The Faith Instinct Read Online Free PDF Page A

building blocks from their apelike ancestors and developed them into moral instincts.
    Biologists thus began to see that they might be able to construct a new explanation of morality: moral behavior does not originate from outside the human mind or even from conscious reasoning, the sources favored by theologians and philosophers, but rather has been wired into the genetic circuitry of the mind by evolution.
    The clearest statement of the new program came from the distinguished biologist Edward O. Wilson. “The time has come,” he wrote in his book Sociobiology, “for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized.” 11 A few years later he confidently predicted that “Science for its part will test relentlessly everyassumption about the human condition and in time uncover the bedrock of the moral and religious sentiments.” 12
    Both philosophers and psychologists took some time to respond to Wilson’s challenge, but a highly interesting investigation is now being undertaken by both groups, working partly in collaboration.
    The new view of morality, that it is at least partly shaped by evolution, has not been arrived at easily. Philosophers long focused on reason as the basis of morality. David Hume, the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher, defied this tradition in arguing strongly that morals spring not from conscious reasoning but from the emotions. “Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason,” Hume wrote in his Treatise on Human Nature.
    But Hume’s suggestion only made philosophers keener to found morality in reason. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant sought to base moralityoutside of nature, in a world of pure reason and of moral imperatives that met the test of being fit to be universal laws. This proposal, Wilson wrote acidly, made no sense at all: “Sometimes a concept is baffling not because it is profound but because it is wrong. This idea does not accord, we know now, with the evidence of how the brain works.” 13
    Psychologists too, however, were long committed to the philosophers’ program of deriving morality exclusively from reason. The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, following Kant’s ideas, argued that children learned ideas about morality as they passed through various stages of mental development. Lawrence Kohlberg, an American psychologist, built on Piaget’s ideas, arguing that children went through six stages of moral reasoning. But his analysis was based on interviewing children and having them describe their moral reasoning, so reason was all he could perceive.
    Even primatologists, who would eventually contribute to the new view of morality, were muzzled because animal behaviorists, under the baleful influence of the psychologist B. F. Skinner, accused anyone of anthropomorphism if they attributed emotions like empathy to animals.
    With everyone on the wrong track, and Hume’s insight neglected, the study of morality was at something of a stalemate. “It is an astonishing circumstance that the study of ethics has advanced so little since the nineteenth century,” Wilson wrote in 1998, dismissing a century’s work. 14
    A development that helped break the logjam was an article in 2001 by Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at the University of Virginia. Haidt had taken an interest in the emotion of disgust and was intrigued by a phenomenon he called moral dumbfounding. He would read people stories about a family that cooked and ate its pet dog after it had been run over, or a woman who cleaned a toilet with the national flag. His subjects were duly disgusted and firmly insisted these actions were wrong. But several were unable to explain why they held this opinion, given that no one in the stories was harmed.
    It seemed to Haidt that if people could not explain their moral judgments, then evidently they were