The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (53 page)

Today these connections regularly make headlines. Scientists link crime to low serotonin. Molecular biologists try — with slight but growing success — to isolate genes that incline the brain toward mental illness. A natural chemical called oxytocin is found to underlie love. And an unnatural chemical, the drug Ecstasy, induces a deeply benign state of mind; now anyone can be Gandhi for a day. People are getting the sense — from news in genetics, molecular biology, pharmacology, neurology, endocrinology — that we are all machines, pushed and pulled by forces that we can't discern but that science can.

This picture, though utterly biological, has no special connection with evolutionary biology. Genes, neurotransmitters, and the various other elements of mind control are being studied, for the most part, without special inspiration from Darwinism.

But Darwinism will increasingly frame this picture and give it narrative force. We will see not only that, for example, low serotonin encourages crime, but why: it seems to reflect a person's perception of loreclosed routes to material success; natural selection may "want" that person to take alternate routes. Serotonin and Darwinism together could thus bring sharp testament to otherwise vague complaints about how criminals are "victims of society." A young inner-city thug is pursuing status by the path of least resistance, no less than you; and he is compelled by forces just as strong and subtle as the ones that have made you what you are. You may not reflect on this when he kicks your dog or snatches your purse, but afterwards, on reflection, you may. And you may then see that you would have been him had you been born in his circumstances.

The landslide of news about the biology of behavior is just beginning. People, by and large, haven't succumbed to it and concluded
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that we're all mere machines. So the notion of free will lives on. But it shows signs of shrinking. Every time a behavior is found to rest on chemistry, someone tries to remove it from the realm of volition. That "someone" is typically a defense lawyer. The most famous example is the "Twinkie defense." A lawyer convinced a California jury that a junk-food diet had left his client with a "diminished capacity" to think clearly, and that full "premeditation" of his crime — murder — was thus impossible. Other examples abound. In both British and American courts, women have used premenstrual syndrome to partly insulate themselves from criminal responsibility. As Martin Daly and Margo Wilson rhetorically asked in their book Homicide, can a "high-testosterone" defense of male murderers bo far behind?
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Of course, psychology was eroding culpability even before biology came along to help it. "Posttraumatic stress disorder" is a defense lawyer's favorite malady — said to encompass everything from "battered-woman syndrome" to "depression-suicide syndrome" (which purportedly leads people not only to commit crimes, but to bungle them, with the unconscious goal of being caught). The dis order was originally couched in purely psychological terms, with little reference to biology. But work is constantly under way to link such maladies to biochemistry, because physical evidence is what really gets a jury's attention. Already, an expert witness touting a conjectured posttraumatic stress disorder subcategory called "action-addict syndrome" (a dependency on the thrill of danger) has traced the problem to endorphins, which the criminal desperately craves, and obtains via crime.
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And compulsive gamblers, it turns out, have abnormally high levels of endorphins in their blood when they gamble. Thus (the argument goes) gambling is a disease. Well, we all like our endorphins, and we all do things to get them, ranging from jogging to sex. And when we do those things, our endorphin levels are abnormally high. No doubt rapists feel good at some point during or after their crimes; no doubt that pleasure has a biochemical basis; and no doubt this basis will come to light. If defense lawyers get their way and we persist in removing biochemically mediated actions from the realm of free will, then within decade
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that realm will be infinitesimal. As, indeed, it should be — on strictly intellectual grounds, at least.

There are at least two ways to respond to the growing body of evidence that biochemistry governs all. One is to use the data, perversely, as proof of volition. The argument runs as follows: Of course all these criminals have free will, regardless of the state of their endorphins, blood-sugar levels, and everything else. Because if bio-chemistry negated free will, then none of us would have free will! And we know that's not the case. Right? (Pause.) Right?

