Below are two reviews of ‘Moral Minds’ by Marc D. Hauser; the first by Richard Rorty from the New York Times and the second by Jonathan Derbyshire from the Guardian. They encapsulate my feelings precisely and they say it better than I could. The book is unsatisfying on many levels, not least the drudgery of wading through his rather dense prose.
Richard Rorty’s Review
‘Nazi parents found it easy to turn their children into conscientious little monsters. In some countries, young men are raised to believe that they have a moral obligation to kill their unchaste sisters. Gruesome examples like these suggest that morality is a matter of nurture rather than nature — that there are no biological constraints on what human beings can be persuaded to believe about right and wrong. Marc Hauser disagrees. He holds that “we are born with abstract rules or principles, with nurture entering the picture to set the parameters and guide us toward the acquisition of particular moral systems.” Empirical research will enable us to distinguish the principles from the parameters and thus to discover “what limitations exist on the range of possible or impossible moral systems.”
Hauser is professor of psychology, organismic and evolutionary biology, and biological anthropology at Harvard. He believes that “policy wonks and politicians should listen more closely to our intuitions and write policy that effectively takes into account the moral voice of our species.” Biologists, he thinks, are in a position to amplify this voice. For they have discovered evidence of the existence of what Hauser sometimes calls “a moral organ” and sometimes “a moral faculty.” This area of the brain is “a circuit, specialized for recognizing certain problems as morally relevant.” It incorporates “a universal moral grammar, a toolkit for building specific moral systems.” Now that we have learned that such a grammar exists, Hauser says, we can look forward to “a renaissance in our understanding of the moral domain.”
The exuberant triumphalism of the prologue to “Moral Minds” leads the reader to expect that Hauser will lay out criteria for distinguishing parochial moral codes from universal principles, and will offer at least a tentative list of those principles. These expectations are not fulfilled. The vast bulk of “Moral Minds” consists of reports of experimental results, but Hauser does very little to make clear how these results bear on his claim that there is a “moral voice of our species.”
Many of the experiments Hauser tells us about are intended to delimit stages in child development. Three-year-olds already know, for example, that “if an act causes harm, but the intention was good, then the act is judged less severely.” Hauser takes this fact to support the claim that “rather than a learned capacity … our ability to detect cheaters who violate social norms is one of nature’s gifts.” But do such facts as that children learn to use expressions like “didn’t mean to do it” at roughly the same time as they learn “shouldn’t have done it” help us draw a line between nature and nurture? Hauser does not spell out the relevance of data about child development to the question of whether internalizing a moral code requires a dedicated area of the brain.
To convince us that such an organ exists, Hauser would have to start by drawing a bright line separating what he calls “the moral domain” — one that nonhuman species cannot enter — from other domains. But he never does. The closest he comes is saying things like “a central difference between social conventions and moral rules is the seriousness of an infraction.” He takes this to suggest “that moral rules consist of two ingredients: a prescriptive theory or body of knowledge about what one ought to do, and an anchoring set of emotions.” Apparently both rules of etiquette and moral rules embody knowledge about what ought to be done. All that is distinctive about morality is added emotional freight. But, as Hauser tells us, many nonhuman species obey social conventions. (For example, “Do not start tearing at the carcass before the alpha male has eaten his fill.”) It is hard to see why evolution had to carve out a new, specialized organ just to generate the extra emotional intensity that differentiates guilt from chagrin.
Perhaps Hauser does not mean to say that greater seriousness is the only, or the most important, mark of the moral domain. But the reader is left guessing about how he proposes to distinguish morality not just from etiquette, but also from prudential calculation, mindless conformity to peer pressure and various other things. This makes it hard to figure out what exactly his moral module is supposed to do. It also makes it difficult to envisage experiments that would help us decide between his hypothesis and the view that all we need to internalize a moral code is general-purpose learning-from-experience circuitry — the same circuitry that lets us internalize, say, the rules of baseball.
Hauser thinks that Noam Chomsky has shown that in at least one area — learning how to produce grammatical sentences — the latter sort of circuitry will not do the job. We need, Hauser says, a “radical rethinking of our ideas on morality, which is based on the analogy to language.” But the analogy seems fragile. Chomsky has argued, powerfully if not conclusively, that simple trial-and-error imitation of adult speakers cannot explain the speed and confidence with which children learn to talk: some special, dedicated mechanism must be at work. But is a parallel argument available to Hauser? For one thing, moral codes are not assimilated with any special rapidity. For another, the grammaticality of a sentence is rarely a matter of doubt or controversy, whereas moral dilemmas pull us in opposite directions and leave us uncertain. (Is it O.K. to kill a perfectly healthy but morally despicable person if her harvested organs would save the lives of five admirable people who need transplants? Ten people? Dozens?)
Hauser hopes that his book will convince us that “morality is grounded in our biology.” Once we have grasped this fact, he thinks, “inquiry into our moral nature will no longer be the proprietary province of the humanities and social sciences, but a shared journey with the natural sciences.” But by “grounded in” he does not mean that facts about what is right and wrong can be inferred from facts about neurons. The “grounding” relation in question is not like that between axioms and theorems. It is more like the relation between your computer’s hardware and the programs you run on it. If your hardware were of the wrong sort, or if it got damaged, you could not run some of those programs.
