Science of Good and Evil

by Michael Shermer

  I says, “Maybe it ain’t a sin. Maybe it’s just the way folks is.” Well, I was layin’ under a tree when I figured that out, and I went to sleep. And it come night, an’ it was dark when I come to. They was a coyote squawkin’ near by. Before I knowed it, I was sayin’ out loud … “There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do … . And some of the things folks do is nice, and some ain’t nice, but that’s as far as any man got a right to say.”69

  This is not in any way to endorse a purely situational ethics or relative morality. The stuff some folks do really ain’t nice in most circumstances, to most people, most of the time. But there is no such thing as pure sin or pure virtue, any more than there is pure evil or pure good. The purpose of this exercise in ethical debunking is to shift the focus from sin and virtue, evil and good as metaphysical Platonic essences to quantifiable human behaviors that can be scientifically studied, causally understood, and ultimately modified or dealt with according to the needs and dictates of society. Evil forces do not exist, but evil acts are an all-too-human expression. Walt Kelly’s cartoon character Pogo put it simply: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”70

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it more elegantly in his analysis of the gulags of the Soviet Union, surely a den of evil if ever there was one: “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”71

  Surely none of us, as Aeschylus suggested in Prometheus Bound:

  Prometheus, Prometheus,

  hanging upon Caucasus

  Look upon the visage

  Of yonder vulture:

  Is it not thy face,

  Prometheus?72

  But remember, it was Prometheus who brought us knowledge, and through knowledge comes power, including the power of cultural amity to override natural enmity. We may always live in a world with walls; in recent history, however, the stone and mortar walls enforced by men with guns are gradually being replaced by invisible boundaries enforced by social contracts; in the future even these invisible boundaries may be replaced by semipermeable lines of demarcation, kept open through negotiation and cooperative exchange. It is a visage worthy of humanity.

  4

  MASTER OF MY FATE: MAKING MORAL CHOICES IN A DETERMINED UNIVERSE

  He that is good is free, though he be a slave; he that is evil is a slave, though he be a king.

  —St. Augustine, The City of God, IV, A.D. 427

  On March 30, 1981, as United States President Ronald Reagan emerged from the Washington Hilton Hotel, he was gunned down in his tracks by John W. Hinckley, Jr., an obsessive loner who, in the scuffle following the initial shots, also blew a hole in the head of Reagan’s press secretary, James Brady, and wounded two others. Hinckley was immediately arrested. Remarkably, although Hinckley clearly fired the shots and never denied this fact, he pleaded not guilty. How can you not be guilty when your act is observed by dozens of eyewitnesses, filmed and seen by millions, and you admit you committed the crime?

  Hinckley claimed that he was insane at the time of the assassination. His insanity? He was “crazy” about the movie star Jodie Foster, who he said obsessed him. His was the so-called insanity defense, known legally as NGRI, or “Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity.” To determine whether Hinckley was insane—that he was not responsible for his actions and thus should be placed in a mental institution instead of jail—the court subjected him to an extensive psychological evaluation. Three government-appointed psychiatrists determined that he was sane at the time of the crime because of the considerable planning required to attempt a political assassination. But his defense-appointed psychiatrists diagnosed him with several severe mental disorders, including Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorder and Paradoxical Rage. Amazingly (although maybe we should not be amazed any longer), the jury agreed that Hinckley was not responsible for his actions because he was insane. Reflecting modern understandings of the “out of control” nature of some extreme human behaviors, the jury acquitted him. Rather than being imprisoned for shooting the president, Hinckley was sent to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., where he underwent psychological observation and treatment. In time, he even earned privileges to leave the facility for supervised visits to his parents’ home, and eventually was granted unsupervised trips off the facility grounds.1

  By sharp contrast, nearly two and a half centuries earlier, on January 5, 1757, French king Louis XV was charged by an unknown assailant, Robert-François Damiens, who broke through the king’s protective guards, grabbed his shoulder with one hand, and stabbed him with a knife held in the other. Damiens was a one-time menial in the college of the Jesuits in Paris. During a religious dispute between Pope Clement XI and the parliament of Paris over whether sacraments should be granted to Jansenists and Convulsionnaires, Damiens got in his mind the idea that religious peace would be restored if the king were eliminated. For a crime resembling Hinckley’s (albeit with a different motive), Damiens was convicted for attempted regicide and sentenced to receive a rather harsher punishment than Hinckley got:

  Pincered at the breasts, arms, thighs and calves, his right hand holding the knife with which he perpetrated the said act, he was to be burned on the hand with sulfur, to be doused at the pinion points with boiling oil, molten lead, and burning resin, and then to be dismembered by four horses, before his body was burned, reduced to ashes, and scattered to the winds. Then one of the executioners, a strong and robust man, grasped the metal pincers, each one foot long, and by twisting and turning them, tore out huge lumps of flesh, leaving gaping wounds which were doused from a red-hot spoon. Between his screams, Damiens repeatedly called out, “My God, take pity on me!” and “Jesus, help me!” The final operation lasted a very long time, because the horses were not used to it. Six horses were needed: but even they were not enough. The executioner asked whether they should cut him in pieces, but the Clerk ordered them to try again. After two or three more attempts, the executioners took out knives, and cut off his legs … . They said that he was dead. But when the body had been pulled apart, the lower jaw was still moving, as if to speak.2

  As if that were not enough, Damiens’s home was razed to the ground, his brothers and sisters were ordered to change their names, and the rest of his family, including his wife and daughter, were banished from the country.

