12.04.09
Hauser guilty of cowardice?
IT SEEMS BIOLOGY (NOT RELIGION) EQUALS MORALITY
I was perhaps overly hasty in dismissing Hauser’s work today in a previous post. His thesis makes a good deal of sense, and shows a strong resemblance to Kantian thinking on morality. The problem I have is, not the suggestion that our sense of morality has ‘evolved’, but the assumption that this evolution must be Darwinian. If Hauser is so confused as to put his thesis on the doorstep of Darwin then his work deserves to be condemned, and probably for cowardice since I am suspicious that Hauser is a fake Darwinist.
The problem with all this is underestimating the full complexity of human evolution, which requires first an explanation of evolving consciousness, and much else.
Further, since we have cited Kant, the question of the ‘freedom to act ethically’ arises, and this is always factored out by scientific students of morality. The complicated deliberations of Kant on the basis of morality and freedom has been replaced with a shark’s game of ‘science’, and the inability of the participants to even speak freely or in violation of the Paradigm.
One has to be suspicious that Hauser is lying to get ahead and achieve some place in the science public.
That’s unethical.
If religion is not the source of our moral insights — and moral education has the demonstrated potential to teach partiality and, therefore, morally destructive behaviour — then what other sources of inspiration are on offer?
One answer to this question is emerging from an unsuspected corner of academia: the mind sciences. Recent discoveries suggest that all humans, young and old, male and female, conservative and liberal, living in Sydney, San Francisco and Seoul, growing up as atheists, Buddhists, Catholics and Jews, with high school, university or professional degrees, are endowed with a gift from nature, a biological code for living a moral life.This code, a universal moral grammar, provides us with an unconscious suite of principles for judging what is morally right and wrong. It is an impartial, rational and unemotional capacity. It doesn’t dictate who we should help or who we are licensed to harm. Rather, it provides an abstract set of rules for how to intuitively understand when helping another is obligatory and when harming another is forbidden. And it does so dispassionately and impartially. What’s the evidence?
Todd White said,
December 4, 2009 at 8:16 pm
Let me get this straight: According to this guy, “all humans” are endowed with a “biological code for living a moral life.” Umm, has he ever heard of The Holocaust? Does he even pick up a newspaper?
nemo said,
December 5, 2009 at 1:17 pm
I think I may have misrepresented his thesis, and was critical because of the probable Darwinism lurking in the background.
Hauser’s thesis is a very close match (on a superficial level) with Kant’s thinking. Despite the problems, it is hard to avoid Kant’s suggestion that something he calls ‘common ordinary morality’ is a part of man’s equipment, notwithstanding the apparent exceptions.