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The
Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share and Follow
the Golden Rule by Michael Shermer Rating: •• (Mildly
Recommended) |
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Skepticism It’s
usually philosophers or theologians who explore moral issues. Michael Shermer, a scientist, uses the scientific method to
explore good an evil in his new book, The
Science of Good and Evil. Taking a skeptical, scientific approach yields
some interesting perspectives. Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 6, “How We Are
Moral: Absolute, Relative, and Provisional Ethics,” pp. 166-178: Provisional Ethics If we are going to try to apply the
methods of science to thinking about moral issues and ethical systems, here is
the problem as I see it: as soon as one makes a moral decision—an action that
is deemed right or wrong— it implies that there is a standard of right versus
wrong that can be applied in other situations, to other people, in other
cultures (in a manner that one might apply the laws of planetary geology to
planets other than our own). But if that were the case, then why is that same
standard not obvious and in effect in all cultures (as, in the above analogy,
that geological forces operate in the same manner on all planets)? Instead,
observation reveals many such systems, most of which claim to have found the
royal road to Truth and all of whom differ in degrees significant enough that
they cannot be reconciled (as if gravity operated on some planets but not
others). If there is no absolute moral standard and instead only relative
values, can we realistically speak of right and wrong? An action may be wise
or unwise, prudent or imprudent, profitable or unprofitable within a given
system. But is that the same as right or wrong? So, both absolutism and relativism
violate clear and obvious observations: there is a wide diversity of
ethical theories about right and wrong moral behavior; because of this there
are disputes about what constitutes right and wrong both between ethical
theories and moral systems as well as within them; we behave both morally and
immorally; humans desire a set of moral guidelines to help us determine right
and wrong; there are moral principles that most ethical theories and moral
systems agree are right and wrong. Any viable ethical theory of morality
must account for these observations. Most do not. In thinking about this problem I asked myself this question: how do we know something is true or right? In science, claims are not true or false, right or wrong in any absolute sense. Instead, we accumulate evidence and assign a probability of truth to a claim. A claim is probably true or probably false, possibly right or possibly wrong. Yet probabilities can be so high or so low that we can act as if they are, in fact, true or false. Stephen Jay Gould put it well: “In science, ‘fact’ can only mean ‘confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.’” That is, scientific facts are conclusions confirmed to such an extent it would be reasonable to offer our provisional agreement. Heliocentrism—that the earth goes around the sun and not vice versa—is as factual as it gets in science. That evolution happened is not far behind heliocentrism in its factual certainty. Other theories in science, particularly within the social sciences (where the subjects are so much more complex), are far less certain and so we assign them much lower probabilities of certitude. In a fuzzy logic manner, we might say heliocentrism and evolution are .9 on a factual scale, while political, economic, and psychological theories of human social and individual behavior are much lower on the fuzzy scale, perhaps in the range of .2 to .5. Here the certainties are much fuzzier, and so fuzzy logic is critical to our understanding of how the world works, particularly in assigning fuzzy fractions to the degrees of certainty we hold about those claims. Here we find ourselves in a very familiar area of science known as probabilities and statistics. In the social sciences, for example, we say that we reject the null hypothesis at the .05 level of confidence (where we are 95 percent certain that the effect we found was not due to chance), or at the .01 level of confidence (where we are 99 percent certain), or even at the .0001 level of confidence (where the odds of the effect being due to chance are only one in ten thousand). The point is this: there is a sliding scale from high certainty to high doubt about the factual validity of a particular claim, which is why science traffics in probabilities and statistics in order to express the confidence or lack of confidence a claim or theory engenders. The same way of thinking has
application to morals and ethics. Moral choices in a provisional ethical system
might be considered analogous to scientific facts, in being provisionally
right or provisionally wrong, provisionally moral or provisionally immoral: In provisional ethics, moral or
immoral means confirmed to such an extent it would be reasonable to offer
provisional assent. Provisional is an appropriate word here, meaning
“conditional, pending confirmation or validation.” In provisional ethics it
would be reasonable for us to offer our conditional agreement that an action
is moral or immoral if the evidence for and the justification of the action
is overwhelming. It remains provisional because, as in science, the evidence
and justification might change. And, obviously, some moral principles have
less evidence and justification for them than others, and therefore they are
more provisional and more personal. Provisional ethics provides a
reasonable middle ground between absolute and relative moral systems.
