Our universal sense of right and wrong

As the 2008 presidential campaign warms, it’s a testimony to the power instinct that anyone would want the job of heading an modern nation, let alone the 900-pound gorilla of nations, the United States.

Bush’s war in Iraq has entangled the U.S. and allies in a grinding trap, Iran races ahead with its nuclear program, Israel faces an array of hatred from surrounding Arab countries, bombings in India, Pakistan, Indonesia rattle hopes for peaceful reconciliation of disputes, and an unnerving arms control dispute, the most serious of the post-cold war era, emerged yesterday when Poland and the Czech Republic indicated an interest in hosting facilities for the Pentagon's missile defense shield. If they follow through, Russia threatened to target the central Europeans, prompting Germany denounced the US moves as potentially destabilizing.

Nor are these the only conflicts of the world’s “tribes”. Africa, South America, China, and Southeast Asia, are likewise teeming with external and internal disputes over territory, resources, religious ideologies, and political power. The current world strife is not new. The problem has been with us since civilization began. It would seem that we are no closer to a solution, but much closer to a disastrous conclusion.

The problem? Absent from the contentious polemics of the day is any reference to a set of moral principles that could unravel the Gordian knot of human conflict. While most would like to think of themselves as acting morally (certainly Bush anoints himself with moral rectitude), what is “moral” action? Is killing moral? Is theft moral? Is lying moral? If you say, no, then is a politician acting morally when he sends troops to kill Iraqi insurgents, knowing innocents and his own troops will be killed as well? Is the tax collector moral when he forces you at gunpoint to hand over your earnings so that he can protect you from his announced enemies abroad and even from your own self at home? Is Bush or any politician moral when he or she lies in order to get public support for actions?

When is an action moral? The answer, of course, depends on the definition of ‘moral’. Morality is usually thought to have its roots in religion, however Marc Hauser, Professor of Psychology, Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and Biological Anthropology at Harvard, and author of Moral Minds: How Nature Designed our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong, argues that the source of morality is in our genes. Pursuing the emerging science of evolutionary biology, he and other leading researchers in the field are piecing together the building blocks of human nature, and the result holds answers that may save the species.

Hauser, as well as others including Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, argue that morality is a byproduct of natural selection, and appears in one form or another in other mammals. “As with grammar, flying beneath the radar of our awareness…is a universal moral grammar…evolved over million of years to include a set of principles for building a range of moral systems.”

While for centuries scholars presumed that moral judgments of what is right and what is wrong can be derived from  experience and education, Hauser argues that humans have a moral instinct “unconsciously propelling us to deliver judgments of right and wrong, independent of gender, education, and religion.”

To test how deeply a sense of morality is instinctive, Hauser and others have confronted research subjects with ‘moral dilemmas’, studies that tend to confirm the evolutionary roots of right and wrong. In one such moral dilemma originally proposed by philosopher Phillipa Foot, we imagine a runaway train bearing down on a group of people trapped in a stalled car on the tracks. They will certainly be killed if the train hits them. An individual standing beside the track sees the train coming, and has the power to throw a lever and divert the train onto a siding. Unfortunately, there is a man on the siding who will be killed if the lever is thrown. Is it immoral to throw the lever and kill the single individual, or not throw it and let the five die?

Instinctively, most research subjects queried felt that the moral act is to save five lives at the cost of one. But, what if the individual on the siding had no lever to divert the train, but could stop it by physically pushing another car carrying one innocent individual onto the tracks. Would that be moral, or murder, or moral murder? Most subjects surveyed considered it moral to throw the switch, but immoral to physically push the individual onto the tracks.

Now Hauser presents a more difficult moral dilemma. Five patients in a hospital are dying, each with a different organ failing, and each could be saved with a transplant of that organ. In the waiting room is a healthy patient with those five organs. Is it moral to grab him, kill him, take his organs, and save the five patients? Most consider it clearly immoral to take his life to save the five patients. But what is the difference between that and pushing the car with a lone innocent onto the railroad track? The difference is our innate feeling that aggression against an innocent individual is wrong.

Immanuel Kant, one of history’s most influential philosophers, would agree. He reasoned that in principle, it would be immoral for one person or group to use a non-consenting individual as a means to their own ends, no matter how it benefited them. He argued that moral requirements are based on a standard of rationality he dubbed the “Categorical Imperative”. Other philosophers, such as Locke and Hobbes, agreed. But what these 18^th and 19^th century philosophers could not perceive before Darwinian natural selection arrived, was the evolutionary underpinnings of the “reason and experience” that led them to their conclusions.

That feeling you and I get when we instinctively perceive an action to be right or wrong is the whispering of our ancestral genes telling us that some action will help or hinder our survival or our procreative chances. As the subtitle to Hauser’s book states, nature designed our universal sense of right and wrong. It was designed by natural selection as a survival tool.

This leads back to the choices that politicians are forcing on the world. In a thousand ways, they violate the principles of natural morality.

What does this evolutionary-rooted morality suggest relative your own actions? It suggests that Kant was touching on a truth about human nature when he reasoned that it is immoral for one person or group to force a non-consenting individual to serve their own ends, no matter how it benefited that individual or group. To us as individuals, it confirms that we are instinctively outraged when our property is stolen from us under the guise that others need it more. When innocents are attacked or killed under the argument that its for the good of the group, it’s no different that taking the patient from the waiting room and harvesting his organs for the benefit of the other patients.

Ultimately, and if the species is lucky enough to survive, the moral dilemma that has confounded mankind for thousands of generations will be solved through an abandoment of the failed nation-state conflicts, and an abandoment of group power over the individuals in the group.  Political power, under the guise of defending individuals, will be replaced by individual methods of self defense that do not require the sacrifice of the lives and property of innocent bystanders.

The Sovereign Society was founded on the principle that each individual is sovereign, and justly owns his life and property, and also is  responsible for his or her own self defense. You can't demand that the state agress against others in order to defend yourself. Any individual acts immorally if any other non-consenting individual is aggressed against. Because of the innate moral sense built into the average human, a society of sovereign individuals, each following an instinctive sense of right and wrong, would be the most peaceful and productive that ever existed on earth.