathe.
The same may be true of conflicts over kin, mates, and friends. I mentioned that if a couple were guaranteed to be faithful, to favor each other over their kin, and to die at the same time, their genetic interests would be identical, wrapped up in their common children. One can even imagine a species in which every couple was marooned on an island for life and their offspring dispersed at maturity, never to return. Since the genetic interests of the two mates are identical, one might at first think that evolution would endow them with a blissful perfection of sexual, romantic, and companionate love.
But, Symons argues, nothing of the sort would happen. The relation between the mates would evolve to be like the relation among the cells of a single body, whose genetic interests are also identical. Heart cells and lung cells don't
{268} have to fall in love to get along in perfect harmony. Likewise, the couples in this species would have sex only for the purpose of procreation (why waste energy? ), and sex would bring no more pleasure than the rest of reproductive physiology such as the release of hormones or the formation of the gametes:
There would be no falling in love, because there would be no alternative mates to choose among, and falling in love would be a huge waste. You would literally love your mate as yourself, but that's the point: you don't really love yourself, except metaphorically; you are yourself. The two of you would be, as far as evolution is concerned, one flesh, and your relationship would be governed by mindless physiology. . . . You might feel pain if you observed your mate cut herself, but all the feelings we have about our mates that make a relationship so wonderful when it is working well (and so painful when it is not) would never evolve. Even if a species had them when they took up this way of life, they would be selected out as surely as the eyes of a cave-dwelling fish are selected out, because they would be all cost and no benefit. 89
The same is true for our emotions toward family and friends: the richness and intensity of the feelings in our minds are proof of the preciousness and fragility of those bonds in life. In short, without the possibility of suffering, what we would have is not harmonious bliss, but rather, no consciousness at all.
<< {269} >> Chapter 15
The Sanctimonious Animal
One of the deepest fears people have of a biological understanding of the mind is that it would lead to moral nihilism. If we are not created by God for a higher purpose, say the critics on the right, or if we are products of selfish genes, say the critics on the left, then what would prevent us from becoming amoral egoists who look out only for number one? Wouldn't we have to see ourselves as venal mercenaries who cannot be expected to care for the less fortunate? Both sides point to Nazism as the outcome of accepting biological theories of human nature.
The preceding chapter showed that this fear is misplaced. Nothing prevents the godless and amoral process of natural selection from evolving a big-brained social species equipped with an elaborate moral sense. 1 Indeed, the problem with Homo sapiens may not be that we have too little morality. The problem may be that we have too much.
What leads people to deem an action immoral ("Killing is wrong") as opposed to disliked ("I hate broccoli"),
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? unfashionable ("Don't wear stripes with plaids"), or imprudent ("Avoid wine on long flights")? People feel that moral rules are universal. Injunctions against murder and rape, for example, are not matters of taste or fashion but have a transcendent and universal warrant. People feel that others who commit immoral acts ought to be punished: not only is it right to inflict harm on people who have committed a moral infraction, it is wrong not to, that is, to "let them get away with it. " One can easily say, "I don't like broccoli, but I don't care if you eat it," but no one would say, "I don't like killing, but I don't care if you murder someone. " That is why pro-choice advocates are missing the point when they say, in the words of the bumper sticker, "If you're against abortion, don't have one. " If someone believes abortion is immoral, then allowing other people to engage in it is not an option, any more than allowing people to rape or murder is an option. People therefore feel justified in invoking divine retribution or the coercive power of the state to enact {270} the punishments. Bertrand Russell wrote, "The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists -- that is why they invented hell. "
Our moral sense licenses aggression against others as a way to prevent or punish immoral acts. That is fine when the act deemed immoral truly is immoral by any standard, such as rape and murder, and when the aggression is meted out fairly and serves as a deterrent. The point of this chapter is that the human moral sense is not guaranteed to pick out those acts as the targets of its righteous indignation. The moral sense is a gadget, like stereo vision or intuitions about number. It is an assembly of neural circuits cobbled together from older parts of the primate brain and shaped by natural selection to do a job. That does not mean that morality is a figment of our imagination, any more than the evolution of depth perception means that 3-D space is a figment of our imagination. (As we saw in Chapters 9 and 11, morality has an internal logic, and possibly even an external reality, that a community of reflective thinkers may elucidate, just as a community of mathematicians can elucidate truths about number and shape. ) But it does mean that the moral sense is laden with quirks and prone to systematic error -- moral illusions, as it were -- just like our other faculties.
