I wouldn’t fit in at all
John Shook argues that morality evolved long before religion did, which seems right, but then he claims more.
If you were suddenly plucked from your life and sent back in time to live with people in Indonesia about 15,000 years ago (or even Ethiopia 150,000 years ago), you would be able to figure out what is going on. The basic social roles, responsibilities, and civil rules would seem somewhat familiar to you, and you’d fit in pretty fast.
Oh no I wouldn’t – not fit in pretty fast I wouldn’t. I might be able to figure out what is going on, but I would also want no part of it. I would want no part of the social roles that would be imposed on me as a woman, and I would probably not be crazy about the civil rules to do with how slaves, foreigners, criminals, prisoners of war, and other inferiors or others were treated – in fact I would be a foreigner and thus probably a slave. I’d be a foreign slave woman, and I would ‘fit in’ pretty fast. No I wouldn’t! Not unless ‘fit in’ means ‘obey because I have no choice.’
Cultural anthropologists have long recognized how all human societies have similar basic norms of moral conduct. Marc Hauser, professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard University, has just published a paper about additional studies showing that people’s moral intuitions do not vary much across different religions all around the world.
But they do. People’s moral intuitions about the rightness of killing women for being raped, of stoning women to death in front of their children, of forced marriage, of killing witches, of killing gay people – the list goes on, and those moral intuitions do vary much.
Furthermore, basic morality is highly resistant to religious influence — most people easily reject religious rules that violate their basic moral intuitions.
Really? Then why do some ‘devout believers’ think daughter-murder is mandated by their religion under certain circumstances while other people don’t?
People’s moral intuitions about the rightness of killing women for being raped, of stoning women to death in front of their children, of forced marriage, of killing witches, of killing gay people – the list goes on, and those moral intuitions do vary much.
I’m not actually sure this is true. People DO all these things, sure. But do they do them because of their moral intuitions? How do we know?
I’m not sure they do. Reading about the people who do these things, I think it’s quite likely that they are not acting on their consciences, but that they instead are acting on their hate and rage despite their consciences.
I don’t know this, of course. But it’s fallacious to assume that anything people do is because of their “moral intuitions.” Sometimes it’s in spite of those intuitions, even when people are very defensive about what they’re doing.
why do some ‘devout believers’ think daughter-murder is mandated by their religion under certain circumstances while other people don’t?
Well, exactly. “Some” devout believers think this. Hauser’s contention is that most people will not murder their daughters even if their religion tells them to.
Well you’re right, I don’t know for sure. But on the other hand, it’s not just a few people acting – it’s also a lot of people around them approving (and urging on ahead of time, or demanding ahead of time), and so on. It’s ‘conservative clerics’ pitching fits whenever anyone tries to change the law. It’s pretty clearly a moral consensus of some kind, even if it is less than universal.
It’s a consensus, sure. But a moral one? Do most of the people behind these things even think they’re doing the right thing? Or do they just think “I want to kill that bitch”?
Human societies of similar size have similar norms, but it’s definitely not true that the norms of a 50-person band of hunter-gatherers have morals which would be recognizable to humans living in cities of a million people. What is right ahd wrong, how “justice” is meted out, and how power is structured are very, very different.
If we were born into these tribes we would fit in but if we were transplanted as adults we would find it a real shock, assuming we fit in at all.
We should, in the interests of a clean inquiry, probably suppose that we’re only interested in the elements of morality that are really stable. Sanctions against rape and genital mutilation are two instances that vary, among others, so they can’t say much about boo. But it seems the evolutionary moral psychologists have fairly generic pro-social traits in mind, like “reputation monitoring” and so on (Box 1). This is fine, though only a sociopath (or maybe a virtue theorist) would think that the posited list is sufficient for morality.
“What religion can do, and what political and legal institutions can do as well, is alter local and highly specific cases. And yet, they appear to have no influence at all on the intuitive system that operates more generally, and for unfamiliar cases.” This is a highly interesting and peculiar finding. For when a person’s inquiries are sincere, probing, and wholehearted — i.e., done by autonomous agents — then the theory chosen will have a deep impact on the intuitions generated. Intuitions are, or can be, can be theory-laden. Since this is a survey of populations, not a thoroughgoing examination of individual people holding considered beliefs, it is understandable that they would find similar intuitive judgments cropping up across atheist/theist, and cultural divides.
