The Faith Instinct Read Online Free PDF Page B

accident in 1848. Gage, astonishingly, survived the accident but his personality was changed. Previously hardworking and responsible, he was now “fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires,” according to a physician who examined him 20 years later. 17
    A more specific damage to moral sensibilities is seen in patients with Huntington’s disease. Strangely, they become very utilitarian, making moral judgments by weighing only the consequences and ignoring strong social taboos. Consider a situation where a man’s wife has just died. Her body is there on the bed, and he decides to have intercourse with her one last time. Is that OK? Most people will say absolutely not. Huntington’s patients see no problem. Their sense of disgust, an emotion that intensifies certain moral judgments, seems strangely relaxed: if shown a piece of chocolate molded in the form of dog turd, most people will lose any appetite for it, but many Huntington’s patients will happily wolf it down. 18
    There seem to be neural circuitries for morality and for disgust, since specific damage to the brain can cause a loss of either behavior. But these behaviors, though at their core very similar in every society, are heavily shaped by culture. Because of cultural differences, societies may vary widely in terms of the actions they consider morally permissible. In Western societies, for instance, killing an infant is generally regarded as murder. But among the !Kung San, a hunting and gathering people in the Kalahari desert of southern Africa, it is the mother’s moral duty to kill after birth any infant that is deformed, and one of each pair of twins. 19 A !Kung mother must carry her infant wherever she goes, and does for some 5,000 miles before the child learns to walk. Since she must also carry food, water and possessions, she cannot carry twins. So the duty to kill a twin, and to avoid investment in a defective child with limited prospects of survival, can be seen not as any moral deficiency on the !Kungs’ part but rather as a shaping of human moral intuitions to their particular circumstances.
    Standards of sexual morality vary widely, particularly in regions like aboriginal Australia and neighboring Melanesia where conception is not regarded as dependent on the father’s sperm and men are therefore less jealous of sexual access to their partners. Thus at kayasa, the festival gatherings held by people of the Trobriand Islands off the eastern endof Papua New Guinea, the sportive element in games was taken somewhat further than is customary in Western countries. “At a tug-of-war kayasa in the south,” reports the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, “men and women would always be on opposite sides. The winning side would ceremonially deride the vanquished with the typical ululating scream (katugogova), and then assail their prostrate opponents, and the sexual act would be carried out in public. On one occasion when I discussed this matter with a mixed crowd from the north and the south,both sides categorically confirmed the correctness of this statement.” 20 As Rudyard Kipling had occasion to note, “The wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Khatmandu, And the crimes of Clapham chaste in Martaban.”
    But the commonalities in morality are generally more striking than the variations. The fundamental moral principle of “do as you would be done by” is found in all societies, as are prohibitions against murder, theft and incest. Many of these universal moral principles are likely to be shaped by innate neural circuits, while the variations spring from moral learning systems that are more guided by cultural traditions and a society’s particular ecological circumstances.
    Returning to moral intuition and moral reasoning, the two basic psychological processes that