Science of Good and Evil

by Michael Shermer

  At first blush this does seem, well, fair and just. After all, it’s not my fault that my parents were not as well off as other parents who sent their children to exclusive private schools, while I floundered through mediocre public schools. Shouldn’t I be compensated somehow? What about poorer black kids attending inner city public schools that fall far below mediocrity? Shouldn’t redress be made for this bias? Unfortunately, when you carry this line of reasoning out through all of its consequences, it becomes absurd in the extreme. What qualifies as a native asset? Height, looks, and intelligence? Social psychologists have found that men in excess of six feet in height will earn more money than men under six feet tall, that better-looking people receive more attention from teachers and more breaks on the job, and that people with an IQ in excess of 145 puts them at the top of the game in both native ability and earning power. Should people receive compensation for handicaps of height, looks, and smarts? Of course not. It seems fairly obvious that this trend toward equality would lead to extensive and draconian governmental interventions. Instead of justice for all, we would end up with freedom for none.

  A more reasonable alternative, it seems to me, is the libertarianism of Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Ironically, Nozick makes an argument similar to Rawls’s concept, but he arrives at a radically different solution about the role of the state. “Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights). So strong and far-reaching are these rights that they raise the question of what, if anything, the state and its officials may do.” As little as possible, Nozick concludes: “A minimal state, limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on, is justified; that any more extensive state will violate persons’ rights not to be forced to do certain things, and is unjustified; and that the minimal state is inspiring as well as right.”28 Inspiring and right. It doesn’t get any better than that. But here I may not be purely objective.

  In fact, I must plea a mea culpa for enthusiastically embracing what has to be one of the most paradoxical forms of secular absolute moral systems ever devised—Ayn Rand’s Objectivism. Throughout my youthful forays into divers ethical systems, I clung to a core of philosophy laid down in her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, a novel many people devour for its ideals of personal responsibility, rugged individualism, and free-market economics. Objectivism is based on four central tenets: 1. Metaphysics: Objective Reality; 2. Epistemology: Reason; 3. Ethics: Self-interest; 4. Politics: Capitalism.29 Thinking for oneself is primary, and behaving morally leads to success and happiness. Rand’s moral hero is John Gait, the Atlas who shrugged when his vision of the world failed to take hold. Gait is the “Prometheus who changed his mind. After centuries of being torn by vultures in payment for having brought to men the fire of the gods, he broke his chains and he withdrew his fire—until the day when men withdraw their vultures.” When the vultures (read Big Government and Big Religion) finally withdrew their restrictions, Galt (read Rand) exhorted the heroes left standing: “The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it’s yours.30

  The problem with Objectivism is its contention that absolute knowledge and final truths are attainable. For Objectivists, once a principle has been discovered through reason to be True, there is no further cause for disputation. If you disagree with the principle, then too bad for you—the principle is True anyway. This is more like theology than it is philosophy. Whatever it is, it is not science. In Rand’s circle, such absolutism led to the same end that all absolute moral systems experience if they are carried out to their logical extreme: a bipolarization of people into true believers and heretics, with acceptance of the former and excommunication of the latter. Nathaniel Branden, Rand’s chief lieutenant, who began as a true believer and ended up an excommunicated heretic, explained the “implicit premises” to which “everyone in our circle subscribed,” including: “Ayn Rand is the greatest human being who has ever lived. Atlas Shrugged is the greatest human achievement in the history of the world. Ayn Rand, by virtue of her philosophical genius, is the supreme arbiter in any issue pertaining to what is rational, moral, or appropriate to man’s life on earth. Once one is acquainted with Ayn Rand and/or her work, the measure of one’s virtue is intrinsically tied to the position one takes regarding her and/or it. No one can be a good Objectivist who does not admire what Ayn Rand admires and condemn what Ayn Rand condemns.”31

  Absolute morality generates absolute intolerance. And the problem is endemic to all absolute systems of thought, from religious to nonreligious, from libertarian to communist. One would think, for example, that Objectivists would embrace all libertarians. But no, like the Baptists and Anabaptists who warred over whether baptism should be implemented at birth or in adulthood (with the Anabaptists opting for the latter), some of Rand’s biggest battles were fought not with socialists, but with fellow libertarians. Barbara Branden recalled a dinner catastrophe that resulted from the first meeting between Rand, the libertarian economist Henry Hazlitt, and Ludwig von Mises, the greatest intellectual defender of free-market economics of the twentieth century. “The evening was a disaster. It was the first time Ayn had discussed moral philosophy in depth with either of the two men. ‘My impression,’ she was to say, ‘was that von Mises did not care to consider moral issues, and Henry was seriously committed to altruism … . We argued quite violently. At one point von Mises lost his patience and screamed at me.’”32 Economist and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, one of the fountainheads of libertarianism, recalled an incident at the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947, at which was gathered a veritable who’s who of free-market economists (including Friedrich von Hayek, Fritz Machlup, George Stigler, Frank Knight, Henry Hazlitt, and Ludwig von Mises). “One afternoon, the discussion was on the distribution of income, taxes, progressive taxes, and so on. In the middle of that discussion von Mises got up and said, ‘You’re all a bunch of socialists,’ and stomped out of the room.”33

