Science of Good and Evil

by Michael Shermer

1 Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of The Metaphysic of Morals (1785), translated by T. K. Abbott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952).

  2 Francis A. Schaeffer, How Then Should We Live?: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture (New York: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1976).

  3 Barrett, Kurian, and Johnson, World Christian Encyclopedia. (Barrett is head of the Global Evangelization Movement, making one wonder if all this data is being collected to calibrate how long it will take to reduce this rich religious diversity to one cosmo-macromega Christian religion.)

  4 Robert Goodwin Olson, An Introduction to Existentialism (New York: Dover Publishers, 1961). Robert C. Solomon, ed., Existentialism (New York: Modern Library, Random House, 1974). See also Existentialism: A Primer online at www.tameri.com/csw/exist/.

  5 Jeremy Bentham, The Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) (New York: Macmillan, 1948), p. 80.

  6 Ibid., p. 30.

  7 Ibid.

  8 Stephen Jay Gould, Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983), p. 25.

  9 Bart Kosko, Fuzzy Thinking: The New Science of Fuzzy Logic (New York: Hyperion, 1993), p. 250.

  10 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) (New York: Modern Library, Random House, 1965).

  11 For example, Marilyn vos Savant was bombarded with angry letters when she revealed the correct solution in her weekly column in Parade magazine. Marilyn vos Savant, “Ask Marilyn,” Parade, September 9, 1990, February 17, 1991, and July 7, 1991. You can actually play the three-door game online at http://utstat.toronto.edu/david/MH.html#r. And on other Web sites you can find computer programs that have run hundreds of thousands of simulations of the game, proving that in the long run it is better to switch doors. See also Leonard Gillman, “The Car and the Goats,” American Mathematical Monthly, vol. 99, no. 1 (January 1992), pp. 3-7.

  12 Thomas Gilovich, Robert Vallone, and Amos Tversky, “The Hot Hand in Basketball: On the Misperception of Random Sequences,” Cognitive Psychology, vol. 17 (1985), pp. 295-314. Since we are dealing with professional basketball players instead of coins, adjustments have to be made. If a player’s shooting percentage is 60 percent, for example, we would expect, by chance, that he will sink six baskets in a row once for every twenty sequences of six shots attempted.

  13 Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

  14 Ibid.

  15 Ibid., p. 123.

  16 Ibid., p. 167.

  17 Ibid..

  18 Stardate: 1672.1 Earthdate: October 6, 1966. Star Trek, episode 5, “The Enemy Within,” produced by Gene Roddenberry, directed by Leo Penn, written by Richard Matheson.

  19 First presented as a principle in Michael Shermer, “The Captain Kirk Principle,” Scientific American (December 2002), p. 32.

  20 David G. Myers, Intuition: Its Powers and Perils (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 1.

  21 Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal, “Thin Slices of Expressive Behavior as Predictors of Interpersonal Consequences: A Meta-Analysis,” Psychological Bulletin, vol. 3 (1992), pp. 256-74, and Ambady and Rosenthal, “Half a Minute: Predicting Teacher Evaluations from Thin Slices of Nonverbal Behavior and Physical Attractiveness,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 64, pp. 431-41.

  22 J. A. Krosnick et al., “Subliminal Conditioning of Attitudes,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol. 18 (1992), pp. 152-62.

  23 Myers, Intuition, p. 119.

  24 Ibid., pp. 36-37.

  25 Ibid., pp. 174-76.

  26 Ibid., pp. 44-45.

  27 Ibid., pp. 46-47.

  28 Ibid., pp. 46-49. See also Paul Ekman, Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life (New York: Times Books, 2003).

  29 Jonathan Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment,” Psychological Review, vol. 108 (2001), pp. 814-34; Haidt, “The Positive Emotion of Elevation,” Prevention and Treatment 3, article 3 (2000); Haidt, “The Moral Emotions,” in Handbook of Affective Sciences, ed. R. J. Davidson, K. Scherer, and H. H. Goldschmidt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

  30 J. Greene et al., “An fMRI Investigation of Emotional Engagement in Moral Judgment,” Science, vol. 293 (2001), pp. 2105-08.

  31 Steven N. Brenner and Earl A. Molander, “Is the Ethics of Business Changing?” Harvard Business Review (January-February 1977), pp. 57-71.

