Just Babies (22 page)

Still,
the right fiction at the right time can have an effect. There is significant historical evidence that literature, movies, television shows, and the like really have influenced the trajectory of human history, which supports Nussbaum’s rebuttal to Posner—the Nazis might have read a lot, but they didn’t read the right sort of books. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 book,
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, the bestselling novel of the nineteenth century, helped whites to imagine slavery from the perspective of slaves and played a significant role in changing Americans’ attitudes toward the institution. Dickens’s
Oliver Twist
prompted changes in how children were treated in nineteenth-century Britain; the work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn introduced people to the horrors of the Soviet gulag; movies such as
Schindler’s List
and
Hotel Rwanda
expanded our awareness of the plights
of people (sometimes in the past, sometimes in other countries) whom we might never encounter in real life.

For a more recent example, consider how radically the treatment of racial and sexual minorities in the United States has changed over the last few decades. Much of the credit here should go to television; we often relate to characters on our favorite shows as if they were our friends, and millions of Americans regularly interacted with pleasant and amusing and nonthreatening blacks and gays on programs like
The Cosby Show
and
Will and Grace.
This can be powerful stuff; it might well be that the greatest force underlying moral change in the last thirty years of the United States was the situation comedy.

I admit that this is just a hunch, but it’s backed up by evidence from other countries, where the introduction of television has had an observable effect on moral beliefs. Robert Jensen and Emily Oster find that
when rural Indian villages start to get cable television, more women attend school, people find spousal abuse less acceptable, and there is a decrease in the preference for sons over daughters. Jensen and Oster suggest that these changes result from exposure to soap operas, which tend to present more cosmopolitan values. Similar findings have emerged from studies in Brazil and Tanzania.

There is no law of nature, though, stating that the messages conveyed through stories have to be morally good ones. For every story that expands the moral circle, motivating the audience to take the perspective of a distant other, one can find another that shrinks it, describing how people
outside the in-group are evil or disgusting. For every
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
and
Schindler’s List
there is a
Birth of a Nation
and a
Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Any theory of moral change has to explain why the expansive stories have more purchase than the cruel ones and why we are motivated to create such good stories in the first place.

N
O DISCUSSION
of morality would be complete without discussing religion, as many see this as a major force for moral progress.

Actually, many people, especially in America, take this further—
they think you cannot be good without believing in God. Many Americans say that they would not vote for an otherwise qualified atheist to be president—in fact, atheists come off worse in this regard than Mormons, Jews, and homosexuals. When people are asked about who shares their vision of American society, atheists are at the bottom.
They are seen as self-interested and immoral, as both potential criminals and snooty elitists.

Some suggest that even if individuals can be good without God, still, they owe some of that goodness to having grown up in a society founded on religious ideals. The philosopher and legal scholar Jeremy Waldron argues that many of the key moral insights that lead us to care about others have their origin in the teachings of the great monotheistic faiths:
“Challenging the limited altruism of comfortable community has been one of the great achievements of the Western religions.… What I have in mind are the prescriptions of the Torah, the uncompromising preaching
of the Prophets and the poetry of the Psalmist aimed specifically to discomfit those whose prosperity is founded on grinding the faces of the poor, on neglecting the stranger, and on driving away the outcast. I have in mind too the teaching and example of Jesus Christ in associating with those who were marginal and despised, and in making one’s willingness to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, take in the stranger, and visit those who are in prison a condition of one’s recognition of Him.”

If Waldron is right, then religion explains, at least in part, the expansion of the moral circle. Other scholars, though, hold the opposite view, agreeing with Christopher Hitchens that
religion is “violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children.”

Now, any fair-minded observer would have to agree that many moral projects that we now see as positive, such as the establishment of major international charities and the American civil rights movement, have been grounded in religious faith and supported by religious leaders. But it should be equally obvious that
some of the most horrific atrocities in history have been motivated by religious faith. Supporters of religion can go through the Bible and the Koran and cite the enlightened parts; religion’s critics can easily rattle off long passages that we now see as morally grotesque, such as divine approval of genocide, slavery, and mass rape. Indeed, some passages reflect a moral code that is almost comically cruel, as in the story of
how “little
children” teased the prophet Elisha about his baldness (“Go up, thou bald head”) and so Elisha cursed them, and then two she-bears came out of the woods and “tare forty and two children of them.”

There has to be an answer to the question of whether religion has been a net gain or a net loss for our species, but nobody knows what the answer is, and I’m not sure anyone ever will. The problem is that religion is
everywhere.
Right now (and for as far back as we know), most people are religious: most of us believe in one or more Gods; most believe in some sort of afterlife; most engage in some sort of religious practice. This makes it difficult to separate the influence of religion from every other aspect of being human and makes it particularly hard to assess claims about nonreligious societies and individuals. Certainly there are atheists who are moral, but perhaps their morality benefits from the religiosity of those societies in which they live. Certainly there are decent countries with a large proportion of atheists, such as Denmark, but such countries are just a few generations from being devout, so perhaps they have inherited their virtues from their religious past. Asking how humanity would fare without religion is like asking what things would be like if we had three sexes instead of two, or if humans could fly.

We might have better luck with a more modest question:
Are the religious individuals in a society more moral than the secular ones? Many researchers have looked into this, and the main finding is that there are few interesting findings. There are subtle effects here and there: some studies
find, for instance, that the religious are slightly more prejudiced, but this effect is weak when one factors out other considerations, such as age and political attitudes, and exists only when religious belief is measured in certain ways.

