Review: “The Moral Instinct”

An article appeared in the New York Times recently called “The Moral Instinct.” The tagline is “Evolution has endowed us with ethical impulses. Do we know what to do with them?” The author, Steven Pinker, is a professor of philosophy; in the article he dissects the concept of morality, where it comes from, and what we ought to do about it, especially in a culture with competing ideas of what moral behavior is. I wasn’t intending to write about it, but some parts of the argument troubled me and wouldn’t let go. I found myself wanting to say at least something in the face of this polished, sophisticated, and entirely atheistic discussion of morality.

 

First off, I want to point out the one area that I think Pinker touches on the truth. He argues for the reality of morality, in much the same way that mathematics has reality: we are born with an intuitive sense of it which then develops as we grow. That, insofar as it goes, is actually quite a remarkable statement to make in today’s relativistic culture. (Perhaps that’s why Pinker waits until page seven of eight to make the claim.) So far so good – but I don’t agree with what he builds on that foundation.

 

For one thing, though he ends up with the position that morality has its own reality (or offers that position as a possibility; it is not clear whether this is his own position), Pinker argues that it is evolution that has given us a sense of morality, which can be described in terms of five different “spheres”: harm, fairness, community (or group loyalty), authority and purity (according to an anthropologist cited in the essay). Pinker then argues that differences between moral codes of different cultures comes largely from differing emphases of the importance of the spheres; some cultures value fairness highly, others value authority.

 

If you set aside the origins question, the idea of different spheres of morality seems to be a useful way of examining the issue. My concern is that while Pinker is assuming that there is an underlying morality common to all, his actual explication of the “moral spheres” can be used to justify a profoundly relativistic viewpoint.

 

All this brings us to a theory of how the moral sense can be universal and variable at the same time. The five moral spheres are universal, a legacy of evolution. But how they are ranked in importance, and which is brought in to moralize which area of social life — sex, government, commerce, religion, diet and so on — depends on the culture. Many of the flabbergasting practices in faraway places become more intelligible when you recognize that the same moralizing impulse that Western elites channel toward violations of harm and fairness (our moral obsessions) is channeled elsewhere to violations in the other spheres. Think of the Japanese fear of nonconformity (community), the holy ablutions and dietary restrictions of Hindus and Orthodox Jews (purity), the outrage at insulting the Prophet among Muslims (authority). In the West, we believe that in business and government, fairness should trump community and try to root out nepotism and cronyism. In other parts of the world this is incomprehensible — what heartless creep would favor a perfect stranger over his own brother?

The ranking and placement of moral spheres also divides the cultures of liberals and conservatives in the United States. Many bones of contention, like homosexuality, atheism and one-parent families from the right, or racial imbalances, sweatshops and executive pay from the left, reflect different weightings of the spheres. In a large Web survey, Haidt found that liberals put a lopsided moral weight on harm and fairness while playing down group loyalty, authority and purity. Conservatives instead place a moderately high weight on all five. It’s not surprising that each side thinks it is driven by lofty ethical values and that the other side is base and unprincipled.

 

Here we have simply a description of what people think about morality… but behind it is the subtle assumption that, if both sides think they are right, that they are both wrong. The idea of “moral spheres” can with almost no effort at all be used to justify nearly anything. Just a couple of days after I read this essay, I was browsing through the religion section at Barnes and Noble and happened to pick up a book that claimed to explain the Bible’s perspective on sex. In the section on “homosexuality,” the book took the line that for the ancient Israelites, male/male sex was wrong primarily because it represented a transgression of boundaries, which was a serious offense for that culture at that time. The argument went on to say that in our culture, we no longer find boundary transgressions to be offensive; just as we no longer worry about wearing linen and flax together, we no longer need to worry about homosexuality. A neat little argument, except that it doesn’t work: for one thing, something could be both a transgression of boundaries and a sin for other reasons, and for another thing, while many aspects of the Old Testament law no longer apply after the coming of Christ, the New Testament is quite clear that sexual immorality isn’t one of them.

 

The larger point is that I could see how easy it is to use the idea of “moral spheres” to bolster cultural relativism. In the case of Pinker’s essay, as he describes different moral senses in different cultures, it does not occur to him that some of those moral senses might be off track.

