What is Morality?

By Wil Forbis
Jan 1, 2011

Sometime ago, I was sitting on a bench at the zoo and reading a book. I was enjoying myself until a woman parked a stroller containing a screaming baby right next to me. For several minutes, the infant screamed and bawled, increasingly getting on my nerves. Suddenly, with a jolt of inspiration, I arrived at a solution. "I should just toss this kid into the crocodile pit," I thought to myself, chuckling at the mental image of a pinkish human blob being set upon by steely toothed reptiles.

Of course, the wrongness of the plan immediately dawned on me. There was no doubt that the mother of a baby would begin freaking out the instant after I dispatched her annoying child, and it would still be impossible to get any reading done. It became clear that I would have to toss her into the crocodile pit as well.

Now, I think we've all had such impulses when dealing with the most egregiously annoying examples of our fellow man. But we never act upon them*. Why?

*It occurs to me that some of my readers may have actually acted upon such impulses. If so, I congratulate you on pertaining Internet service in prison. Or hell.

It's easy to bring to mind a rather predictable list of reasons as to why one shouldn't toss children into the open mouths of crocodiles. Let's review.

• You'll go to jail. Certainly true. But is this the only reason we refrain from committing such acts? If we found ourselves in a situation where there would be no threat of imprisonment were we to kill someone, would we have no compunction about doing so? I doubt it.
• You'll go to hell. This is less certain, and to an atheist such as myself, seems highly unlikely. But, if God did appear before you and not only permitted you to toss a baby into a crocodile pit with no fear of eternal hellfire, but even ordered you to do so, could you do it without discomfort? Again, I doubt it.
• Killing is immoral. This seems like a sensible answer at first. Certainly every moral system created by humankind would agree. And the seemingly obvious axiom, "do unto others as you would have others do unto you," lines up with the sentiment. Moral behavior simply seems like the right thing to do.

* What do I mean by "intellectual contextualizations." Let's look at the example of guilt. When you feel guilty, you physically feel ill. But you're also aware of the reason you feel ill e.g. you cheated on your wife, or you ran over your daughter's cat, or you cheated on your wife with your daughter's cat and then ran them both over. The reason for your guilt is the intellectual contextualization.

How does our brain know when to offer the carrot, and when the stick? Partly through learned experience. You touch a stove and burn yourself as a child, and from then on, you experience the sting of fear when considering touching a stove. And certain aspects of our behavior (such as fear of snakes or spiders) may be "programmed" into our genes and DNA.

* To be clear, I'm using the idea of rules in a metaphorical sense. I'm not saying the brain actually has a literal rule book imprinted somewhere in its neurons.

Now, many creatures, humans especially, are social in nature. They interact with each other and quite often are dependent on their fellow creatures for survival. Of course, socialization also requires rules. We need some basic rules as to how to get along with one another. Not killing each other is a good start. Not raping each other is also good. As is not taking each other's stuff.

* I'm using the pronoun "I" in the most ego-less sense possible here. I'm certainly not the first person to make these arguments about morality. Generally speaking, the field of evolutionary psychology is based on similar presumptions. So is the philosophy of philosophers ranging from Nietzsche to Arthur Leff.

Can I prove such statements? Well, tracing the activity of our neurons through our brain, and also across the period of our evolution is close to impossible. But I would like to offer some interesting nuggets of food for thought.

We intuitively understand --- and science has largely shown this to be true --- that different people feel emotions differently. We all know people who cry every time they see a sad scene in a movie, and we all know people who seem relatively unbothered by the horrors of the world. And if people vary in their ability to feel emotion, they are going to vary in their ability to feel the "carrot and stick" of morality. Some people, of course, seem particularly bothered by what they perceive as immorality or injustice, while others have a more blasé attitude. I posit that when "hyper-moralalists" encounter a moral transgression, their body state revolts (by this I mean their pulse quickens, their chest tightens, blood rushes to their head etc.) more so than other people. They "feel" morality on a more visceral level.

Why would the species of man evolve with a penchant for moral behavior*? Generally speaking, moral behavior is behavior that encourages the survival of its practitioners, particularly in the tribal environment in which humans evolved. Sociologists often use the term "reciprocal altruism," which essentially breaks down to, "I'll do you a favor, but I expect you to do me a favor sometime in return." People who violate this rule are thought of as selfish, or "immoral," and in the days of yore, stood a good chance of getting kicked out of the tribe, which seriously impeded their survival and the survival of their genes. You can see similar evolutionary logic in regards to our moral views on topics such as cleanliness, work ethic and sexual mores**.

* This question is the core question of what is sometimes called "Evolutionary Ethics." A good overview can be found at Wikipedia.

** The morality of sex is, of course, a complex topic, made more complex with the recent publication of the book "Sex at Dawn." I interviewed the author here.

The idea that morality is not bound to God or some universal truth, but rather belongs to the domain of the body is not without critics. And one of the main criticisms is that if you propagate the idea that there is no great "moral truth" people have no reason to behave morally. In the above mentioned article, "The Moral Instinct," author Pinker seems sanguine about this problem, arguing (unconvincingly in my view) that becoming aware of our moral instincts will make man more, not less, moral. Modern philosopher Sam Harris has argued (also unconvincingly to my mind) that science can answer moral questions.

If I'm unconvinced by their arguments, do I predict that society will become increasingly morally unwound, eventually arriving at the doorstep of violent anarchy? Well, no. The moral rulebook does, for the most part, benefit the vast majority, and I think most of us implicitly realize this on an emotional, rational, and most importantly, instinctual, level. But if it is true that morality is more instinctual than logical or divine, then sorting out the moral conundrums that face our species becomes more difficult. We presume to think that we can use religious texts or reason to solve the great debates of our time --- abortion, war, justice. And we presume that we can rely on such sources to handle the innumerable potential moral conundrums of the future --- robot rights, bioengineering, trans-humanism etc. But until we can confirm the existence of an absolute moral rulebook , I think we will be stumbling through ethical clouds filled with argument and discontent.

It may turn out that tossing the kid into the crocodile pit wasn't such a bad idea after all.