Provisional moral principles are applicable for most people in most
circumstances most of the time, yet flexible enough to account for the wide
diversity of human behavior, culture, and circumstances. What I am getting at
is that there are moral principles by which we can construct an ethical
theory. These principles are not absolute (no exceptions), nor are they
relative (anything goes). They are provisional—true for most people in most
circumstances most of the time. And they are objective, in the sense that
morality is independent of the individual. Moral sentiments evolved as part
of our species; moral principles, therefore, can be seen as transcendent of
the individual, making them morally objective. Whenever possible, moral
questions should be subjected to scientific and rational scrutiny, much as
nature’s questions are subjected to scientific and rational scrutiny. But can
morality become a science? Fuzzy Provisionalism One of the strongest objections to be
made against provisional ethics is that if it is not a form of absolute
morality, then it must be a form of relative morality, and thus another way
to intellectualize one’s ego-centered actions. But this is looking at the
world through bivariate glasses, a violation of the
either-or fallacy, breaking the law of the excluded middle. Here again, fuzzy logic has direct applications to moral thinking. In the discussion of evil, we saw how fuzzy fractions assigned to evil deeds assisted us in assessing the relative merits or demerits of human actions. Fuzzy logic also helps us see our way through a number of moral conundrums. When does life begin? Binary logic insists on a black-and-white Aristotelian A or not-A answer. Most pro-lifers, for example, believe that life begins at conception—before conception not-life, after conception, life. A or not-A. With fuzzy morality we can assign a probability to life—before conception a, the moment of conception .1, one month after conception .z, and so on until birth, when the fetus becomes a 1.0 life-form. A and not-A. You don’t have to choose between pro-life and pro-choice, themselves bivalent categories still stuck in an Aristotelian world (more on this in the next chapter). Death may also be assigned in degrees.
“If life has a fuzzy boundary, so does death,” fuzzy
logician Bart Kosko explains. “The medical definition
of death changes a little each year. More information, more precision, more
fuzz.” But isn’t someone either dead or alive? A or
not-A? No. “Fuzzy logic may help us in our fight against death. If you
can kill a brain a cell at a time, you can bring it back to life a cell at a
time just as you can fix a smashed car a part at a time.”9 A
and not-A. Birth is fuzzy and provisional and so is death. So is murder.
The law is already fuzzy in this regard. There are first-degree murder,
second-degree murder, justifiable homicide, self-defense homicide, genocide,
infanticide, suicide, crimes of passion, crimes
against humanity. A and not-A. Complexities and subtleties abound.
Nuances rule. Our legal systems have adjusted to this reality; so, too, must
our ethical systems. Fuzzy birth. Fuzzy death. Fuzzy murder. Fuzzy ethics. Moral Intuition and the
Captain Kirk Principle Long before he penned the book that
justified laissez-faire capitalism, Adam Smith became the first moral
psychologist when he observed: “Nature, when she formed man for
society, endowed him with an original desire to please, and an original
aversion to offend his brethren. She taught him to feel pleasure in their
favorable, and pain in their unfavorable regard.” Yet, by the time he
published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, Smith realized that human
motives are not so pure: “It is not from the benevolence of the
butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their
regard of their own interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity, but
to their self-love, and never talk to them of our necessities, but of their
advantage.” Is our
regard for others or for ourselves? Are we empathetic or egotistic? We are
both. But how we can strike a healthy balance between serving self and
serving others is not nearly as rationally calculable as we once thought. Intuition plays a
major role in human decision making—including and especially moral decision
making—and new research is revealing both the powers and the perils of
intuition. Consider the following scenario: imagine yourself a contestant on
the classic television game show Let’s Make a Deal. You must choose
one of three doors. Behind one of the doors is a brand-new automobile. Behind
the other two doors are goats. You choose door number one. Host Monty Hall,
who knows what is behind all three doors, shows you what’s behind door number
two, a goat, then inquires: would you like to keep the door you chose or
switch? It’s fifty-fifty, so it doesn’t matter, right? Most people think so.
But their intuitive feeling about this problem is wrong. Here’s why: you had
a one in three chance to start, but now that Monty has shown you one of the
losing doors, you have a two-thirds chance of winning by switching doors.