Consider this story:
Julie and Mark are brother and sister. They are traveling together in France on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the beach. They decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. At the very least it would be a new experience for each of them. Julie was already taking birth control pills, but Mark uses a condom too, just to be safe. They both enjoy making love, but they decide not to do it again. They keep the night as a special secret, which makes them feel even closer to each other. What do you think about that; was it OK for them to make love?
The psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues have presented the story to many people. 2 Most immediately declare that what Julie and Mark did was wrong, and then they grope for reasons why it was wrong. They mention the dangers of inbreeding, but they are reminded that the siblings used two forms of contraception. They suggest that Julie and Mark will be emotionally hurt, but the story makes it clear that they were not. They venture that the act would offend the community, but then they recall that it was kept secret. They submit that it might interfere with future relationships, but they acknowledge that Julie and Mark agreed never to do it again. Eventually many of the respondents admit, "I don't know, I can't explain it, I just know it's wrong. " Haidt calls this "moral dumbfounding" and has evoked it by other disagreeable but victimless scenarios: {271}
A woman is cleaning out her closet, and she finds her old American flag. She doesn't want the flag anymore, so she cuts it up into pieces and uses the rags to clean her bathroom.
A family's dog was killed by a car in front of their house. They had heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog's body and cooked it and ate it for dinner.
A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a dead chicken. But before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he cooks it and eats it.
Many moral philosophers would say that there is nothing wrong with these acts, because private acts among consenting adults that do not harm other sentient beings are not immoral. Some might criticize the acts using a more subtle argument having to do with commitments to policies, but the infractions would still be deemed minor compared with the truly heinous acts of which people are capable. But for everyone else, such argumentation is beside the point. People have gut feelings that give them emphatic moral convictions, and they struggle to rationalize the convictions after the fact. 3 These convictions may have little to do with moral judgments that one could justify to others in terms of their effects on happiness or suffering. They arise instead from the neurobiological and evolutionary design of the organs we call moral emotions.
? ? ? ? ? ? ~
Haidt has recently compiled a natural history of the emotions making up the moral sense. 4 The four major families are just what we would expect from Trivers's theory of reciprocal altruism and the computer models of the evolution of cooperation that followed. The other-condemning emotions -- contempt, anger, and disgust -- prompt one to punish cheaters. The other-praising emotions -- gratitude and an emotion that may be called elevation, moral awe, or being moved -- prompt one to reward altruists. The other-suffering emotions -- sympathy, compassion, and empathy -- prompt one to help a needy beneficiary. And the self-conscious emotions -- guilt, shame, and embarrassment -- prompt one to avoid cheating or to repair its effects.
Cutting across these sets of emotions we find a distinction among three spheres of morality, each of which frames moral judgments in a different way. The ethic of autonomy pertains to an individual's interests and rights. It emphasizes fairness as the cardinal virtue, and is the core of morality as it is understood by secular educated people in Western cultures. The ethic of community pertains to the mores of the social group; it includes values like duty, respect, adherence to convention, and deference to a hierarchy. The ethic of divinity pertains to a sense of exalted purity and holiness, which is opposed to a sense of contamination and defilement. {272}
The autonomy-community-divinity trichotomy was first developed by the anthropologist Richard Shweder, who noted that non-Western traditions have rich systems of beliefs and values with all the hallmarks of moralizing but without the Western concept of individual rights. 5 The elaborate Hindu beliefs surrounding purification are a prime example. Haidt and the psychologist Paul Rozin have built on Shweder's work, but they have interpreted the moral spheres not as arbitrary cultural variants but as universal mental faculties with different evolutionary origins and functions. 6 They show that the moral spheres differ in their cognitive content, their homologues in other animals, their physiological correlates, and their neural underpinnings.
