RadioLab, Evolved Morality, and Empathy

My last post covered some intersting moral dilemmas given in the “Morality” RadioLab podcast.  But that podcast had some other interesting material as well.

More on Morality

The hosts, Robert and Jhad, interview an obviously bright guy with a brain scanner who scans people’s brains when they are asked moral questions, like the train dilemmas (see my previous post).  Based on his observations of brain activity when given moral dilemmas, he suggests that many of our moral responses are simply from our “inner chimp”, that is our psychological and physiological responses that evolution has programmed us to do for the survival of our species.

Robert and Jhad next visit an expert on chimp behavior who shows them how giving berries to chimps results in conflict.  The chimps fight for a bit over the berries, but then calm down when some of the older chimps take charge and a system of sharing the berries is followed.  The chimp expert seems to take exception to the use of the term “humane” (obviously derived from human) to describe moral behavior.  Additionally, a case is mentioned where a young boy at a zoo in Germany somehow falls into a gorilla enclosure, and the gorilla, instead of harming the baby as the bystanders feared, handed it back to its parent.  This ties not only evolution but also empathy to morality.

Eventually a much more difficult moral dilemma is presented to people, based upon the last epsidoe of the TV show M*A*S*H.  The dilemma is this: you live in a village and enemy soldiers are walking into it.  You and all the villagers are in hiding in a hut, so the soldiers won’t find you.  You have a baby, and the baby has a cold, so it is coughing and making noise.  The question then is, do you kill your baby by suffocation in order to save your own life and the lives of all the other innocent villagers, or do you allow your baby to live so that the soldiers find and kill you, your baby, and the villagers?

Interestingly enough, it was found that people were pretty evenly split between killing and not killing the baby.  At this point, the brain expert with the brain scanner says it turns out humans do have some uniquely human things that go on during tough moral dilemmas.  Apparently some areas right behind our eyebrows “light up” on the scanner as we are rationally trying to decide upon our moral course.

My Thoughts

It was a fascinating podcast, and it relates to a post I made some time ago which you can see here.  Observing animal behavior is a very interesting thing, and it is impressive how they have learned to share for the benefit of their entire group.  Yet had evolution favored the survival of creatures who followed different behaviors, say, the strong taking the food from the weak, we wouldn’t deem the food-stealing chimps as morally lacking.  They are just doing what they must for survival, following the “law of the jungle.”

Now let’s try a similar thought experiment with humans.  What if human morality had evolved differently, because evolution is driven by meaningless chance?  Different environments or circumstances could have resulted in humans living in situations in which killing the crippled meant the human species survived when caring for them would have hurt survival.  But then let’s say the human race eventually thrived and no longer needed to kill the crippled to survive.  But humans killed the crippled anyway because of millions of years of evolutionary instinct.  To be logically consistent, the moral naturalist must hold that  this needless killing would not be wrong, it would just be an artifact of the evolutionary drive for survival. The moral naturalist could say that such killing is no longer necessary, but what he could not say was that it was wrong or that humans were obligated to change their behavior.  Those of us who believe morality is objective (ie real and independent of ourselves)  can simply say “killing needlessly is wrong because humans have intrinsic value.”   I submit that this is a far superior view that better accounts for the data.

What about the empathic mother gorilla who put the human baby out of danger?  There is no doubt that we are glad that she responded to the baby as she did.  But would she have committed a morally wrong act or failed to meet a moral obligation to show empathy if she had instead killed the child?  I think not.  She would be surviving according to her instincts.  Another question is, can an animal like a gorilla really have empathy or just appear to display empathy?  I’m not sure the answer to that question, but I’ve seen animals be especially kind to their masters when they are sad or hurt, and there are other stories, especially of mother animals saving creatures of other species.  I guess I am content to say that some animals can truly have empathy.  But they are not obligated to have empathy because they are not moral agents.

I think it was telling that even the naturalistically-inclined brain expert from the podcast found humans to be unique from animals due to their capacity for moral reasoning (as evidenced by the brain scanner during the M*A*S*H scenario.)  That finding seems to support the idea that our ability to use reason to grapple with right and wrong is what makes us morally responsible agents with obligations to show empathy (among other things) whether it benefits our survival or not.