MORAL PSYCHOLOGY AND THE MISUNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION
I study morality from every angle I can find. Morality is one of
those basic aspects of humanity, like sexuality and eating, that
can't fit into one or two academic fields. I think morality is
unique, however, in having a kind of spell that disguises it. We all
care about morality so passionately that it's hard to look straight
at it. We all look at the world through some kind of moral lens, and
because most of the academic community uses the same lens, we
validate each other's visions and distortions. I think this problem
is particularly acute in some of the new scientific writing about
religion.
When I started graduate school at Penn in 1987, it seemed that
developmental psychology owned the rights to morality within
psychology. Everyone was either using or critiquing Lawrence
Kohlberg's ideas, as well as his general method of interviewing kids
about dilemmas (such as: should Heinz steal a drug to save his wife's
life?). Everyone was studying how children's understanding of moral
concepts changed with experience. But in the 1990s two books were
published that I believe triggered an explosion of cross-disciplinary
scientific interest in morality, out of which has come a new
synthesis?very much along the lines that E. O. Wilson predicted in
1975.
The first was Antonio Damasio's Descartes' Error, in 1994, which
showed a very broad audience that morality could be studied using the
then new technology of fMRI, and also that morality, and rationality
itself, were crucially dependent on the proper functioning of
emotional circuits in the prefrontal cortex. The second was Frans de
Waal's Good Natured, published just two years later, which showed an
equally broad audience that the building blocks of human morality are
found in other apes and are products of natural selection in the
highly social primate lineage. These two books came out just as John
Bargh was showing social psychologists that automatic and unconscious
processes can and probably do cause the majority of our behaviors,
even morally loaded actions (like rudeness or altruism) that we
thought we were controlling consciously.
Furthermore, Damasio and Bargh both found, as Michael Gazzaniga had
years before, that people couldn't stop themselves from making up
post-hoc explanations for whatever it was they had just done for
unconscious reasons. Combine these developments and suddenly
Kohlbergian moral psychology seemed to be studying the wagging tail,
rather than the dog. If the building blocks of morality were shaped
by natural selection long before language arose, and if those evolved
structures work largely by giving us feelings that shape our behavior
automatically, then why should we be focusing on the verbal reasons
that people give to explain their judgments in hypothetical moral
dilemmas?
In my dissertation and my other early studies, I told people short
stories in which a person does something disgusting or disrespectful
that was perfectly harmless (for example, a family cooks and eats its
dog, after the dog was killed by a car). I was trying to pit the
emotion of disgust against reasoning about harm and individual
rights.
I found that disgust won in nearly all groups I studied (in Brazil,
India, and the United States), except for groups of politically
liberal college students, particularly Americans, who overrode their
disgust and said that people have a right to do whatever they want,
as long as they don't hurt anyone else.
These findings suggested that emotion played a bigger role than the
cognitive developmentalists had given it. These findings also
suggested that there were important cultural differences, and that
academic researchers may have inappropriately focused on reasoning
about harm and rights because we primarily study people like
ourselves?college students, and also children in private schools near
our universities, whose morality is not representative of the United
States, let alone the world.
So in the 1990s I was thinking about the role of emotion in moral
judgment, I was reading Damasio, De Waal, and Bargh, and I was
getting very excited by the synergy and consilience across
disciplines. I wrote a review article called "The Emotional Dog and
its Rational Tail," which was published in 2001, a month after Josh
Greene's enormously influential Science article. Greene used fMRI to
show that emotional responses in the brain, not abstract principles
of philosophy, explain why people think various forms of the "trolley
problem" (in which you have to choose between killing one person or
letting five die) are morally different.
Obviously I'm biased in terms of what I notice, but it seems to me
that the zeitgeist in moral psychology has changed since 2001. Most
people who study morality now read and write about emotions, the
brain, chimpanzees, and evolution, as well as reasoning. This is
exactly what E. O. Wilson predicted in Sociobiology: that the old
approaches to morality, including Kohlberg's, would be swept away or
merged into a new approach that focused on the emotive centers of the
brain as biological adaptations. Wilson even said that these emotive
centers give us moral intuitions, which the moral philosophers then
justify while pretending that they are intuiting truths that are
independent of the contingencies of our evolved minds.
