The roots of morality: It’s time to look far beyond religion.

Many articles purporting to examine morality bore me. They tend to be laundry lists of personal preferences--the writer's catalog of things that personally annoy and delight him or her--completely un-anchored by the scientific method or, for that matter, by any sort of disciplined thinking. Such articles have been around for a long time. Many of them were written prior to 1785, when Immanuel Kant wrote his Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, where he urged that we get serious about morality's underpinnings. Though Kant's categorical imperative leaves much to be desired as a full description of phenomenon of morality, it should be noted that Kant did not have access to the modern findings of cognitive science. At edge.com, Marc D. Hauser, a Harvard Professor of Psychology, Organismic & Evolutionary Biology and Biological Anthropology, has published an article entitled "It Seems Biology (Not Religion) Equals Morality." Hauser's article, based on many of his prior writings, is a rigorous, insightful and succinct account of the roots of human morality. Hauser starts his article with an attack on the commonly heard claim that religion is a major source of our moral insights. There is not a drop of evidence suggesting this, as should be obvious. After all, morally deficient believers and morally enlightened nonbelievers are ubiquitous (and vice versa). Hauser does acknowledge that religions do endow their members with a sense of meaning and community. His sharp attack, however, is on the narrow claim that religions provide "the only-- or perhaps even the ultimate-- source of moral reasoning." This raises an obvious question: If our sense of morality is not based on religion, on what is it based? Hauser argues thatscience has demonstrated that each of us is endowed with a gift from nature: "a biological code for living a moral life." Our biologically endowed "cold calculus" takes the form of rules such as these: Actions are seen as worse than omissions; and forcing someone to do something for the greater good is worse if you make a person worse off in the process. Hauser describes this set of rules as a "moral grammar . . . and impartial, rational and unemotional capacity . . . an abstract set of rules for how to intuitively understand when helping another is obligatory and when harming another is forbidden." This impartial grammar has been revealed through experiments in which people were presented with unfamiliar moral dilemmas (he avoided such well-worn topics as abortion and euthanasia). For instance, is it permissible for a hospital to involuntarily take various internal organs from a healthy person walking by the hospital in order to save the lives of five patients needing transplants? When these sorts of dilemmas are presented to people of wildly divergent cultural backgrounds, the surprising finding is that their particular backgrounds are virtually irrelevant to determining how they will resolve such dilemmas. The work of Frans de Waal dovetails nicely with Hauser's writings. In particular, De Waal has argued that humans have evolved to be predominantly groupish and peace-loving beings who are well-tuned to look out for each other. Therefore, the question arises: what has gone wrong where we see moral atrocities? Hauser's answer is that these atrocities arise due to culturally constructed emotions that fuel "in-group favoritism, outgroup hatred and ultimately dehumanization." Essentially, we become just like psychopaths with regard to those we perceive to be in out-groups. Psychopaths are generally this way toward all others--they know the "rules" but they don't care. The rest of us are psychopaths toward every who we characterize to be our outgroup. We see these people in outgroups as "disposable." We allow children overseas to die, even when we have the money to prevent these deaths, and even when we would not allow the child of a sibling or a neighbor's child (who we perceive to be in our ingroup) to suffer.

Here lies the answer to understanding the dangers of nurture, of education and partiality. When we fuel in-group biases by elevating and praising members of the group, we often unconsciously, and sometimes consciously, denigrate the "other" by feeding the most nefarious of all emotions, the dragon of disgust. We label "the other" (the members of the outgroup) with a description that makes them as subhuman even an adamant, often parasitic and file, and thus disgusting. When disgust is recruited, those in the ingroup have only one way out: purge the other.
Hauser's work also dovetails well with the research of Jonathan Haidt, who has argued that disgust is one of the five pillars of morality. Haidt considers in-group/outgroup tension to be another one of those five pillars of morality (a separate pillar), whereas Hauser appears to be consolidating these two factors (people in outgroups disgust us). This consolidation seems to be the case, at least on an intuitive and anecdotal basis. Xenophobia and disgust do seem to go hand in hand. Mistreatment of members of outgroups not only allowed, but sometimes encouraged by those who preach universal love. Consider, for instance, the way that the members of many religions characterize gays--they are usually relegated to the outgroup. Hauser's argument also comports with the basic findings of those who have studied human reactions to ingroups and outgroups. If left unexamined and unchecked, our evolved system of simplistically categorizing people into ingroups and outgroups leads to moral catastrophe. This simplistic and intuitive system evolved while we lived in small groups of highly familiar people (many of them family members), and during times when there were no formal laws that coordinated large numbers of widely diverse individuals. According to Hauser, this genesis of the problem also presents a potential solution. Although all animals have evolved the capacity to distinguish between members of the in group and out groups, these features are not calibrated in the genome. They are "abstract and content free," much as our biologically endowed rules of moral grammar. We learn how to define our ingroup (and consequently, outgroups). Even seemingly compelling distinctions among humans, such as "racial" differences can be diminished or even eliminated by spending time with different-seeming others. Moral education requires introducing all children, early in life, to a wide varieties of religions, political systems, languages, social organizations and races. Research shows that those who dated or married people of other "races" don't so readily characterize those of other "races" to their outgroup. Exposure to diversity is perhaps our best option for reducing, if not eradicating, strong outgroup biases. Hauser urges that we take our intuitive moral intuitions to task. We need to consciously push ourselves beyond our local family and community and train ourselves to "listen to the universal voice of [our] species." We need to become "champions of plurality." At bottom, we need to recognize that diversity is not simply a buzzword. It is a critical part of the moral curriculum. We need to make ourselves spend time with different others, so that we are more likely to see one race, not many. We need to learn to see only fellow humans, rather than "our people" versus sub humans. Only when we have trained ourselves this way can our universal instinct toward empathy and our biologically endowed abstract moral grammar work together t pragmatically resolve differences peacefully. This would be a much better alternative to cracking heads and going to war based upon our ancient impulses toward unexamined, unenlightened and unjustified disgust.