  32 P. A. M. Van Lange, T. W Taris, and R. Vonk, “Dilemmas of Academic Practice: Perceptions of Superiority Among Social Psychologists,” European Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 27 (1997), pp. 675-85.

  33 “Oprah: A Heavenly Body? Survey Finds Talk-Show Host a Celestial Shoo-in,” U.S. News and World Report (March 31, 1997), p. 18.

  34 J. A. White and S. Plous, “Self-Enhancement and Social Responsibility: On Caring More, but Doing Less, Than Others,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology. vol. 25 (1995), pp. 1297-1318.

  35 J. Kruger, “Personal Beliefs and Cultural Stereotypes About Racial Characteristics,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 71 (1996), pp. 536-48.

  36 Brad J. Sagarin, Kelton V. L. Rhoads, and Robert B. Cialdini, “Deceiver’s Distrust: Denigration as a Consequence of Undiscovered Deception,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol. 24 (1998), pp. 1167-76.

  7. How We Are Immoral

  1 David Buss, The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex (New York: Free Press, 2002).

  2 J. Stuart Snelson, Win-Win Theory for Win-Win Success: Science, Theory, and Strategy of Win-Win Success for Family and Business, Community and Nation (forthcoming).

  3 Gottfried Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics (1826), translated by G. R. Montgomery (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1992).

  4 Jonathan D. Glater, “Adultery May Be a Sin, but It’s a Crime No More,” New York Times, April 17, 2003, p. A12.

  5 Buss, The Dangerous Passion, p. 103.

  6 D. H. Lawrence, Pornography and So On (London: Faber and Faber, 1936). Stewart statement rendered in case judgment Jacobellis v. Ohio, 1964. 378 U.S. 184.

  7 Anaïs Nin, Little Birds (New York: Harcourt, 1963), p. 123.

  8 D. Henson and H. Rubin, “Voluntary Control of Eroticism,” Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, vol. 4 (1971), pp. 37-44. K. Kelley and D. Byrne, “Assessment of Sexual Responding: Arousal, Affect, and Behavior,” in Social Psychophysiology, ed. John Cacioppo and Richard Petty (New York: Guilford, 1983). D. Przbyla and D. Byrne, “The Mediating Role of Cognitive Process in Self Reported Sexual Arousal,” Journal of Research in Personality, vol. 18 (1984), pp. 54-63. M. Zuckerman, “Physiological Measures of Sexual Arousal in the Human,” in Technical Reports on the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, vol. 1. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971).

  9 Catharine MacKinnon, “Pornography: A Feminist Perspective,” position paper presented to the Minneapolis City Council, 1983. Andrea Dworkin, Letters From a War Zone (New York: Dutton, 1988).

  10 Berl Kutchinsky, “The Effect of Easy Availability of Pornography on the Incidence of Sex Crimes: The Danish Experience,” in Pornography and Censorship, ed. David Copp and Susan Wendell (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1983), p. 307.

  11 Fred R. Berger, “Pornography, Sex, and Censorship,” in Pornography and Sexual Deviance, ed. Michael Joseph Goldstein and Harold S. Kant (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).

  12 Luis T. Garcia, “Exposure to Pornography and Attitudes About Women and Rape; A Correlational Study,” Journal of Sex Research, vol. 22 (1986), pp. 378-85. Cynthia S. Gentry, “Pornography and Rape: An Empirical Analysis,” Deviant Behavior, vol. 12. (1991), pp. 277-88. Berl Kutchinsky, “Pornography and Rape: Theory and Practice?” International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, vol. 14 (1991), pp. 47-64.

  13 Paul Abramson and Haruo Hayashi, “Pornography in Japan: Cross-Cultural and The
oretical Considerations,” in Pornography and Sexual Aggression, ed. Neil Malamuth and Edward Donnerstein (Orlando: Academic Press, 1984). Berl Kutchinsky, “Pornography and its Effects in Denmark and the United States: A Rejoinder and Beyond,” Comparative Social Research: An Annual, vol. 8 (1985), pp. 301-30.

  14 Edward Donnerstein and Leonard Berkowitz, “Victims’ Reactions in Aggressive Erotic Films as a Factor in Violence Against Women,” in Malamuth and Donnerstein, Pornography and Sexual Aggression.

