Typical psychopaths have suffered no trauma to their prefrontal cortexes, so they are natural-born immoralists. Because they tend to have above-average intelligence, some of them are unusually adept at understanding societal rules, and they can be brilliant in pretending to have normal emotions. In addition, they can be quite astute in exploiting the trust of normal people: as one example, a serial killer lured a series of well-meaning, doomed girls to his car by asking for assistance with his “broken leg.” However, many less careful psychopaths tend to be reckless thrill-seekers, who spend most of their lives behind bars as relatively petty criminals who predictably get caught.
People very significantly afflicted in this way probably number as high as one or more out of several hundred in our total population. Not only are they without feelings of remorse or shame; often, they also take a curious kind of pride in their impulsive depredations. These individuals crop up in every walk of life, and the disorder is so fundamental that if they rate high on Robert Hare’s screening test, psychiatric treatment does them little or no good. They will never be fully moral for two reasons: first, they haven’t these emotional hookups, which are needed to identify with and internalize society’s rules, and second, they lack empathetic concern for others.
HOW NORMAL PEOPLE “CONNECT” WITH GROUP MORES
Half a century ago, sociologist Talcott Parsons tried to look at human social behavior from a number of perspectives, including the cultural and the psychological, and he spoke convincingly of the “internalization” of values and rules.10 By this he meant, in effect, that when groups translate their social values into rules of conduct, such as “Do unto Others,” individuals form emotional connections with those rules so that they feel fine about following them and uneasy about breaking them. Going against an internalized rule such as “Thou shalt not steal” can make normal people—but not psychopaths—feel apprehensively ashamed of themselves, socially tortured if they are caught in the act, and sincerely remorseful after the fact.
Let’s consider Parsons’s insight as it relates to psychopaths. These predators can’t internalize society’s values and rules as normal people do, and as a result they lack the active “inner voice,” laced with self-judgmental moral feeling, that Darwin talked about so eloquently.11 In contrast, the rest of us will feel that an important part of our identity is tied in with how we follow rules, and our self-respect will suffer or prosper accordingly. Morally normal human beings identify strongly with their own cultures and with the specific rules inherent in living a productive social life. They do so even though their appetites for power or “things” or sex or status may easily lead them to break some of these rules. Psychopaths simply don’t identify with the rules in the first place.
How can such a pathology evolve? How is it that at least one person in perhaps a few hundred can be a seriously predatory psychopath today? How can these socially perverse people’s genes stay alive and well in the human gene pool given that seriously deviant types are punished severely, with consequences for their fitness? To answer this question, we must rephrase the problem in evolutionary terms and ask, what benefits could psychopathy have brought to individuals who carried this trait in our hunter-gatherer past?
Prehistorically, some of these people surely became targets of capital punishment, but perhaps there were also some fitness advantages. For instance, that such individuals were unusually selfish with tendencies to dominate might have worked for them quite well in the strongly hierarchical early human communities that predated an egalitarian human lifestyle based on systematic group punishment. And even in nonhierarchical prehistoric band societies that were moralistically egalitarian, being unusually “selfish” could have had some fitness payoffs—even though if expressed in seriously antisocial ways, it could have led to big trouble. As we’ll see, the name of the game was self-control.
It seems likely that there would be some specific genes involved, but how would this be demonstrated? Like Robert Hare, psychologist Kent Kiehl, whom Hare mentored, works with prison populations. He’s an innovator: he brought mobile MRI units right into prison yards to scan the brains of felons. This research professor at the University of New Mexico’s Mind Institute used Hare’s formal evaluation procedures to decide reliably which criminals were psychopaths and which ones had a normal, “emotionally connected” sense of morality, and then he compared the two.12
A murderer could fall into either category, depending on whether a moralistic sense of empathy with the victim led to feelings of remorse afterward. Whereas typically a psychopathic murderer felt untroubled by the killing during and afterward, a morally normal felon who killed someone in a flash of uncontrollable anger would be deeply upset with himself over the ultimate hurt and damage he had done. This demonstrates that his moral makeup was no different from anyone else’s, and the remorse could be lifelong. After doing brain scans on large samples of prisoners in both categories, Kiehl noted that there were apparent anomalies in the paralimbic systems (at the base of the brains) of the psychopaths. This fairly old component of the brain facilitates the coupling of emotions with how people react to a variety of social situations, so this brings us back to the matter of rule internalization as a normal function of the conscience.
THE BEST-ADAPTED CONSCIENCE IS FLEXIBLE
Having a conscience can be considered in a number of ways. For instance, Sigmund Freud talked about the superego as a mechanism of the mind that stands between us and our unruly libidos.13 And economist Robert Frank has made the case that a conscience, with its emotions, is individually adaptive.14 In more general usage, having a conscience simply means being internally constrained from antisocial behavior, and, I would add, deriving one’s self-regard from following society’s rules. Here, however, the evolutionary conscience will be defined still more broadly.