And now, 30 years later, Josh Greene has a paper in press where he
uses neuroscientific evidence to reinterpret Kantian deontological
philosophy as a sophisticated post-hoc justification of our gut
feelings about rights and respect for other individuals. I think E.
O. Wilson deserves more credit than he gets for seeing into the real
nature of morality and for predicting the future of moral psychology
so uncannily. He's in my pantheon, along with David Hume and Charles
Darwin. All three were visionaries who urged us to focus on the moral
emotions and their social utility.
I recently summarized this new synthesis in moral psychology with
four principles:
1) Intuitive primacy but not dictatorship. This is the idea, going
back to Wilhelm Wundt and channeled through Robert Zajonc and John
Bargh, that the mind is driven by constant flashes of affect in
response to everything we see and hear.
Our brains, like other animal brains, are constantly trying to fine
tune and speed up the central decision of all action: approach or
avoid. You can't understand the river of fMRI studies on
neuroeconomics and decision making without embracing this principle.
We have affectively-valenced intuitive reactions to almost
everything, particularly to morally relevant stimuli such as gossip
or the evening news. Reasoning by its very nature is slow, playing
out in seconds.
Studies of everyday reasoning show that we usually use reason to
search for evidence to support our initial judgment, which was made
in milliseconds. But I do agree with Josh Greene that sometimes we
can use controlled processes such as reasoning to override our
initial intuitions. I just think this happens rarely, maybe in one or
two percent of the hundreds of judgments we make each week. And I do
agree with Marc Hauser that these moral intuitions require a lot of
computation, which he is unpacking.
Hauser and I mostly disagree on a definitional question: whether this
means that "cognition" precedes "emotion." I try never to contrast
those terms, because it's all cognition. I think the crucial contrast
is between two kinds of cognition: intuitions (which are fast and
usually affectively laden) and reasoning (which is slow, cool, and
less motivating).
2) Moral thinking is for social doing. This is a play on William
James' pragmatist dictum that thinking is for doing, updated by newer
work on Machiavellian intelligence. The basic idea is that we did not
evolve language and reasoning because they helped us to find truth;
we evolved these skills because they were useful to their bearers,
and among their greatest benefits were reputation management and
manipulation.
Just look at your stream of consciousness when you are thinking about
a politician you dislike, or when you have just had a minor
disagreement with your spouse. It's like you're preparing for a court
appearance. Your reasoning abilities are pressed into service
generating arguments to defend your side and attack the other. We are
certainly able to reason dispassionately when we have no gut feeling
about a case, and no stake in its outcome, but with moral
disagreements that's rarely the case. As David Hume said long ago,
reason is the servant of the passions.
3) Morality binds and builds. This is the idea stated most forcefully
by Emile Durkheim that morality is a set of constraints that binds
people together into an emergent collective entity.
Durkheim focused on the benefits that accrue to individuals from
being tied in and restrained by a moral order. In his book Suicide he
alerted us to the ways that freedom and wealth almost inevitably
foster anomie, the dangerous state where norms are unclear and people
feel that they can do whatever they want.
Durkheim didn't talk much about conflict between groups, but Darwin
thought that such conflicts may have spurred the evolution of human
morality. Virtues that bind people to other members of the tribe and
encourage self-sacrifice would lead virtuous tribes to vanquish more
selfish ones, which would make these traits more prevalent.
Of course, this simple analysis falls prey to the free-rider problem
that George Williams and Richard Dawkins wrote so persuasively about.
But I think the terms of this debate over group selection have
changed radically in the last 10 years, as culture and religion have
become central to discussions of the evolution of morality.
I'll say more about group selection in a moment. For now I just want
to make the point that humans do form tight, cooperative groups that
pursue collective ends and punish cheaters and slackers, and they do
this most strongly when in conflict with other groups. Morality is
what makes all of that possible.
