Reinventing Morality
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Moral Grammar
A great example of moral-writing software
is culture. Cultural influences on moral decision making can include
everything from the laws that govern a particular society to the ideas
about pride, honor, and justice that play out in a city neighborhood to
the power dynamics of a given household. Religion, upbringing, gender,
third-grade experiences dealing with bullies, and so on all contribute
lines of code to an individual’s moral software. For this reason, no two
moral processes will be identical. Academics have given this phenomenon
a fancy name: moral relativism. The theory holds that because morality
is transferred from groups to individuals in the form of traditions,
institutions, codes, etc., everyone will have a different idea of good
and bad.
But what if there are limitations to the
spectrum of variation? What if, beneath the trappings of culture and
upbringing, there really is such a thing as universal morality? If such
a thing existed, how would you go about proving it? Enter Marc Hauser,
whose research is adding credence to the notion of a universal goodness
impulse.
According to Hauser, the human brain
learns right from wrong the same way it learns language. The vast
majority of the world’s languages share at least one thing in common: a
system of guidelines for usage. This is called grammar. Just as
languages have rules about where to put a subject, an adverb, and a
predicate in a sentence, so too every culture has a set of guidelines to
teach people how to make moral decisions in different situations. So
just as learning a language means learning not only words, but also a
system for putting the words together, the same is true for morality;
there are very specific “commandments” that are unique to every culture,
but there are also softer usage guidelines. People who have mastered the
moral guidelines of their particular culture have what some might call
principles or scruples. Hauser calls this a moral grammar.
“A mature individual’s moral grammar
enables him to unconsciously generate and comprehend a limitless range
of permissible and obligatory actions within the native culture, to
recognize violations when they arise, and to generate intuitions about
punishable violations,” he writes in his book. “Once an individual
acquires his specific moral grammar, other moral grammars may be as
incomprehensible to him as Chinese is to a native English speaker.”
Hauser has spent his career studying how
people from different backgrounds and cultures rely on different
grammars to make moral decisions. About three years ago, he put up a
survey Web site called the Moral Sense Test, which is still operating
today. Since its establishment, some 300,000 people from around the
world have logged on. Participants are asked to answer a series of
so-called trolley problems to reveal their unique moral decision-making
processes.
The quintessential trolley problem goes
something like this: A group of five people is on a train track unaware
that a runaway trolley is heading toward them. One person is on a
separate track, equally oblivious to what’s going on. If you’re in a
control room overlooking the train yard, is it morally permissible to
pull a lever and divert the train away from the five people onto the
track with the one person, thereby saving the five and killing the one?
Or is it morally preferable to take no action and allow the trolley to
continue along its predestined path?
“Each question targets some kind of
psychological distinction,” says Hauser. “For example, we’re very
interested in the distinction between action and omission when both lead
to the same consequence.… It’s an interesting distinction because it
plays out in many areas of biomedical technology and experiences.”
Surveys such as these aren’t new. But
Hauser’s Web-based survey model allows him to ask these questions of
people who originate from all sorts of cultural, economic, and
educational points of view, as opposed to polling the opinions of a
handful of Ivy League undergrads.
“There’s going to be that kind of
variation culturally,” he says. “But what the science is trying to say
is Look, could the variation we observe today be illusory? Could there
be real regularity, universals that underpin that variation fundamental
to how the brain works?”
Though the Moral Sense Test is ongoing,
it is adding significantly to an understanding of moral reasoning across
different cultures. Among Hauser’s most interesting findings: People who
don’t adhere to a specific religion and people who do are remarkably
similar in the way they make moral decisions.
“This is independent of the benefits that
people obtain from being associated with religion; I have nothing to say
about that,” he insists. “This is more a question of … does having a
religious background really change the nature of these intuitive
judgments. The evidence we’ve accumulated suggests, no.” His research
shows that people who are religious and people who claim to be atheists
show the same moral patterns and answer the same way when they’re
presented with a whole host of moral dilemmas. Where they diverge, says
Hauser, is when the question touches on political or topical issues
about which people are likely to have pre-formed and not necessarily
educated opinions.
This is one area where he hopes moral
science can make a real difference.
“If you ask most people, Do you think
stem-cell research is morally good or morally bad, many people will say
bad,” says Hauser. “But then you ask, what is a stem cell? Most people
won’t have a clue. What they’ve often done, they’ve masted stem-cell
research onto something else, [such as] killing a baby. If killing a
baby is bad then stem-cell research is bad. So that’s a matter of using
a moral problem one is familiar with and using it to judge a new case
that one is not familiar with. We do that all the time…. What science
should be doing is trying to educate us, and say Look, the blastocyst is
a cluster of cells that stem-cell research is focusing on … nothing like
a baby. It’s the potential, with lots of change and development, to
become a baby. But it’s not a baby. There’s an onus on researchers to
educate. In the absence of education, what people do is examine moral
cases in terms of what they’re familiar with.”
He’s received a mixed reaction to his
findings. Some people, he says, see the work as artificial, that what
morality is really about is how we behave. In other words, according to
some, morality can’t be judged on the basis of how a person answers a
survey, but on what that person does in real life.
In the future, new technologies like
virtual reality will test this hypothesis. But first, researchers need
to learn more about how the process plays out
in the brain.
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