Just Babies (21 page)

Now, one can take these claims as metaphorical, as poetic expressions of awe at our wondrous capacities. But Collins, D’Souza, and Wallace all mean it literally—they are claiming that God
actually did something to us
, presumably in the few million years since we split off from other primates. Since our beliefs and choices emerge from the workings of our physical brains, this means that, at some point in our evolution, God literally restructured the human brain. It follows, then, that careful neuroscientists should be able to find the brain areas that God modified and observe how his divine handiwork differs from the more prosaic products of biological evolution. If Collins and others are right, then, our advanced morality could lead us to the greatest discovery in the history of science—decisive proof of the existence of God.

But they are not right. The mere existence of altruistic motivations that serve no reproductive purpose—even those that motivate choices that are bad for us and bad for our genes, as when we risk our lives to save strangers—is
fully consistent with biological evolution. After all, natural selection is not clairvoyant; it responds to current contingencies, not to anticipated future environments, so maladaptive behavior in the here and now is fully consistent with evolutionary theory. This is easy enough to see in other domains. Lust presumably evolved to motivate people to engage in reproductively relevant sexual behaviors, yet many men get aroused by pornography and go on to spill their seed in a manner that does nothing to increase their chances of producing children and grandchildren. Is this wasteful activity an evolutionary mystery, and thereby proof of divine intervention? Of course not. Similarly, certain altruistic tendencies that have evolved through natural selection might be triggered now by situations that have no biological payoff.

Collins, D’Souza, and Wallace are right when they claim that certain puzzling aspects of our morality are not accidents: they manifest a design and a purpose that need to be accounted for. But, as I have argued throughout this book, it is mistaken to assume that these higher moral faculties are part of human nature. Insights such as the wrongness of slavery could hardly be innate if they weren’t appreciated by people hundreds of years ago, and even certain aspects of morality that are assumed by many to be part of our innate endowment, such as kindness toward strangers, actually turn out to be lacking in babies and young children.

These critics are like men marveling at eyeglasses and arguing that since natural selection couldn’t have created such intricate wonders they must be the handiwork of God.
They are forgetting the third option.
We
made them. Similarly, our enhanced morality is the product of human interaction and human ingenuity. We create the environments that can transform an only partially moral baby into a very moral adult.

C
ONSIDER
first the power of custom. My emphasis throughout the book has been on moral sentiments and moral judgments, but neither of these is necessary for good behavior.

Think about tipping. This act is purely altruistic in the sense that it helps others at a cost to oneself, without any tangible benefit. But it typically lacks a moral motivation. Few people, as they are about to leave behind a few dollars or add a bit to their credit card, actively take the perspective of the person who just served them, flinching at his imagined outrage at being stiffed or warming in the empathetic appreciation of her pleasure at getting an 18 percent tip. Few of us think about the moral logic of tipping, mulling over how little servers get paid and concluding that we really should hand over something extra. Few of us experience any other-directed motivation at all. We just calculate the tip and leave it, with nothing in our heads but the math.

Now, it is possible that this thoughtless action is the result of prior contemplation: perhaps each of us at one time thought about the logic and morality of tipping and decided it was the right thing to do, and over time
this kindness turned into reflex. This is how we succeed at complicated activities like tying our shoes—we start by consciously attending to our actions, and soon awareness fades; we
proceed on autopilot. Perhaps this is true of morality more generally. As Aristotle noted, one of the traits of virtuous individuals is that they aspire to turn thoughtful good behavior into mindless habit, to grow into the sorts of people who do the right thing without ever thinking about it.

Still, much of the behavior that we see as good is picked up as part of one’s culture, as custom, and never ruminated upon. It is like learning to speak. When a two-year-old learns that dogs are called “dogs,” she will not usually ask why dogs have this particular name or why things have names at all. These are good questions, and they may occupy her when she gets older, but young children have to learn many tens of thousands of words, and the way to do this is by simply copying what others do, not working out the logic behind it. Indeed, much of what we learn is unconscious. As a result of my upbringing, for instance, I prefer to keep a certain physical distance from other people. But I notice this only when I’m with people who have been raised differently, just as I am conscious of what we call things in English only when hearing a speaker of another language use different words.

Or recall
Herodotus’s story about how Darius brought together the Greeks who would burn the bodies of their dead fathers with the Indians who would eat the bodies of their dead fathers. Each group was horrified at the acts of the other, because they believed that their own custom was the only appropriate way to treat the dead. They believed this, not because they had each previously engaged in a process of choosing between the alternative ways of treating the
dead, but because they had never thought of the alternatives in the first place. Herodotus ends this story by writing, “One can see by this what custom can do,” and he goes on to call custom “king of all.”

We are most influenced by the behaviors that we see repeatedly, but even brief experience can have an effect. Researchers have studied
how children between the ages of about six and eleven behave after observing the charitable acts of strangers. In a typical experiment, children played a bowling game and got some sort of reward afterward, such as tokens they could trade in for prizes. Before playing, children watched someone else play, either an adult or another child, and then saw that person donate some proportion of his or her reward into a charity jar for the poor. The more that this first person donated, researchers found, the more the child donated. The experience of watching the other person was more powerful than explicit exhortations to give to charity—in fact, some studies found that preaching had a
negative
effect.

As any parent would tell you, though, children pick up bad behaviors along with the good. If the model puts nothing in a jar, children often put in nothing as well—even though they would otherwise have given a little. Interestingly, some studies find that children are more influenced by bad behavior than by good.
In a recent set of experiments by the psychologist Peter Blake and his colleagues, three- to six-year-olds watched as their parent gave away resources to another adult. Children saw Mom or Dad either being quite selfish (giving one out of ten stamps) or very generous
(giving nine out of ten stamps). Later, when dividing up their own resources with another child, children imitated the parent’s example more strongly when the parent gave very little than when their parent gave a lot. It’s as if they were looking for an excuse to be selfish and the bad behavior of their parent provided it.

