[This is the first in an ongoing series on First Drafts, in which authors are given space to reply to reviews of their books. Here, Marc Hauser, professor of psychology at Harvard, responds to Jonathan Derbyshire's Guardian review of his Moral Minds.
The argument in Moral Minds is that we have evolved a moral instinct, a dedicated set of neural circuits designed to deliver moral verdicts of right and wrong. The foundation of this moral capacity is a universal moral grammar, a set of principles that assess the beliefs, desires and goals of an agent with respect to his or her actions, and the consequences for the welfare of others. What this thesis suggests is that much of our moral reasoning may be illusory, mediated instead by intuitive and unconscious processes that are, to some extent, immune to cultural influences.]
Though much of Jonathan Derbyshire’s review captures much of my book Moral Minds quite accurately, there are some egregious errors that I would like to flag. I will quote directly from Derbyshire so that there is no misunderstanding.
Problem one. My moral sense test aims to probe moral intuitions by asking respondents how they imagine they would act in various hypothetical moral dilemmas. One such dilemma asked respondents to imagine themselves standing on a bridge from which they can see a tram hurtling towards five people stranded on the track. The only way to save their lives is to drop a heavy weight in front of the tram. A fat man also happens to be standing on the bridge. Should you push him to his death in order to stop the tram, or leave him, in which case those on the track will die?
Derbyshire writes that, “Hauser reports that only 10 per cent of respondents said it was morally permissible to push the fat man from the bridge. From this and similar results, he deduces a universal ‘intention principle,’ according to which intended harm is morally worse than harm that is foreseen but not directly intended. What is unclear, however, is why Hauser thinks data like these also license claims about the existence of a discrete moral faculty or ‘organ.’ It is one thing to articulate principles that help to make sense of our intuitive responses to moral dilemmas, but quite another to conclude from this that such principles must belong to a particular region of the brain.â€
I did not claim that an understanding of the principles that guide moral judgement licences inferences about neural localisation. What I did say was that an understanding of the principles that guide our judgements enables us to move into detailed studies of the brain, attempting to both localise such psychological processes, chart their development and explore what happens when they break down. This is precisely what my students and I have done. For example, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we recently published a paper that shows that the right temporo-parietal junction is critically involved in dilemmas that entail information about a person’s beliefs. More importantly, the level of activation in this area is modulated by the outcome of an action. Thus, if a person believes he will do harm and his actions cause harm, then the pattern of activation in this region is different than if the person believes he will do harm, but fails to do so. We explored this area in part because of our interest in how beliefs, intentions, goals and action figure into our moral judgements. Thus the theoretical and behavioral work motivates an exploration at the neural level.
Problem two. “Moral Minds is full of fascinating reports on psychological experiments, few of which offer any obvious support for Hauser’s ambitious claims about moral grammar.â€
Moral Minds provides a novel way of looking at our moral psychology, building on the general insights of Chomsky, the more specific ideas expressed by Rawls, and most recently, the work of the philosophers John Mikhail and Sue Dwyer. Unlike Pinker’s The Language Instinct, which eloquently summarised not only Chomsky’s arguments about language but the mountain of evidence that had accumulated over the 40 years since his initial account, Moral Minds was exploratory. But half the battle in science is to ask new questions that are, we hope, sufficiently interesting for people to attempt to answer. When I began working on this problem three to four years ago, there were several questions that had never really been asked. For example, to this day we still have no evidence about critical periods for acquiring a moral system, whether the first moral system is acquired in a fundamentally different way from a second system acquired later in life, of whether people can be “bi-moral,” and whether the neural representation of one moral system is different from the representation of two. Once the linguistic analogy is invoked, these become the obvious questions. Moral Minds has already set off a host of experiments, some of these from my own lab; interested readers may wish to download some of our recent papers.
Problem three. “And there is nothing here to suggest that this nascent discipline will conquer the ‘proprietary province of the humanities’ any time soon.â€
I did not claim that a biology of morality will conquer the humanities. In fact, Derbyshire fails to quote the complete sentence, which reads: “Inquiry into our moral nature will no longer be the proprietary province of the humanities, but a shared journey with the natural sciences.†The natural sciences are coming into increasing contact with the social sciences and humanities. For me, and many of my colleagues, there is an appreciation that the best work will come from a collaboration, one that recognises both that different disciplines have different strengths, and that each discipline brings some proprietary issues, some of which are open to inter-disciplinary fertilisation. In the case of morality, the biological sciences can provide rich descriptions of how people judge moral dilemmas and how they act in such cases, but it can not dictate what we ought to do. The field is abuzz, and the results are emerging quickly. I am glad to be alive to witness this renaissance, an inquiry into one of the most interesting aspects of human life.
