This many pages in, it’s obvious that I think the former scenario is pretty powerful—look, we see the roots of a sense of fairness and justice in the egalitarian nature of nomadic hunter-gatherers, in other primates, in infants, in the preeminent limbic rather than cortical involvement. But, inconveniently for that viewpoint, that’s totally counter to what emerges from these studies—across the twenty-five cultures it’s the hunter-gatherers, the ones most like our ancestors, living in the smallest groups, with the highest degrees of relatedness and with the least reliance on market interactions, who show the least tendency toward making fair offers and are least likely to punish unfairness, whether to themselves or to the other guy. None of that prosociality is there, a picture counter to what we saw in chapter 9.
I think an explanation is that these economic games tap into a very specific and artificial type of prosociality. We tend to think of market interactions as being the epitome of complexity—finding a literal common currency for the array of human needs and desires in the form of this abstraction called money. But at their core, market interactions represent an impoverishment of human reciprocity. In its natural form, human reciprocity is a triumph of comfortably and intuitively doing long-term math with apples and oranges—this guy over here is a superstar hunter; that other guy isn’t in his league but has your back if there’s a lion around; meanwhile, she’s amazing at finding the best mongongo nuts, that older woman knows all about medicinal herbs, and that geeky guy remembers the best stories. We know where one another live, the debit columns even out over time, and if someone is really abusing the system, we’ll get around to collectively dealing with them.
In contrast, at its core, a cash-economy market interaction strips it all down to “I give you this now, so you give me that now”—myopic present-tense interactions whose obligations of reciprocity must be balanced immediately. People in small-scale societies are relatively new to functioning this way. It’s not the case that small-scale cultures that are growing big and market reliant are newly schooled in how to be fair. Instead they’re newly schooled in how to be fair in the artificial circumstances modeled by something like the Ultimatum Game.
HONOR AND REVENGE
Another realm of cross-cultural differences in moral systems concerns what constitutes appropriate response to personal affronts. This harks back to chapter 9’s cultures of honor, from Maasai tribesmen to traditional American Southerners. As we saw, such cultures have historical links to monotheism, warrior age groups, and pastoralism.
To recap, such cultures typically see an unanswered challenge to honor as the start of a disastrous slippery slope, rooted in the intrinsic vulnerability of pastoralism—while no one can raid farmers and steal all their crops, someone can rustle a herd overnight—and if this sum’a bitch gets away with insulting my family, he’ll be coming for my cattle next. These are cultures that place a high moral emphasis on revenge, and revenge at least in kind—after all, an eye for an eye was probably the invention of Judaic pastoralists. The result is a world of Hatfields and McCoys, with their escalating vendettas. This helps explain why the elevated murder rates in the American South are not due to urban violence or things like robberies but are instead about affronts to honor between people who know each other. And it helps explain why Southern prosecutors and juries are typically more forgiving of such crimes of affronted honor. And it also helps explain the command apparently given by many Southern matriarchs to their sons marching off to join the Confederate fight: come back a winner or come back in a coffin. The shame of surrender is not an option.
SHAMED COLLECTIVISTS AND GUILTY INDIVIDUALISTS
We return to our contrast between collectivist and individualistic cultures (in the studies, as a reminder, “collectivist” has mostly meant East Asian societies, while “individualistic” equals Western Europeans and North Americans). Implicit in the very nature of the contrast are markedly different approaches to the morality of ends and means. By definition, collectivist cultures are more comfortable than individualistic ones with people being used as a means to a utilitarian end. Moreover, moral imperatives in collectivist cultures tend to be about social roles and duties to the group, whereas those in individualistic cultures are typically about individual rights.
Collectivist and individualistic cultures also differ in how moral behavior is enforced. As first emphasized by the anthropologist Ruth Benedict in 1946, collectivist cultures enforce with shame, while individualistic cultures use guilt. This is a doozy of a contrast, as explored in two excellent books, Stanford psychiatrist Herant Katchadourian’s Guilt: The Bite of Conscience and NYU environmental scientist Jennifer Jacquet’s Is Shame Necessary?30
In the sense used by most in the field, including these authors, shame is external judgment by the group, while guilt is internal judgment of yourself. Shame requires an audience, is about honor. Guilt is for cultures that treasure privacy and is about conscience. Shame is a negative assessment of the entire individual, guilt that of an act, making it possible to hate the sin but love the sinner. Effective shaming requires a conformist, homogeneous population; effective guilt requires respect for law. Feeling shame is about wanting to hide; feeling guilt is about wanting to make amends. Shame is when everyone says, “You can no longer live with us”; guilt is when you say, “How am I going to live with myself?”*
From the time that Benedict first articulated this contrast, there has been a self-congratulatory view in the West that shame is somehow more primitive than guilt, as the West has left behind dunce caps, public flogging, and scarlet letters. Shame is the mob; guilt is internalizing rules, laws, edicts, decrees, and statutes. Yet, Jacquet convincingly argues for the continued usefulness of shaming in the West, calling for its rebirth in a postmodernist form. For her, shaming is particularly useful when the powerful show no evidence of feeling guilt and evade punishment. We have no shortage of examples of such evasion in the American legal system, where one can benefit from the best defense that money or power can buy; shaming can often step into that vacuum. Consider a 1999 scandal at UCLA, when more than a dozen healthy, strapping football players were discovered to have used connections, made-up disabilities, and forged doctors’ signatures to get handicapped parking permits. Their privileged positions resulted in what was generally seen as slaps on the wrist by both the courts and UCLA. However, the element of shaming may well have made up for it—as they left the courthouse in front of the press, they walked past a phalanx of disabled, wheelchair-bound individuals jeering them.31
Anthropologists, studying everyone from hunter-gatherers to urbanites, have found that about two thirds of everyday conversation is gossip, with the vast majority of it being negative. As has been said, gossip (with the goal of shaming) is a weapon of the weak against the powerful. It has always been fast and cheap and is infinitely more so now in the era of the Scarlet Internet.
