My vacation is over. Your humble blogger is now back to work, complete with some awkward tan lines and a slightly jet-lagged brain.
I'd thought I'd begin by making sure everybody read Richard Rorty's scathing review of Marc Hauser's new book, Moral Minds, in the NY Times. Hauser's claims are simple: he holds that "we are born with abstract [moral and ethical] rules or principles, with nurture entering the picture to set the parameters and guide us toward the acquisition of particular moral systems." Thus, he believes that neuroscience will soon discover "what limitations exist on the range of possible or impossible moral systems." As anyone familiar with Rorty's pragmatic philosophy can guess, he's skeptical of such an approach. (I'm not sure why they let Rorty review this book, since his negativity was entirely predictable. If I were Hauser, I'd be pissed.) While I have yet to read Hauser's book, I think Rorty's skepticism sounds exactly right. I don't believe that colorful fMRI images will ever lead us to reconsider the 10 commandments or revise Tort law. While neuroscience might expose the neural anatomy of our moral intuitions, exposing the substrate of something sheds no light on whether it is right or wrong. Hauser is fond of Chomsky analogies - he thinks morality is just as innate as linguistic grammar - but he forgets that the neuroscience of language will never tell us how to conjugate a verb, or compose a sentence.
Hauser hopes that his book will convince us that "morality is grounded in our biology." Once we have grasped this fact, he thinks, "inquiry into our moral nature will no longer be the proprietary province of the humanities and social sciences, but a shared journey with the natural sciences." But by "grounded in" he does not mean that facts about what is right and wrong can be inferred from facts about neurons. The "grounding" relation in question is not like that between axioms and theorems. It is more like the relation between your computer's hardware and the programs you run on it. If your hardware were of the wrong sort, or if it got damaged, you could not run some of those programs.
Knowing more details about how the diodes in your computer are laid out may, in some cases, help you decide what software to buy. But now imagine that we are debating the merits of a proposed change in what we tell our kids about right and wrong. The neurobiologists intervene, explaining that the novel moral code will not compute. We have, they tell us, run up against hard-wired limits: our neural layout permits us to formulate and commend the proposed change, but makes it impossible for us to adopt it. Surely our reaction to such an intervention would be, "You might be right, but let's try adopting it and see what happens; maybe our brains are a bit more flexible than you think." It is hard to imagine our taking the biologists' word as final on such matters, for that would amount to giving them a veto over utopian moral initiatives.
The humanities and the social sciences have, over the centuries, done a great deal to encourage such initiatives. They have helped us better to distinguish right from wrong. Reading histories, novels, philosophical treatises and ethnographies has helped us to reprogram ourselves -- to update our moral software. Maybe someday biology will do the same. But Hauser has given us little reason to believe that day is near at hand.
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I may well be missing the point, but I don't grasp why our understanding the biological underpinnings of morality would lead to restricting us to that morality--I would think it would help us find better work-arounds, ways to create "software" that compensates for problems in the "hardware."
Hauser was on NPR the other day and this is exactly what he is warning against, not what the book is about. Thus, either his interview and his book are opposite from each other or Rorty has seriously mischaracterized him.
I agree with the previous comments. What about saying that we have an innate morality on the basis of biological evolution says that this is all the morality we can have or should have? There is a great deal of confusion about how biological evolution and cultural evolution relate to one another. The latter has built on the former. Cultural evolution can proceed faster, uses different agents than sexual reproduction, whether one likes the term "memes" or not. Learning everything about all of our genes will clarify exactly what hardware there is instead of it being as much conjecture as it is now. Maybe then people can be more objective about how cultural evolution interacts with the hardware, that this is not the rational process that some see it as.
The principles our genes and neurons give us are as simple as it's wrong to hurt people. Does the goodness of helping people have its own hardware or is it something learned as a corollary to that first principle? Is the difference between helping people for what it does for me vs. something purely selfless in our genes or is it cultural or is it a potential many could reach given a particular individual experience, but few do. Is that few do our biological limitations or our cultural ones? I can't imagine these are pointless or dangerous questions.
I also can't imagine the scenario Rorty brings up about neurobiologists saying some morality is impossible. That's irrational fear and a straw man, just as creationists say that if you believe in evolution, you're saying you should act like animals. Cultural evolution fights biological evolution in some ways, such as controlling violence. It enhances biological evolution in some ways such as providing a framework for selfish biological love to become more than that. People can pretend that all came from God dictating holy books to us. That's a foolishness that no doubt both biology and culture get people to do. Yet with time it will become even more clear that that is not what happened. I have faith that this will be a good thing to know.