LINKS
Marc Hauser’s website
Buy Moral Minds at the Prospect bookshop
Participate in the moral sense test
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“It is one thing to articulate principles that help to make sense of our intuitive responses to moral dilemmas, but quite another to conclude from this that such principles must belong to a particular region of the brain.â€
Derbyshire flags up a red-herring objection here, and one that has been common to objections to evolutionary psychological approaches to the mind in general over the past 15 years: “So and so claims that mental faculty X is located in this part of the brain – this is ridiculous and unsupported by the evidenceâ€.
Evolutionary psychologists, however, are not interested in tying mental functions to singular brain regions per se, but in uncovering psychological processes or systems that underpin behaviour. There is no reason or desire to propose that such systems will have a single, clearly identifiable residency in the brain. In fact, they are likely to recruit many areas of the brain, but at the psychological level may still function as a coherent, adaptive whole (conferring benefits on our ancestors who possessed these systems). (Note: this doesn’t mean that studying brain functioning is irrelevant to understanding psychological processes.)
So the question of whether moral principles belong to a particular region of the brain is beside the point. The relevant question, which Derbyshire comes so close to asking, is whether the rules devised to explain the range of empirically observed moral intuitions are actually embodied in the mind somehow – whether we have some innate knowledge of these rules – or whether some other processes explain moral decision-making.
One proposal, based on brain-imaging studies, is that when confronted with the issue of pushing the fat man to his death under the tram to save five others (in what is known as the footbridge dilemma), two systems kick into action. One generates a strong, negative emotional response at the prospect of this up-close and personal violence, which shows up as increased activity in brain regions associated with processing negative emotions. Counter-acting this are more conscious, controlled cognitive systems that weigh up the lives saved versus live lost, and after looking at the numbers conclude that pushing the man is the best option (which shows up as increased activity in ‘executive areas’ of the prefrontal cortex). How an individual chooses in this dilemma depends on which systems wins out, but the results suggest that the emotional response carries the day for most people in this case.
Results from studies of the related ‘trolley problem’ – in which a tram (or trolley, as it is more often referred to) is heading down the tracks, again on course to kill five people, and the only way to prevent these deaths is to flick a switch that will send the trolley down another track with just one person on it – fit in with this idea. In this case, there is no personal violence involved, and so less of an emotional response to counter-act the rational, utilitarian part of the mind. Not only are brain areas related to emotional processing less active when considering this dilemma, most people say “Yes, flick the switch†(whereas they mostly say “No†to pushing in the footbridge dilemma).
On Hauser’s account, the moral grammar faculty analyses the action and follows the rule that intentional harm (as occurs in the case in the footbridge dilemma) is impermissible, while harms caused as a side-effect to a justifiable end (as occurs in the trolley problem) are permissible. On the emotion-versus-reason view (to overly simplify), emotions win out in the former, utilitarian considerations in the latter (as there is less of an emotional response in the first place) – producing the same pattern of behaviour but without positing the existence of any innate knowledge of moral rules or a moral grammar.
So part of the problem is teasing these options apart, and working out whether emotions causally drive moral judgements, or whether moral emotions arise as part of the output of a moral grammar that derives judgements of permissibility before emotions have kicked in. One way this has been approached is using subtle variations on the trolley and footbridge dilemmas, and seeing whether the responses they elicit are best accounted for the respective theories. I don’t think the case is closed for either approach (and there are others to evaluate as well), but Hauser’s proposal certainly deserves serious consideration – and will no doubt help people clarify their own position, perhaps especially if opposed to Hauser’s main thesis.
Most of the reviews I’ve read of Moral Minds have not given proper credit to Hauser’s achievements in producing this large, wide-ranging book. Even if you disagree with Hauser’s claims about a universal moral grammar, there is much to learn from the book and a wealth of stimulating ideas to ponder. In particular, Hauser draws together a large number of studies from developmental psychology to build up a picture of how children learn to analyse the social world and the behaviour of others in terms of goals, desires, intentions, actions and so on, and how they differentiate intentional harm from harms produced as side-effects to a desirable end. These mental skills – ‘principles of action’, which together constitute what Hauser calls a grammar of action – form the basis of breaking down moral dilemmas into questions such as ‘if this course of action is taken, is anyone harmed, and is the harm intentional or an undesired side-effect?’, which feed into judgments of whether a particular action is permissible or not.
The ability to understand complex social actions in this way seems to be a crucial aspect to moral thinking whether it is driven by emotions or a moral grammar. It is plausible that the analysis afforded by a grammar of action/moral grammar might lead directly to judgments of permissibility or otherwise. At the same time, it is also possible that such a breakdown of the behavioural options presented in moral dilemmas might also determine which emotional states are activated, and perhaps also provide information for executive areas to contemplate in weighing up a moral problem. As Hauser says, the field is abuzz at the moment, and as researchers push forward in exploring the psychological, neurological, evolutionary and cultural roots of morality answers could soon be forthcoming.
[...] and biologist Marc Hauser to my Guardian review of his book Moral Minds. It’s entitled ‘Did you actually read the book?‘, and is the first in a series in which authors are given the opportunity to take issue with [...]