Default unconsidered impressions, however, are of course not sufficient for morality either, any more than Chomsky’s universal grammar is sufficient for an actual grammar. But at least in that limited sense, the so-called linguistic analogy holds up. (Box 2) In conclusion, this is interesting, but no-one should be confused into thinking that it is anything other than a study of the amoral, just as nobody should be confused into thinking that the study of acorns is the study of trees, or of syntactic structures is the study of a mature syntax.
Jenavir, well obviously no one can know what’s in each and every head, but going by what people say, yes, they do think they’re doing the right thing. They talk about it in moral (stupid-moral, because theocratic, but still moral) terms. I do think it’s all deeply entangled with hatred – that father who stuck his conscious daughter into a hole in the ground must have been seething with hatred – but unfortunately that doesn’t rule out thinking of it in moral terms. It’s moral hatred. That’s what makes religion of this kind so dangerous.
‘It’s a consensus, sure. But a moral one? Do most of the people behind these things even think they’re doing the right thing? Or do they just think “I want to kill that bitch”?
They probably think that ‘killing that bitch’ IS ‘the right thing’. I doubt there are many atrocities committed by people who know they are the baddies.
This clip illustrates the problem quite clearly:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KasHtBAa7k&feature=youtube_gdata
With regard to the claim that most people reject religious rules that violate their basic moral intuitions – I’m not sure that’s false.
I do, admittedly, have the luxury of living in Australia, so take this with a grain of salt, but I think there are a lot more “moderates” than “true believers”. The latter get all the press, but even in in the Middle East the majority of the population aren’t prepared to become suicide bombers.
Or maybe I’m just that naive.
I haven’t seen the particular article from Hauser, but of course Singer and Hauser have an essay on this subject in 50 Voices of Disbelief, and I’ve read other stuff on it by Hauser and others.
What seems clear is not that all morality is common across all human cultures but that the preferred solutions to trolley problems and the like are common across all cultures. On other things, such as sexual morality, there’s a lot of difference.
Hauser would probably argue that the trolley type problems, which are about life and death, are the core of morality, and possibly even that a lot of the other stuff is superfluous or even counterproductive. I’d probably agree with him as far as that goes. It’s true, though, that we see some very oppressive moralities relating to gender roles, sexual conduct, and so on. It’s this kind of oppressive “morality” that makes me think that moral philosophers should largely be in the business of debunking morality, or at least debunking “morality”.
Russell touches on a problem here, namely that “morality” refers to two distinguishable things:
1. Empathic concerns (seeing yourself in the Other, seeing the Other as just as valuable as yourself, leading to reciprocity and compassion)
2. Purity concerns (regulating others’ bodies, especially the scary bodies of women).
Now, the first is the only legitimate kind of morality (and this shouldn’t be a matter of debate among people who accept Enlightenment values). That is, it’s the only morality not ultimately based on superstition. Purity-obsession is not only superstitious, but leads to rampant violations of empathic concerns.
Since empathy-based morality is the “genuine” kind of morality, the kind that derives directly from being social primates living in a community, it is universal or near-universal. The purity norms are not (though they are generally patriarchal, they are often differently patriarchal) because they will simply vary with the needs of the ruling class in every society.
I should clarify that “purity concerns” doesn’t refer to any regulation of the body but rather to those based on some concept of protecting society from some mystical taint.
And here’s where we need to have a think about Jonathan Haidt’s approach to all this – though I’m with Jenavir rather than with Haidt. I think he’s all too willing to see value in these purity-related moralities that Jenavir castigates (correctly IMHO).
I think there might be another distinction that needs to be made: in-group and out-group morality. I suspect that there isn’t as much variation in how we think we should treat our own people. However, there has been a lot more variation on how inclusive we are when we define what “our people” are. At various times and places, “our people” could be limited to a single tribe or clan, or exclude women, slaves or just anyone who looked sufficiently different.
That’s what John Snook seems to be missing. You might recognize a lot of how people treat each other in that hypothetical tribe 15,000 years ago – but you will not be treated as one of them.
Wow, this is probably the most egregious case of “assumed male” I´ve seen in some time. “Fit in pretty fast”, my foot.
Shook ends his piece with: “The rich diversity of supernatural fantasies hides their common function: to enhance willing obedience. Religion did not evolve independently from, or earlier than, our moral capacities. Morality is independent from religion, while religion is dependent on human morality. And that’s a good thing.”