Decades ago, in Darwinism and Human Affairs, biologist Richard D. Alexander defined the evolutionary conscience as being more than an inhibitor of antisocial behavior. He called it the “still small voice that tells us how far we can go in serving our own interests without incurring intolerable risks.”15 Thus, a conscience seems to be as much a Machiavellian risk calculator as a “pure” moral force that maximizes prosocial behavior and minimizes deviance. If we are interested in the conscience and its evolution, we must define it dispassionately in terms of how it has served our fitness, and in this respect Alexander’s realistic definition is a bit better than Darwin’s. Of course, Darwin saw the conscience as a means to inhibit immorality, rather than to strategize how much immorality a person might get away with. Simple introspection will tell us, if we are honest with ourselves, that an evolutionary conscience does both.
In this context, we may ask exactly how strong the emotions are that bond normal human beings to their group’s rules. Internalization doesn’t mean that our best citizens become so deeply involved with society’s rules that they follow them automatically without thinking about alternatives—especially if socially disapproved alternatives happen to offer great satisfaction. Not at all. As we all know from personal experience, the selfish needs and desires that orient our behavior and generally help our fitness provide many social temptations that can result in moral censure and even personal disaster. What well-internalized moral values and rules do is to slow us down sufficiently that we are able, to a considerable extent, to pick and choose which behaviors we care to exhibit before our peers. As a result, most of our self-interested acts don’t become so predatory or antisocial that we’re likely to be discovered and severely punished—with our fitness ultimately being damaged.
Thus, our consciences can often make us into ambivalent conformists when an attractive but socially disapproved behavior presents itself. Imagine, for instance, finding a big paper bag full of money in an anonymous urban setting with nobody else in sight. For the first half of my professional life as a lowly paid academic, I found myself occasionally wondering how I would respond if faced with such a dumpster windfall. Would I at least
be tempted if it was obviously money lost by criminals and not some poor eccentric’s life savings? As we’ll see, such purely hypothetical moral dilemmas can be used to scientifically probe the moral functions of our brains, and, as we’ll see, among hunter-gatherers in the far north such hypotheticals can even be used to influence how children learn the moral rules of their cultures.
Sometimes, of course, we may simply succumb to life’s predictable temptations—in spite of being haunted by an impending sense of shame that combines with fear of punishment. Our consciences not only identify a given alternative as being moral or immoral but also help us decide what to do about it. And in this context it makes evolutionary sense if we can cut some useful corners competitively without taking major social risks. That way, our fitness can be advanced.
So internalization doesn’t make people socially perfect. Far from it. But even the opportunistic evolutionary conscience that Alexander identified does serve as a cognitive beacon when we are about to stray and harm our social reputation and also as an emotional inhibitor that often keeps us from straying too far—and perhaps disastrously. Thus, an internalizing conscience has been useful in keeping us out of serious trouble socially, and today in modern society it may also keep us out of jail, where our reproductive success would be considerably diminished. At the same time, a conscience can help us to maintain respect for ourselves, for basically we judge ourselves by the same group moral standards that we use in judging others.
From the previous discussion, it seems obvious that several brain areas have evolved to give us this remarkable moral faculty that might be unique to humans. A sense of right and wrong and a capacity to blush with shame, along with a highly developed sense of empathy, compel us as moral beings to consider how our actions may negatively affect the lives of others—or how we may gain satisfaction in helping them. We also possess the capacity to understand that our groups may punish us for present and past misdeeds, including deeds in the distant past, and a conscience helps us to be aware of our social reputations in general. Yet the conscience also has its Machiavellian functions, for it can guide us to take a flexible approach to being moral that allows us to profit from having a decent reputation and at the same time judiciously cut the occasional not-too-serious corner and profit from doing so.
How should a reproductively useful conscience be designed, then? First, in the Darwinian competition among individuals a conscience shouldn’t be too weak because this can lead to personal disaster. Nor should it be too strong, for the internalization of rules shouldn’t be too inflexible. We’ll be discussing this further, but an efficient evolutionary conscience is one that lets us express ourselves socially in ways that help us to both keep ourselves out of trouble and get ahead in life. For instance, this conscience doesn’t make us give the government the benefit of the doubt when we are paying income tax—but it does keep most of us from robbing banks or, unless we are prominent politicians, from committing flagrant and reckless adultery.
CONSCIENCE AND EMPATHY
Ever since Darwin, sympathy and conscience have been talked about in the same breath, but feeling concern for others and listening to an inner voice are far from being identical. For instance, we may stop ourselves from doing harm to another simply because we fear being caught and punished. Of course, we may also feel for our victim and refrain—sometimes even though we have good reason to dislike that victim—because we have internalized a social norm that tells us hurting another human being is wrong.
The interactions of such psychological forces can be complex, and they often breed ambivalence. In A Fable, one of William Faulkner’s less appreciated novels, soldiers on both sides of the trenches in World War I France mutiny to try to stop the senseless killing.16 This action is partly a matter of self-preservation, but it is also a matter of conscience and a refusal to dehumanize the enemy. A Christ-like figure is the main actor, and the story involves a combination of motives that include self-preservation, empathy, and morality. Normally, across the front lines in warfare both morality and sympathy tend to be suspended because a soldier is dealing with “outsiders,” but Faulkner’s well-told story makes clear that under the right circumstances conscience and feeling for others can apply strongly not just to the in-group but to members of the out-group as well.
