Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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.

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]

I agree with Rick: great idea, poor execution. Various moral and social systems have long tried to codify and explain away through religious and other naratives what is only natural to us. Kudos to Mark Hauser for bringing our innate "moral organ" to broad attention.

His writing however is another matter. I suggest, read his introductory chapter "What Is Wrong?" and then cherry-pick from the rest of the book as much of the following material is highly repetitive. This is topic waiting to be tackled again by another, stronger writer.

If an ethical theory is to be useful and applicable to everyday life, its foundations must be drawn from human experiences, from what a human being has actually faced and might face in the real world. If this is not done, then it is merely a philosophical construction, and will lose itself in the gigantic conceptual spaces constructed by philosophical speculation. Ethical thought experiments are therefore to be avoided at all costs, as they complicate the issues at hand and make it appear that ethical reasoning is only proper in literary or verbal channels. It may be interesting or fun to debate hypothetical ethical dilemmas, but if there is not even one historical example that illustrate these dilemmas, their value for ethics is completely vitiated.

The author of this book unfortunately makes use of several hypothetical ethical dilemmas to assist in building his case for a theory of ethics that could, following the same nomenclature in linguistics, be described as `generative'. Therefore, moral reasoning, like language, is the result of a particular ability of the human mind (brain) and as such is universal in its grammatical patterns, even though these patterns can vary over geographical location and be parametrized by different cultures. Morality is instinctual, the author argues, and it is unaffected by the dictates of both religion and governmental institutions. The moral grammar that the author discusses, and his arguments to support it, is of course very analogous to the generative grammar of Chomskian linguistics. He even gives an analogue of the famous `poverty of the stimulus' argument of Noam Chomsky, in that he asks whether the environment contains enough information to construct a moral grammar.

This hypothesis may at first sight appear radical, and in the jacket of the book and in the author's prologue it is advertised as such. But given the advances in cognitive neuroscience that have taken place in the last fifteen years, it now seems that an ethical theory based on scientific principles is within reach. The author claims that his is such a theory, and he endeavors to justify it with what is known in evolutionary psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and related areas. It is refreshing to hear that the author wants to finally divorce morality and religion, and he feels a sense of urgency in proposing a different outlook on morality. The traditional ones have caused us great trouble, he states emphatically.

In general the author presents a fair case for his conception of morality, but there are problems with his approach. The first deals with his use of thought experiments and his insistence, sometimes merely implicit, of the superiority of the moral philosophy of John Rawls. The author views Rawls as being one of the most important contributors to the problem of justice and fairness. The moral/ethical conceptions of Rawls are contrasted with those of Immanuel Kant and David Hume, with the Kantian conception being one characterized by duty, and the Humean emphasizing emotional responses. Rawls, at least the way the author understands him, asserts that moral judgments are driven by principles that are not part of conscious awareness. Even more interesting for the Rawlsian viewpoint is that the moral agent is not usually able to provide justification for a particular action or set of actions. The `operative principles' on which judgments are based do not however have to be known by the moral agent, and this agent does not usually arrive at a moral decision by conscious reasoning from specific principles. Further, moral dilemmas or conflicts are resolved by `considered judgment', which is done on very short time scales and is essentially automatic. Lastly, the author discusses the now famous Rawlsian thought experiment of `original position' which was designed (apparently) to find the unconscious principles of justice that are contained in the moral faculty of an agent. The principles of justice must however be discovered behind a `veil of ignorance' so as to eliminate the bias of social status, religious beliefs, etc.

But Rawls falters here, since the veil of ignorance is an idealistic ephemeral construct, and while being favorable to philosophers who enjoy these types of abstractions, is not a practical strategy for discovering ethical truths. Bias is absolutely necessary for the discovery of not only ethical truth but all truth, for it enables one to frame an issue clearly so that it is accessible to experiment and study. A biased hypothesis is one that is more easily refuted if it is indeed wrong. A hypothesis that is floppy or unconstrained is much more difficult to find counterexamples to, and has much less predictive power. And the veil of ignorance seems to fall into a Marxian trap here since it is implicitly assuming that one's social status or membership in a class structure determines one's reasoning patterns on a particular issue. Rawls then invites "reasonable men" to free themselves from their social status in order to think more clearly about ethical issues. What Rawls is asking may be possible but it would be inefficient. What is really needed is a group of individuals of all backgrounds suggesting ideas as quickly as possible and then finding their flaws collectively. The search tree for principles of justice can then be more efficiently pruned. The author does in a later section of the book allude to the need and inevitability of errors in forming a worldview or theory. Errors that keep repeating in a theory, the author argues, are an indication that the theory is too rigid and immune to counterexamples. This requires a break with the past and attempting a new theory that goes against expectations. A successful theory of moral intelligence, either similar to the author's or not, will require an ability of theory to confront new situations and propose alternative courses of action.

The author is aware of the problems in Rawlsian moral philosophy, and even more aware of the extreme difficulties is testing their applicability and practicality in the real world. To test Rawlsian principles and their insistence on long-term "reflective equilibrium' one needs large blocks of time and a method for monitoring whether a collection of experimental subjects indeed followed these principles in the period under question. Did these subjects actually follow the principles or did they alter them as they confronted new situations in life?

