Customer Reviews

Moral Minds: The Nature of Right and Wrong (P.S.)

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After about 300 pages, I decided to look at some amazon reviews for this book. I was wondering if others had as tough a time as I did following Hauser. I was curious to find out if others were as confused as I was about how this book could be called a work of science rather than an attempt of a scientist to delve into philosophy.

I am somewhat relieved that others came away with the same impression. Before I got this book, I was excited indeed to read it. I have read much both in moral philosophy and explorations of the intersection between it and biology (books by Shermer, Midgley, Ridley, Richard Posner, and works of evolutionary psychology.)

I don't want to risk exagerating, but this one is probably the worst of them. Hauser states his intent to show that morality is instinctual and innate in the sense that linguists have shown a "language instinct." That is, Hauser recognizes moral differences between cultures, but wants to show that morality has basic rules that are innately present, and that variation - like in language - is an acquired thing.

And on top of this, he wants to tie his findings to the conception of morality of John Rawls' "Veil of Ignorance" theory, rather than David Hume and Adam Smith's more emotive theory of morality. Where he does this exactly, I am not sure. I tried to decipher his argument, but the section of the book where he argues for a Rawlsian, rather than a Humean, conception of moral development seems actually to do the opposite. He succeeds only in showing that human moral judgments are first made on gut intuition and only after use reason either to justify or refine them. Humean indeed!

The other area where I was unclear was on how, exactly, Hauser showed that our moral sense is in any way objective across cultures. (I happen to believe this, but I have seen the argument made much better elsewhere!) In fact, this is a very hard case to make. Hauser says over and over that while the human moral sense is in some ways universal, variation is to be expected. Unfortunately, that is a very difficult statement to make in science. (It is like saying that while we are predicting that a certain law is universal, it manifests itself in so many different ways that appearance of universality should not be expected, enough that the law will not seem universal at all to our tests. In other words, "It is universal despite the fact of numerous exceptions to the rule." Science indeed!)

I also missed the part where Hauser goes into the possible explanations for how we may have acquired such moral instincts. (That is okay, I have heard and seen them elsewhere, and am convinced of many of them. I think particularly of Matt Ridley and Michael Shermer.) This may not be Hauser's fault, but my own. As I mentioned, I stopped at around page 300. But should it have taken him that long to get around to evolutionary explanations of moral development?

To conclude, the biggest problem with this book is that it meanders to a degree that writing a summary for each chapter would be almost impossible. Hauser goes in several directions during each chapter. Because of this, it seems that he doesn't make any real case for anything because he meanders too much.

Another big problem is that too much of this book is spent on moral philosphy such that a reader wanting discourse on science will be disappointed. There is some here, to be sure, but most of it is social science and speculative economics (games devised by economists to get a glimpse of our moral faculties at work).

But here are the seven words that sum up why I gave it two stars: this book falls flat on all counts.

First, go read Kevin Currie's review, because it is fairly insightful. Much of what I would say is written there, and there is nothing there that I disagree with enough to contradict it, except that there is a great deal of science, you just have to filter it out of the remainder of the book. To be fair, much of it is after page 307, where he apparently stopped.

My generalized comment about this book is that reading it is like looking through a microscope with the eyepieces too far apart: There is some region in the center that is viewable through both eyes, but the remainder of the field of view is only accessible by part of what should be seeing it. The two fields are science and the humanities. They are overlapping in part, but there are problems with the integration. For example, as in all carefully worded scientific statements, the author is careful to word things as "evidence of this was not found in the study", which means that it is not disproven, it is merely inconclusive. The humanities references are largely inappropriate, making little or no sense in the context that they are in. They seem to scream, "I'm not just a scientist! I am a renaissance man, and my interests are diverse!" The problem is that they are irrelevant at best, distracting at worst, and never tied into the flow of ideas, except perhaps as a joke would be in Family Guy.

More particular comments, as I am wont to do with science books, are as follows:

First, his mention, on pg. 10, of the evolution of distanced altruism being formerly impossible, is quite clever. I haven't ever seen this suggestion before, even if it is not unique, and it is quite useful.

Second, on pg. 136, amongst other places, Dr. Hauser refers to the unchanging status of human moral and psychological systems. This is, perhaps, the second greatest flaw with the book (the first comes shortly, rest assured). As at least one other reviewer has mentioned, the nature of mankind should never be assumed static.

Third, and the greatest weakness of the book, the acceptance of the "Rawlsian creature" is made fait accompli, as Kevin Currie alludes to. To see why this is a problem, greater details are necessary.

The premise of the book is that there is an underlying moral system that is universal to all humans, but that is largely inaccessible to our cognitive system. It just does its job, and then the conscious mind reationalizes whatever decision is made. Dr. Hauser then gives three different conceptions of moral creatures: a Kantian, which may or may not be accurate (see other reviews), a Humean (which has not been commented upon), and a Rawlsian (which seems to be lifted from the thesis of a graduate student, at least from the text).

In typical philosophical and scientific style, the three are presented, and then the alternatives are tested. This goes on for about two hundred pages, with little or no resolution. Then, somehow, the Rawlsian creature wins, without any explanation, on pg. 251. This is not only one of the last mentions of ANY of the moral systems, until the final page, but it marks the point where the other systems are no longer mentioned at all. This smacks of bad philosophy (which is understandable, since it appears Dr. Hauser's hobby, rather than his forte) AND bad science (which is inexcusable, since this is his career).