Anger, for example, which is the other-condemning emotion in the sphere of autonomy, evolved from systems for aggression and was recruited to implement the cheater-punishment strategy demanded by reciprocal altruism. Disgust, the other-condemning emotion in the sphere of divinity, evolved from a system for avoiding biological contaminants like disease and spoilage. It may have been recruited to demarcate the moral circle that divides entities that we engage morally (such as peers) from those we treat instrumentally (such as animals) and those we actively avoid (such as people with a contagious disease). Embarrassment, the self-conscious emotion in the sphere of community, is a dead ringer for the gestures of appeasement and submission found in other primates. The reason that dominance got melded with morality in the first place is that reciprocity depends not only on a person's willingness to grant and return favors but on that person's ability to do so, and dominant people have that ability.
Relativists might interpret the three spheres of morality as showing that individual rights are a parochial Western custom and that we should respect other cultures' ethics of community and divinity as equally valid alternatives. I conclude instead that the design of the moral sense leaves people in all cultures vulnerable to confusing defensible moral judgments with irrelevant passions and prejudices. The ethic of autonomy or fairness is in fact not uniquelv Western; Amartya Sen and the legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon have shown that it also has deep roots in Asian thought. 7 Conversely, the ethic of community and the ethic of divinity are pervasive in the West. The ethic of community, which equates morality with a conformity to local norms, underlies the cultural relativism that has become boilerplate on college campuses. Several scholars have noticed that their students are unequipped to explain why Nazism was wrong, because the students feel it is impermissible to criticize the values of another culture. 8 (I can confirm that students today reflexively hedge their moral judgments, saying things like, "Our society puts a high value on being good to other people. ") Donald Symons comments on the way that {273} people's judgments can do a backflip when they switch from autonomy- to community-based morality:
If only one person in the world held down a terrified, struggling, screaming little girl, cut off her genitals with a septic blade, and sewed her back up, leaving only a tiny hole for urine and menstrual flow, the only question would be how severely that person should be punished, and whether the death penalty would be a sufficiently severe sanction. But when millions of people do this, instead of the enormity being magnified millions-fold, suddenly it becomes "culture," and thereby magically becomes less, rather than more, horrible, and is even defended by some Western "moral thinkers," including feminists. 9
The ethic of community also includes a deference to an established hierarchy, and the mind (including the Western mind) all too easily conflates prestige with morality. We see it in words that implicitly equate status with virtue -- chivalrous, classy, gentlemanly, honorable, noble -- and low rank with sin -- low-class, low-rent, mean, nasty, shabby, shoddy, villain (originally meaning "peasant"), vulgar. The Myth of the Noble Noble is obvious in contemporary celebrity worship. Members of the royalty like Princess Diana and her American equivalent, John E
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Kennedy Jr. , are awarded the trappings of sainthood even though they were morally unexceptional people (yes, Diana supported charities, but that's pretty much the job description of a princess in this day and age). Their good looks brighten their halos even more, because people judge attractive men and women to be more virtuous. 10 Prince Charles, who also supports charities, will never be awarded the trappings of sainthood, even if he dies a tragic death. People also confuse morality with purity, even in the secular West.
Remember from Chapter 1 that many words for cleanliness and dirt are also words for virtue and sin pure, unblemished, tainted, and so on). Haidt's subjects seem to have conflated contamination with sin when they condemned eating a dog, having sex with a dead chicken, and enjoying consensual incest (which reflects our instinctive repulsion toward sex with siblings, an emotion that evolved to deter inbreeding).