These problems with Rawlsian philosophy do not completely undermine the author's case for an intrinsic moral grammar, but his use of thought experiments does to some extent. In the chapter entitled "Grammars of Violence" for example he discusses some favorite "moral dilemmas" of philosophers such as the "trolley problem". These are used to frame ethical issues and study responses to hypothetical scenarios, such as when it is permissible to kill. However there is not one historical example of any of these scenarios on the books, and as such they have a artificial air about them. They are good for philosophical diatribe but nothing more really, and completely unnecessary for building a scientific foundation for ethics. The author seems to be aware of this to some extent, since in that same chapter he reminds the reader that scientific evidence plays no role in the musings of moral philosophers. And he asks philosophers to consider the fact that many people may arrive at different answers to ethical dilemmas then they do, and that this variation may be more than just faulty thinking on the part of these people. Science can investigate this variation more meaningfully by taking philosophical insight "to the streets." And in this same chapter the author's analysis of `macho cultures' is fascinating and definitely worthy of attention and reflection.

There are many more thought-provoking discussions in the book, which are outside the ill-defined boundaries of philosophy and touch on experimental efforts. One of these concerns the inability of three-year old children to access the knowledge and beliefs of other people. The author believes that this fact is crucial to an understanding of the origins of moral thinking, in that the child will need to be able to identify her own shortcomings, at least when judged relative to the affect they have on other people. And it is clear when reading the chapter "The Moral Organ" that the author believes that a successful theory of morals and ethics must be tied to what is known about the brain, i.e. the research and results in the field of neuroscience must be consulted at every step. It is in this chapter that skepticism regarding the moral dilemma/thought experiments discussed earlier will be somewhat alleviated, as the author discusses some neuroimaging studies that indicate a relationship between brain activation and these moral dilemmas. The author though is intellectually honest enough to state that this research does not indicate the existence of a neural system for selectively processing moral content.

Morality that is based on religion or that is rule-based is of course rejected by the author, due mostly to its impotence in resolving important moral issues. No set of canons or legal principles can cover every contingency, and the moral agent must be able to adapt to novel situations and still maintain a moral perspective. The religions of the world fail at this miserably, and therefore their role in a scientific vision of morality will be marginal or even vacuous. The author though realizes that much work remains in deriving a science of morality, and he alludes to the growing influence of science into ethical inquiry. The role of religion, philosophy and sociology in moral considerations will therefore be eclipsed by what is being done in the scientific laboratory, and maybe at the end of the twenty-first century the divorce between science and religion will be complete, with no reconciliation possible.

Hauser wants to develop a science of morality, which is increasingly feasible by combining insights from psychology, neuroscience, ethology (study of animals in natural settings), sociobiology (evolutionary origins of social behavior)and direct, empirical investigation of moral judgments. While I have had exposure to the first four fields before, I found the material on moral judgments new and fascinating, albeit challenging. We seem to make fine moral distinctions based on the proper application of complex principles most of us cannot consciously even begin to identify. Since, as Hauser argues, our basic moral sense is inherited, but "parameterized" by culture, it would be interesting to learn how culture teaches us these fine distinctions.

Hauser can write clearly and make effective use of analogies. Yet I found the book so unnecessarily wordy that I lost patience and stopped reading at p260. Hauser is much too concerned with his non-scientific predecessors in the field, and redundant. I wold also point out that the ethologist Frans de Waal in his book "Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals" (1996) made the same analogies between language acquisition and the acquisition of morality that Hauser does. This should have been a great book, but is not.

This book affirms something that I have thought true for some time now - that morality is governed by instinctual paradigms in healthy individuals. Hearing from birth and from right-wing sources on the news daily that our morality can only be saved by a reversion to "biblical" mores, I had always wondered why the statistics do not back this "moral majority" up. For instance, in countries like Sweden and Iceland and many other European nations where secularism is high, they have much lower rates of crime and their citizens are just as happy if not more so than the average Sunday-bible-toting-American who thinks they have a "higher" version of morality than the "godless heathen."

Hauser cites empirical data that shows that morality is often operating at an unconscious level in human beings as evidenced by tests where subjects make a moral choice but then can offer only incoherent justifications. Hauser's parallel to our "Language Instinct" here is spot on, given that most native speakers can form perfectly grammatical sentences, but if asked about detailed grammatical structures and relationships, they fail miserably. This, I think, is one reason that religion enjoys its ascendant status (at least in America) in regards to morality. Religion is an overt manifestation of moral principles, something people otherwise have little or no conscious access to. It doesn't matter how outdated or ridiculous religious "morals" are, people will cling to them because in their minds it is the only available source of a description of morality. The faster that science can describe these principles, the better off humanity will be.

Taking in relevant topics from moral philosophy, economics, psychology, and of course, the meat of his argument, socio-biological findings from our primate and animal cousins, Hauser shows that the precursors of human morality, at least in rudimentary form, are present in many other animals. This presence gives science a strong foothold in the arena of ethics. These findings must be to the chagrin of such writers as Francis Collins who invoked the god of the gaps in "The Language of God" to explain that human morality must be due to divine fiat. Indeed it is not.

This book is about a very interesting subject but it's been nothing but misery to read. I think Hauser must have actually decided that the key to writing readable, engaging non-fiction is to NEVER walk in a straight line. So we have him wandering here, and there, and everywhere. The burden is on the reader to figure out what he's really up to. What specific moral instincts is he postulating? What's the evidence that there are instincts? How is his theory about moral instincts like Haidt's or Pinker's? I've been trying to get through this for ages and I might...just...have...to...stop.

I really wish the fascinating topic had been tackled by a better writer. The syntax is convoluted and frequently garbled, so any understanding can be gained only with a great deal of rereading and inference. The Hobbesian and Rawlsian interjections seemed like a lot of intellectual masturbation.

Hopefully someone else will tackle the subject in a more coherent fashion.