One can learn to be good without much moral motivation, then, just by mimicking the goodness of others. But this just pushes the question back: Why are the
others
so nice? Where do these customs come from? In the United States two hundred years ago, it was the custom of whites to keep black slaves. Indeed, many people considered slavery to be a moral institution, a conclusion derived in part from biblical justification and in part from the genuine belief that this arrangement was best for all members of the society, including the slaves. A white child raised in such a society would be prone to absorb such views, just as she would learn how to talk and how to tip and how close to stand to strangers.

O
NE
way to think about our changing moral attitudes is in terms of
“the moral circle.” This metaphor was developed by William Lecky, a nineteenth-century historian, and was popularized by Peter Singer in his 1981 book,
The Expanding Circle.
The moral circle encompasses those individuals whose fates we are concerned with, who matter to us.

Lecky believed that the circle starts small and expands over history: “Men come into the world with their benevolent affections very inferior in power to their selfish ones,
and the function of morals is to invert this order.… At one time the benevolent affections embrace merely the family, soon
the circle expanding
includes first a class, then a nation, then a coalition of nations, then
all humanity
, and finally, its influence is felt in the dealings of man with the animal world.” In
The Descent of Man
, Darwin approvingly cites Lecky and goes on to observe that, over the course of our species’ development,
our sympathies “became more tender and widely diffused, so as to extend to the men of all races, to the imbecile, the maimed, and other useless members of society, and finally to the lower animals.”

Darwin’s remark about “other useless members of society” reminds us, first, of the many changes in how we talk about certain groups since 1871—nobody today would so casually describe mentally or physically impaired individuals as “useless.” Second, and more importantly, his phrase reminds us that the engine that drives the expansion of the moral circle cannot be sheer self-interest. Expanding the moral circle doesn’t necessarily confer any material gains upon us; we don’t profit by caring more for “the imbecile” and “the maimed.”

One force that can expand the circle is personal contact—when people are of equal status, working toward a common goal, interactions between individuals often reduce prejudice. Military units and sports teams are two frequently cited examples, but various studies from the 1950s have confirmed
the power of personal contact in a range of other circumstances: white housewives living in desegregated public housing, white police officers who were
assigned black partners, and so on. Parents are being reasonable, then, when they try to extinguish racism in their children by putting them in racially diverse schools—since, under the right conditions of contact, the children will expand their moral circles to include members of other races.

Another important factor in expanding the circle is
exposure to stories. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum explains how stories teach children to empathize and identify with people whose perspectives and identities may be very different from their own: “We see personlike shapes all around us: but how do we relate to them?… What storytelling in childhood teaches us to do is to ask questions about the life behind the mask, the inner world concealed by the shape. It gets us into the habit of conjecturing that this shape, so similar to our own, is a house for emotions and wishes and projects that are also in some ways similar to our own; but it also gets us into the habit of understanding that that inner world is differently shaped by different social circumstances.”

Now, stories are not necessary for relating to the minds of others. As we discussed earlier, even one-year-olds think of the “personlike” shapes around them as having emotions and wishes and projects that are distinct from their own. But Nussbaum is talking about
habit
, not ability, and it is worth taking seriously her claim that exposure to stories makes us more prone to think about the minds of other people. Also, there are some “personlike shapes” whom we wouldn’t naturally tend to consider. I had never given much
thought to
the plight of prisoners in solitary confinement, but after reading a moving journalistic discussion, I now feel differently.

Stories can elicit compassion on a case-by-case basis, but they can also lead us to question our moral principles and our habits of behavior. As the psychologist Steven Pinker puts it,
“Exposure to worlds that can be seen only through the eyes of a foreigner, an explorer, or a historian can turn an unquestioned norm (‘That’s the way it’s done’) into an explicit observation (‘That’s what our tribe happens to do now’).” This is the point that Herodotus was making when he told the story of the Greeks and the Indians. Travel broadens, and literature is a form of travel.

Now, some object that this explanation ignores the moral complexity of literature. The literary critic Helen Vendler writes that
“treating fictions as moral pep-pills or moral emetics is repugnant to anyone who realizes the complex psychological and moral motives of a work of art.” The legal scholar Richard Posner points out that
many of the great stories express terrible values—rape, pillage, murder, human and animal sacrifice, concubinage, and slavery in the
Iliad;
anti-Semitism, racism, and sexism in the works of Shakespeare and Dickens; and so on. Posner concludes, “The world of literature is a moral anarchy.”

He notes as well that there is little evidence that frequent readers are any nicer than everybody else. The Nazis were famously literate;
Joseph Goebbels was said to love Greek tragedy. Some psychologists would disagree here, citing recent findings that
people who read more fiction
have somewhat higher social skills than people who prefer nonfiction. But even if this is true, it doesn’t follow that they are nicer people. Also, it’s unclear what to make of this sort of correlation; perhaps it’s not that reading makes one more social but instead that social people enjoy fiction more. Women read more fiction than men, and this may be because women are, in certain regards, more social than men. And along these lines, Jennifer Barnes, a former graduate student in my lab, found that
adults who suffer from mild forms of autism, and hence who are socially impaired, are less interested in fiction than a more normal population. So while it’s clear that one’s social and empathetic capacities influence one’s interest in fiction, we can’t be confident that the effect goes in the other direction.