Isn’t there a big difference between nuances in language and the varying ways in which different societies define murder? A definition of murder seems much more fundamental to human behavior than whether the French language applies gender to nouns and English does not.
That’s a great question. I think the way to unpack it is in the following sense. Look, everyone speaks a language. Everyone has a moral system. You can also say, “Look, every language has certain abstract variables, like nouns and verbs.” That’s true. Now, what I would say is that every culture has got a distinction about intended harms, about actions versus omissions. There are abstractions about the nature of action which play a role in the same kind of way as nouns and verbs do.
My guess is this: It’s a hypothesis. There’s a huge amount of other work to be done. In the end, I will bet that the analogy will only go so deep. Morality could not be just like language. It’s a different system. But my guess is that there will be unconscious, inaccessible principles that will be in some sense like morality. They will not be part of a child’s education, and there will be a richness to the child’s representations of the world in the moral area that will be as rich as they are in language.
If every time you were confronted with a moral issue you had to work it through, you would do nothing else
Are there moral principles that hold true across all societies?
People want to say things like “do unto others [as you would have done unto you].” You see it everywhere. So there’s some notion of reciprocity, and that includes both the good and bad. If I have been harmed, there is some notion of revenge which certainly seems to be part of the human psychology. Some level of, “If somebody does something nice for me, I should do something nice back to them” also seems part of the psychology. It may be evolutionarily ancient. Work that we’ve done on animals suggests some kind of reciprocity, some ancient level of cooperation. So is there a generic rule that says “don’t kill others”? No, there’s not, because that rule is always adjoined to a caveat, which says, “Well, we kill some people, but not everybody.” It’s always an in-group, out-group distinction.
What impact does religion have on moral behavior?
I think that for many who come from a religious background, religion is synonymous with morality. Some people think that if you’re an atheist, you simply have no morals. That is just wrong. There are an awful lot of people who are atheists who do very, very wonderful things. As an objective question, do people who have religious backgrounds show different patterns of moral judgments than people who are atheists? So far, the answer is a resounding no.
Do you mean that people give the same answers to objective tests of moral reasoning regardless of religious background?
One hundred percent. So far, exactly the same. Here’s an example that comes from MIT philosopher Judy Thomson. She was interested in a question of whether the fetus has an obligatory right to the mother’s body. So she gives an incredibly apocryphal, crazy example: A woman is lying in bed one morning, and she wakes up to find a man lying in bed unconscious next to her. Another gentleman walks up to her and says: “I’m terribly sorry, but this man right next to you is a world-famous violinist, and he’s unconscious and in terrible health. He’s in kidney failure, and I hope you don’t mind, but we’ve plugged him into your kidney. And if he stays plugged in for the next nine months, you will save him.”
You ask people, “Is that morally permissible?” They’re like: “No, it’s insane. Of course not.” Well, that makes [Thomson’s] point exquisitely. It would be nice if she said, “Sure, I love this guy’s playing; plug him in.” But she’s not obligated to do so. Now let me make it like the abortion case. She says, “Yes, I love this guy’s violin playing!” Two months into it, she goes: “You know what? This really is a drag,” and she unplugs. Now people all of a sudden have a sense that’s less permissible than the first case. But here, people who are pro-choice or pro-life do not differ. So the point is, if you take people away from the familiar and you capture some of the critical underlying psychological issues that play into the real-world cases, then you find that the religious effects are minimal.
Do other species have any form of moral faculty?
Certainly sympathy, caretaking, cooperation; those things are there in some animals. The crucial questions are, “Do animals have any sense of what they ought to do?” and “To what extent will animals judge transgressions of others as being wrong in some way?” How we’d ever understand that, I don’t know.
