Human Hardwiring and Morality
Human Hardwiring and Morality
As scientists noted that such similarity of belief can often best be explained by the human brain's hardwiring, these scientists were naturally led to look for other areas of common belief in babies as well as across human times and cultures. While there are many such areas, I will discuss just two: human beliefs in and about morality and religion. Morality and religion, like the beliefs mentioned above, are pervasive across times and cultures. The details differ in important and sometimes striking ways. But it is just as striking that every culture indeed has both moral codes and religious beliefs and practices. And this fact led some scientists to suppose that human brains are hardwired to form beliefs about morality and religion as well.
There is indeed a good deal of evidence that lots of human behavior we would describe as “moral” arises from innate or hardwired dispositions. Like beliefs and desires associated with contagion avoidance, moral beliefs and desires appear to be part of our built-in “operating system.” One quick example will suffice to give us a glimpse of this. Across times and cultures human beings display firm beliefs and feel strong desires pulling them in the direction of punishing those who do wrong. When we learn that someone has abused a child, or even when we see someone run a red light (perhaps right in front of the police cruiser!), we feel strongly that the wrongdoer deserves to be penalized (the severity of the suffering depending on the severity of the crime).
One might think that this disposition toward punishment is just a reasoned reaction to fundamental principles of morality and justice. But there is good evidence that something more is going on. In fact, there is reason to think that our tendency to want to punish is wired into our thought processes in a way that runs far ahead of any carefully reasoned thought process. This has been made evident by a variety of experiments, perhaps the most telling of which is one carried out by the Swiss scientist and economist Ernst Fehr. In Fehr's study subjects would play a game with a series of groups of three other individuals. Each person starts the game with $20. In the game each player can contribute as much as they choose, $0–$20, to a central pool of funds. After the contributions are made, the total pot is revealed and tallied, and each player receives back 40 percent of the total amount contributed. Thus, if everyone donated all his money, the total pot would be $80, and each player would receive 40 percent of that total ($32), thus generating a $12 profit (as should be clear, the game includes a bank to supply additional funds to the pot if necessary). However, if one player contributes nothing and the rest contribute all of theirs, the total pot would be $60, and each player—including the noncontributor—would receive $24 dollars. The cheapskate would now have his original $20 plus the $24 earned from other contributions to the pot, for a total of $44, while his fellow players had earned a mere $4 profit. This, as you might guess, would make the other players angry. As the experiment is set up, players would play with (or against!) their fellow players only one time (something they are told before the game starts). So, if you were the cheapskate, you could move on to the next round of the game, with all new players, and no one would know of your past cheapskate behavior. In other words, your cheating behavior need never “come back to haunt you” in future rounds.
However, Fehr's game had one further twist. After the funds were contributed, tallied, and redistributed, players had a chance to do one more thing. Each player could contribute up to $10 to punish another player of their choosing (for any reason). For every dollar spent on punishing, the victim of the punishment would be charged $3. The funds received from all of the punishing activity went back into the bank.
A player who wants to maximize her earnings (if reasoning carefully) should (a) contribute nothing and (b) never punish. Let's think just about (b) here. Punishing in this game really serves no point for the punisher. For the punisher, it simply costs him money that will never be recouped in future rounds (since even if the punisher is deterred, that will only help the punished players' future fellow players). And yet, despite this, players in the game show a marked tendency to spend a lot of their resources on this pointless punishing activity.
What does this show? The reasonable conclusion is this: we are hardwired to seek to punish wrongdoers even when there is no possible future benefit to doing so. This aspect of our moral beliefs and desires is an innate disposition that we can escape only by expending great effort to resist our innate tendencies.