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The Charter for Compassion: simple kind-hearted affirmation of others

Karen Armstrong's "Charter for Compassion" is a new and eloquent re-affirmation of the golden rule. Her Charter is not based upon any particular religious tradition. Rather, it is based on the recognition that compassion (the golden rule) is the centerpiece for all worthy moral systems. Armstrong, formerly a nun was recently interviewed by Bill Moyers, and had this to say:

[T]his is the beginning of something. We're writing a charter which we hope will be sort of like the charter of human rights, two pages only. Saying that compassion is far more important than belief. That it is the essence of religion. All the traditions teach that it is the practice of compassion and honoring the sacred in the other that brings us into the presence of what we call God, Nirvana, Raman, or Tao. And people are remarkably uneducated about compassion these days. So we want to bring it back to the center of attention. But then, it's got to be incarnated into practical action. . . . Compassion doesn't mean feeling sorry for people. It doesn't mean pity. It means putting yourself in the position of the other, learning about the other. Learning what's motivating the other, learning about their grievances. So the Charter of Compassion was to recall compassion from the sidelines, to which it's often put in religious discourse and put it back there.
I do believe that this type of approach is sorely needed in the modern world. We need an approach that can be embraced by every good-hearted person, religious or not. This Charter is something simple enough and powerful enough to combat the egoism, arrogant intellectualism, arrogant religions, consumerism and xenophobia that are screwing up so many of us.

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Chris Mooney: New Atheists’ attack on religion is counter-productive

Chris Mooney is the author of The Republican War on Science, Storm World, and Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum). He is also an atheist who, for years, has engaged with believers on the validity of religious claims. He strongly believes that those who respect the scientific method should question religious claims. In this interview with D.J. Grothe at Point of Inquiry, however, Mooney takes on the New Atheists (starting here at about the 10:30 minute mark). Instead of attacking religions, Mooney advocates that we should promote scientific literacy. Yes, we should refute the baseless claims of fundamentalists, but it is equally critical to "mobilize the religious moderates," and not alienate them by attacking all religions. Mooney argues that the New Atheists have painted with much too broad a brush, and that they have used an aggressive tone that achieves "nothing at all." He points to P.Z. Myers as being one of the most prominent culprits.

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An atheist’s response to a religious greeting

I have an acquaintance at the gym, let's call him "Greg". I like Greg. Whenever I ask him how he's feeling Greg answers, "I am blessed!" If I see him when I'm on my way out and I say, "See ya later Greg!', he always says something like, "God bless!" or "God willing!" Greg is obviously a devout man. He hurt his wrist in a bad fall recently and told me how God was looking out for him because it could have been much worse. I nodded silently. Greg doesn't know I am a doubter and I would never bring it up in the gym. The strange thing is that lately I have found myself returning his greeting in kind. The other day Greg saw me before I saw him and he greeted me first. "How's it going today Mike?" "I am blessed!", I found myself saying (much to my surprise) and I meant it! "You know it!", he said with a knowing smile, and walked on. It's true! I do feel "blessed", whatever that means. I'm very grateful for the things, the people, my health and the opportunities that I have in my life. I think about it every day. I often say that I feel like I live in a constant state of thankfulness. If that isn't blessed I don't know what is! So now whenever I see Greg I greet him in a way that I'm sure leads him to think that I am a believer like him. My beliefs haven't changed, I'm still an atheist, but it makes me feel good to say it and hear him say it back. Is that wrong??

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