Shaming is also effective when dealing with outrages by corporations.32 Bizarrely, the American legal system considers a corporation to be an individual in many ways, one that is psychopathic in the sense of having no conscience and being solely interested in profits. The people running a corporation are occasionally criminally responsible when the corporation has done something illegal; however, they are not when the corporation does something legal yet immoral—it is outside the realm of guilt. Jacquet emphasizes the potential power of shaming campaigns, such as those that forced Nike to change its policies about the horrific working conditions in its overseas sweatshops, or paper giant Kimberly-Clark to address the cutting of old-growth forests.
Amid the potential good that can come from such shaming, Jacquet also emphasizes the dangers of contemporary shaming, which is the savagery with which people can be attacked online and the distance such venom can travel—in a world where getting to anonymously hate the sinner seems more important than anything about the sin itself.
FOOLS RUSH IN: APPLYING THE FINDINGS OF THE SCIENCE OF MORALITY
Which Dead White Male Was Right?
Let’s start with a question that has kept folks busy for millennia, namely, what is the optimal moral philosophy?
People pondering this question have grouped the different approaches into three broad categories. Say there’s money sitting there, and it’s not yours but no one is looking; why not grab it?
Virtue ethics, with its emphasis on the actor, would answer: because you are a better person than that, because you’ll have to live with yourself afterward, etc.
Deontology, with its emphasis on the act: because it’s not okay to steal.
Consequentialism, with its emphasis on the outcome: what if everyone started acting that way, think about the impact on the person whose money you’ve stolen, etc.
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Virtue ethics has generally taken a backseat to the other two in recent years, having acquired a quaint veneer of antiquarian fretting over how an improper act tarnishes one’s soul. As we’ll see, I think that virtue ethics returns through the back door with considerable relevance.
By focusing on deontology versus consequentialism, we are back on the familiar ground of whether ends justify means. For deontologists the answer is “No, people can never be pawns.” For the consequentialist the answer is “Yes, for the right outcome.” Consequentialism comes in a number of stripes, taken seriously to varying degrees, depending on its features—for example, yes, the end justifies the means if the end is to maximize my pleasure (hedonism), to maximize overall levels of wealth,* to strengthen the powers that be (state consequentialism). For most, though, consequentialism is about classical utilitarianism—it is okay to use people as a means to the end of maximizing overall levels of happiness.
When deontologism and consequentialism contemplate trolleys, the former is about moral intuitions rooted in the vmPFC, amygdala, and insula, while the latter is the domain of the dlPFC and moral reasoning. Why is it that our automatic, intuitive moral judgments tend to be nonutilitarian? Because, as Greene states in his book, “Our moral brains evolved to help us spread our genes, not to maximize our collective happiness.”
The trolley studies show people’s moral heterogeneity. In them approximately 30 percent of subjects were consistently deontologists, unwilling to either pull a lever or push a person, even at the cost of those five lives. Another 30 percent were always utilitarian, willing to pull or push. And for everyone else, moral philosophies were context dependent. The fact that a plurality of people fall into this category prompts Greene’s “dual process” model, stating that we are usually a mixture of valuing means and ends. What’s your moral philosophy? If harm to the person who is the means is unintentional or if the intentionality is really convoluted and indirect, I’m a utilitarian consequentialist, and if the intentionality is right in front of my nose, I’m a deontologist.
The different trolley scenarios reveal what circumstances push us toward intuitive deontology, which toward utilitarian reasoning. Which outcome is better?
For the sort of person reading this book (i.e., who reads and thinks, things to be justifiably self-congratulatory about), when considering this issue at a calm distance, utilitarianism seems like the place to start—maximizing collective happiness. There is the emphasis on equity—not equal treatment but taking everyone’s well-being into equal consideration. And there is the paramount emphasis on impartiality: if someone thinks the situation being proposed is morally equitable, they should be willing to flip a coin to determine which role they play.