4) Morality is about more than harm and fairness. In moral psychology
and moral philosophy, morality is almost always about how people
treat each other. Here's an influential definition from the Berkeley
psychologist Elliot Turiel: morality refers to "prescriptive
judgments of justice, rights, and welfare pertaining to how people
ought to relate to each other."
Kohlberg thought that all of morality, including concerns about the
welfare of others, could be derived from the psychology of justice.
Carol Gilligan convinced the field that an ethic of "care" had a
separate developmental trajectory, and was not derived from concerns
about justice.
OK, so there are two psychological systems, one about
fairness/justice, and one about care and protection of the
vulnerable. And if you look at the many books on the evolution of
morality, most of them focus exclusively on those two systems, with
long discussions of Robert Trivers' reciprocal altruism (to explain
fairness) and of kin altruism and/or attachment theory to explain why
we don't like to see suffering and often care for people who are not
our children.
But if you try to apply this two-foundation morality to the rest of
the world, you either fail or you become Procrustes. Most traditional
societies care about a lot more than harm/care and fairness/justice.
Why do so many societies care deeply and morally about menstruation,
food taboos, sexuality, and respect for elders and the Gods? You
can't just dismiss this stuff as social convention. If you want to
describe human morality, rather than the morality of educated Western
academics, you've got to include the Durkheimian view that morality
is in large part about binding people together.
From a review of the anthropological and evolutionary literatures,
Craig Joseph (at Northwestern University) and I concluded that there
were three best candidates for being additional psychological
foundations of morality, beyond harm/care and fairness/justice. These
three we label as ingroup/loyalty (which may have evolved from the
long history of cross-group or sub-group competition, related to what
Joe Henrich calls "coalitional psychology"); authority/respect (which
may have evolved from the long history of primate hierarchy, modified
by cultural limitations on power and bullying, as documented by
Christopher Boehm), and purity/sanctity, which may be a much more
recent system, growing out of the uniquely human emotion of disgust,
which seems to give people feelings that some ways of living and
acting are higher, more noble, and less carnal than others.
Joseph and I think of these foundational systems as expressions of
what Dan Sperber calls "learning modules"?they are evolved modular
systems that generate, during enculturation, large numbers of more
specific modules which help children recognize, quickly and
automatically, examples of culturally emphasized virtues and vices.
For example, we academics have extremely fine-tuned receptors for
sexism (related to fairness) but not sacrilege (related to purity).
Virtues are socially constructed and socially learned, but these
processes are highly prepared and constrained by the evolved mind. We
call these three additional foundations the binding foundations,
because the virtues, practices, and institutions they generate
function to bind people together into hierarchically organized
interdependent social groups that try to regulate the daily lives and
personal habits of their members. We contrast these to the two
individualizing foundations (harm/care and fairness/reciprocity),
which generate virtues and practices that protect individuals from
each other and allow them to live in harmony as autonomous agents who
can focus on their own goals.
My UVA colleagues Jesse Graham, Brian Nosek, and I have collected
data from about 7,000 people so far on a survey designed to measure
people's endorsement of these five foundations. In every sample we've
looked at, in the United States and in other Western countries, we
find that people who self-identify as liberals endorse moral values
and statements related to the two individualizing foundations
primarily, whereas self-described conservatives endorse values and
statements related to all five foundations. It seems that the moral
domain encompasses more for conservatives?it's not just about
Gilligan's care and Kohlberg's justice. It's also about Durkheim's
issues of loyalty to the group, respect for authority, and
sacredness.
I hope you'll accept that as a purely descriptive statement. You can
still reject the three binding foundations normatively?that is, you
can still insist that ingroup, authority, and purity refer to ancient
and dangerous psychological systems that underlie fascism, racism,
and homophobia, and you can still claim that liberals are right to
reject those foundations and build their moral systems using
primarily the harm/care and fairness/reciprocity foundations.
But just go with me for a moment that there is this difference,
descriptively, between the moral worlds of secular liberals on the
one hand and religious conservatives on the other. There are, of
course, many other groups, such as the religious left and the
libertarian right, but I think it's fair to say that the major
players in the new religion wars are secular liberals criticizing
religious conservatives. Because the conflict is a moral conflict, we
should be able to apply the four principles of the new synthesis in
moral psychology.