The mental mix-up of the good and the clean can have ugly consequences. Racism and sexism are often expressed as a desire to avoid pollutants, as in the ostracism of the "untouchable" caste in India, the sequestering of menstruating women in Orthodox Judaism, the fear of contracting AIDS from casual contact with gay men, the segregated facilities for eating, drinking, bathing, and sleeping under the Jim Crow and apartheid policies, and the "racial hygiene" laws in Nazi Germany. One of the haunting questions of {274} twentieth-century history is how so many ordinary people committed wartime atrocities. The philosopher Jonathan Glover has documented that a common denominator is degradation: a diminution of the victim's status or cleanliness or both. When someone strips a person of dignity by making jokes about his suffering, giving him a humiliating appearance (a dunce cap, awkward prison garb, a crudely shaved head), or forcing him to live in filthy conditions, ordinary people's compassion can evaporate and they find it easy to treat him like an animal or object. 11
The peculiar mixture of fairness, status, and purity constituting the moral sense should make us suspicious of appeals to raw sentiment in resolving difficult moral issues. In an influential essay called "The Wisdom of Repugnance," Leon Kass (now the chair of George W. Bush's Council on Bioethics) argued that we should abandon moral reasoning when it comes to cloning and go with our gut feelings:
We are repelled by the prospect of cloning human beings not because of the strangeness or novelty of the undertaking, but because we intuit and feel, immediately and without argument, the violation of things that we rightfully hold dear. Repugnance, here as elsewhere, revolts against the excesses of human willfulness, warning us not to transgress what is unspeakably profound. Indeed, in this age in which everything is held to be permissible so long as it is freely done, in which our given human nature no longer commands respect, in which our bodies are regarded as mere instruments of our autonomous rational wills, repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity. Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder. 12
There may be good arguments against human cloning, but the shudder test is not one of them. People have shuddered at all kinds of morally irrelevant violations of standards of purity in their culture: touching an untouchable, drinking from the same water fountain as a person of color, allowing Jewish blood to mix with Aryan blood, tolerating sodomy between consenting men. As recently as 1978, many people (including Kass) shuddered at the new technology of in vitro fertilization, or, as it was then called, "test-tube babies. " But now it is morally unexceptionable and, for hundreds of thousands of people, a source of immeasurable happiness or of life itself.
The difference between a defensible moral position and an atavistic gut feeling is that with the former we can give reasons why our conviction is valid. We can explain why torture and murder and rape are wrong, or why we should oppose discrimination and injustice. On the other hand, no good reasons can be produced to show why homosexuality should be suppressed or why the races should be segregated. And the good reasons for a moral position are not {275} pulled out of thin air: they always have to do with what makes people better off or worse off, and are grounded in the logic that we have to treat other people in the way that we demand they treat us.
~
Another strange feature of the moral emotions is that they can be turned on and off like a switch. These mental spoinks are called moralization and amoralization, and have recently been studied in the lab by Rozin. 13 They consist in
flipping between a mindset that judges behavior in terms of preference with a mindset that judges behavior in terms of value.
There are two kinds of vegetarians: those who avoid meat for health reasons, namely reducing dietary fat and toxins, and those who avoid meat for moral reasons, namely respecting the rights of animals. Rozin has shown that compared with health vegetarians, moral vegetarians offer more reasons for their meat avoidance, have a greater emotional reaction to meat, and are more likely to treat it as a contaminant -- they refuse, for example, to eat a bowl of soup into which a drop of meat broth has fallen. Moral vegetarians are more likely to think that other people
? ? ? ? ? ? ? should be vegetarians, and they are more likely to invest their dietary habit with bizarre virtues, like believing that meat eating makes people more aggressive and animalistic. But it is not just vegetarians who associate eating habits with moral value. When college students are given descriptions of people and asked to rate their character, they judge that a person who eats cheeseburgers and milkshakes is less nice and considerate than a person who eats chicken and salad!