The only large effect is that religious Americans give more to charity (including nonreligious charities) than atheists do. This holds even when one controls for demographics (religious Americans are more likely than average to be older, female, southern, and African American).

To explore why this relationship exists, the political scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell asked people about life after death, the importance of God to morality, and various other facets of religious belief. It turns out that
none
of their answers to such questions were related to behaviors having to do with volunteering and charitable giving. Rather, participation in the religious community was everything. As Putnam and Campbell put it,
“Once we know how observant a person is in terms of church attendance, nothing that we can discover about the content of her religious faith adds anything to our understanding or prediction of her good neighborliness.… In fact, the statistics suggest that even an atheist who happened to become involved in the social life of the congregation (perhaps through a spouse) is much more likely to volunteer in a soup kitchen than the most fervent believer who prays alone. It is religious belongingness that matters for neighborliness, not religious believing.”

This importance of community, and the irrelevance of belief, extends as well to the nastier effects of religion.
The psychologist Jeremy Ginges and his colleagues found
a strong relationship between religiosity and support for suicide bombing among Palestinian Muslims, and, again, the key factor was religious community, not religious belief: mosque attendance predicted support for suicide attacks; frequency of prayer did not. Among Indonesian Muslims, Mexican Catholics, British Protestants, Russian Orthodox in Russia, Israeli Jews, and Indian Hindus, frequency of religious attendance (but again, not frequency of prayer) predicts responses to questions such as “I blame people of other religions for much of the trouble in this world.”

It might seem perverse to conclude that religious beliefs are toothless when it comes to morality. Take suicide bombing. Even if one’s attitude is best predicted by religious attendance and not religious belief, it does seem reasonable to conclude, as Richard Dawkins does, that
someone who believes that God wants them to kill infidels is going to be a lot more enthusiastic about killing infidels than someone who doesn’t believe in God in the first place. More generally, religions make explicit moral claims, about abortion, homosexuality, duties to the poor, masturbation, and just about everything else. Surely
this
would have an effect on the psychologies of their followers?

Maybe, but an alternative is that
religious belief does not cause moral belief—it reflects it. This is a view defended by the journalist and scholar Robert Wright in
The Evolution of God.
Wright is particularly interested in the expansion and contraction of what we have been describing here as the moral circle, and he tracks how monotheistic religions have
changed their attitudes toward those outside the group. For Wright, these shifts correspond to more general cultural changes. When the moral circle contracts, perhaps because of war or some other external threat, people “tend to find a scriptural basis for intolerance or belligerence.” When it expands, “they’re more likely to find the tolerant and understanding side of their scriptures.” Believing that scripture itself causes these changes is like concluding that newspaper headlines cause plane crashes.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that religious belief is irrelevant to morality. It might serve as an
accelerant
—part of a self-reinforcing system. Individuals or societies who are inclined to hate some group of people—homosexuals, say—will seek support from religious texts and the words of religious figures; once they find it, this can reinforce and justify and intensify their hatred. Those who are inclined toward compassion or justice can find support for this as well, and hence religion can ground causes that even the staunchly secular will deem morally positive.

W
E HAVE
considered some of the forces that drive moral change, but we’ve ignored so far the complexity of many moral decisions. This is particularly the case with regard to the moral circle, where we have followed scholars like Lecky and Darwin in assuming that the bigger the circle, the better. This is a plausible enough position to start from; one might say that the main problem with humanity up to now is that our circle of concern has tended to be so cruelly small.

But it’s not hard to see that
a bigger moral circle isn’t always a better one. Should we expand our circle to fetuses, treating them as morally equivalent to children? What about embryos? Zygotes? Some would say yes all the way down, and indeed, many believe that society’s refusal to protect these individuals from destruction is a moral wrong on a par with the Holocaust. What about nonhuman animals? In Paris in the 1500s,
lowering a cat onto a fire was considered an acceptable form of public entertainment; as one historian put it: “The spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized.” We don’t do this anymore; should the next step be to stop hunting animals, eating them, and using them for medical research? Some would say yes to all of this too, but then what about the proper treatment and protection of skin cells? Personal computers? Viruses? Not everything has moral weight, and a too-big moral circle makes life worse for those individuals who plainly do have rights and moral worth. If a zygote is treated the same as a child, this may harm pregnant women; if we choose not to experiment on nonhuman animals, this may hinder the treatment of disease in people. These are the sorts of dilemmas that we have to deal with.

The recognition of these problems suggests a missing ingredient in our story so far. This is reason. When thinking about morality, we make inferences, ferret out inconsistencies, and explore analogies. We can assess clashing claims by seeing how well they capture our intuitions about
situations that are both real and imaginary. In doing all of this, we are exercising the same capacity that we use to develop scientific theories and deal with practical problems, like setting up a business or planning where to go on vacation. This capacity might be more developed in some people, but we all possess it. It has driven moral progress over history: just as we’ve used reason to make scientific discoveries, such as the existence of dinosaurs, electrons, and germs, we’ve also used it to make moral discoveries, such as the wrongness of slavery.

I am aware that this position will seem outlandish to some. It is certainly unfashionable. The current trend in psychology and neuroscience is to downplay rational deliberation in favor of gut feelings and unconscious motivations. The political and cultural commentator
David Brooks provides an articulate defense of this trend in his bestselling book
The Social Animal.
He argues that what matters is not cold-blooded rationality but what lies beneath: “emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, genetic predispositions, character traits, and social norms.” Psychology and neuroscience, Brooks tells us, “[remind] us of the relative importance of emotion over pure reason, social connections over individual choice, character over IQ.”