In what follows I will take it for granted that religion is a part of
the natural world that is appropriately studied by the the methods of
science. Whether or not God exists (and as an atheist I personally
doubt it), religiosity is an enormously important fact about our
species. There must be some combination of evolutionary,
developmental, neuropsychological, and anthropological theories that
can explain why human religious practices take the various forms that
they do, many of which are so similar across cultures and eras. I
will also take it for granted that religious fundamentalists, and
most of those who argue for the existence of God, illustrate the
first three principles of moral psychology (intuitive primacy,
post-hoc reasoning guided by utility, and a strong sense of belonging
to a group bound together by shared moral commitments).
But because the new atheists talk so much about the virtues of
science and our shared commitment to reason and evidence, I think
it's appropriate to hold them to a higher standard than their
opponents. Do these new atheist books model the scientific mind at
its best? Or do they reveal normal human beings acting on the basis
of their normal moral psychology?
1) Intuitive primacy but not dictatorship. It's clear that Richard
Dawkins (in The God Delusion) and Sam Harris (in Letter To A
Christian Nation) have strong feelings about religion in general and
religious fundamentalists in particular. Given the hate mail they
receive, I don't blame them. The passions of Dawkins and Harris don't
mean that they are wrong, or that they can't be trusted. One can
certainly do good scholarship on slavery while hating slavery.
But the presence of passions should alert us that the authors, being
human, are likely to have great difficulty searching for and then
fairly evaluating evidence that opposes their intuitive feelings
about religion. We can turn to Dawkins and Harris to make the case
for the prosecution, which they do brilliantly, but if we readers are
to judge religion we will have to find a defense attorney. Or at
least we'll have to let the accused speak.
2) Moral thinking is for social doing. This is where the scientific
mind is supposed to depart from the lay mind. The normal person (once
animated by emotion) engages in moral reasoning to find ammunition,
not truth; the normal person attacks the motives and character of her
opponents when it will be advantageous to do so. The scientist, in
contrast, respects empirical evidence as the ultimate authority and
avoids ad hominem arguments. The metaphor for science is a voyage of
discovery, not a war. Yet when I read the new atheist books, I see
few new shores. Instead I see battlefields strewn with the corpses of
straw men. To name three:
a) The new atheists treat religions as sets of beliefs about the
world, many of which are demonstrably false. Yet anthropologists and
sociologists who study religion stress the role of ritual and
community much more than of factual beliefs about the creation of the
world or life after death.
b) The new atheists assume that believers, particularly
fundamentalists, take their sacred texts literally. Yet ethnographies
of fundamentalist communities (such as James Ault's Spirit and Flesh)
show that even when people claim to be biblical literalists, they are
in fact quite flexible, drawing on the bible selectively?or ignoring
it?to justify humane and often quite modern responses to complex
social situations.
c) The new atheists all review recent research on religion and
conclude that it is an evolutionary byproduct, not an adaptation.
They compare religious sentiments to moths flying into candle flames,
ants whose brains have been hijacked for a parasite's benefit, and
cold viruses that are universal in human societies. This denial of
adaptation is helpful for their argument that religion is bad for
people, even when people think otherwise.
I quite agree with these authors' praise of the work of Pascal Boyer
and Scott Atran, who have shown how belief in supernatural entities
may indeed be an accidental output of cognitive systems that
otherwise do a good job of identifying objects and agents. Yet even
if belief in gods was initially a byproduct, as long as such beliefs
had consequences for behavior then it seems likely that natural
selection operated upon phenotypic variation and favored the success
of individuals and groups that found ways (genetic or cultural or
both) to use these gods to their advantage, for example as commitment
devices that enhanced cooperation, trust, and mutual aid.
3) Morality binds and builds. Dawkins is explicit that his goal is to
start a movement, to raise consciousness, and to arm atheists with
the arguments they'll need to do battle with believers. The view that
"we" are virtuous and our opponents are evil is a crucial step in
uniting people behind a cause, and there is plenty of that in the new
atheist books. A second crucial step is to identify traitors in our
midst and punish or humiliate them. There is some of that too in
these books?atheists who defend the utility of religion or who argue
for disengagement or détente between science and religion are
compared to Chamberlain and his appeasement of Hitler.