This sort of whistling in the dark is often heard in the books and articles that bemoan crumbling culpability. It was also implicit in the referendum that finally removed the "diminished capacity" defense from California law. Presumably the voters sensed that if something as natural as sugar could indeed turn you into a robot, that would mean everyone's a robot, and no one deserves punishment. Precisely. The second response to dehumanizing biochemical data is Darwin's — complete surrender. Give up on free will; no one really deserves blame or credit for anything; we are all slaves of biology. We must view a wicked man, Darwin wrote in his notes, "like a sickly one." It would "be more proper to pity than to hate & be disgusted."

In short: brotherly love is a valid doctrine. The hatred and revulsion that send people to jail and to the gallows — and, in other contexts, lead to arguments, fights, and wars — are without intellectual foundation. Of course, they may have a practical foundation, Indeed, that's the problem: blame and punishment are as practically neccssary as they are intellectually vacuous. That's why Darwin took comfort in the hope that his insights would never become common.

What to do? If Darwin knew that the cat, alas, was out of the bag, that the material underpinnings of behavior were on public display, what would he suggest? How should society respond to creeping knowledge of our robotic nature? There are hints in his notes. To begin with, we should try to disentangle punishment from the visceral impulses that drive it. This will sometimes mean narrowing its use,
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restricting it to the cases where it actually does some good. "[I]t is right to punish criminals; but solely to deter others," Darwin wrote. This is very much in the spirit of the time-honored utilitarian prescription. We should punish people only so long as that will raise overall happiness. There is nothing good, in itself, about retribution, the suffering inflicted on wrongdoers is just as sad as the suffering of everyone else, and counts equally in the grand utilitarian calculus. It is warranted only when outweighed by the growth it brings in the welfare of others, "through the prevention of future crime."
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This idea strikes many people as reasonable and not terribly radical, but taking it seriously would mean overhauling legal doctrine In American law, punishment has several explicit functions. Most are strictly practical: keeping the criminal off the streets, discouraging him from crime after his release, discouraging others who witness his fate, rehabilitating him — all of which a utilitarian would applaud. Bui one of the stated functions of punishment is strictly "moral": retri bution, pure and simple. Even if punishment serves no discernible purpose, it is supposedly good. If on some desert island you happen upon a ninety-five-year-old prison escapee whose very existence was long ago forgotten, you will serve the cause of justice by somehow making him suffer. Even if you don't enjoy dishing out the punishment, and if no one back on the mainland ever hears about it, you can rest assured that, somewhere in the heavens, the God of Justice is smiling.

The doctrine of retributive justice doesn't play the prominent roll-it once played in the courts. But there is discussion these days, es pecially among conservatives, of reemphasizing it. And even now it is one reason courts spend so much time deciding whether people "volitionally" committed a crime — as opposed to being "insane" or "temporarily insane" or having "diminished capacity," or whatever If utilitarians ran the world, messy words like "volition" would never enter the picture. The courts would ask two questions: (a) Did the defendant commit the crime? and (b) What is the practical effect of punishment — on the criminal's own future behavior, and on the behavior of other would-be criminals?

Thus, when a woman who has been beaten or raped by her husband kills or mutilates him, the question wouldn't be whether
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she has a "disease" called battered-woman syndrome. And when a man kills his wife's lover, the question wouldn't be whether jealousy is "temporary insanity." The question, in both cases, would be whether punishment would prevent these people, and similarly situated people, from committing crimes in the future. This question is impossible to answer precisely, but it's less messy than the question of volition, and it has the added virtue of not being rooted in an outmoded worldview.