Think of it this way: there are three possibilities for the three doors: (1) good bad bad; (2) bad good bad; (3) bad bad
good. In possibility one you lose by switching, but in possibilities two and
three you can win by switching. Here is another way to reason around our
intuition: there are ten doors; you choose door number one and Monty shows
you doors number two through nine, all goats. Now would you switch? Of course
you would, because your chances of winning increase from one in ten to nine
in ten. This is a counterintuitive problem that drives people batty, including
mathematicians and even statisticians. Intuition is tricky. Gamblers’ intuitions, for example, are notoriously flawed (to the profitable delight of casino operators). You are playing the roulette wheel and hit five reds in a row. Should you stay with red because you are on a “hot streak” or should you switch because black is “due”? It doesn’t matter because the roulette wheel has no memory, but try telling that to the happy gambler whose pile of chips grows before his eyes. So-called hot streaks in sports are equally misleading. Intuitively, don’t we just know that when the Los Angeles Lakers’ Kobe Bryant is hot he can’t miss? It certainly seems like it, particularly the night he broke the record for the most three-point baskets in a single game, but the findings of a fascinating 1985 study of “hot hands” in basketball by Thomas Gilovich, Robert Vallone, and Amos Tversky—who analyzed every basket shot by the Philadelphia 76ers for an entire season—does not bear out this conclusion. They discovered that the probability of a player hitting a second shot did not increase following an initial successful basket beyond what one would expect by chance and the average shooting percentage of the player. What they found is so counterintuitive that it is jarring to the sensibilities: the number of streaks, or successful baskets in sequence, did not exceed the predictions of a statistical coin-flip model. That is, if you conduct a coin-flipping experiment and record heads or tails, you will encounter streaks. On average and in the long run, you will flip five heads or tails in a row once in every thirty-two sequences of five tosses. Players may feel “hot” when they have games that fall into the high range of chance expectations, but science shows that this intuition is an illusion. 12 These are just a couple of the
countless ways our intuitions about the world lead us astray: we rewrite our
past to fit present beliefs and moods, we badly misinterpret the source and
meaning of our emotions, we are subject to the hindsight bias where after the
fact we surmise that we knew it all along, we succumb to the self-serving
bias where we think we are far more important than we really are, we see
illusory correlations that do not exist (superstitions), and we fall for the
confirmation bias where we look for and find evidence for what we already
believe. Our intuitions also lead us to fear the wrong things. Let us return
to Adam Smith. According to Smith’s theory, our moral sentiments lead us to
observe what happens to others, empathize with their pain, then turn to our
own self-interest in dreaded anticipation of the same disaster befalling us.
The week I wrote this section the ABC television news program 20/20 ran a
story about kids who dropped heavy stones off freeway overpasses that smashed
through car windows, killing or maiming the passengers within. The producers
appealed to the fearful side of our nature by introducing viewers to the
hapless victims with mangled faces and shattered lives, evoking our empathy;
they then engaged our self-love with the rhetorical question: “could this
happen to you?” Could it? Not likely. In fact, it is so
unlikely you would be better off Worrying about lightning striking you. Then
why do we worry about such matters? Because our moral intuitions have been
hijacked by what Religions play on our fears by hyping
up the doom and gloom of this world to make the next world seem all the more
appealing. On May 17, 1999, an
evangelical Christian friend of mine insisted that we are in the “end times”
because the Bible prophesied an increase in immorality and malfeasance. Since
everyone knows crime is an epidemic problem in How can
this be? Benjamin Disraeli had an answer: lies, damn lies, and statistics. We
may be good storytellers, but we are lousy statisticians. Glassner shows, for example, that women in their forties
believe they have a 1 in
10 chance of dying from breast cancer, but their real lifetime odds are more
like 1 in 250. He notes that some “feminists
helped popularize the frightful but erroneous statistic that two of three
teen mothers had been seduced and abandoned by adult men” when in reality it
“is more like one in ten, but some feminists continued to cultivate the
scare well after the bogus stat had been definitively debunked.” The bigger
problem here is the law of large numbers, where million-to-one odds happen
280 times a day in Herein lies
the problem for our moral sensibilities. We are fed numbers daily that we
cannot comprehend about threats to our security we cannot tolerate. Better
safe than sorry, right? Not necessarily. Pathological fear takes a dramatic
toll on our psyches and wallets. “We waste tens of billions of dollars and
person-hours every year,” Glassner notes, “on
largely mythical hazards like road rage, on prison cells occupied by people
