The Faith Instinct

by Wade, Nicholas

  The beauty of the trolley problems is that they capture moral intuition at work in ways for which the moral reasoning process is unable to invent a plausible explanation. This gives a deep insight into the hidden rules by which the moral intuitive process operates.

  Hauser and his colleagues have described three of these rules, which they call the contact principle, the intention principle and the action principle. (Philosophers have described them under other names.)

  The contact principle is perhaps the most fascinating because it seems the most primitive. It is simply a taboo on causing bodily harm to anyone. It was presumably engraved in the mind’s neural circuits long before the invention of spears or arrows that allowed people to be killed at a distance. The contact principle may also underlie the reason why moral situations before our eyes are more compelling than those at a distance. If we see a child injured by the roadside, we know we must stop and help. But if we see an advertisement soliciting funds to repair a child’s harelip in faraway places, it’s permissible to turn the page.

  The contact principle explains part of the reason why in Fred’s moral dilemma, people say it’s wrong for him to push the thick-set man onto the tracks to save the five. In Denise’s dilemma, her actions led to the death of the hiker on the side-track, but there was no personal contact between her and the person killed.

  Another insight into the contact principle is to assume, in Fred’s dilemma, that all the people but Fred have been replaced with chimpanzees. Is it OK for Fred to push a fat chimp off the bridge to save five chimps on the track? Most people say it’s OK. The taboo of killing a person with one’s bare hands is no longer evoked. Curiously, when subjects were asked why they judged Denise’s action OK but not Fred’s, several mentioned the fact of physical contact but rejected it as sufficient reason for the distinction. “Subjects were typically able to articulate the relevant principle used, but unwilling to endorse it as morally valid,” Hauser writes.22

  Another hidden rule of intuitive morality, the intention principle, can be discerned in Denise’s and Fred’s dilemmas. Denise foresaw that the hiker on the side-track would be killed, but didn’t intend it. The hiker’s death was a foreseen consequence but not the desired outcome of her action. Whereas Fred, if he pushes the thick-set man into the train’s path, intends the man’s death or, at the very least, must include the likelihood of the man’s death in his intended act. The moral intuitive process clearly makes a distinction between intended harm, which is not OK, and merely foreseen harm, which may be justifiable. The complexity of this distinction, which most people cannot articulate, suggests an innate rule at work, one to which the conscious mind has no more access than to the rules that generate grammatical sentences.

  A third hidden rule, the action principle, is that harms caused by positive action are deemed worse than those caused by omission, or not acting. Suppose Fred has a lever that drops the thick-set man onto the tracks in front of the train. (The lever arrangement is to avoid triggering the intuitive contact principle.) Then there is Jeff, whose lever does the opposite—it prevents the thick-set man’s otherwise inevitable fall onto the tracks. Fred’s action in pulling the lever, and Jeff’s failure to do so, have precisely the same effect—the thick-set man is killed but the five are saved. Nonetheless, people judge Jeff’s omission far more acceptable than Fred’s action. In this case, however, most subjects can articulate the intuitive principle at work.

  The moral intuitive process equips everyone with the neural machinery for making instant moral decisions, without review by the moral reasoning apparatus. It is easy to see how advantageous such a system would have been in days when our ancestors were hunter gatherers and had to make life-or-death decisions in a split second. This instantaneous process is useful in today’s societies too. The social fabric is surely stronger if everyone has immediate knowledge of what is right and wrong.

  But doesn’t the possession of an instantaneous moral decision-making machinery, inaccessible to the conscious mind, make a person into a contemptible robot? Not really; an individual can always ignore the machinery’s prompting. Also, the moral intuitive process, as mentioned above, is shaped by culture, meaning the education and moral instruction a person receives in childhood. Religion plays a central role here, as described in the next chapter. So do a child’s peers and parents. All these influences are working to shape a set of innate moral behaviors to each society’s particular values.

  These values are set by tradition and ultimately by the collective behavior required for each society to survive in its particular environment. They may therefore vary from one society to another. Human nature, generally thought of as being the same everywhere, must depend more on the constant features of every society’s moral behavior, and therefore on the innate moral behaviors. What are these behaviors and where do they come from?

  The Origin of Moral Sentiments

  Darwin, in his book The Descent of Man, published in 1871, devoted two chapters to the evolution of morality. His arguments were long dismissed by many biologists, but they anticipated much of what is current wisdom today.

  Darwin argued that sociality arose as a defense against predators, and that animals that banded together for this purpose would need to moderate their behavior toward one another. “All animals living in a body, which defend themselves or attack their enemies in concert, must indeed be in some degree faithful to one another; and those that follow a leader must be in some degree obedient,” he wrote.23

  The social instincts would develop from simple emotions like the parent-child bond, Darwin argued, and any social animal would acquire morality once it had evolved sufficient intellectual powers. He saw no discontinuity between the social instincts in animals and in people but in human societies, he assumed, the instincts would be enhanced by people’s desire for the approval of their peers, and the “remorse, repentance, regret or shame” that follows on forfeiting the good opinion of one’s peers.