  15 Edward Donnerstein, “Erotica and Human Aggression,” in Aggression: Theoretical and Empirical Review, vol. 2, ed. Russell Geen and Edward Donnerstein (New York: Academic Press, 1983).

  16 W A. Fisher and D. Byrne, “Individual Differences in Affective, Evaluative and Behavioral Responses to an Erotic Film,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology (August 1978), pp. 355-65.

  17 Neil Malamuth and James Check, “The Effects of Aggressive Pornography on Beliefs of Rape Myths: Individual Differences,” Journal of Research in Personality, vol. 19 (1985), pp. 299-320.

  18 Goldstein and Kant, eds., Pornography and Sexual Deviance.

  19 Naomi Wolf, “Our Bodies, Our Souls,” The New Republic (October 16, 1995). In this article for The New Republic, feminist author Naomi Wolf shocked the pro-choice movement by claiming that the fetus at all stages is a human individual and therefore abortion is immoral (although she still supports free choice). In Wolf’s 6,700-word essay, however, there is not a single scientific fact presented in support of her claim for fetal human individuality. Instead, we get emotional references to “lapel pins with the little feet,” “framed sonogram photos,” and “detailed drawings of the fetus” from the popular pregnancy book What to Expect When You’re Expecting. With similar shortcomings, in a 1995 PBS Firing Line debate, Arianna Huffington claimed that scientists have proven that life begins at conception, yet no facts were offered in support of this claim.

  20 Roy Rivenburg, a writer for the Los Angeles Times, succinctly summarized the pro-choice and pro-life positions: Roy Rivenburg, “A Decision Between a Woman and God,” Los Angeles Times, May 24, 1996.

  21 The Supreme Court’s decision is posted all over the Internet. A Google search generates 141,000 hits; see, for example, http://members.aol.com/abtrbng/410b1.htm or www2.law.cornell.edu.

  22 See, for example, the Amici Curiae Brief in Support of Appellees, William L. Webster et al., Appellants v. Reproductive Health Services et al., Appellees, 1988.

  23 B. L. Koops, L.J. Morgan, and E C. Battaglia, “Neonatal Mortality Risk in Relation to Birth Weight and Gestational Age: Update,” Journal of Pediatrics, vol. 101 (1982), pp. 969-77. Milner and Beard, “Limit of Fetal Viability,” Lancet, vol. 1, 1984, p. 1079. Pleasure, Dhand, and Kaur, “What Is the Lower Limit of Viability?” American Journal of Diseases of Children, vol. 138 (1984), p. 783.

  24 I. R. Beddis et al., “New Technique for Servo-Control of Arterial Oxygen Tension in Preterm Infants,” Archives of Disease in Childhood, vol. 54 (1979), pp. 278-80.

  25 Michael Flower, “Neuromaturation and the Moral Status of Human Fetal Life,” in Abortion Rights and Fetal Personhood, ed. Edd Doerr and James W. Prescott (Long Beach, Calif.: Centerline Press, 1989). M. E. Molliver, I. Kostovic, and H. Van Der Loos, “The Development of Synapses in Cerebral Cortex of the Human Fetus,” Brain Research, vol. 50 (1973), pp. 403-7. D. P. Purpura, “Morphogenesis of Visual Cortex in the Preterm Infant,” in Growth and Development of the Brain, ed. Mary A. B. Brazier (New York: Raven Press, 1975).

  26 For a good general discussion of the terms of this debate, see Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (New York: Random House, 1992).

  27 Claudia Kalb, “Treating the Tiniest Patients,” Newsweek (June 9, 2003 pp. 48-51.

  28 Debra Rosenberg, “The War Over Fetal Rights,” Newsweek (June 9, 2003), pp. 40-47.

  29 John-Thor Dahlburg, “Firm Says It Created First Human Clone,” Los Angeles Times, December 28, 2002, p. A13.

  30 Quoted in Jeffrey Kluger, “Will We Follow the Sheep?” Time (March 10, 1997), pp. 67-70, 72.

  31 Quoted in Cloning Human Beings: Report and Recommendations (Rockville, Md.: National Bioethics Advisory Commission, 1997).

