[extropy-chat] Origin of morality

[Keith Henson]

This should be of interest to the sl4 list as well if someone wants to post 
it there--though being evolutionary psychology, you might take flack for 
doing so.

"He says the human sense of right and wrong, which evolved over millions of 
years, . . . "

*If* it evolved, that means that there was a selective advantage in the EEA 
for it.

Keith

Author Interview
The Bookshelf talks with Marc Hauser
Greg Ross

Oscar Wilde said, "Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace." But 
how do we learn where to draw these lines? It's commonly understood that 
moral rules are instilled in church, school and home, but Harvard 
psychologist Marc Hauser believes that they have a deeper source-an 
unconscious, built-in "moral grammar" that drives our judgments of right 
and wrong.

Widely known for his studies of animal cognition (see "What Do Animals 
Think About Numbers?" in the March-April 2000 American Scientist), Hauser 
has long been intrigued by the nature of human moral judgment (interested 
readers can take his Web-based Moral Sense Test). He says the human sense 
of right and wrong, which evolved over millions of years, precedes our 
conscious judgments and emotions, providing a hidden engine of moral 
intuition that's shared by people around the world. "Our moral instincts 
are immune to the explicitly articulated commandments handed down by 
religions and governments," he writes. "Sometimes our moral intuitions will 
converge with those that culture spells out, and sometimes they will 
diverge." In Moral Minds (Ecco) Hauser draws ideas from the social and 
natural sciences, philosophy and the law to support his own findings for an 
unconscious moral instinct.

American Scientist Online managing editor Greg Ross interviewed Hauser by 
e-mail in July 2006.

Can you describe what you mean by a moral grammar?

The core idea is derived from the work in generative grammar that [MIT 
linguist Noam] Chomsky initiated in the 1950s and that the political 
philosopher John Rawls brought to life in a short section of his major 
treatise A Theory of Justice in 1971. In brief, I argue that we are endowed 
with a moral faculty that delivers judgments of right and wrong based on 
unconsciously operative and inaccessible principles of action. The theory 
posits a universal moral grammar, built into the brains of all humans. The 
grammar is a set of principles that operate on the basis of the causes and 
consequences of action. Thus, in the same way that we are endowed with a 
language faculty that consists of a universal toolkit for building possible 
languages, we are also endowed with a moral faculty that consists of a 
universal toolkit for building possible moral systems.

By grammar I simply mean a set of principles or computations for generating 
judgments of right and wrong. These principles are unconscious and 
inaccessible. What I mean by unconscious is different from the Freudian 
unconscious. It is not only that we make moral judgments intuitively, and 
without consciously reflecting upon the principles, but that even if we 
tried to uncover those principles we wouldn't be able to, as they are 
tucked away in the mind's library of knowledge. Access comes from deep, 
scholarly investigation.
Paralleling language, the notion of grammar that has been developed in 
modern linguistics is virtually incomprehensible outside the field of 
linguistics. The grammar we learned in school has virtually no resemblance 
to the grammatical principles uncovered by linguists. In the same way, once 
we delve deeper into our moral faculty we will uncover principles that are 
virtually unrecognizable from the social norms that we articulate and live 
by in our day-to-day lives. And in the same way that the unconscious but 
operative principles of language do not dictate the specific content of 
what we say, if we say anything, the unconscious but operative principles 
of morality do not dictate the specific content of our moral judgments, nor 
whether we in fact choose to help or harm others in any given situation.

Source: American Scientist
http://www.americanscientist.org/template/InterviewTypeDetail/assetid/52880