Myths of the Crazy Ape #3: A Moral Instinct?
As the Crazy Ape species, we do an excellent job of exhibiting our craziness. One current mad fandango is the resurgence of the idea of "instincts" as determinants of human behavior.
The notion of inherited behavior is an old theme touted with much hoopla in the early part of the 20th century, then revived in the computer-conscious 1980s as "hard-wiring" of the nervous system by genes for various apparently innate behavioral routines.
The word "instinct" is now being used again, and it's unfortunate that not much is said about the political abuse of the idea in the past. Both science and the American public had a dangerous run with this idea during the 1920s and 1930s, dangerous because the madness of the public and the dullness of the scientific community soon produced the tragic compulsory sterilization of many thousands of American women deemed "unfit" for society.
The problem, of course, is that if you advocate instincts in the form of genes as determining bad or "defective" behavior then you're also advocating heredity as determining bad behavior, which quickly leads to calls by idiot politicians for legislative "eugenic" measures to prevent contamination of the American gene pool.
The eugenic legislative measure of compulsory sterilization was put into law in the 1920s in various states for people who were "genetically inferior". In Virginia, for example, where the practice continued until 1972, more than 7,000 women were sterilized for drunkenness, feeble-mindedness, and various forms of mental illness and "immorality" -- for "genetic inferiority". As you might expect, the judgments of so-called genetic inferiority were often arbitrary, capricious, and biased. Some of the people who made judgments were said to have a marvelous talent for spotting a feeble-minded person just by looking at them.
If you're horrified that this sounds close to what the Nazis did in the 1930s to various "defective" groups, please remember that the Nazis imported their ideas about genetic inferiority and sterilization from American eugenicists and the American government. We did not get it from the Nazis, they got it from us.
In America, by 1935, more than 30 states had passed compulsory sterilization laws. By that time more than 21,000 sterilizations had occurred -- more than 60,000 sterilizations by the 1960s.
Compulsory sterilization laws were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes writing the majority opinion that included the phrase, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."
Apparently it never occurred to the "genius" Justice Holmes that the diagnosis of "imbecile" was ultimately arbitrary and without scientific meaning.
In the 1930s, American eugenicists followed what was happening in Nazi Germany with great interest. In 1936, when the Germans had already sterilized hundreds of thousands of "genetically inferior" people, mostly women and girls, Harvard University eugenicists invited a group of German eugenicists to Harvard's 300th anniversary celebration.
Harvard, of course, was not alone in its apparent affection for the ideas of eugenics. The American eugenics movement had strong financial support from important sources: the Carnegie Institution of Washington, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Kellog family (Kellog cereals) of Battlecreek, Michigan, and the Harriman family (Union Pacific Railroad) of New York.
(These and other details can be found in Garland E. Allen, Genetica, 1997 99:77-88.)
The classical definition of "instinct" is an "inherent disposition" toward a particular behavior. In current parlance, "inherent" means innate, which means determined by genes, which in turn means determined by heredity. So when a few weeks ago Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker published an essay in the New York Times Magazine (January 13, 2008) with the title "The Moral Instinct", what Pinker offered the public was the idea that human morality is fixed by genes, inherited, with the clear implication that some people have it and some people don't have it.
The problem is that like most offerings to the public of this kind, there's more hype than hard science in the offering, and maybe we need to look carefully at what's on the plate.
Pinker says: "The human moral sense turns out to be an organ of considerable complexity, with quirks that reflect its evolutionary history and its neurobiological foundations."
The trouble with this pop science braggadocio is that there's absolutely no hard scientific evidence for such a thing as a "moral sense" -- let alone that moral sense has an evolutionary history or neurobiological foundations.