When people are dealing only with others of their own group, this dimension of the human conscience is prominent.17 Notions of right and wrong may not rule our lives, but they regulate them very significantly, and many of the mores we internalize are shaped by helpful feelings toward others. For instance, in addition to moral rules aimed at keeping us from doing harm to others, there are rules that spur us to give needed assistance to others even if they are not close kin. Clearly, having a sympathetic conscience that includes a sense of shame helps us to fit with the prosocially oriented communities we reside in and to fit in with networks of cooperation that profit ourselves and others. The only problem with having such feelings is that they lead us to aid others even if they won’t necessarily pay us back, and this is a major theoretical problem we’ll try to resolve in Chapter 7. Again, the answer I’ll be favoring is social selection.
LOQUACIOUS HUMANS IN GROUPS
The rules individuals internalize are the cultural product of groups that gossip moralistically on an ongoing basis. That’s how moral codes originate, stay in place, and are continuously refined. Surely gossip is a hunter-gatherer universal from way back,18 and it still manifests itself today in our national media in the form of gossip columns, TV “entertainment shows,” and soap operas, while in our workplaces and neighborhoods we continue to discuss privately (and deliciously) the doings of others—just as has been done in small communities of human foragers for dozens and dozens of millennia.
Such “talking” with trusted associates permits people not only to evaluate their peers, but also to intuitively mull over what is useful or disruptive in human social life and to keep in place a moral consensus about how group members shouldn’t—or should—act toward one another. In a rather immediate sense, then, it’s gossiping that’s responsible for the group mores that orient social control and lead people to preach actively in favor of cooperation and generosity. I’ll have much more to say on the subject of gossiping in Chapter 9, for every cultural anthropologist has to be adept at this verbal art.
Today human groups come in the form of nations or cities as well as tribes and nomadic bands, but they all have such moral codes. And even though certain types of moral belief can vary considerably (and sometimes dramatically) between cultures, all human groups frown on, make pronouncements against, and punish the following: murder, undue use of authority, cheating that harms group cooperation, major lying, theft, and socially disruptive sexual behavior. These basic rules of conduct appear to be human universals. In any event they are so widespread that we may make an evolutionary assumption that as cultural practices they would have been reasonably well suited to whatever social exigencies were common in Late Pleistocene human living situations, which, as I’ll be demonstrating, in many ways were not that dissimilar to exigencies we face today.
It’s clear that “biology” and “culture” have been working together to make us adaptively moral. For instance, when we use our cultural acumen to learn moral rules as children, this is based on developmental “windows” that are sequentially hardwired. The same rules about helping others that have been internalized through early child socialization are later reinforced in adults by the prosocial “preaching” we’ll be discussing throughout the book, which basically encourages group members to live a socially useful life by being helpful to others. Salient are strictures to be generous both within the family and to group members who are not family. For nomadic modern hunter-gatherers who are strongly egalitarian, we may add being humble in demeanor and avoiding aggressive domination to their particular list of desirables,19 along with being truthful with other group members, being cooperative and respectful of others, being fair in “business deal
ings,” and being prosocially inclined in general.
If language is used for such encouragement, language also generates criticism that comes in the form of pointedly hostile corrective advice or the mocking of a deviant. And still stronger forms of language-based social control exist, of course, such as group shaming. There’s also ostracism or shunning, which conversely removes deviants from normal communication. There’s expulsion from the group, a distressing measure arrived at through group consensus. Mobile hunter-gatherers in their small bands do all of these things, all over the world, and very much the same is true of all other humans, whether they’re living in larger sedentary “tribes” or in villages or towns or even in enormous urban environments.
In extreme cases where acts of deviance seriously threaten the lives of others or are felt to be truly abhorrent, a death penalty may be inflicted after a hunter-gatherer consensus is reached by privately talking things out. Such dire punishment is still widespread today, and just a few thousand years ago—before movements against such measures arose—it probably was the norm worldwide. Indeed, 15,000 years ago in a Pleistocene world peopled just by mobile foragers, capital punishment surely was universal or quite widespread as a practical but extreme expression of social distancing.
PYGMIES JEER AT AN ARROGANT CHEATER
A vivid instance of hunter-gatherer moral life—and the role of language—can be taken from the Mbuti Pygmies. They live in what was once called, in colonial times, the Congo, a place I have seen only from a distance—and a bit fearfully. For six years I made an annual trip to Gombe National Park in Tanzania to study wild chimpanzees while working in collaboration with Dr. Jane Goodall, and in the early 1980s, from our isolated research quarters on the beach, we could just see the hills of Zaire forty miles away, on the far side of enormous Lake Tanganyika.
Moral Origins Page 4