who pose little or no danger to others, on programs designed to protect young
people from dangers that few of them ever face, on compensation for victims
of metaphorical illnesses, and on technology to make airline travel—which is
already safer than other means of transportation—safer still.”’ Of all the
institutions feeding our fears, the media takes center stage for
sensationalism (“if it bleeds, it leads”). An These
notable shortcomings to our intuitive instincts aside, however, there is
something quite empowering about intuition that cannot be dismissed,
especially in the moral realm. In fact, intuition is so ingrained into the
human psyche that it cannot be separated from intellect (witness the
aforementioned intuitive afflictions). So integrated are intuition and
intellect that I have coalesced them into what I call the Captain Kirk
Principle, from an episode of Star Trek entitled “The Enemy
Within.” Captain James T. Kirk has just beamed up from planet
Alpha 177,
where magnetic anomalies have caused the transporter to
malfunction, splitting Kirk into two beings. One is cool, calculating, and
rational. The other is wild, impulsive, and irrational. Rational Kirk must
make a command decision to save the landing party now stranded on the planet
because of the malfunctioning transporter. (Why they could not just send
down a shuttle craft to rescue them is never explained, and thus this episode
has contributed to the long list of Star Trek bloopers.) Because his
intellect and intuition have been split, Kirk is paralyzed with indecision,
bemoaning to Dr. McCoy: “I can’t survive without him [irrational Kirk]. I
don’t want to take him back. He’s like an animal—a thoughtless, brutal
animal. And yet it’s me.” This psychological battle between intellect and
intuition was played out in nearly every episode of Star Trek in the
characters of the ultrarational Mr. Spock and
hyperemotional Dr. McCoy, with Captain Kirk as the near-perfect embodiment of
both. Thus, I call this balance the Captain Kirk Principle: intellect is
driven by intuition, intuition is directed by intellect. For most scientists, intuition is the bête noire of a rational life, the enemy within to beam away faster than a Vulcan in heat. Yet the Captain Kirk Principle is now finding support from a rich new field of scientific inquiry brilliantly summarized by psychologist David G. Myers, who demonstrates through countless well-documented experiments that intuition—”our capacity for direct knowledge, for immediate insight without observation or reason”—is as much a part of our thinking as analytic logic. Physical intuition, of course, is well known and accepted as part of an athlete’s repertoire of talents—Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods come to mind. But there are social, psychological, and moral intuitions as well that operate at a level so fast and subtle that they cannot be considered a product of rational thought. Harvard’s Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal, for example, discovered that the evaluations of teachers by students who saw a mere thirty-second video of the teacher were remarkably similar to those of students who had taken the entire course. Even three two-second video clips of the teacher yielded a striking .72 correlation with the course student evaluations! How can this be? We have an intuitive sense about people that allows us to make reasonably accurate snap judgments about them. Research consistently shows how even
unattended stimuli can subtly affect us. In one experiment, for example,
researchers flashed emotionally positive scenes (a kitten or a romantic
couple) or negative scenes (a werewolf or a dead body) for forty-seven
milliseconds before subjects viewed slides of people. Although subjects
reported seeing only a flash of light for the initial emotionally charged
scenes, they gave more positive ratings to people whose photos had been
associated with the positive scenes. In other words, something
registered somewhere in the brain. That also appears to be the situation in
the case of a patient who was unable to recognize her own hand, and when
asked to use her thumb and forefinger to estimate the size of an object was
unable to do it. Yet when she reached for the object her thumb and forefinger
were correctly placed.2 Another study revealed that stroke
patients who have lost a portion of their visual cortex are consciously blind
in part of their field of vision. When shown a series of sticks, they report
seeing nothing, yet unerringly identify whether the unseen sticks are
vertical or horizontal. That’s weird. Intuition especially plays a powerful
role in “knowing” other people. The best predictor of how well a
psychotherapist will work out for you is your initial reaction in the first
five minutes of the first session.2s The reason for this is
because for psychotherapy (talk therapy), research shows that no one modality
or style is better than any other. It does not matter what type or how many
degrees the therapist has, or what particular school the therapist attended,
or whom the therapist trained under. What matters most is how well suited the
therapist is for you, and only you can make that judgment, one best made
through intuition, not intellect. Similarly, people with dating experience
know within minutes whether or not they will want to see a first date again.