After this myth, what follows in Pinker's essay is an exercise in amateur philosophy, not science. Psychology has its academic roots in philosophy, and all the roots have not yet been ripped away. Meanwhile, "moral sense" remains a philosophical concept, its evolutionary history a fairy tale whose details vary with each generation (you can find one version in Darwin and another in Plato), and as for neurobiological foundations, looking at which parts of the brain are active in brain-scans during ethical decision-making tells us nothing about "neurological foundations".
Meanwhile, the eugenicists of old are laughing in their graves at this current revival of ideas about "instincts" in human behavior.
It's a carnival that returns us to the 1920s, and it requires only one response: Been there, done that, it's junk science and it's dangerous.
Not that it means much. In the Land of the Crazy Ape, history is no more than an amusing costume drama to provide entertainment, and we're told there's no need to pay any attention to it. Caveat emptor.
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I am charmed by this very civil discussion, but disagree.
I claim three moral virtues are clearly instinctual. They are moral because individuals must, at least short term, accept potential penalties which benefit the group. They are instinctual because they are common to meerkats, wolves, gorillas, and people. Claiming these behaviors are somehow instinctual in animals but not in people ignores our ancestor’s place as just another species evolving to live in cooperative groups.
These instinctual moral virtues are 1) willingness to risk injury and death to defend family, friends, and common resources against outside threats, 2) willingness to care for immature offspring of family and friends, and 3) an ability to cooperate in a hierarchy even when your status is lower than you would like.
Effective cooperation in a hierarchy is not a commonly noted moral virtue in the United States. But significant moral thinkers like Confucius did include it, and I think rightly so.
There are also instinctual emotional responses that are key to our ability to acquire culturally evolved moralities. These are 1) empathy, 2) conscience (including guilt), 3) concern for reputation (including shame), and 4) pleasure in the cooperative company of family and friends. When these instinctual responses are working properly, people are well prepared to incorporate into their individual moral sentiments the moral lessons, good or bad, they learn based on their individual experiences and cultures.
Rational psychopaths, the estimated 1% of Americans who lack the ability to learn to feel empathy for other people or feel pangs of conscience, provide evidence these responses critical to incorporating cultural moralities are in fact instinctual.
Most of what we call morality, (like the Seven Catholic Virtues: humility, kindness, forgiveness, diligence, charity, temperance, and chastity), are cultural. These cultural standards can be very diverse and even contradictory. However, the view that our genetic evolution, which is responsible for our instincts, is not the critical foundation of our morality is not simply wrong, but perhaps tragically misleading. We need rational morality in the world with the purpose, as in evolution, of increasing cooperation and perhaps thereby avoiding extinction.
Wow. I could try for a month (more like a year) and never say it that well. One quibble: Some psychopaths are made more than they are born, and either way it's not a condition completely blind to the feelings of others. That's at least my observation from having dealt with many as an adversary over the last 50 years.
Damn, this post turned into an excellent thread, what the heck took so long?
I'm glad I came back to check. Seems everyone has offered a little piece to the puzzle.
I would add, emotion is of import in brain chemistry and evolution, genetics and epigenetics are also important, especially when considering time (age) in development at the differing stages of an individual's life. The plasticity of the brain is quite remarkable also, and goes on for a lifetime. Schemata and neural-networks are always forming.
I want to thank everyone here for their comments. I recommend a readable book called EVOLUTION IN FOUR DIMENSIONS by Jablonka and Lamb (pub 2005, MIT Press). A higher level version of these ideas for professionals appears in the journal Behavior and Brain Sciences (2007) 30:353-392. Thanks again. Dan Agin.
Thanks for the commentary. I think Pinker has a point. That the moral sense lies within each of us as an evolutionary legacy is worth knowing. We can observe this moral sense universally in humans. It is activated by intelligence and knowledge (a point Pinker obscures). It generates the broad spectrum of moral thought across the globe. Pinker goes wrong, in my opinion, in not distinguishing the particular moral conclusions or judgments that he condemns, and that you fail to mention, from the moral sense itself. Furthermore, his article advocates a utilitarian morality, which again you don't mention, that leads to startling results, such as legitimization of certain kinds of incest and the selection of Gill Gates as a better model of virtue than Mother Teresa. But he doesn't, openly or impliedly, advocate anything like eugenics. His argument, which I think is well taken, is that we all have to fight against the tendency of the moral sense to "commandeer" our thinking, hindering us in reaching sound moral judgments. You don't have to accept his morality to recognize that.
