Mencian Biology

     Richard Rorty reviews Marc D. Hauser's new book, Moral Minds: How Nature Designed our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong, in yesterday's NYT Book Review.   Rorty describes the book's project thusly:

Nazi parents found it easy to turn their children into conscientious little monsters. In some countries, young men are raised to believe that they have a moral obligation to kill their unchaste sisters. Gruesome examples like these suggest that morality is a matter of nurture rather than nature — that there are no biological constraints on what human beings can be persuaded to believe about right and wrong. Marc Hauser disagrees. He holds that “we are born with abstract rules or principles, with nurture entering the picture to set the parameters and guide us toward the acquisition of particular moral systems.” Empirical research will enable us to distinguish the principles from the parameters and thus to discover “what limitations exist on the range of possible or impossible moral systems.”

Hauser is professor of psychology, organismic and evolutionary biology, and biological anthropology at Harvard. He believes that “policy wonks and politicians should listen more closely to our intuitions and write policy that effectively takes into account the moral voice of our species.” Biologists, he thinks, are in a position to amplify this voice. For they have discovered evidence of the existence of what Hauser sometimes calls “a moral organ” and sometimes “a moral faculty.” This area of the brain is “a circuit, specialized for recognizing certain problems as morally relevant.” It incorporates “a universal moral grammar, a toolkit for building specific moral systems.” Now that we have learned that such a grammar exists, Hauser says, we can look forward to “a renaissance in our understanding of the moral domain.”

    Rorty believes that Hauser ultimately fails to make the psycho- biological case for "a moral organ."  The experimental science just doesn't seem to add up persuasively, for Rorty at least. 

    I have not read the book, but am just responding to the review here - I am not taking any position on whether Hauser has succeeded or not in his purpose.  What I do want to point our, however, are the resonances here with Mencius.

     Mencius famously believed that humans are innately good.  He did  not root this assertion in a sophisticated biological analysis - none then existed.  Rather, it was based on his observation and reason and, I believe, his hope and optimism about humanity.  His most well known example runs like this:

Mencius said: "Everyone has a heart that can't bear to see others suffer.  The ancient emperors had hearts that couldn't bear to see others suffer, and so had governments that couldn't bear to see others suffer.  If you lead a government that can't bear to see others suffer, ruling all beneath heaven is like turning it in the palm of your hand.

"Suddenly seeing a baby about to fall into a well, anyone would be heart-stricken with pity: heart-stricken not because they wanted to curry favor with the baby's parents, not because they wanted the praise of neighbors and friends, and not because they hated the baby's cries.  This is why I say everyone has a heart that can't bear to see others suffer. (55)

     Of course, Mencius is well aware that some people will do bad things and act heartlessly toward others.  This, he believes, is learned behavior.  People have to learn how to be bad.  We all start out with the same good, moral innate capacities.  He makes this comparison:

"...Human nature is inherently good, just like water flows inherently downhill.  There's no such thing as a person who isn't good, just as there's no water that doesn't flow downhill.

"Think about water: if you slap it, you can make it jump over your head; and if you push it, you can make it stay on a mountain.  But what does this have to do with the nature of water?  It's only responding to the forces around it.  It's like that for people, too: you can make them evil, but that says nothing about human nature." (198)

     Do we need psycho-biological confirmation of this idea?  Not really.  It might be better to put our money scientific and efforts into understanding what makes people evil.

Comments

[Bro. Bartleby]

The difference between a 3-month old human and ‘little apes’ is ‘potential’—what baby humans possess and what the little apes don’t. Leaving university vocabulary behind, I would say baby humans have a very advanced CPU, not simply ‘hardwired’ —- for the human brain isn’t hardwired, it is ‘fluid-wired’ with the potential to grow evermore complex, not only from generation to generation, but within the lifespan of each human brain. But that very advanced CPU has little potential without the software to drive it. As research on feral children have shown, the potential of the human brain is wasted, the ‘wild child’ advances very little beyond a very clever ‘little ape’ … alas, given a mother, that baby immediately begins to ‘download’ software to drive that CPU/brain. And a father and immediate family adds more software for the tiny brain to process and adapt to, and the neighborhood provides even more variety of ‘programming’ to the CPU to work with, yet the fledgling CPU in a baby's skull haven’t even begun to reach its potential. Ever more circles of community input more software into the tiny brain, software that becomes ‘fluidware’ that interacts with itself. Slowly from potential springs forth a mind, and even yet more potential is ever present and awaits that which will feed it. And what became of our dear ‘little apes’? I would say that they have not the ‘image of God’ as we humans have. It is we humans who are created in God’s image and thus have potential to reveal that image of God.