I incline to endorse that part. There are, as there have always been, some very dangerous places for the traveller to go. Yet he or she can generally assume that the local morality will forbid murder, theft, rape… etc. No Michelin guide for any country (to my knowledge) says that one is expected to kill one person a day and failure to do so will result in arrest and incarceration; or something along those Kafkaesque lines; though terrifying things can happen when prolonged drought or or other natural disaster causes long-established morality to collapse.
Shamans were a feature of pre-agricultural society, but priestly castes and the state (and the inevitable rivalry between the two) required an agricultural base. I think Shook would have done well to consider the developments involved. I have travelled in Iran, where one definitely had to mind the pitfalls in the local ‘customs’, but it was not another planet; though I think I would ‘fit in’ better with a Kalahari tribe (never been there) or a Melanesian island community (been to one, briefly).
Shook is simply wrong. From almost every conceivable standpoint. I cannot even make out what he is trying to say and from the standpoint of the history of religion, not to mention a sober perspective on current religious practice, the whole piece is risible.
Putting aside the choice of argument that Shook makes, and which Ophelia rightly shows us was fairly ill-advised, the core point about evolution and morality is nigh indistinguishable from the one that Dawkins makes in the final sections of TGD. (This is also why I think of Dawkins as being a kind of Critical Theorist, since his theory can help examine and explain how it is that we can make a break from religion.)
It’s not an awful kind of argument, but really the devil’s in the details.
I think Jenavir is on to something when s/he talks about the “mystical taint” at the heart of purity taboos. I’ve heard it argued that most moral disagreements are not so much about the basic underlying morals, as they are about the facts of the matter. If everyone agrees on all the background facts, then most people will more or less agree on the moral rule which applies. At worst, they will recognize that it’s a matter of competing values, with no objective way to place one over the other.
This is why religion is so dangerous. It rules out ambiguities and nuances: there is one right way, and an Authority to determine it. It then assumes facts that aren’t obvious or provable to outsiders. Believers have “inside knowledge.”
If we agreed with all the facts which suicide bombers use to argue their case — yes, these people are of the devil, and dangerous to good people; yes, God exists, and is wise and good, and is ordering this act; and so on and so forth — “mystical taints” and secret insight into the Big Picture of cause and effect — then where would we go to argue that suicide bombing is wrong? It wouldn’t be. We’d realize that our duty is up there with them. We’ve granted the factual framework in which their choice makes good sense.
OB,
You know it’s interesting but PC was just agreeing with you.
Just joking!!!
Yes there may be difference in how women are treated in 2010 but go back 250 years — PRE-Enligtenment — were the mores so difference everywhere in every culture?
I certainly don’t know enough and maybe it’s hard to know if any historian of culture has been able to discuss the shifts. In Afghanistan, for example, I believe I’ve read that as recently 30-40 years ago women were treated much much more decently than now. Even rural women did not have covered faces.
Maybe I have those facts wrong but I believe that the big picture is that people have acted pretty weird about other people. Odysseus was treated well as a foreigner (with the maybe significant point is that he was a warrior and that even then the Gods had no compunctions about treating him as a slave) but there were slaves all about.
I suspect that only in the past several hundred years has a certain degree of moral fastidiousness become more prevalent.
Hahaha!
Quite so, David – this is what I’m saying. Even during the Enlightenment the mores were not all that different – respectable women in Jane Austen’s world couldn’t really walk around freely, much less travel freely. It was physically possible but highly dubious, frowned on, likely to lead to gossip, etc. And they certainly couldn’t work! Except as governesses, which was seen as a kind of prison sentence. They had shitty narrow limited lives. They weren’t stoned to death or beaten for having sex the wrong (adulterous) way, but by god they were shunned. Except in the very upper classes, which Austen disapproved of.
I’d be interested to see how really devout Catholics would respond if it was the Pope that was going to be flattened in a trolley problem.
Or whether a devout Muslim would be more likely to throw a girl who is pregnant out of wedlock off the bridge to stop the trolley.
Russell: Haidt definitely needs examination, if only to counter him. His love affair with conservative notions of purity and order is…disturbing at best, borderline fascist at worst.
I think Deen has a great point about in-group vs. out-group morality. People have treated those they recognize as real people in similar ways throughout history, but their circle of “real people” was often limited to upper-class males. I believe that is what Peter Singer describes as the “moral circle,” the circle of beings to whom ordinary morality applies.
Haidt gives me the crawls.
I’ve done posts on the subject in the past…the distant past.