  Intolerance is just as prevalent at the other end of the political and economic spectrum. Economist Murray Rothbard, who avers that the Libertarian party was founded in his living room, compared the intolerance of communists with that of Randian Libertarians, with a corresponding result that due to the inability of followers to properly toe the party line, at any given time both groups had more ex-members than members: “an ideological cult can adopt the same features as a more overtly religious cult, even when the ideology is explicitly atheistic and anti-religious.” Intolerance is enforced through ideological straitjackets: “Communists preserve their members from the dangerous practice of thinking on their own by keeping them in constant activity together with other Communists … of the major Communist defectors in the United States, almost all defected only after a period of enforced isolation.” The same was true in the Rand circle. “Every night one of the top Randians lectured to different members expounding various aspects of the ‘party line’: on basics, on psychology, fiction, sex, thinking, art, economics, or philosophy. Failure to attend these lectures was a matter of serious concern in the movement.”34 Loyal followers often found themselves outcast heretics for the minutest of infractions, such as listening to the “wrong” music or not properly denouncing an irrational idea. Moral absolutism leads to moral absurdities, turning acolytes into apostates.

  Judge Not, That Ye Be Not Judged

  One of the reasons that Christianity succeeded was its tolerance for diversity and openness to all comers. With the success of Christianity, the within-group intolerant morality of the Old Testament gave way to a more tolerant morality of the New Testament. Contrast Rand’s Old Testament—style morality with that of Jesus on the matter of moral judgment. Here is Rand’s position:

  The precept: “Judge not, that ye be not judged” … is an abdication of moral responsibility: it is a moral blank check one gives to others in exchange for a moral blank check one expects for oneself. There
is no escape from the fact that men have to make choices; so long as men have to make choices, there is no escape from moral values; so long as moral values are at stake, no moral neutrality is possible. To abstain from condemning a torturer, is to become an accessory to the torture and murder of his victims. The moral principle to adopt … is: “Judge, and be prepared to be judged.”35

  Actually, what Jesus said in full (in Matt. 7:1—5) was:

  Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.

  The principle Jesus extols is not moral neutrality or a moral blank check, but a warning against self-righteous severity and a rush to judgment, as explained in the Talmudic collection of commentary on Jewish custom and law called the Mishnah: “Do not judge your fellow until you are in his position” (Aboth 2:5); “When you judge any man weight the scales in his favor” (Aboth 1:6). Jesus wants us to be cautious, not to cross the line between legitimate and hypocritical moral judgment. The “mote” and “beam” metaphor is purposeful hyperbole. The man who lacks virtue feels morally smug in judging the virtue of his neighbor. The “hypocrite” is the critic who disguises his own failings by focusing attention on the failings of others. Perhaps Jesus is offering insight into human psychology where, for example, the adulterer is obsessed with judging other peoples’ sexual offenses, the homophobe secretly wonders about his own sexuality, or the liar suspects others of excessive falsehoods.36

  Methodological Individualism and Moral Tolerance

  Why should absolutism necessarily lead to intolerance? Is it just that people who prefer absolute systems of morality tend to be intolerant by temperament, or is there something built into the systems themselves that leads to intolerant attitudes and behavior? An answer can be found in the difference between the binary logic of absolute morality and the fuzzy logic of provisional morality. The basis of most ethical systems is Aristotelian binary logic: black or white, right or wrong, moral or immoral. Ayn Rand well represents this position: “There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist.”37

  Nonsense on stilts. Philosophy often only tells us the way the world should be. Science tells us how it really is, and science reveals a very fuzzy world with multiple shades of gray. Since the basis of provisional ethics is evolutionary theory, it seems fitting to turn to a Darwinian principle that leads to a more tolerant moral guide for our fuzzy world—methodological individualism. It assumes that only individual phenomena have a basis in reality—there are no pure Platonic essences, no fixed Aristotelian types. In the natural world, for example, there is no such thing as an immutable species fixed in the mind of some divine Gepetto. There are only individual organisms classified into types we call species. (These species, while temporarily stable in form and function, harbor the seeds of change or extinction. On a human time scale they appear relatively stable, but on a geological time scale species change.) Analogously, there are no fixed “species” of pure good or evil, only individual organisms of good and evil acts. Thus, if we want to understand morality and immorality, we must study individuals who express moral and immoral behaviors. That is, the target of our investigation should be the individual and individual human action in all its wondrous variety.