To my mind an irony of Dawkins' position is that he reveals a kind of
religious orthodoxy in his absolute rejection of group selection.
David Sloan Wilson has supplemented Durkheim's view of religion (as
being primarily about group cohesion) with evolutionary analyses to
propose that religion was the conduit that pulled humans through a
"major transition" in evolutionary history.
Dawkins, along with George Williams and most critics of group
selection, acknowledge that natural selection works on groups as well
as on individuals, and that group selection is possible in principle.
But Dawkins relies on Williams' argument that selection pressures at
the individual level are, in practice, always stronger than those at
the group level: free riders will always undercut Darwin's suggestion
that morality evolved because virtuous groups outcompeted selfish
groups.
Wilson, however, in Darwin's Cathedral, makes the case that culture
in general and religion in particular change the variables in
Williams' analysis. Religions and their associated practices greatly
increase the costs of defection (through punishment and ostracism),
increase the contributions of individuals to group efforts (through
cultural and emotional mechanisms that increase trust), and sharpen
the boundaries ? biological and cultural ? between groups. Throw in
recent discoveries that genetic evolution can work much faster than
previously supposed, and the widely respected work of Pete Richerson
and Rob Boyd on cultural group selection, and suddenly the old
consensus against group selection is outdated.
It's time to examine the question anew. Yet Dawkins has referred to
group selection in interviews as a "heresy," and in The God Delusion
he dismisses it without giving a reason. In chapter 5 he states the
standard Williams free rider objection, notes the argument that
religion is a way around the Williams objection, concedes that Darwin
believed in group selection, and then moves on. Dismissing a credible
position without reasons, and calling it a heresy (even if tongue in
cheek), are hallmarks of standard moral thinking, not scientific
thinking.
4) Morality is about more than harm and fairness. In Letter to a
Christian Nation, Sam Harris gives us a standard liberal definition
of morality: "Questions of morality are questions about happiness and
suffering? To the degree that our actions can affect the experience
of other creatures positively or negatively, questions of morality
apply." He then goes on to show that the Bible and the Koran, taken
literally, are immoral books because they're not primarily about
happiness and suffering, and in many places they advocate harming
people.
Reading Harris is like watching professional wrestling or the Harlem
Globetrotters. It's great fun, with lots of acrobatics, but it must
not be mistaken for an actual contest. If we want to stage a fair
fight between religious and secular moralities, we can't eliminate
one by definition before the match begins. So here's my definition of
morality, which gives each side a chance to make its case:
Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, practices,
institutions, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together
to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible.
In my research I have found that there are two common ways that
cultures suppress and regulate selfishness, two visions of what
society is and how it ought to work. I'll call them the contractual
approach and the beehive approach.
The contractual approach takes the individual as the fundamental unit
of value. The fundamental problem of social life is that individuals
often hurt each other, and so we create implicit social contracts and
explicit laws to foster a fair, free, and safe society in which
individuals can pursue their interests and develop themselves and
their relationships as they choose.
Morality is about happiness and suffering (as Harris says, and as
John Stuart Mill said before him), and so contractualists are
endlessly trying to fine-tune laws, reinvent institutions, and extend
new rights as circumstances change in order to maximize happiness and
minimize suffering. To build a contractual morality, all you need are
the two individualizing foundations: harm/care, and
fairness/reciprocity. The other three foundations, and any religion
that builds on them, run afoul of the prime directive: let people
make their own choices, as long as they harm nobody else.
The beehive approach, in contrast, takes the group and its territory
as fundamental sources of value. Individual bees are born and die by
the thousands, but the hive lives for a long time, and each
individual has a role to play in fostering its success.The two
fundamental problems of social life are attacks from outside and
subversion from within. Either one can lead to the death of the hive,
so all must pull together, do their duty, and be willing to make
sacrifices for the group. Bees don't have to learn how to behave in
this way but human children do, and this is why cultural
conservatives are so heavily focused on what happens in schools,
families, and the media.