Of course, the two questions have a certain amount in common. The courts tend to recognize "free will," and hence justifiable "blame," in the kinds of acts that can be deterred by the anticipation of punishment. Thus, neither a utilitarian nor an old-fashioned judge would send an out-and-out psychotic to jail (though both might institutionalize him if he seemed likely to repeat the crime). As Daly and Wilson write, "The enormous volume of mystico-religious bafflegab about atonement and penance and divine justice and the like is the attribution to higher, detached authority of what is actually a mundane, pragmatic matter: discouraging self-interested competitive acts by reducing their profitability to nil."
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All told, then, "free will" has been a fairly useful fiction, a rough proxy for utilitarian justice. But all the time-wasting debates now in progress (Is alcoholism a disease? Are sex crimes an addiction? Does premenstrual syndrome nullify volition?) suggest that it is beginning to outlive its usefulness. After another decade or two of biological research, it may be more trouble than it's worth; and in the meantime, the scope of "free will" may have shrunk considerably. We will then face (at least) two choices: either (a) artificially restore free will to robustness by redefining it (proclaim, for example, that the existence of a biochemical correlate has no bearing on whether a behavior is volitional); or (b) dispense with volition altogether and adopt explicitly utilitarian criteria of punishment. Both of these options amount to roughly the same thing: as the biological (that is, environmental-genetic) underpinnings of behavior come into view, we must get used to the idea of holding robots responsible for their malfunctions — so long, at least, as this accountability will do some good.

Dispensing with the idea of volition might strip the legal system
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of some emotional support. Jurors so readily mete out punishment in part because of their vague sense that it's an inherently good thing. Still, this vague sense is a stubborn sense, unlikely to be extinguished by a change of legal doctrine. And even where it weakens, the practical value of punishment will likely remain clear enough to keep jurors doing their jobs.

The truly formidable threat posed by scientific enlightenment is in the moral, not the legal, realm. The problem here isn't that the sense of justice, the governor of reciprocal altruism, will break down entirely. Even people of extreme detachment and humanity, if they feel cheated, lied to, or otherwise mistreated, manage to summon enough indignation for utilitarian purposes. Darwin believed in everyone's ultimate blamelessness, but he could conjure up anger when pressed. He found himself "burning with indignation" at the behavior of his bitter critic, Richard Owen. Writing to Huxley, Darwin said, "I believe I hate him more than you do."
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As a rule, if we all worked toward the ideal of universal com passion and forgiveness, drawing on all the enlightenment modern science has to offer, the meager progress we made would hardly bring civilization tumbling down around us. Few of us are anywhere near overkill in the brotherly-love department. And it is unlikely that all the demystifying logic of modern biology will get us there. The hard animal core of TIT FOR TAT is secure against the ravages of truth.

The real moral danger is less direct. Moral systems draw their strength not just from the principles behind TIT FOR TAT-aggrieved parties punishing offenders — but from society at large pun ishing offenders. Charles Dickens was afraid to take up publicly with his mistress not because his wife would have punished him. (He had already left her; and how much power did she have anyway?) He was afraid, rather, of infamy.

And so it is whenever a strong animal impulse is consistently thwarted by a moral code: violation would bring low repute, the avoidance of which is also a strong animal impulse. Effective moral codes fight fire with fire.
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Indeed, they fight fire with an elaborate fire-making machine. Robert Axelrod, whose computer tournament so nicely supported the theory of reciprocal altruism, has also studied the ebb and flow of norms. He finds that robust moral codes rest not just on norms but on "metanorms": society disapproves not only of the code's violators but also of those who tolerate violators by failing to disapprove.
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Had Dickens gone public with his adultery, his friends might well have had to cut ties with him or else suffer punishment themselves for failing to punish.

It is in the world of norms and metanorms, with its oblique and diff use retaliation, that modern science takes its toll on moral fiber. We needn't worry about creeping determinism muting a victim's rage. But the rage of spectators may wane as they come to believe that, for example, male philandering is "natural," a biochemical compulsion — and that, anyway, the wife's retributive furor is an arbitrary product of evolution. Life — the life, at least, of those other than ourselves, our kin, and our close friends — becomes a movie that we watch with the bemused detachment of an absurdist. This is the specter of a thoroughly postmodern morality. Darwinism isn't its only source, nor is biology more broadly, but together the two could do much to feed it.