  Darwin then raised the problem that an altruistic person who gave his life for his community would leave no children, or at any rate fewer than less heroic people. So how could the inherited character of altruistic behavior ever become more common?

  The biologist William Hamilton answered the question a century later, at least for small communities of related individuals. In his theory of kin selection, Hamilton explained that getting your relatives’ genes into the next generation was just as advantageous, as far as natural selection is concerned, as passing on your own genes. So since your brother has on average half of the same genes as you do, you could get your genes for altruism into the next generation by saving two brothers’ lives just as well as by saving your own.

  But Darwin’s answer, despite Hamilton’s more specific formulation, is still of great interest. First, Darwin wrote that “To do good unto others—to do unto others as ye would they should do unto you—is the foundation-stone of morality.” A man who sacrificed his life following this principle would be widely admired and inspire valor in other members of his tribe. “He might thus do far more good to his tribe than by begetting offspring with a tendency to inherit his own high character,” Darwin wrote.

  The second part of Darwin’s answer raised an issue now known as group selection, the idea that genes can become more common if they confer a benefit on groups of people rather than just individuals. Darwin did not know of the existence of genes, so could not have formulated the problem to himselfin those specific terms. Nonetheless, he described a process which, if it occurs, shows immediately how the genes underlying morality and other aspects of human sociality could have become common.

  But Darwin’s insight was dismissed for more than a century because of several intellectual blinders that have begun to fall only in recent years.

  First, people did not want to abandon the idea that morality is the bright line that separates people from animals. Darwin’s idea that there was a continuum of the social instincts from social animals to man cut right through
that line. Even biologists didn’t like the idea that morality had been shaped by natural selection. If morality had a genetic basis, it must have arisen as an unintended by-product of some other process, they argued. “I account for morality as an accidental capability produced, in its boundless stupidity, by a biological process that is normally opposed to the expression of such a capability,” wrote George Williams, a leading evolutionary biologist, in 1988.24

  Second, the idea that natural selection works at the level of groups has been rejected by most evolutionary biologists, largely under the influence of George Williams. He argued that selection of genes through the individuals who carry them was far more likely and should be assumed as a matter of principle unless there was strong evidence to the contrary.25 So though group selection might be theoretically possible, he contended that “group-related adaptations do not, in fact, exist.”

  Darwin’s thesis about the evolution of morality raises a seriously disturbing possibility. He is saying that morality, viewed by some as man’s noblest achievement, arose from warfare, the least noble, and that the brisker the pace of warfare the more rapidly would morality have blossomed. This suggests that people were highly aggressive in the distant past, an implication that has raised a third mental block. Many social scientists are reluctant to believe that people were more violent in the past than they are today. Archaeologists, seeking to avoid glorification of war, have contrasted the carnage of modern wars to the peaceable behavior of human foragers before agriculture and the birth of cities. Only recently has a careful survey shown how constant and merciless was the warfare between pre-state societies, much of it aimed at annihilating the opponent.26

  A fourth obstacle to understanding the evolutionary nature of morality has been the insistence by researchers who study animal behavior that it was fallacious to attribute complex emotions to them, especially positive ones. The primatologist Frans de Waal reports that in his studies of peacemaking among chimpanzees he was instructed to use dehumanized language. A reconciliation, sealed with a kiss, had to be described as a “post-conflict interaction involving mouth-to-mouth contact.”27 Given the evolutionary closeness of humans and chimpanzees, de Waal considered that the two species were likely to have similar emotions. Excessive fear of anthropomorphism had long stifled research on animal emotions, in his view. It also prevented biologists from acknowledging the continuum of social instincts that Darwin recognized between social animals and people.

  After decades of neglect because of these various intellectual road-blocks, the evolutionary origin of morality has been slowly resurrected as a fit subject of research. William Hamilton’s theory of kin selection explained how altruism could evolve in kin-based societies, like those of the social insects. Another biologist, Robert Trivers, showed how, even in groups of individuals who were not related to one another, natural selection could favor reciprocal altruism—doing someone a favor on the assumption it would be paid back later. These ideas were developed by Edward O. Wilson in his landmark 1975 book Sociobiology and extended from animals to people. “The requirement for an evolutionary approach to ethics is self-evident,” he wrote.

  Sociobiology, though intended by its author as merely a synthesis of new biological ideas, posed a political challenge to Marxists and much of the academic left. It showed how the human mind was not a blank slate, on which governments could write whatever ideological prescriptions they wished in order to shape Socialist Man, but was already shaped or predisposed by evolution to behave in certain ways. Wilson’s book was assailed by Marxist colleagues at Harvard, such as the geneticist Richard Lewontin. Students disrupted Wilson’s lectures and harassed even Hamilton and Trivers. Researchers dared not use the word sociobiology, even if they agreed with its ideas, lest they be caught up in the furor. Sociobiology, as applied to people, is now pursued mostly under the name of evolutionary psychology.

