The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

by Steven Pinker

  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 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:

  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.

  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 custo
m 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 uniquely 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 peopie’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 F. 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 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 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 bro
ught 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. 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: