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117 of 129 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Science of Morality Comes of Age, September 9, 2006
This review is from: Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong (Hardcover)
When Darwin discovered natural selection, he was quick and remarkably insightful as to how this might affect our understanding of our own species, Homo sapiens. Alfred Russel Wallace, the impressive co-discover of the theory, never agreed to its application to humans. He considered our mental faculties far too advanced to be accounted for by the same forces that gave rise to pond scum and even chimpanzees. The debate continues to this very day, and will not be resolved in the forseeable future.
Nevertheless, there is now little doubt but that we share many of our mental faculties with other species, including, as Marc Hauser shows us in this fine volume, some of our moral capacities. Even those we do not share with our evolutionary relatives, he claims, are clearly the product of biological evolutionary forces. I think his argument accurately reflects our current state of knowledge, and is impressive indeed. Sociobiology, which was roundly rejected and indeed excoriate by most behavioral scientists when first proposed by Edward O. Wilson in 1975, has been fully vindicated.
The past decade has seen a strong push for the notion that ethics is a part of science, and the philosophy of ethics, in principle, ought not to be that different from the philosophy of physics. In particular, our ethical notions do not come from some rarified Platonic realm, or the capacity to perceive synthetic a prioris, or our superior informational processing power, but rather from our evolution as a species that has spend most of its history living in small bands of mobile, propertyless, stateless, hunter-gatherers.
Hauser deals with our current understanding of virtally all aspects of the mental life of humans, cognitive, affective, and moral, and he consistently weaves an intellectual web in which the mental capacities of animals and humans are inextricably interwoven. His specific claim, and unique to my knowledge, is that we can understand human morality in much the same manner as we have come to understand human language, based on the work of Chomsky and his coworkers. Humans are genetically endowed with a universal moral grammar, a tool kit for building specific human moralities, the latter being the product of cultural specificity. Thus, just as we cannot understand a foreign tongue, so we cannot appreciate a foreign morality, even though we know it springs from the same basic human capacities.
I think the analogy of ethics with language is a fruitful one, and well argued by Hauser on the basis of the facts (e.g., people cannot defend their ethical beliefs any more than they can explain the rules of grammar that they follow, unless they have been trained to do so). I am less sure that it is true. This is because the actual content of ethical principles is largely the same across all societies, and certainly across major religious and cultural groups (see Donald Brown, Human Universals, and Hauser's discussion of religion, pp. 421ff). We humans certainly can amplify our petty differences (e.g., what to eat, what to call our God, when to wear what), and there are important non-petty differences (tolerance, gender equality, abortion and homosexuality), but these vary systematically with level of economic development, and are not the cocophony of human languages.
This book is written for the novice, and is a wonderful introduction to the recent liturature on the human mind, by an eminent researcher whose knowledge of "wild minds" (the title of his previous book) is unsurpassed, and who has enriched us all by turning his gaze to human primates.
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54 of 60 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A Mess. Hauser Is Both Confusing and Deeply Confused, August 8, 2008
This review is from: Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong (Hardcover)
This is a horribly written (at times incoherent) and poorly argued for book. Hauser's main thesis is that humans have a "moral grammar" analogous to the universal grammar made famous by Chomsky's theory of human language acquisition. Unfortunately Hauser offers little evidence to support his "theory" of universal moral grammar. His theory is actually a loosely held together notion that is more armchair speculation than actual systematic scientific theory.
My first complaint is stylistic. I am usually not a stickler for style in scientific writing but the book is so bad in this area that something must be said to warn the potential reader. The reader is subjected to prose that meanders between the redundant to the trivial to the nonsensical. For example, odd phraseology such as describing at one point how one can "literally" pull "propositions" out of a hat slow the reading down and makes the reader wonder about the English proficiency of the writer. Hauser also repeatedly makes seemingly absurd claims without any justification such as claiming that Swedes would wage warfare on anyone who would dare to try to tell them to change religions (p. 416). I am not being nitpicky here; the book is filed with these kinds of stupid, nonsensical, and absolutely bizarre statements.
Content wise, the book also fails. Hauser tries to establish his "theory" by listing a hodgepodge of empirical studies from ethology, neuroscience, psychology, anthropology and economics which he claims support it. Unfortunately the reader is not given any reason whatsoever to believe this. It's an uncontroversial truth that humans do have innate moral instincts given us by our evolutionary history but philosophers have known about the natural inclinations toward morality for, literally, thousands of years (Aristotle, Confucius, Mencius, for example all described how humans are naturally endowed with moral instincts, capacities, dispositions and emotions). This thesis is not new and it does have justification in the empirical sciences. But to claim that there are universal grammars analogous to universal linguistic grammars is to make a far stronger and more audacious claim, a claim that Hauser does not prove in this work (it seems to me he doesn't even offer much of an attempt). Many of the experiments he uses to "support" his thesis are only tenuously linked to it at best. At times Hauser strains to establish a connection and at other times no connection is apparent at all. His strategy seems to be to impress readers by throwing as much information as possible at them in the hope of impressing them with red herrings. At times, even Hauser seems to get confused by his own examples and how they are linked to his thesis. The critical reader gets the impression that Hauser's repeated uses of ad hoc interpretations of the experimental data are desperate attempts to save what little substance there is in the book.