  Richard Alexander, after the storm over Sociobiology had settled, was one of the first biologists to resume the study of morality. Human ancestors lived in groups, he argued in a book published in 1987, as a defense against other human groups, and warfare had been a major influence in human evolution. Usually predators find it most efficient to live in small groups (wolves, lions, killer whales) while it is prey animals that congregate in large herds for defense. But humans departed from this rule, probably because their most feared enemies were other human groups. Incessant warfare led to selection for greater social complexity and intelligence, and the larger societies required ever greater self-constraint to avoid infringing on other individuals’ interests, Alexander argued. “The function or raison d’ être of moral systems is evidently to provide the unity required to enable the group to compete successfully with other human groups. Only in humans is the major hostile force of life composed of other groups in the same species,” he wrote.28

  The surprising idea that people might be inherently moral was difficult for biologists and others to accept because it conflicted with the usual assumption that human nature is selfish. Even harder to swallow, for those not steeped in the concepts of evolutionary biology, was the assertion that something as precious as morality could have blossomed from the murky soil of strife and warfare.

  Alexander’s book was largely theoretical. It was a work of practical observation that gave substance to his views. Frans de Waal, now at the Yerkes National Primate Center, had spent many years observing apes and monkeys in captivity. He noticed that each species had its own special protocols for peacemaking and for patching things up after fights.

  Why would animals have any interest in peacemaking ? Social monkeys and apes, de Waal observed, live in just the conditions specified by Alexander as conducive to the emergence of morality. In many primate species there are conflicts between rival groups. Chimpanzees are territorial and patrol their boundaries, killing any neighboring male they find. Sometimes chimps conduct lethal raids into their neighbors’ territory, trying to kill off male defenders one by one in a systematic campaign. If successful, they then take over their neighbors’ property.

  Female chimpanzees seem to be aware of the dangers posed by internal strife. If their males kill or maim one another, the community is less well defended against neighboring bands. So it is greatly in their interest to prevent or assuage conflicts between rival males. De Waal observed that in captive chimpanzee colonies the females would sometimes prize stones or sticks out of the hands of males who are about to fight.

  The art of reconciliation and peacemaking is one of the building blocks of primate behavior from which human morality later evolved, in de Waal’s view. He has found several other such building blocks of morality in monkey and ape societies. A basic one is empathy, the ability to perceive another’s emotions. Many social animals seem aware of one another’s pain. In a particularly striking experiment, rhesus monkeys allowed to take food only from an apparatus that delivered an electric shock to a companion would starve themselves, for 5 days in one case, for 12 days in another.

  But it could be that the monkeys were not trying to help their companion but were personally distressed by their cries. Chimpanzees present a clearer case for empathy. They regularly console the loser of a fight. In distress, they elicit sympathy with a range of very human expressions. “When upset, chimpanzees pout, whimper, yell, beg with outstretched hand, or impatiently shake both hands so that the other will hurry and provide the calming contact so urgently needed,” de Waal wrote.29 Chimps have been known to try to save others from drowning in the moats that sometimes surround zoo colonies. This is a huge risk for them because they cannot swim.

  A third moral building block is an ability to learn social rules. Infant monkeys are accorded much license, but as they grow older they learn how to respect the food and space of dominant animals. Monkey and ape societies are organized in hierarchies, in which each individual knows its place. Each species has its own repertoire of signals for communicating who is higher in the hierarchy and who is lower. Among rhesus monkeys an
inferior will give a bared-teeth grin to an approaching superior and often present its vulnerable rear quarters. The hierarchy gives the community a structure and an order.

  A fourth likely building block of morality is a sense of reciprocity. This is not so far from the human concept of justice. Chimpanzees remember who is a good sharer of food and who isn’t, indicating they have a notion of fair treatment. In a fascinating experiment with capuchin monkeys, de Waal trained them to exchange tokens for a food reward, either a grape or a slice of cucumber. When capuchins saw their neighbor get a grape in exchange for a token, but they were given just a slice of cucumber, they seemed outraged by the unfairness of it all. Some refused to eat the slice of cucumber they were handed or even flung it back at the researcher.30

  So what then is morality? De Waal’s definition, from his perspective as a primatologist, is very different from that of rationalist philosophers. “We understand morality as a sense of right and wrong that is born out of group-wide systems of conflict management based on shared values,” he writes. “Moral systems thus provide a set of rules and incentives to resolve competition and conflicts within the group in the service of the ‘greater good,’ that is, benefits (to individuals) derived from resource distribution and collective action. Morality, by this definition, is closely related to social behavior.”31

  By breaking out of the specialist frameworks in which philosophers and psychologists had long imprisoned the study of morality, De Waal established that morality is a biological behavior and that evolution is the only framework in which the origins of morality can be addressed.

  Human Morality

  In the terms of Haidt’s distinction between people’s moral intuition and moral reasoning, it is easy to see how the moral intuitive process could have evolved by slow degrees in the human lineage from the four building blocks described by de Waal in primates—getting along (techniques for reconciliation after conflict), empathy, learning social rules and a sense of reciprocity.