What is the evidence that infants already have a moral code ingrained in their brains?
I don’t think we’re ready to say. Studies have shown that infants as young as 15 months are sensitive to the beliefs of others—true versus false beliefs. That’s crucial to the moral domain.
There’s also this from the work of Elliot Turiel [a cognitive scientist at the University of California at Berkeley]. He said, Look, there’s a very important distinction between a social convention and a moral rule. Children by at least the age of 3 or 4 understand that distinction. Here is a simple way of putting it. If a teacher comes into a classroom and says, “Today, class, instead of raising your hand when you want to ask a question, just ask your question. Don’t raise your hand.” If you ask kids, “Is that OK?” kids will say, “OK, fine.” If you tell them, “In our class, we raise our hands to ask questions, but in France they never raise their hands. Is that OK?” “OK.” So it’s basically open to authority; it’s culturally variable.
There appears to be some kind of unconscious process driving moral judgments without its being accessible to conscious reflection
So that’s a social dimension. But now imagine the following situation. The teacher comes into the class and says, “If you’re annoyed by a child sitting next to you, just punch him!” You’re going to have moral outrage. You can’t say that! If you say, “But in France they do,” they’d say, “Well, the French are weird; the French can’t say that.” So it’s completely not open to authoritarian override, in a sense, and it’s not culturally variable. So you get this kind of fundamental distinction that’s coming on fairly early. But first the question is: How does the kid know that it’s in the moral zone as opposed to merely the social zone? We don’t know.
Why would natural selection have favored the evolution of an innate moral code within our brains?
One possibility is that these principles that I’m describing were not selected for morality. They were favored for other aspects of social cognition and are simply borrowed by morality. What does morality do at a very general level? It sets up, either unconsciously or consciously, rules for navigating the social world. Now, why might it be unconscious? It might be unconscious for exactly the same reason that language is unconscious at some level.
Imagine that every time you would try to talk to me, you had to think about adjectives, nouns, verbs, and where they go. Well, you would never say anything. This conversation would take 10 years to complete. Whereas if it’s unconscious, well, you’re just jamming through all this information, because the structure of this stuff is just natural to you. My guess is that there is some aspect of morality which is very much like that. If every time you were confronted with a moral issue you actually had to work it through, you would do nothing else. So there’s something highly adaptive to the unconscious aspects of not having to think about these things all the time.
Of course, one of the things that makes morality adaptive is that it does allow for a certain level of within-group stability and, therefore, allows for individual fitness to be enhanced from a genetic perspective. So if I live in a world of defectors, I have no chance, whereas if I can find the cooperators and cooperate with them, my own individual fitness will be greatly enhanced. So I want to know who are the individuals I can trust and those I can’t trust. At that level, there’s been, of course, greater selection for any kind of social group to have certain kinds of principles that allow for group-level stability.
You draw an analogy between Noam Chomsky’s theory of a universal grammar and your own concept of a universal moral code. But moral rules, as described in your book, differ across cultures. For example, some societies permit intentional murder, such as honor killings of women who have transgressed that society’s sexual codes. How do you explain this?
Let’s focus on honor killings. In this country, in its early stage of colonization, the South of the United States was colonized in part by Celtic herders, Irish, and Scotsmen, whereas the North/Northeast was colonized heavily by German potato plow farmers. That kind of colonization set up very different cultural psychologies. The South developed this very macho policy toward the world—if somebody took your cattle, you were going to kill them. That was crucial to your livelihood. Whereas nobody is going to steal a crop of potatoes. If somebody takes a few, who cares? What that machismo led to were these cases where if a man’s wife was caught with somebody else, it was not merely permissible for the man to kill his spouse, it was obligatory. Now, let’s take the Middle East. They, too, have honor killings in cases of infidelity. But who does the killing is completely different. There it’s not the husband. It’s the wife’s family who is responsible for killing her. There are rules for permissible killing. Who does the killing is simply a parameter in that space of permissibility.
You mention honor killings in cases of infidelity, but sometimes the victim may simply have been caught in public talking to a man who is not her husband. As a Western woman raised in the liberal tradition, I think that is immoral. Yet in societies where honor killings are acceptable, the decision to kill the woman is deemed morally correct. Why?
Let’s go back to language. You’re a speaker of English. In French, the world "table" is feminine. Why? Isn’t that weird? Isn’t that incomprehensible? For an English speaker, that’s the most bizarre thing in the world! It’s incredibly hard to learn. Yet are the French weird? They’re not weird. They speak another language.
The analogy to language is to me very profound and important. When you say, “Look, it’s weird that a culture would actually kill someone for infidelity,” it’s no different than us making a language that’s got these really weird quirks. Now, here’s where the difference is crucial. As English speakers, we can’t tell the French: “You idiots. Saying that a word has gender is stupid, and you guys just change the system.” But as we have seen historically, one culture telling another culture, “Hey, this is not OK. We do not think it is morally permissible to do clitoridectomies, and you should just stop, and we’re going to find international ways to put the constraints on you”—now, that’s whoppingly different. But it also captures something crucial. The descriptive level and the prescriptive level are crucially different. How biology basically guides what people are doing is one thing. What we think should happen is really different. That just doesn’t arise as a distinction within language.