  Consider the work of an entomologist and evolutionary biologist whose specialty was gall wasps and whose methodology was evolutionary individualism. After earning a doctorate from Harvard and landing a post at the University of Indiana, he spent the next twenty years of his career logging tens of thousands of miles and collecting some 300,000 specimens of gall wasps, publishing the results of his research in two large monographs in 1930 and 1936: “In the intensive and extensive measurement of tens of thousands of small insects … I have made some attempt to secure the specific data and the quantity of data on which scientific scholarship must be based. During the past two years, as a result of a convergence of circumstances, I have found myself confronted with material on variation in certain types of human behavior.” The convergence of circumstances was this: in 1938 his university wanted to offer a course on marriage, a euphemism at the time for sex education. The entomologist was asked to serve as chairman of the committee to regulate the course and to give three lectures on the biology of sex. Thorough scientist that he was, he went to the library and found virtually nothing on human sexuality. So he began to research the subject himself. A student had scrawled a graffito on the title page of Harvard’s only copy of the 1936 wasp monograph: “Why don’t you write about something more interesting, Al?” Al was Alfred Kinsey, the pioneer in the scientific study of human sexuality.

  Kinsey undertook to collect his own data on a massive scale. One colleague described his need “to devour life, to gulp life, to look, and experiment and record”; Kinsey explained, “The technique we are using in this study is definitely the same as the technique in the gall wasp study.”38 As an entomologist, before he would hazard even a cautious conclusion about a particular group or species, Kinsey collected thousands of individual insects. He was no less thorough in his study of human sexuality. He began his research with personal interviews in his office, but as the process became too unwieldy, he developed a sizable staff and procured a separate research office and private grants to support a longitudinal study. By the time he published his results, Kinsey had collected data on more than 18,000 people, far outstripping all other studies done on any type of human behavior.

  The reason for such exhaustiveness was that Kinsey realized the unique individuality of all living organisms, from wasps to humans. A taxonomist’s generalizations of species, genera, and even higher categories, Kinsey explained, “are too often descriptions of unique individuals and structures of particular individuals that are not quite like anything that any other investigator will ever find.” Not just entomologists but psychologists as well are equally guilty of such hasty generalizations: “A mouse in a maze, today, is taken as a sample of all individuals, of all species of mice under all sorts of conditions, yesterday, today, and tomorrow.” Worse still, these collective conclusions are even extrapolated to humans: “A half dozen dogs, pedigrees unknown and breeds unnamed, are reported upon as ‘dogs’—meaning all kinds of dogs—if, indeed, the conclusions are not explicitly or at least implicitly applied to you, to your cousins, and to all other kinds and descriptions of humans.”39

  If wasps showed so much variation, how much more might humans? In his 1948 book Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Kinsey concluded: “Given the range of variation … the clinician can determine the averageness or uniqueness of any particular person, and comprehend the extent to which generalizations developed for the whole group may be applied to any particular case”; such individualist thinking helps “in the understanding of particular individuals by showing their relation to the remainder of the group.”40 Methodological individualism showed that even for such two seemingly dichotomous categories—heterosexual or homosexual—not everyone could be easily classified. “The histories which have been available in the present study make it apparent that the heterosexuality or homosexuality of many individuals is not an all-or-none proposition.” One can be both simultaneously, or neither temporarily. One can start as heterosexual and become homosexual, or vice versa. And the percentage of time spent in either state varies considerably among individuals in the population. “For instance,” Kinsey observed, “there
are some who engage in both heterosexual and homosexual activities in the same year, or in the same month or week, or even in the same day”; therefore, he concluded, “one is not warranted in recognizing merely two types of individuals, heterosexual and homosexual, and that the characterization of the homosexual as a third sex fails to describe any actuality.”41 Extrapolating this methodology to taxonomy in general, Kinsey deduced the uniqueness of individuals (in a powerful statement tucked away amid countless tables and graphs):

  Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separate pigeon-holes. The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects. The sooner we learn this concerning human sexual behavior the sooner we shall reach a sound understanding of the realities of sex.42

  Approaching human behavior—including the holy grail of moral behavior—from the perspective of methodological individualism leads to moral tolerance. If variation and uniqueness are the norm, then what form of morality can possibly envelop all human actions? For human sexuality alone, Kinsey measured 250 different items for each of over 10,000 people: “Endless recombinations of these characters in different individuals swell the possibilities to something which is, for all essential purposes, infinity.”43 At the end of his 1948 volume on males, Kinsey concluded that there is virtually no evidence for “the existence of such a thing as innate perversity, even among those individuals whose sexual activities society has been least inclined to accept.” On the contrary, he demonstrated through vast statistical tables and in-depth analysis that the evidence leads us to conclude that “most human sexual activities would become comprehensible to most individuals, if they could know the background of each other individual’s behavior.”44