The problem is that if it's possible to "fight" against an instinct, it's really not an instinct -- unless you posit "mind" as an independent entity with executive control over "instincts" that are really no more than tendencies. Tendencies are not instincts. The result, it seems to me, is a philosophical tangle far removed from biological science. I see nothing wrong with the philosophical argument (although it's not falsifiable), but everything wrong with the argument as science (because it's not falsifiable). In general, I think, the problem is that we have certain concepts that we use to organize the way we think about behavior, which is fine, but reifying these concepts is really not science, it's philosophy.
Dan Agin
I don't agree with your analysis of instinct, particularly the distancing of instincts from tendencies. But I like your mother cat story. I agree the evidence of Pinker's MRI and psychological studies does little to persuade us of the details of his proposals. But it doesn't take much science to show that the moral sense, which Pinker says is a sixth sense like the other five, exists. We observe it in every human population. Only people who reject evolution outright would deny its evolutionary provenance. I like your objection that Pinker improperly reifies concepts we use to organize how we think of behavior. The reification comes from Pinker's failure to distinguish the moral sense itself from moral rules, as mentioned in my earlier post. He leaves the misleading impression that the moral rules he disparages are mere emotional impulses.
I'm curious. Why are there a number of researchers, particularly in cognitive neruopsychology, who are finding specific areas of the brain (fMRI studies) lighting up in relation to moral choices by the subject. These brain areas ARE determined by genetics and development programs in the DNA.
You say, '...lookin
How do your claims stack up against Marc Hauser, Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson, among many others, who do find a compelling argument that aspects of moral sentiment ARE heritable (as did Darwin)?
You seem to making a blanket statement without providing any evidence contrary to the arguments Pinker gave.
I have generally found your posts informative and generally in line with the research I read. But this one seems more motivated by a political position rather than scientific findings. Sorry.
V.
Thanks for your response. But I have no "political position". There is no evidence demonstrating neural activity PRODUCING a "moral instinct". The neural substrate is assumed by Pinker and others, but where is it? As for fMRI, as I pointed out in a previous essay on "Neurobunk", knowing which loci are active in a system as complex as the human brain is not a final step but only a first step to identifying a "neurological foundation". We're at the very beginning, not at the end of knowing how the brain works, and that needs to be stressed -- especially when some people are already advocating hereditarian schemes for behavior not even well-defined.
Dan Agin
Here's an amusing bit about instincts:
When a pregnant cat delivers her kittens, she immediately starts licking and eating the membranes that surround each newborn kitten. For centuries this was touted as a fine example of "maternal instinct". Then, in the 20th century, we learned that a pregnant cat has a salt deficiency, and that the fetal membranes contain a high concentration of salt. The mother cat licks and eats the newborn membranes to get salt back into her body (she has a strong physiological taste for salt). In fact, if you soak a tennis ball in a salt solution and present it to a female cat who has just delivered kittens, the mother cat will usually lick the tennis ball and allow the kittens to die. So much for "maternal instinct" and the "morality" of cats.
We will learn more by deconstructing instincts into physiology and biochemistry rather than by proposing instincts as explanations for behavior. Labeling a behavior an "instinct" explains nothing, and our ability to concoct a story about how that instinct is "adaptive" is not evidence of Darwinian genetic evolution of that instinct.
Dan Agin
Aspects are heritable, but other mechanisms provide strategies that differ from person to person. Brain waves may show the area where choices are made, but not reflect the differences in values applied to those considerations. For example, differences in degrees of meanness or kindness may not be distinguishable, yet they clearly affect one's moral outlook.