Knowing more details about how the diodes in your computer are laid out may, in some cases, help you decide what software to buy. But now imagine that we are debating the merits of a proposed change in what we tell our kids about right and wrong. The neurobiologists intervene, explaining that the novel moral code will not compute. We have, they tell us, run up against hard-wired limits: our neural layout permits us to formulate and commend the proposed change, but makes it impossible for us to adopt it. Surely our reaction to such an intervention would be, “You might be right, but let’s try adopting it and see what happens; maybe our brains are a bit more flexible than you think.” It is hard to imagine our taking the biologists’ word as final on such matters, for that would amount to giving them a veto over utopian moral initiatives. The humanities and the social sciences have, over the centuries, done a great deal to encourage such initiatives. They have helped us better to distinguish right from wrong. Reading histories, novels, philosophical treatises and ethnographies has helped us to reprogram ourselves — to update our moral software. Maybe someday biology will do the same. But Hauser has given us little reason to believe that day is near at hand.’
Richard Rorty recently retired from teaching at Stanford. He is the author of “Philosophy and Social Hope.”
Jonathan Derbyshire’s Review
‘According to Marc Hauser, “morality is grounded in our biology”. We’ve heard this sort of thing before, of course – from evolutionary biologists, for instance, who claim that natural selection favours altruistic behaviour, since acting benevolently towards other people is a way of securing our genetic posterity. Some proponents of the evolutionary explanation go further, and infer from this that what seem to be our moral concerns aren’t our real concerns at all, and that what looks like altruism is in fact just a disguise for the operation of selfish genes.
Though Hauser himself believes that the moral machinery of human brains has been designed by the “blind hand” of Darwinian selection, he rejects such extreme interpretations. There’s no gene for altruism, he says, so we can’t derive specific rules for conduct from the structure of our DNA. And for that reason, we shouldn’t worry that our genetic inheritance leaves us trapped in an unchanging set of moral beliefs or judgments. On the contrary, our biology does not fix the range of possible moral systems, which is constrained only by history and culture. What that biology gives us is a set of very general principles on the basis of which we are able to develop one system of moral beliefs or another.
These general principles are at the heart of Hauser’s argument in Moral Minds. His contention, which he thinks amounts to nothing less than a “radical rethinking” of the nature of morality, is that human beings are creatures born with innate “moral instincts”. Because Homo sapiens is the only species to construct complex moral systems, morality has to be grounded in some distinctive property of the human brain – what Hauser calls a “moral organ” or “moral grammar”.
As the latter description suggests, Hauser’s inspiration here is the work done in theoretical linguistics by Noam Chomsky. Chomsky argues that the ability of children to learn to talk, which involves mastering highly complex rules of grammar, couldn’t simply be acquired by listening to competent adult speakers. There must be an innate “universal grammar” underlying different languages, deep structures that can be uncovered through painstaking comparative study.
Hauser builds on the “linguistic analogy” suggested by the philosopher John Rawls, who thought that a satisfactory account of our moral capacities would involve appealing to intuitive principles that we aren’t necessarily capable of articulating for ourselves. Just as we generate different, and mutually unintelligible, languages on the basis of universal grammatical principles, so, Hauser argues, there are deep moral “intuitions” that underlie cultural variations in social norms.
In order to uncover this “universal moral grammar”, Hauser devised a “moral sense test”. The test presented subjects with a number of so-called “trolley” problems, imaginary dilemmas dreamt up by philosophers and designed to tease out people’s moral intuitions. Imagine, for example, that you’re standing on a footbridge from which you can see a driverless tram hurtling in the direction of five people stranded on the track. The only way of stopping the tram and saving the lives of those people is to drop a heavy weight in its path. As it happens, a fat man is also standing on the bridge. Should you push the fat man to his death in order to stop the tram or leave him unmolested, in which case those on the track will die?
Hauser reports that only 10% of respondents said it was morally permissible to push the fat man from the bridge. From this and similar results, he deduces a universal “intention principle”, according to which intended harm is morally worse than harm that is foreseen but not directly intended. What is unclear, however, is why Hauser thinks data like these also license claims about the existence of a discrete moral faculty or “organ”. It is one thing to articulate principles that help to make sense of our intuitive responses to moral dilemmas, but quite another to conclude from this that such principles must belong to a particular region of the brain.
Moral Minds is full of fascinating reports on psychological experiments, few of which offer any obvious support for Hauser’s ambitious claims about moral grammar. This accounts, in part, for the book’s longueurs – that and the fact that Hauser’s rather colourless prose style is no match for that of scientific popularisers such as Steven Pinker or Richard Dawkins.
Hauser’s extravagant promise, in the prologue, to “explain how an unconscious and universal grammar underlies our judgments of right and wrong” is therefore not fulfilled. In fact, he comes close to acknowledging this in a somewhat deflating conclusion when he concedes that the “science of morality” is still in its infancy. And there is nothing here to suggest that this nascent discipline will conquer the “proprietary province of the humanities” any time soon.’
Jonathan Derbyshire is a philosopher and blogger