That assessment is not made through tallying up the pluses and minuses of the
date in some intellectual process equivalent to a mental ledger; we don’t
usually ask for a date’s résumé or curriculum vitae before agreeing to a
second date. But we do perform something like this in a quick intuitive
assessment based on subtle cues—body language, facial expressions, voice
tone and volume, wit and humor, politeness, and so forth—all of which can be
assessed relatively quickly. To the extent that lie detection
through the observation of body language and facial expressions is accurate
(overall not very), women are better at it than men because they are more
intuitively sensitive to subtle cues. In experiments in which subjects
observe someone either truth telling or lying, although no one is
consistently correct in identifying the liar, women are correct
significantly more often than men. Women are also superior in discerning
which of two people in a photo was the other’s supervisor, whether a
male-female couple is a genuine romantic relationship or a posed phony one,
and when shown a two-second silent video clip of an upset woman’s face, women
guess more accurately then men whether she is criticizing someone or
discussing her divorce. People who are highly skilled in
identifying “micromomentary” facial expressions
are also more accurate in judging lying. In testing such professionals as
psychiatrists, polygraphists, court judges, police officers, and secret
service agents on their ability to detect lies, only secret service agents
trained to look for subtle cues scored above chance. Most of us are not good
at lie detection because we rely too heavily on what people say rather than
on what they do. Subjects with damage to the brain that renders them less
attentive to speech are more accurate at detecting lies, such as aphasic
stroke victims who were able to identify liars 73 percent of the time when focusing on
facial expressions (normal subjects did no better than chance). In support
of an evolutionary explanation of a moral sense, research shows that we may
be hardwired for such intuitive thinking: a patient with damage to parts of
his frontal lobe and amygdala (the fear center) is
prevented from understanding social relations or detecting cheating,
particularly in social contracts, even though cognitively he is otherwise
normal. Cheating detection in social relations, such as in the role of gossip
in small groups, is a vital part of our evolutionary heritage. Although
most secular theories of morality are rationalist theories, recent research
on moral intuition reveals that the Captain Kirk Principle is at work in the
moral realm as well. Consider the following moral dilemma and how our moral intuitions
respond: you witness a runaway trolley headed for five people. If you throw a
switch to derail the trolley, it will save the five but send it down another
track to kill one person. Would you do it? Most people say that they would.
Rationally, it seems justified: sacrificing one life to save five seems like
the logical thing to do. However, consider this minor modification of the moral
dilemma: you witness a runaway trolley headed for five people. You can stop
the trolley by pushing a person onto the track, killing that one individual
but saving five lives in the process. Would you do it? It is the same moral
calculation, but most say they would not do it. Why? Cognitive biases also play a powerful
role in our moral intuitions. The self-serving bias, for example, which
dictates that we tend to see ourselves in a more positive light than others
actually see us, leads us to think we are more moral than others. National
surveys, for instance, show that most businesspeople believe they are more
moral than other businesspeople. Even social psychologists who
study moral intuition think they are more moral than other social
psychologists! And we all believe that we will be rewarded for our
ethical behavior. A U.S. News & World Report study asked
Americans who they think is most likely to make it to heaven: 19 percent
said 0. J. Simpson, 52 percent
said former President Bill Clinton, 6o percent said Princess Diana, 65 percent
chose Michael Jordan, and, not surprisingly, 79 percent elected Mother
Teresa. But the person survey takers thought most likely to go to heaven, at
87 percent, was the survey taker him- or herself!33 Consistent with these experimental
results are studies that show people are more likely to rate themselves
superior in “moral goodness” than in “intelligence,” and community residents
overwhelmingly see themselves as caring more about the environment and other
social issues than other members of the community do.34 In one
College Entrance Examination Board survey of 829,000
high school seniors,
none rated themselves below average in the category “ability to get along
with others,” 6o percent rated themselves in the top 10 percent, and 25 percent said they were in the top 10 percent. Likewise,
just as behaviors determine perceptions—smokers overestimate the number of
people who smoke, for example—moral behaviors determine moral perceptions:
liars overestimate the number of lies other people tell. One study found that
people who cheat on their spouses and income taxes overestimate the number of
others who do so. Although in science we eschew intuition
because of its many perils, we would do well to remember the Captain Kirk
Principle that intellect and intuition are complementary, not competitive.
Without intellect our intuition may drive us unchecked into emotional chaos.
Without intuition we risk failing to resolve complex social dynamics and
moral dilemmas, as Dr. McCoy explained to the indecisive rational Kirk: “We
all have our darker side—we need it! It’s half of what we are. It’s not
really ugly—it’s human. Without the negative side you couldn’t be the
captain, and you know it! Your strength of command lies mostly in him.” If
you’re scientifically bent, you’re likely to really enjoy The
Science of Good and Evil. If you’re more philosophically inclined, this
book may become frustrating to read. Steve
Hopkins, March 23, 2004 |
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ã 2004 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the April 2004
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The
Science of Good and Evil.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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