Rozin notes that smoking has recently been moralized. For many years the decision of whether to smoke was treated as a matter of preference or prudence: some people simply didn't enjoy smoking or avoided it because it was hazardous to their health. But with the discovery of the harmful effects of secondhand smoke, smoking is now treated as an immoral act. Smokers are banished and demonized, and the psychology of disgust and contamination is brought into play. Nonsmokers avoid not just smoke but anything that has ever been in contact with smoke: in hotels, they demand smoke-free rooms or even smoke-free floors. Similarly, the desire for retribution has been awakened: juries have slapped tobacco companies with staggering financial penalties, appropriately called "punitive damages. " This is not to say that these decisions are unjustified, only that we should be aware of the emotions that may be driving them. At the same time, many behaviors have been amoralized, switching (in the eyes of many people) from moral flaws to lifestyle choices. The amoralized acts include divorce, illegitimacy, working motherhood, marijuana use, homosexuality, masturbation, sodomy, oral sex, atheism, and any practice of a non-Western culture. Similarly, many afflictions have been reassigned from the wages of sin to the vagaries of bad luck and have been redubbed accordingly. {276} The homeless used to be called bums and tramps; sexually transmitted diseases were formerly known as venereal diseases. Most of the professionals who work with drug addiction insist that it is not a bad choice but a kind of illness. To the cultural right, all this shows that morality has been under assault from the cultural elite, as we see in the sect that calls itself the Moral Majority. To the left, it shows that the desire to stigmatize private behavior is archaic and repressive, as in H. L. Mencken's definition of Puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. " Both sides are wrong. As if to compensate for all the behaviors that have been amoralized in recent decades, we are in the midst of a campaign to moralize new ones. The Babbitts and the bluenoses have been replaced by the activists for a nanny state and the college towns with a foreign policy, but the psychology of moralization is the same. Here are some examples of things that have acquired a moral coloring only recently:
advertising to children ? automobile safety ? Barbie dolls ? "big box" chain stores ? cheesecake photos ? clothing from Third World factories ? consumer product safety ? corporate-owned farms ? defense- funded research ? disposable diapers ? disposable packaging ? ethnic jokes ? executive salaries ? fast food ? flirtation in the workplace ? food additives ? fur ? hydroelectric dams ? IQ tests ? logging ? mining ? nuclear power ? oil drilling ? owning certain stocks ? poultry farms ? public holidays (Columbus Day, Martin Luther King Day) ? research on AIDS ? research on breast cancer ? spanking ? suburbia ("sprawl") ? sugar ? tax cuts ? toy guns ? violence on television ? weight of fashion models
Many of these things can have harmful consequences, of course, and no one would want them trivialized. The question is whether they are best handled by the psychology of moralization (with its search for villains, elevation of accusers, and mobilization of authority to mete out punishment) or in terms of costs and benefits, prudence and risk, or good and bad taste. Pollution, for example, is often treated as a crime of defiling the sacred, as in the song by the rock group Traffic: "Why don't we . . . try to save this land, and make a promise not to hurt again this holy ground. " This can be contrasted with the attitude of economists like Robert Frank, who (alluding to the costs of cleanups) said, "There is an optimal amount of pollution in the environment, just as there is an optimal amount of dirt in your house. " Moreover, all human activities have consequences, often with various degrees of benefit and harm to different
parties, but not all of them are conceived as immoral. We don't show contempt to the man who fails to change the batteries in his smoke alarms, takes his family on a driving vacation (multiplying their risk of accidental death), or moves to a rural area (increasing pollution {277} and fuel use in commuting and shopping). Driving a gas-guzzling SUV is seen as morally dubious, but driving a gas-guzzling Volvo is not; eating a Big Mac is suspect, but eating imported cheese or tiramisu is not. Becoming aware of the psychology of moralization need not make us morally obtuse. On the contrary, it can alert us to the possibility that a decision to treat an act in terms of virtue and sin as opposed to cost and benefit has been made on morally irrelevant grounds -- in particular, whether the saints and sinners would be in one's own coalition or someone else's. Much of what is today called "social criticism" consists of members of the upper classes denouncing the tastes of the lower classes (bawdy entertainment, fast food, plentiful consumer goods) while considering themselves egalitarians.
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? ? There is another bit of moral psychology that is commonly associated with primitive thinking but is alive and well in
modern minds: concepts of the sacred and the taboo. Some values are considered not just worthy but sacrosanct. They have infinite or transcendental worth, trumping all other considerations. One is not permitted even to think of trading them off against other values, because the very thought is self-evidently sinful and deserves only condemnation and outrage.
The psychologist Philip Tetlock elicited the psychology of the sacred and the taboo in the students of American universities. 14 He asked them whether people should be allowed to buy and sell organs for transplantation, auction licenses to adopt orphans, pay for the right to become a citizen, sell their vote in an election, or pay someone to serve in their stead in prison or the military. Not surprisingly, most of the students thought that the practices were unethical and should be outlawed. But their responses went well beyond disagreement: they were outraged that anyone would consider legalizing these practices, were insulted to have been asked, and wanted to punish anyone who tolerated them. When they were asked to justify their opinion, all they could say was that the practices were "degrading, dehumanizing, and unacceptable. " The students even sought to cleanse themselves by volunteering to campaign against a (fictitious) movement to legalize the auctioning of adoption rights. Their outrage was reduced a bit, but was still potent, after hearing arguments in favor of the taboo policies, such as that a market in orphans would put more children in loving homes and that lower-income people would be given vouchers to participate.
