MARC D. HAUSER is a psychologist and biologist at Harvard University. He is the author of Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think.
Here’s an idea based on a few studies, some of which my students and I have conducted: It appears that a wide variety of moral judgments are immune to cultural and demographic variation, including religious background. Controlling for age, people with only a high school education are no different from people with advanced degrees when it comes to judging the permissibility of harming another person in certain contexts. People with religious backgrounds are no different in this regard from atheists and agnostics.
Two further pieces of evidence make these results striking and provide support for the idea that some aspects of our moral psychology are immune to cultural background. First, neither utilitarian nor rule-based/nonconsequentialist perspectives are of help in navigating these dilemmas. For example—to cite the classic trolley problem—a person can flip a switch to prevent a trolley from killing five people by diverting it onto a side track, where it will kill only one. Alternatively, the person can push a man onto the tracks, killing him but saving the five people ahead. The utilitarian option, favored by some religions and cultures, would have subjects always pick saving as many people as possible. The rule-based, or nonconsequentialist, option favored by others would have subjects avoid killing even to forestall the deaths of several other people. But these two theoretical positions fail to resolve the variety of moral dilemmas that people confront, leaving the test subjects in a quandary with respect to delivering logically consistent explanations for their judgments of right and wrong. What looks at first like a rational position, backed by religious and legal doctrine or cultural norms, ends up as inconsistent, irrational blundering. Second, some test subjects are clearly religious whereas others are not, yet their judgments and justifications are in many cases the same. If an atheist or an agnostic provides an incoherent explanation for a particular judgment, so too does a Jew, Catholic, Muslim, or Buddhist.
I think that our evolved moral instincts account for this seemingly universal pattern. Others will argue that it is the insignia of divine creation. I don’t think this argument flies. Let’s unpack the logic into observations, inferences, and conclusions. For a host of moral dilemmas involving harming or helping others, there are—in the studies conducted so far—no statistically significant differences in the patterns of judgments, regardless of whether or not the test subjects are religious. When people with religious backgrounds judge these cases, their religious doctrine does not provide a set of bulletproof principles for resolving the dilemmas.
We can interpret this result in two ways: Either a divine power created our universal moral sense or evolution did. At this point, we reach a stalemate, because there is no proof for or against a divine power. But those who think a divine power created our universal moral sense have a problem: How do they explain the observation of universal intuitions regarding harming and helping others and the fact that some religions hold principles that are not universal? If you believe that your religion, with its set of doctrinal principles, is perfectly aligned with a divine power’s principles, then you have to agree that the universal incidence of the countervailing intuition is derived from some source other than the divine. Biology would be the logical candidate. Alternatively, you could argue that a divine power is the source of the universal moral sense but that religions have simply chosen to live by other principles. But if religions are free to choose in this way, deriving their inspiration from something other than the divine, then much of the motivation and emotion underlying formal religion is in jeopardy. This is an irrational position to uphold.
What is dangerous is not the idea that we are endowed with a moral instinct—a biologically evolved faculty for delivering universal verdicts of right and wrong that is immune to religion and other cultural phenomena. What is dangerous is holding on to an irrational position that starts by equating morality with religion and then moves to an inference that a divine power fuels religious doctrine. This step forces religious people to concede that religious doctrine provides an incoherent account of people’s moral judgments.
It’s a conclusion that ought to lead people to search for inspiration outside the church. I personally prefer the Darwinian pulpit.