Fourth, and more minor, on pg. 313, Dr. Hauser suggests that a stable reciprocal system requires that: "individuals must recognize each other, recall what was given to whom, how much, when, and with what costs." This is inaccurate, at the least. He backs off of this, to a degree, later, never fully restating this entire list (although portions are continually mentioned). A stable reciprocal system merely requires that there is knowledge that one or more persons or entities owe other persons or entities something. How much, who, and costs are irrelevant. They are "tuning" if you will.

Other than these specific complaints, I will reiterate that the book tends to wander, as if the author decided that he only wanted six chapters in the body, and refused to consider additional ones. This makes them an awkward pastiche of multiple, seemingly unrelated subjects. The connections are somewhat mysterious, at least to me. Also, there is needless repetition of many experimental results and statements that elongates and muddies the book.

It is good subject matter, and it is a good effort at summarizing it. The best thing here is the synopsis of what remains to be discovered. Now if we can start answering those questions, we can decide how morality works and how it evolved. Until then, breeze through this and go back to Shermer for better writing.

C-

Harkius

In "Moral Minds", Marc Hauser makes a great case for the existence of an innate morality that exists within all humans, similar to Noam Chomsky's innate organ of language. Drawing on a vast field of research and history, the reader is led step by step to the understanding that morality is an evolved capability which exists not only in humans, but in various degrees in the other animals in the world. His expositions are clear, his thoughts lucid, and aside from a short and mostly pointless digression discussing Conway's Game of Life, the book is brilliant. Highly recommended to anyone, especially those who are tired of the old "atheists are amoral" arguments.

The book tries to prove - or at least make plausible - that man has a moral grammar, similar to the hardwired language grammar postulated by Noman Chomsky.

While the book contains many, many fascinating accounts of highly interesting tests done by biologists and psychologists, I often missed the link between these results, and the claim the author wants to prove.

Of course, he succeeds in refuting many erroneous claims, such as the one that religion has anything to do with morality, but refuting one claim does not necessarily constitute a proof of another.

So, while reading the results of the many test is very interesting in itself, I feel the book falls short on proving the claim it makes.

This is a shame, as intuitively I am very sure, he is on the right track.

For the definitive review of this book, readers should consult Richard Rorty's piece in the New York Times (available online). Rorty points out the absurd mismatch between on the one hand the triumphalist rhetoric of the book (Hauser declares we are entering a new era when science will finally reveal the Truth about "The Nature of Right and Wrong" (the book's subtitle)), and on the other hand the almost total lack of actual concrete results. In the end, despite its excessive length this book tells us little about morality. It mostly deals with the debate between the role of emotion and reason in ethics, but giving us rather caricatured views of each side (especially of Kant's rationalist ethics, which Hauser badly misunderstands). Hauser's actual concrete claims about morality are mostly trivial or vacuous(my favorite is Hauser's "scientific" conclusion that people are partly selfish, partly altruistic). This book is largely an exercise in armchair speculation about how morality evolved to suit a hunter-gatherer lifestyle on the "savanna" many thousands of years ago (one might call this the Flintstones Theory of human nature). There is however no evidence for this claim, and lots of evidence against it (for example, most people recognize some sort of moral duties to animals, yet this would make no sense from an adaptive perspective). In fact, Hauser does not reveal the depths of the controversy even among biologists as to whether morality is even an adaptation at all, let alone an adaptation to the hunter-gatherer state. In the end, the only practical recommendation he offers us about morality is a deeply conservative one: you can't change human nature, our "moral instincts" are "immune" to the attempted changes mandated by religion, laws, and social rules. In fact, the advice is useless, since he doesn't say just what particular instincts can't be changed, or even what our moral instincts are in general. But there is little reason to take his advice anyway. In fact, even a basic knowledge of history shows the possibility of radical moral shifts in very short time periods: think of the rise of women's rights, or how after slavery was universally accepted for thousands of years, yet in the course of a century became morally forbidden. (One can imagine a 19th century Hauser declaiming against the abolitionists, warning that our moral "instincts" to oppress the "outgroup" are too strong for society to meddle with!). As Rorty points out, when society wants to change people's moral attitudes, it would be better off simply trying to see if the changes can be made, rather than listen to the unsupported speculations of biologists about how human nature is fixed and unchangeable. Indeed, there is an ironic reversal here. Usually, it is the religious & political leaders are usually portrayed as dogmatic and conservative, and the scientists who are supposed to be the experimentalists, calling for trial and error. Now it is the non-scientists who have become the open-minded experimentalists!

I skimmed a lot of this book and as a former Bible reader, I was puzzled by his claim regarding Psalms 137:9 as proving the Bible condoned infanticide. It clearly does not. The following verse is part of the 137th Psalm addressed to the Isralites' enemy, Babylon.

"Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones."

As bloodthirsty as this may seem, it seems this is what the Babylonians did to them and they were looking forward to "an eye for an eye" retribution. Not committing infantacide on their own children.

This was a red flag to me in Mr. Hauser's book, as it immediately indicated shoddy research and faulty claims.