Another study asked about a hospital administrator who had to decide whether to spend a million dollars on a liver transplant for a child or use it on other hospital needs. (Administrators implicitly face this kind of choice all the time, because there are lifesaving procedures that are astronomically expensive and cannot be carried out on everyone who needs them. ) Not only did respondents want to punish an administrator who chose to spend the money on {278} the hospital, they wanted to punish an administrator who chose to save the child but thought for a long time before making the decision (like the frugal comedian Jack Benny when a mugger said, "Your money or your life").
The taboo on thinking about core values is not totally irrational. We judge people not just on what they do but on what they are -- not just on whether someone has given more than he has taken, but on whether he is the kind of person who would sell you down the river or knife you in the back if it were ever in his interests to do so. To determine whether someone is emotionally committed to a relationship, guaranteeing the veracity of his promises, one should ascertain how he thinks: whether he holds your interests sacred or constantly weighs them against the profits to be made by selling you out. The notion of character joins the moral picture, and with it the notion of moral identity: the concept of one's own character that is maintained internally and projected to others.
Tetlock points out that it is in the very nature of our commitments to other people to deny that we can put a price on them: "To transgress these normative boundaries, to attach a monetary value to one's friendships or one's children or one's loyalty to one's country, is to disqualify oneself from certain societal roles, to demonstrate that one just 'doesn't get it' -- one does not understand what it means to be a true friend or parent or citizen. "15 Taboo tradeoffs, which pit a sacred value against a secular one (such as money), are "morally corrosive: the longer one contemplates indecent proposals, the more irreparably one compromises one's moral identity. "16
Unfortunately, a psychology that treats some desiderata as having infinite value can lead to absurdities. Tetlock reviews some examples. The Delaney Clause of the Food and Drug Act of 1958 sought to improve public health by banning all new food additives for which there was any risk of carcinogenicity. That sounded good but wasn't. The policy left people exposed to more dangerous food additives that were already on the market, it created an incentive for manufacturers to introduce new dangerous additives as long as they were not carcinogenic, and it outlawed products that could have saved more lives than they put at risk, such as the saccharin used by diabetics. Similarly after the discovery of hazardous waste at the Love Canal in 1978, Congress passed the Superfund Act, which required the complete cleanup of all hazardous waste sites. It turned out to cost millions of dollars to clean up the last 10 percent of the waste at a given site -- money that could have been spent on cleaning up other sites or reducing other health risks. So the lavish fund went bankrupt before even a fraction of its sites could be decontaminated, and its effect on Americans' health was debatable. After the Exxon Valdez oil spill, four-fifths of the respondents in one poll said that the country should pursue greater environmental protection "regardless of cost. " Taken literally, that meant they were prepared to shut down all schools, hospitals, and police and {279} fire stations, stop funding social programs, medical research, foreign aid, and national defense, or raise the income tax rate to 99 percent, if that is what it would have cost to protect the environment.
Tetlock observes that these fiascoes came about because any politician who honestly presented the inexorable tradeoffs would be crucified for violating a taboo. He would be guilty of "tolerating poisons in our food and water," or worse, "putting a dollar value on human life. " Policy analysts note that we are stuck with wasteful and inegalitarian entitlement programs because any politician who tried to reform them would be committing political suicide. Savvy opponents would frame the reform in the language of taboo: "breaking our faith with the elderly," "betraying the sacred trust of veterans who risked their lives for their country," "scrimping on the care and education of the young. "
? ? ? ? ? In the Preface, I called the Blank Slate a sacred doctrine and human nature a modern taboo. This can now be stated as a technical hypothesis. The thrust of the radical science movement was to moralize the scientific study of the mind and to engage the mentality of taboo. Recall, from Part II, the indignant outrage, the punishment of heretics, the refusal to consider claims as they were actually stated, the moral cleansing through demonstrations and manifestos and public denunciations. Weizenbaum condemned ideas "whose very contemplation ought to give rise to feelings of disgust" and denounced the less-than-human scientists who "can even think of such a thing. " But of course it is the job of scholars to think about things, even if only to make it clear why they are wrong. Moralization and scholarship thus often find themselves on a collision course.