  32 See Nancy L. Segal, Entwined Lives: Twins and What They Tell Us About Human Behavior (New York: Dutton, 1999). Segal convincingly shows that genes influence our behavior and personality in innumerable ways that cannot be ignored. Comparing identical twins reared apart with identical twins reared together, fraternal (nonidentical) twins reared together, siblings reared together, and pseudotwins (genetically different adopted children) reared together, identical twins reared apart are more alike on almost all measures than the comparison groups, including a number of striking similarities between identicals reared apart—from the sublime, such as Harold Shapiro (head of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission charged by President Clinton to pass a moral ruling on cloning) and his twin both growing up to become university presidents, to the ridiculous, such as a preference for a rare Swedish toothpaste called Vademecum. Despite these similarities, identical twins can be surprisingly different. Even for such characteristics as height and weight, which have a heritability of over 90 percent, it is striking how different many of these identical twins turned out to be (photographs appear throughout Segal’s book). And when we consider traits that show heritabilities in the 50 percent range, it is clear how much environment counts. Segal and her colleagues who study twins have revealed that heredity counts a great deal more than it was recently fashionable to believe, and their science is solid. See also Michael Shermer, “I, Clone,” Scientific American, vol. 288, no. 4 (April 2003).

  33 Quoted in Dahlburg, “Firm Says It Created First Human Clone.”

  34 Quoted in Kluger, “Will We Follow the Sheep?,” p. 72.

  35 Ibid., 71.

  36 Quoted in M. L. Rantala and Arthur J. Milgram, eds., Cloning: For and Against (Chicago: Open Court, 1999), p. 157. This theme has been circulating for decades, from Ted Howard and Jeremy Rifkin’s 1977 Who Should Play God?: The Artificial Creation of Life and What it Means for the Future of the Human Race (New York: Delacorte Press) to Ted Peters’s 1997 Playing God?: Genetic Determinism and Human Freedom (New York: Routledge), to a flurry of godly warnings following the brouhaha over Dolly the cloned sheep, such as this one from Kenneth Woodward, opining in Newsweek: “Perhaps the message of Dolly is that society should reconsider its casual ethical slide toward assuming mastery over human life. Do we really want to play God?” (Kenneth L. Woodward, “Today the Sheep … Tomorrow the Shepherd?” Newsweek [March 10, 1997]).

  37 Quoted in Dahlburg, “Firm Says It Created First Human Clone.”

  38 Associated Press, “Clerics Denounce Cloned Baby Claim,” Los Angeles Times, December 29, 2002, p. A15.

  39 Isaac Asimov,I, Robot (New York: Random House, 1950). In Robots and Empire, Asimov presented the “Zeroth Law” as a prequel to the three laws of robotics: “o. A robot may not injure humanity or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.” Asimov explained: “Unlike the Three Laws, however, the Zeroth Law is not a fundamental part of positronic robotic engineering, is not part of all positronic robots, and, in fact, requires a very sophisticated robot to even accept it.” Asimov claimed that the Three Laws originated on December 23, 1940, from a conversation he had with the science fiction publisher John W. Campbell. The Three Laws did not appear in Asimov’s first two robot stories, “Robbie” and “Reason,” but the First Law was stated in Asimov’s third robot story “Liar!” The first story to explicitly state the Three Laws was “Runaround,” which appeared in the March 1942 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. They were finally codified in I, Robot in 1950.

  40 These barriers, and others, are outlined in Steven M. Wise, Science and the Case for Animal Rights (Boston: Perseus Books, 2002).

  41 Verlyn Klinkenborg, “Cow Parts,” Discover (August 2001), pp. 53—62.

  42 Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Nor
ton, 1981).

  43 Carol Tavris, The Mismeasure of Woman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992).

  44 David Brion Davis, “The Enduring Legacy of the South’s Civil War Victory,” New York Times, August 26, 2001, section 4, p. 1. See also Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).

  45 Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 273. Mayr notes that the “‘actual vs. potential’ distinction is unnecessary since ‘reproductively isolated’ refers to the possession of isolating mechanisms, and it is irrelevant for species status whether or not they are challenged at a given moment.” Mayr offers these “more descriptive” definitions: “A species is a reproductive community of populations (reproductively isolated from others) that occupies a specific niche in nature.” And: “Species are the real units of evolution, as the temporary incarnation of harmonious, wellintegrated gene complexities” (Ernst Mayr, Animal Species and Evolution [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963]).