 

As we go on, to Pinker’s credit he does notice the problem with the relativistic approach to morality that inevitably comes out of a biological explanation:

 

Now, if the distinction between right and wrong is also a product of brain wiring, why should we believe it is any more real than the distinction between red and green? And if it is just a collective hallucination, how could we argue that evils like genocide and slavery are wrong for everyone, rather than just distasteful to us?

 

But Pinker makes short work of God as the source of morality:

 

Putting God in charge of morality is one way to solve the problem, of course, but Plato made short work of it 2,400 years ago. Does God have a good reason for designating certain acts as moral and others as immoral? If not — if his dictates are divine whims — why should we take them seriously? Suppose that God commanded us to torture a child. Would that make it all right, or would some other standard give us reasons to resist? And if, on the other hand, God was forced by moral reasons to issue some dictates and not others — if a command to torture a child was never an option — then why not appeal to those reasons directly?

 

It seems to me that Pinker has disposed of God rather hastily. He does touch on a philosophical question about God, but does no service to his argument by leaving the answer in Plato’s hands. Yes, Plato was a great philosopher, but he is also an example of the limits of the reason, left to itself, to discover God. Plato understood that God is real – as we can do, by our own observations of nature and self-reflection – but at his point in history and culture, he had not heard God’s self-revelation. Now, that puts us in another argument, potentially, which is whether there is such a thing as revealed truth or not, but Pinker doesn’t acknowledge that there’s even the possibility.

 

Morality comes from God, and He is good; that is part of His identity, being completely good. Contrary to pop-culture philosophy, it doesn’t somehow “disprove” God to recognize that there are things an omnipotent God can’t do: He can’t do what’s logically impossible (make a square circle) or what goes against His own nature (do something evil).

 

That is what the Ten Commandments are really about – not about us, so much, but about God. By giving us a list of commandments to guide us in moral behavior, we learn that God is good. In a world of competing deities whose claim to worship lay on what they could do for the worshiper (or what they’d do to the worshiper if said worship was unsatisfactory), there was no way for the early Israelites to know that the God who was One was also good, unless He let them know that. And He did.

 

Generations of philosophers have worked to develop an understanding of morality as given by God, but Pinker presses the “skip” button and bypasses the entire Christian intellectual tradition. That’s a pity, because that’s precisely where we find the insights that Pinker is looking for.

 

Pinker continues,

 

This throws us back to wondering where those reasons could come from, if they are more than just figments of our brains. The only other option is that moral truths exist in some abstract Platonic realm, there for us to discover, perhaps in the same way that mathematical truths (according to most mathematicians) are there for us to discover.

 

The only other option? Like I said, the author has rather too swiftly washed his hands of God. If there is indeed an abstract Platonic realm of moral truths, how were they created? And does it really make sense that moral truths, which fundamentally all have to do with relationship, just “are”? I think it makes a whole lot more sense that our morality comes from a Maker, Who is good.

 

One thing that the “Platonic morals” idea fails to explain is why we humans have such a hard time actually living up to these morals. (CS Lewis deals with this brilliantly in Mere Christianity). Nobody who has a normal intelligence has any difficulty with basic mathematics, with adding 2+2 and getting 4 every time. We do quite a lot of math on a daily basis even if we’re not “math” people; we take it for granted. Morality is different. We agree both that it exists, and that we routinely struggle with living up to it. Why? If we can see what constitutes “virtue”, why can’t we live that way?

 

Paul articulates it perfectly in Romans 7: “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” Any naturalistic theory of the moral instinct must also account for why we sense it so strongly but at the same time are so unable to fulfill it. All our other instincts, for food, sleep, sex, recreation – these we can fulfill. But we can’t live up to the dictates of morality. Why not?

 

There is no naturalistic explanation that adequately explains it; what does explain our failure is the doctrine of the Fall. We are fallen creatures; we are broken. We have turned away in pride from the source of all morality, all good, and yet we are made in God’s image. Taken together, the fact that we have a strong moral sense and the fact that we cannot live up to it, point strongly to the existence of a good God and a fallen world.

 

One test of a theory is in its explanatory power: how well does it account for other things? The Christian understanding of morality as coming from God fits the evidence out there in the world; it allows us an exceptional understanding of both our aspirations and our failures. That’s solid support of its truth value, that it captures both the upside and the downside. For someone who is determined to resist the possibility that God exists, this theory gets rejected a priori. But it’s there.

 

I’ve left for last what ends up being the most troubling part of the whole essay – its opening.