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This ruthless dissection of the human moral sense does not mean that morality is a sham or that every moralist is a self- righteous prig. Moral psychology may be steeped in emotion, but then many philosophers have argued that morality cannot be grounded in reason alone anyway. As Hume wrote, " 'Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. "17 The emotions of sympathy, gratitude, and guilt are the source of innumerable acts of kindness great and small, and a measured righteous anger and ethical certitude must have sustained great moral leaders throughout history.
Glover notes that many twentieth-century atrocities were set in motion when the moral emotions were disabled. Decent people were lulled into committing appalling acts by a variety of amoralizing causes, such as Utopian ideologies, phased decisions (in which the targets of bombing might shift from isolated factories to factories near neighborhoods to the neighborhoods themselves), and the diffusion of responsibility within a bureaucracy. It was often raw moral sentiment -- feeling empathy for victims, or asking oneself the moral-identity question "Am I the kind of person who could do this? " -- that {280} stopped people in mid-atrocity. The moral sense, amplified and extended by reasoning and a knowledge of history, is what stands between us and a Mad Max nightmare of ruthless psychopaths.
But there is still much to be wary of in human moralizing: the confusion of morality with status and purity, the temptation to overmoralize matters of judgment and thereby license aggression against those with whom we disagree, the taboos on thinking about unavoidable tradeoffs, and the ubiquitous vice of self-deception, which always manages to put the self on the side of the angels. Hitler was a moralist (indeed, a moral vegetarian) who, by most accounts, was convinced of the rectitude of his cause. As the historian Ian Buruma wrote, "This shows once again that true believers can be more dangerous than cynical operators. The latter might cut a deal; the former have to go to the end -- and drag the world down with them. "18
<< {281} >>
HOT BUTTONS
ome debates are so entwined with people's moral identity that one might despair that they can ever be resolved by reason and evidence. Social S psychologists have found that with divisive moral issues, especially those on which liberals and conservatives disagree, all combatants are
intuitively certain they are correct and that their opponents have ugly ulterior motives. They argue out of respect for the social convention that one should always provide reasons for one's opinions, but when an argument is refuted, they don't change their minds but work harder to find a replacement argument. Moral debates, far from resolving hostilities, can escalate them, because when people on the other side don't immediately
1
capitulate, it only proves they are impervious to reason.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the topics I will explore in this part of the book. People's opinions on politics, violence, gender, children, and the arts help define the kind of person they think they are and the kind of person they want to be. They prove that the person is opposed to oppression, violence, sexism, philistinism, and the abuse or neglect of children. Unfortunately, folded into these opinions are assumptions about the psychological makeup of Homo sapiens. Conscientious people may thus find themselves unwittingly staked to positions on empirical questions in biology or psychology. When scientific facts come in they rarely conform exactly to our expectations; if they did, we would not have to do science in the first place. So when facts tip over a sacred cow, people are tempted to suppress the facts and to clamp down on debate because the facts threaten everything they hold sacred. And this can leave us unequipped to deal with just those problems for which new facts and analyses are most needed.
The landscape of the sciences of human nature is strewn with these third rails, hot zones, black holes, and Chernobyls. I have picked five of them to explore in the next few chapters, while necessarily leaving out many others
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? (for instance, race, sexual orientation, education, drug abuse, and mental illness). {282} Social psychologists have discovered that even in heated ideological battles, common ground can sometimes be found. 2 Each side must acknowledge that the other is arguing out of principle, too, and that they both share certain values and disagree only over which to emphasize in cases where they conflict. Finding such common ground is my goal in the discussions to follow.
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{283} >> Chapter 16
Politics
I often think it's comical
How nature always does contrive That every boy and every gal, That's born into the world alive, Is either a little Liberal,
Or else a little Conservative! 1
? ? ? ? ? Gilbert and Sullivan got it mostly right in 1882: liberal and conservative political attitudes are largely, though far from completely, heritable. When identical twins who were separated at birth are tested in adulthood, their political attitudes turn out to be similar, with a correlation coefficient of .
