Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong [Hardcover]

Marc Hauser (Author)

Book Description

Release date: August 22, 2006 | ISBN-10: 0060780703 | ISBN-13: 978-0060780708 | Edition: 1

Marc Hauser's eminently readable and comprehensive book Moral Minds is revolutionary. He argues that humans have evolved a universal moral instinct, unconsciously propelling us to deliver judgments of right and wrong independent of gender, education, and religion. Experience tunes up our moral actions, guiding what we do as opposed to how we deliver our moral verdicts.

For hundreds of years, scholars have argued that moral judgments arise from rational and voluntary deliberations about what ought to be. The common belief today is that we reach moral decisions by consciously reasoning from principled explanations of what society determines is right or wrong. This perspective has generated the further belief that our moral psychology is founded entirely on experience and education, developing slowly and subject to considerable variation across cultures. In his groundbreaking book, Hauser shows that this dominant view is illusory.

Combining his own cutting-edge research with findings in cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, economics, and anthropology, he examines the implications of his theory for issues of bioethics, religion, law, and our everyday lives.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

How do humans develop their capacity to make moral decisions? Harvard biologist Hauser (Wild Minds) struggles to answer this and other questions in a study that is by turns fascinating and dull. Drawing on the linguistic theories of Noam Chomsky, Hauser argues that humans have a universal moral grammar, an instinctive, unconscious tool kit for constructing moral systems. For example, although we might not be able to articulate immediately the moral principle underlying the ban on incest, our moral faculty instinctually declares that incest is disgusting and thus impermissible. Hauser's universal moral grammar builds on the 18th-century theories of moral sentiments devised by Adam Smith and others. Hauser also asserts that nurture is as important as nature: "our moral faculty is equipped with a universal set of rules, with each culture setting up particular exceptions to these rules." All societies accept the moral necessity of caring for infants, but Eskimos make the exception of permitting infanticide when resources are scarce. Readers unfamiliar with philosophy will be lost in Hauser's labyrinthine explanations of Kant, Hume and Rawls, and Hauser makes overly large claims for his theory's ability to guide us in making more moral, and more enforceable, laws. (Sept. 1)
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From Scientific American

You are driving a train when you see five hikers on the track ahead of you and a siding with a single hiker. Is it okay to flip a switch and send the train onto the siding, killing one hiker but saving five? Most people say yes. Would it be okay for a doctor to harvest organs from a healthy person to save five patients? Most people say no. But they often do not have a clue why they think one of these choices is okay and the other is not. And that fact is a clue that we have an innate moral faculty. Like competent speakers who do not understand the grammatical underpinnings of language, people tend to have strong, gut-level opinions about what is moral but are unable to give coherent explanations. Marc D. Hauser, a Harvard University psychologist, wants to do for morality what Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguist Noam Chomsky did for language—he wants to discover the universal "moral grammar." Chomsky suggested that humans are born with a "universal grammar," a cognitive capacity that helps us acquire language and shapes the way we apply language rules. Hauser thinks our moral grammar works the same way, helping us isolate moral lessons from our culture and make judgments about right and wrong. In Moral Minds, Hauser reviews what we already know about innate human faculties—for instance, that even infants seem to understand that people and animals have intentions, whereas inanimate objects do not. And he presents evidence that our universal morality is probably based on rules about fairness, proportionality and reciprocity, among other things. The material is captivating and ranges from philosophy to anthropology to psychology, including some of Hauser’s own original work. Hauser’s main failing is that he sometimes loses the thread of his argument; he piles on the detail but fails to make it clear how his examples support his argument. The upshot, though, is that we do not yet know exactly how our moral grammar works or even which cognitive capacities contribute to our moral faculty. Hauser’s achievement is to argue convincingly that such a faculty exists and to raise some of the many questions that have to be answered before we will fully understand it.

Kurt Kleiner

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 512 pages
• Publisher: Ecco; 1 edition (August 22, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060780703
• ISBN-13: 978-0060780708
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #751,138 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Marc Hauser is a scientist, educator, innovator, and humanist. With broad training in the biological and social sciences, as well as philosophy and linguistics, he has published over 200 scientific papers and six books, including most recently Moral Minds (2006, NY: Harper Collins). During his 18 years as a professor at Harvard University, he worked on topics in animal cognition, moral psychology, cognitive development, cognitive neuroscience, behavioral economics, linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy. In the last three years, he has worked with high at-risk youths, bringing the tools of the mind and brain sciences to help change their lives, including their capacity to learn and make meaningful decisions. This work continues today. He is married to Lilan Hauser and has two daughters, Alexandra and Sofia.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

120 of 134 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Science of Morality Comes of Age September 9, 2006

By Herbert Gintis

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

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.

60 of 70 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars A Mess. Hauser Is Both Confusing and Deeply Confused August 8, 2008

By Nan Chen

Format: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.

31 of 36 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Taking the "Trolley Test" . . . and beyond December 14, 2006

By Stephen A. Haines HALL OF FAMEVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

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]