 

Pinker asks the reader who is more admirable: Mother Teresa, Bill Gates, or Norman Borlaug? He says that most people will choose Mother Teresa, and he goes on to claim that this response is due to a “moral illusion”:

 

Yet a deeper look might lead you to rethink your answers. Borlaug, father of the “Green Revolution” that used agricultural science to reduce world hunger, has been credited with saving a billion lives, more than anyone else in history. Gates, in deciding what to do with his fortune, crunched the numbers and determined that he could alleviate the most misery by fighting everyday scourges in the developing world like malaria, diarrhea and parasites. Mother Teresa, for her part, extolled the virtue of suffering and ran her well-financed missions accordingly: their sick patrons were offered plenty of prayer but harsh conditions, few analgesics and dangerously primitive medical care.

It’s not hard to see why the moral reputations of this trio should be so out of line with the good they have done. Mother Teresa was the very embodiment of saintliness: white-clad, sad-eyed, ascetic and often photographed with the wretched of the earth. Gates is a nerd’s nerd and the world’s richest man, as likely to enter heaven as the proverbial camel squeezing through the needle’s eye. And Borlaug, now 93, is an agronomist who has spent his life in labs and nonprofits, seldom walking onto the media stage, and hence into our consciousness, at all.

I doubt these examples will persuade anyone to favor Bill Gates over Mother Teresa for sainthood. But they show that our heads can be turned by an aura of sanctity, distracting us from a more objective reckoning of the actions that make people suffer or flourish. It seems we may all be vulnerable to moral illusions the ethical equivalent of the bending lines that trick the eye on cereal boxes and in psychology textbooks.

 

What are the lessons that we are invited to draw from this?

 

1. Personal virtue is not real. Note that Mother Teresa is dismissed as having an “aura of sanctity” that turns our heads.

 

2. The ends are more important than the means; what we do is separate from and more important than who we are.

 

3. Material well-being is more important than spiritual health.

 

I don’t believe that any of these conclusions are true – and I think they are all three of them very dangerous.

 

Our cynical age wants to dismiss Mother Teresa, to say that she was a sham, a self-deceiver, wasting her time. We want to say that saving souls is a waste of time, because we have no souls to save. Why? Because if we admire Mother Teresa, we are saying at some level of our being that we recognize how we ought to be more like her – which is to say, more like Christ, Whom she served. Mother Teresa showed and taught compassion to the outcasts of the earth, the most wretched human beings – reached out and actually touched them. How much easier it is to write a check to an organization, to let someone else help the hopeless, the poor, the damaged… how much easier it is to keep a safely sanitary distance between us and them. So Bill Gates is a much safer moral hero than Mother Teresa. He lets us keep our materialistic goals – make billions of dollars! be envied and powerful! – while tacking on the self-satisfaction of “doing good” by spending some of that money on the faceless needy. Of course we want to have Bill Gates as our hero instead of Mother Teresa. Except that our hearts know that Mother Teresa is more admirable.

 

Of course we want to say that “who we are” is a side issue from “what we do.” Who we are is expressed in every word we say, every relationship we have, every decision we make. And so “who we are” lies at the very root of what we do. Can God take our actions and turn them to good, even if they come from the wrong source? Of course He can. That doesn’t excuse us from taking responsibility for ourselves. It is so much easier to say that what we believe is unimportant, as long as we do what’s right. But in the end, we act as we believe. We cannot do otherwise. And that is why we admire Mother Teresa – in what she did, we could see who she was, and see that she was admirable.

 

And the last conclusion – that material well-being is more important than spiritual health – that is the conclusion that our culture relentlessly pushes for. We are in a culture of more, more, more; a culture of always wanting more. But are we content? How much peace do we have? Real peace, real happiness? As I look around, I see people who are hungry, who are starving in the midst of plenty, trying to fill the empty places in their souls with all the wrong things. I know what that feels like that – I was there for many years, trying to either ignore the hunger, deny it, or fill it with things. But material well-being can come at too high a cost. It can come at the cost of our souls; certainly it can come at the cost of pain, of denying our true needs, of death of the self.

 

Of course our culture wants to venerate Bill Gates – his path to doing good takes us along the path of wanting more, getting more, wanting more, with the promise of feeling better just around the corner. But that’s the real illusion. And when we admire Mother Teresa, even just a little bit, we are experiencing not a “moral illusion” but a glimpse of the truth: that our happiness, our wholeness, lies with One Who is more than anything we can do or get on our own.

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