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104 of 110 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Science of Morality Comes of Age, September 9, 2006
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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26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Taking the "Trolley Test" . . . and beyond, December 14, 2006
The most dangerous question Charles Darwin implied [but didn't ask] was what Nature imposed on humans. It was bad enough for Victorians to be confronted with the idea of an ape-like ancestor. If this was so, what did it say about our sense of values? Whatever else Darwin challenged about our fixed notions of who we are, that one remains in central place. There have been several attempts recently to address the question. Marc Hauser's is not only the most recent, but perhaps the most thorough, of these efforts. In this gracefully written account, he takes us through his reasoning and the evidence supporting it.
Following his earlier "Wild Minds" on other animals, Hauser turns to what makes up human values and how they're achieved. To anyone understanding the process of natural selection, the idea of "morals" as the product of evolution should be a given. Unsatisfied with assumptions, Hauser collects a wealth of information in support of how we derive our values. He sets the data against some "standard" views of what is right and proper behaviour. Drawing on well-known thinkers, he synopsises their views into fabricated entities: the Kantian, Humean, and Rawlsian "creatures". Each represents a different approach in determining what is "fair" and just in the works of Immanuel Kant, David Hume and John Rawls [Hauser provides little cartoon figures as visual aids to help remember these. The publisher had the wit to keep these minimally sized.]. As might be expected, none of these stances are absolutes, and Hauser often confronts us with amalgamations of the positions. What's important isn't the melding itself, but why it has taken place. As humans, we can avoid absolutes and do so on a daily basis. There is, however, a mechanism that was built up over the millennia of our evolutionary track, providing the common foundation for these decisions and our ability to rationalise them.
"Morality", he argues derives from what humans consider "fair" in our interactions with each other. Making the judgement of what is "fair" is an example of how humans break rigid biological bonds which is, in large part, what distinguishes us from others in the animal kingdom. There are fundamentally common aspects to our sense of what is "moral", but there are also variants, generally culturally based. The commonalities we observe are related, in Hauser's view, to Noam Chomsky's "language module". Dubbing it a "moral organ", he's careful not to assign it specific location or even clear function, but it must be an aspect of how our brains consider the world and our place in it.
The pivotal element in his analysis is "The Trolley Test". This classic example pits the lives of five people against one. How are the five to be saved? Are you responsible for the one if you divert the trolley that takes her life? What optional versions provide further insights into what we consider valuable in our interpersonal relations? And, for this study, what is the underlying basis for developing the idea of "morals" at all? Hauser turns to studies of children at various ages, from close to birth through adolescence for explanations. Children perceive much more than we credit them for, due mostly to their lacking skills to communicate. It's clear that while children may often be selfish monsters, they also exhibit early a sense of empathy that extends beyond or by-passes parental input. Actions, here, definitely speak louder than words. They also show that any sense of "morals" cannot be a rigid structure. There must be flexibility and adaptability.
Hauser's proposal can only stir further discussion and investigation. That, indeed, is his stated purpose. While we are unable to reach back into our evolutionary past to record how the proposed "moral organ" developed and how much it determines our behaviour and judgements. Many aspects of our society will be influenced by this book. It should give parents some pause when they find their dictates and a child's response clashing. Lawmakers and judges should consider this book required reading, since it necessarily means abandonment of some fundamental assumptions in the legal system. Hauser's examples even reach into the realm of international affairs and diplomacy. What else could be the result of looking at the question of "morals" in a global framework? It's a compelling study, requiring close reading with an open mind. How many of us are equipped for the task? [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
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13 of 13 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 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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