There has been a considerable amount of work on the social psychology and brain functions (through imaging and evoked potential mapping, etc.) E.g. see "Social Neuroscience: People Thinking About Thinking People", Cacioppo, Visser, & Pickett (eds.), The MIT Press.
Lots of papers re: brain areas involved in various forms of social reasoning, both explicit and implicit -- subconscious -- (including moral processing).
Others like Hauser deal with the evolutionary aspects of how those brain regions came to fulfill the purposes of moral reasoning, thus connecting evolution and mental architecture.
I believe the notion of differences between everyone having a sense of right and wrong and different people having learned different examples of what is right and what is wrong is well established. The strengths of behaviors elicited being different between different individuals within the same cultural grouping is also well established. It's not unlike differences in IQ I susupect.
V.
Every animal, if not also every insect, etc., is born with an innate mechanism for assessing consequences. That's where any innate "moral sense" comes from. You don't need to postulate a moral gene cluster, or assume that some who are deficient in assessing consequences are somehow lacking in one specific area.
Thanks for your response, but I don't agree. A "consequence" does not necessarily involve a value judgment about good and bad -- which is what a "moral sense" is all about. Why look to genes for a "moral sense" when it's easier to find origins of ideas about good and bad in culture and cultural evolution? Why this urge to derive everything from genes? It's extreme -- and dangerous. What's the point of denying the importance of culture? Are changes in genes responsible for the rapid changes in values and attitudes from one generation to the next? Are genes responsible for morality changes from Victorian times to the present? Not quite.
Dan Agin
I don't believe I've denied the importance of culture in shaping our values and attitudes, because they are integral to any decision about what will be "good" and what won't. But I believe what I've said is that a value judgement necessarily involves thinking beforehand about a consequence. Genes always have a role in the type of personality each person is born with, but culture is the final arbiter of what we do with that personality. And what I wanted to stress was that the calculating mechanism involved is not in any one place, and moral sense does NOT spring from any one gene cluster.
But the fact that morality IS relative to culture and circumstance makes our actions entirely dependent on prior consideration of which behaviors are appropriate to what circumstances.
I had made other comments as well, but they seem to have been lost in the moderating process.
Dear Dr. Agin,
I was waiting to comment, to your excellent essay/post, and warning. It was spot-on!
Agape.
Mr. Agin,
Yes, the crazy ape authority would not have any qualms about sterilization of the imbeciles and find no problem with producing insterments of death such as bio and chemical and atomic for the extermination of millions within hours and days.
The world's crazy ape Authority eliminated more than 120million during the 20th century and are well on their way to surpassing that number for the 21st century.
I put my money on Eric Fromn.
http://www
Despite our democratic ideals on paper, the American attitude towards "authority" has usually been as meek as that of Europeans. As late as 1898, in the state of Massachusetts, it was a practice to control deviant behavior by treating it as an inherited disease. Young boys were subject to "therapeutic castration" for "masturbation with weakness of mind" -- see E. Flood, American Journal of Psychology, 1898 10:299.
Dan Agin
Dan Agin,
Boys and girls from all tribes, cultures and races have enjoyed such activity since time began.
And some were also plaged by guilt instilled in them by "authority".
Though "Authority" never revealed to the boys and girls, they also enjoyed the activity during their time as children.
Perhaps some of the sociopaths who eventually came to dominate "Authority" were so cruelly punished for their body stimulation in childhood, they learned to find pleasure in their mastrubating tanks with explosive orgasms and recoil weaponry to justify within themselves the cruelty put upon them by the then "Authority
And of course therein lies the "mastrubation with weakness of mind." in America.
Have it well Professor.
Rolf Krogsæther
I will put my money on B.F. Skinner and his magic box vs. golden, silver or bronze man.
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Posted February 15, 2008 | 04:43 PM (EST)