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

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

by Marc Hauser (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2006) 512 pp.; $27.95 cloth; ISBN 0060780703

IT'S A WORLD beset with problems that we inhabit, but our era must also rank with the golden times of Periclean Athens and the Renaissance for thinking that explores the outer frontiers of human understanding. Many thousands of very bright and educated specialists are burrowing away into hundreds of disciplines, and mostly their work goes unnoticed by the general public. But when a book comes along that pulls some of this research together in a way that reveals larger patterns, the rest of us can see flashes of modern ideas--unthinkable in an earlier era--that could become conventional wisdom for future generations and propel our descendants along new, potentially humanist paths. Harvard evolutionary biologist Marc Hauser's Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong is just that kind of book.

Moral Minds is based on an interesting premise: just as Noam Chomsky predicates the existence of a universal sense of grammar and syntax, particular to our species but ubiquitous within it, so there is a related sense of morality that is equally common to humanity and humanity alone. This moral sense involves perceptual rules like distinguishing between the agent of an action and its recipient, and judgments like which actions are required or permissible or forbidden. It operates as a kind of hidden subtext, available at all times to inform the snap judgments people make when confronting morally ambiguous situations.

Children are born with an innate sense of grammar and syntax, according to Chomsky, and quickly absorb the native language of the people around them. Similarly, according to Hauser, children start with a very general set of ground rules underlying moral choices. Hauser summarizes a variety of tests that have been conducted by child psychologists which show that young children demonstrate a consistent ability to make judgments in situations involving fairness, truth, and altruism. Seems the old Golden Rule comes pretty close to what kids start with when they first look around and confront the need to make moral choices.

Any child will quickly flesh out this innate moral sense with the specific array of value judgments and the dos and don'ts of the culture. Cultures vary widely as we know, so the end product can be just as various as the difference between languages. Men in a "macho" culture will react quite differently to certain circumstances than those in less irritable societies. (Hauser's description of the cultural pattern in our southern states, coming from a Harvard professor, could become a little controversial if it weren't buried rather deeply in his otherwise complex argument.)

Hauser describes the basic elements of this innate moral sense, then explores which ones are shared by other intelligent animals and which are particular to our own species. He makes a stab at exploring how this innate moral sense evolves, recognizing that all the evidence is not yet in. For me the most interesting analysis concerns exploration of human altruism and what it is that gives us the peculiarly human capability of cooperating within very large groups. This is an exceedingly complex and controversial issue because many social scientists don't agree that altruism is a factor at all in holding large societies together. Hauser could prove them wrong and, in the process, clear up our thinking about some of the other invisible neural circuits and innate behavioral patterns that make up the unseen side of what we know as human nature.

Hauser has picked a subject that philosophers have vented about since philosophy began, and knows it. He explores Kant and Hume and Rawls in some detail and uses their insights to characterize different aspects of the human mental apparatus that can become involved in moral judgments. But while he pays respects to these thinkers of the past, he does not kowtow to them. In his own words: "This account shifts the burden of evidence from a philosophy of morality to a science of morality." From my point of view, it's an interesting and timely change.

Carl Coon is a former ambassador to Nepal and author of One Planet, One People, Beyond "Us versus Them," published by Prometheus Books in 2004. He is also vice president of the American Humanist Association.