Utilitarianism can be critiqued on practical grounds—it’s hard to find a common currency of people’s differing versions of happiness, the emphasis on ends over means requires that you be good at predicting what the actual ends will be, and true impartiality is damn hard with our Us/Them minds. But in theory, at least, there is a solid, logical appeal to utilitarianism.
Except that there’s a problem—unless someone is missing their vmPFC, the appeal of utilitarianism inevitably comes to a screeching halt at some point. For most people it’s pushing the person in front of the trolley. Or smothering a crying baby to save a group of people hiding from Nazis. Or killing a healthy person to harvest his organs and save five lives. As Greene emphasizes, virtually everyone immediately grasps the logic and appeal of utilitarianism yet eventually hits a point where it is clear that it’s not a good guide for everyday moral decision making.
Greene and, independently, the neuroscientist John Allman of Caltech and historian of science James Woodward of the University of Pittsburgh have explored the neurobiological underpinnings of a key point—the utilitarianism being considered here is unidimensional and artificial; it hobbles the sophistication of both our moral intuitions and our moral reasoning. A pretty convincing case can be made for utilitarian consequentialism. As long as you consider the immediate consequences. And the longer-term consequences. And the long-long-term consequences. And then go and consider them all over again a few times.
When people hit a wall with utilitarianism, it’s because what is on paper a palatable trade-off in the short run (“Intentionally kill one to save five—that obviously increases collective happiness”) turns out not to be so in the long run. “Sure, that healthy person’s involuntary organ donation just saved five lives, but who else is going to get dissected that way? What if they come for me? I kinda like my liver. What else might they start doing?” Slippery slopes, desensitization, unintended consequences, intended consequences. When shortsighted utilitarianism (what Woodward and Allman call “parametric” consequentialism) is replaced with a longer-viewed version (what they call “strategic” consequentialism and what Greene calls “pragmatic utilitarianism”), you get better outcomes.
Our overview of moral intuition versus moral reasoning has generated a dichotomy, something akin to how guys can’t have lots of blood flow to their crotch and their brain at the same time; they have to choose. Similarly, you have to choose whether your moral decision making will be about the amygdala or the dlPFC. But this is a false dichotomy, because we reach our best long-term, strategic, consequentialist decisions when we engage both our reasoning and our intuition. “Sure, being willing to do X in order to accomplish Y seems like a good trade-off in the short run. But in the long run, if we do that often enough, doing Z is going to start to seem okay also, and I’d feel awful if Z were done to me, and there’s also a good chance that W would happen, and that’s going to generate really bad feelings in people, which will result in . . .” And the “feel” part of that process is not the way Mr. Spock would do it, logically and dispassionately remembering that those humans are irrational, flighty creatures and incorporating that into his rational thinking about them. Instead, this is feeling what the feelings would feel like. This is straight out of chapter 2’s overview of Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis: when we are making decisions, we are running not only thought experiments but somatic feeling experiments as well—how is it going to feel if this happens?—and this combination is the goal in moral decision making.
Thus, “No way I’d push someone onto the trolley tracks; it’s just wrong” is about the amygdala, insula, and vmPFC. “Sacrifice one life to save five, sure” is the dlPFC. But do long-term strategic consequentialism, and all those regions are engaged. And this yields something more powerful than the cocksureness of knee-jerk intuitionism, the “I can’t tell you why, but this is simply wrong.” When you’ve engaged all those brain systems, when you’ve done the thought experiments and feeling experiments of how things might play out in the long run, and when you’ve prioritized the inputs—gut reactions are taken seriously, but they’re sure not given veto power—you’ll know exactly why something seems right or wrong.
The synergistic advantages of combining reasoning with intuition raise an important point. If you’re a fan of moral intuitions, you’
d frame them as being foundational and primordial. If you don’t like them, you’d present them as simplistic, reflexive, and primitive. But as emphasized by Woodward and Allman, our moral intuitions are neither primordial nor reflexively primitive. They are the end products of learning; they are cognitive conclusions to which we have been exposed so often that they have become automatic, as implicit as riding a bicycle or reciting the days of the week forward rather than backward. In the West we nearly all have strong moral intuitions about the wrongness of slavery, child labor, or animal cruelty. But that sure didn’t used to be the case. Their wrongness has become an implicit moral intuition, a gut instinct concerning moral truth, only because of the fierce moral reasoning (and activism) of those who came before us, when the average person’s moral intuitions were unrecognizably different. Our guts learn their intuitions.
Slow and Fast: The Separate Problems of “Me Versus Us” and “Us Versus Them”
The contrast between rapid, automatic moral intuitionism and conscious, deliberative moral reasoning plays out in another crucial realm and is the subject of Greene’s superb 2014 book Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them.33
Greene starts with the classic tragedy of the commons. Shepherds bring their flocks to a common grazing field. There are so many sheep that there is the danger of destroying the commons, unless people decrease the size of their herds. And the tragedy is that if it is truly a commons, there is no incentive to ever cooperate—you’d range from being a fool if no one else was cooperating to being a successful free rider if everyone else was.
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst Page 51