"The Evolution of Human Morality"

Charla and I listened to an interesting podcast on "The Evolution of Human Morality" the other morning. The shownotes:

Incest, infanticide, honour killings - different cultures have different rules of justice. But are we all born with a moral instinct - an innate ability to judge what is right and wrong? Could morality be like language - a universal, unconscious grammar common to all human cultures? Eminent evolutionary biologist Marc Hauser and philosopher Richard Joyce take on these controversial questions in impressive new tomes, and to critical acclaim. But could their evolutionary arguments undermine the social authority of morality? Is biology the new 'religion'?

One insight that emerges from the discussion is that personal and cultural differences in morality tend to exist mainly in the context of relatively complex and context-specific concepts—"the rights of the fetus", for example—whereas simple concepts that underlie such complex concepts, such as "using another person to achieve one's own goals" tend to arouse fairly universal moral responses (negative, in this example).

It seems that we are hard-wired as altruists, but we learn to selectively block our altruistic impulses according to our learned belief systems and our emotional response to others that those belief systems mediate. We learn to identify with the interests and well being of some individuals and groups more than others—and then engage in frantic post-hoc moral self-justification to make ourselves feel ok about that.

So if you'd like to probe your sense of morality, click here to take the Moral Sense Test from the Visual Cognition Laboratory at Havard. I just tried it and learned something interesting about myself (they asked me not to reveal what so as not to bias others' responses!) in about 6 minutes.