Conservatives generally have a more pessimistic view of human nature
than do liberals. They are more likely to believe that if you stand
back and give kids space to grow as they please, they'll grow into
shallow, self-centered, undisciplined pleasure seekers. Cultural
conservatives work hard to cultivate moral virtues based on the three
binding foundations: ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and
purity/sanctity, as well as on the universally employed foundations
of harm/care and fairness/reciprocity. The beehive ideal is not a
world of maximum freedom, it is a world of order and tradition in
which people are united by a shared moral code that is effectively
enforced, which enables people to trust each other to play their
interdependent roles. It is a world of very high social capital and
low anomie.
It might seem obvious to you that contractual societies are good,
modern, creative and free, whereas beehive societies reek of
feudalism, fascism, and patriarchy. And, as a secular liberal I agree
that contractual societies such as those of Western Europe offer the
best hope for living peacefully together in our increasingly diverse
modern nations (although it remains to be seen if Europe can solve
its current diversity problems).
I just want to make one point, however, that should give
contractualists pause: surveys have long shown that religious
believers in the United States are happier, healthier, longer-lived,
and more generous to charity and to each other than are secular
people. Most of these effects have been documented in Europe too. If
you believe that morality is about happiness and suffering, then I
think you are obligated to take a close look at the way religious
people actually live and ask what they are doing right.
Don't dismiss religion on the basis of a superficial reading of the
Bible and the newspaper. Might religious communities offer us
insights into human flourishing? Can they teach us lessons that would
improve wellbeing even in a primarily contractualist society.
You can't use the New Atheists as your guide to these lessons. The
new atheists conduct biased reviews of the literature and conclude
that there is no good evidence on any benefits except the health
benefits of religion. Here is Daniel Dennett in Breaking the Spell on
whether religion brings out the best in people:
"Perhaps a survey would show that as a group atheists and
agnostics are more respectful of the law, more sensitive to the needs
of others, or more ethical than religious people. Certainly no
reliable survey has yet been done that shows otherwise. It might be
that the best that can be said for religion is that it helps some
people achieve the level of citizenship and morality typically found
in brights. If you find that conjecture offensive, you need to adjust
your perspective. (Breaking the Spell, p. 55.)
I have italicized the two sections that show ordinary moral thinking
rather than scientific thinking. The first is Dennett's claim not
just that there is no evidence, but that there is certainly no
evidence, when in fact surveys have shown for decades that religious
practice is a strong predictor of charitable giving. Arthur Brooks
recently analyzed these data (in Who Really Cares) and concluded that
the enormous generosity of religious believers is not just recycled
to religious charities.
Religious believers give more money than secular folk to secular
charities, and to their neighbors. They give more of their time, too,
and of their blood. Even if you excuse secular liberals from charity
because they vote for government welfare programs, it is awfully hard
to explain why secular liberals give so little blood. The bottom
line, Brooks concludes, is that all forms of giving go together, and
all are greatly increased by religious participation and slightly
increased by conservative ideology (after controlling for
religiosity).
These data are complex and perhaps they can be spun the other way,
but at the moment it appears that Dennett is wrong in his reading of
the literature. Atheists may have many other virtues, but on one of
the least controversial and most objective measures of moral
behavior?giving time, money, and blood to help strangers in
need?religious people appear to be morally superior to secular folk.
My conclusion is not that secular liberal societies should be made
more religious and conservative in a utilitarian bid to increase
happiness, charity, longevity, and social capital. Too many valuable
rights would be at risk, too many people would be excluded, and
societies are so complex that it's impossible to do such social
engineering and get only what you bargained for. My point is just
that every longstanding ideology and way of life contains some
wisdom, some insights into ways of suppressing selfishness, enhancing
cooperation, and ultimately enhancing human flourishing.
But because of the four principles of moral psychology it is
extremely difficult for people, even scientists, to find that wisdom
once hostilities erupt. A militant form of atheism that claims the
backing of science and encourages "brights" to take up arms may
perhaps advance atheism. But it may also backfire, polluting the
scientific study of religion with moralistic dogma and damaging the
prestige of science in the process.
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