In arguing his case, he also makes use of ideas developed from moral philosophers. But his understanding of moral philosophy is grossly inadequate. His "Humean Creature" would have been completely alien to David Hume; his "Rawlsian Creature" likewise to John Rawls. It seems to me that he could have completely omitted all the talk of these moral creatures and stuck with the sciences, subject matters he has had far more experience with albeit uses incompetently to establish a very nebulous claim.
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31 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Disgusted with Hauser, July 10, 2008
This review is from: Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong (Hardcover)
Hauser ends his book "Moral Minds" as follows.
"The notion of a universal moral grammar with parametric variation provides one way to think about pluralism. It requires us to understand how, in development, particular parameters are fixed by experience. It also requires us to appreciate that once fixed, we may be as perplexed by another community's moral system as we are by their language. Appreciating the fact that we share a universal moral grammar, and that at birth we could have acquired any of the world's moral systems, should provide us with a sense of comfort, a sense that perhaps we can understand each other." (p 406)
I have rarely started a book with such delight only to end it with such disgust.
Hauser is not only wrong but lazy when he says we may be "as perplexed by another community's moral system as we are by their language." It is *impossible* to be as perplexed by another community's morality as we are by its language. (Though female genital mutilation and honor killings horrify me, they do not perplex me: I "get it" but I also reject it.)
As for acquiring "any of the world's moral systems," Hauser never identifies and distinguishes them. I would like to know if he's thinking there are six major moral systems, or fifty, or several hundred if not thousands. The only moral systems he has a serious interest in are those of Kant, Hume, and Rawls, but Hauser never makes clear in what sense those three men were speaking different moral languages. Further, he attributes the three systems to these specific individuals and not the communities wherein these men grew up and presumably had the parameters of their native moral tongues permanently fixed. (One would think that Hauser would realize that by attributing the three most important ethical theories going--in his view, anyway--to individuals rather than communities, he has undercut his assumption that we take in our morality the way we take in our native languages. No one "grows up" Kantian; one chooses it.)
Hauser does speak of the ethics of hunter-gatherer communities, and of herding communities. He blames excessive violence in the American South on the region's Irish and Scotch settlers--herders--whose honor-based morality contrasts sharply with that of peaceful German and Dutch farmers who settled the North. But if a Southern (Irish) woman marries a Northern (Dutch) man, what is the moral language of their children?
Hauser sees UMG explaining why people from many backgrounds give the same answer to moral dilemmas. I think this is a conceptual mistake. Granted, I'm no linguist and may misperceive the analogy, but it seems to me that Chomsky's universal grammar focuses on the *structure* of spoken languages whereas Hauser focuses on the *content* of moral judgments.
Further, Hauser focuses only on moral emergencies. This would be like a linguistic theory that explained only expletives. (Grammatically, expletives are *exceptional* cases.) We have a multitude of chances to cheat on our taxes or spread rumors about colleagues but few chances to make an instantaneous life or death decision. Consider how Hauser treats a *slow* life and death decision, the Terri Schiavo case.
Hauser favored the removal of feeding tubes. Further, he argues that those opposed to this were basing their judgments on religious teachings and that morality and religion should be "divorced." But he argues elsewhere that moral judgments are *immune* to religious instruction; yet if that were so, such a divorce would make absolutely no difference at all. (Most who favor the divorce of religion and morality think that religion has a negative moral impact and *that* is why they want the divorce; it makes no sense to ask for a divorce if religion is *irrelevant* to one's moral judgments.)
Hauser is having it both ways: arguing that moral judgments are immune to religious instruction but then saying that the Terri Schiavo controversy arose because some people were making moral judgments based on religious instruction while other people (-in the same culture, no less) were not. Also, he clearly thinks those who wanted to remove the tubes were right and those who did not were wrong, but he provides no basis for judging the relative merits of claims made in different moral languages.
I understand that Hauser is using language as an analogy and that no analogy is perfect, but I finished this book wondering in what ways he thought the analogy held. There are thousands of languages but apparently just a few moral systems. Some of these moral systems may be attributed to a specific individual, which no one's native language can be. If morality is like language, why aren't there as many moral systems as languages? What is the moral equivalent of being bi-lingual? One can translate Greek philosophy into Latin, or German, or English, but how can one translate "herder morality" into "farmer morality"? Or Christian morality into atheist terms? Or Rawlsian morality into Kantian terms?
Hauser has gathered much fascinating research but his assessment is more than shaky.
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