  These two dramatically different forms of punishment reflect changing social and cultural attitudes toward behavior and its causes over the past two centuries. Have we changed for the better? This is a moral question with broad and sweeping ramifications for psychology, sociology, social policy and legislation, and political and ethical theory.

  In the previous chapter we discussed theodicy, or the problem of evil, where God’s omnipotence, omnibenevolence, and the existence of evil were seen to be incompatible. The noted Oxford theologian and man of letters C. S. Lewis, in his moving posthumously published work A Grief Observed, reflected on this problem after the premature death from cancer of his beloved wife, Joy: “But is it credible that such extremities of torture should be necessary for us? Well, take your choice. The tortures occur. If they are unnecessary, then there is no God or a bad one. If there is a good God, then these tortures are necessary. For no even moderately good Being could possibly inflict or permit them if they weren’t.”3

  A similar set of logical tenets arises in theology over the problem of free will, and in my opinion there is no satisfactory solution for either of them. Squaring free will with God’s omniscience and omnipotence is problematic. How can He hold us responsible for making “choices” we could not have made freely if He is all-knowing and all-powerful? If we are volitional beings, then we can make free choices, which means that God is limited in knowledge, power, or both. And a limited God is not the God of Abraham, Jesus, and Muhammad. God
Himself, as it were, offered this solution in Milton’s Paradise Lost, in an explanation for how Adam and Eve could have freely chosen to disobey Him even though he already knew their disobedience was foreordained by his power:

  They themselves decreed

  Their own revolt, not I. If I foreknew,

  Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault

  Which had no less proved certain unforeknown.4

  The French philosopher René Descartes suggested a similar way out in less poetic form: “We will be free from these embarrassments if we recollect that our mind is limited while the power of God, by which he not only knew from all eternity what is or can be, but also willed and preordained it, is infinite. It thus happens that we possess sufficient intelligence to know clearly and distinctly that this power is in God, but not enough to comprehend how he leaves the free actions of men indeterminate.”5 After tackling the problem of evil, C. S. Lewis turned his acumen to the problem of free will, expanding on Descartes’s resolution of placing God outside of time:

  But suppose God is outside and above the Time-line. In that case, what we call “tomorrow” is visible to Him in just the same way as what we call “today.” All the days are “Now” for Him. He doesn’t remember you doing things yesterday; he simply sees you doing them, because, though you’ve lost yesterday, He has not. He doesn’t foresee you doing things tomorrow; He simply sees you doing them: because, though tomorrow is not yet there for you, it is for Him. You never supposed that your actions at this moment were any less free because God knows what you are doing.6

  Even without including God in the equation, a new paradox arises in its stead. If we live in a determined universe, how can we make free moral choices? If genetics, biology, culture, and history combine to create a suite of factors that determine our thoughts and behaviors, how can society hold us morally and legally responsible for our actions? Is it legally, philosophically, or scientifically tenable to argue that some or most of us are free most of the time to make moral decisions, while a few (like John Hinckley) are absolutely determined (in other words, they could not have acted otherwise) some of the time to make immoral decisions? Hinckley, it was decided, had lost his free will. He was so under the control of inner forces and outer circumstances that he was determined to commit this act of violence. Determined by what precisely? Presumably by some mix of his genes and his environment, of internal traits unique to him and external states to which he was subjected.

  Since we are all subject to some blend of heredity and environment—internal traits and external states—then why couldn’t any of us cop an insanity plea, or at least a determinism appeal, for any of our immoral actions? Indeed, lots of people do. Consider the various defenses employed to build a case against moral freedom and for criminal determinism: the Twinkie defense (high blood sugar caused Dan White to kill San Francisco’s Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk), the abuse excuse (the Menendez brothers murdered their parents because they were abused as children), black rage syndrome (Colin Ferguson shot six white people on a train because he snapped under the pressure of our racist society), pornography defense (watching other people have sex causes men to rape women), PMS defense (premenstrual syndrome caused a woman to assault a police officer), and television violence (watching other people being violent makes people more aggressive). In the case of John Hinckley, the American court held that he was a determined puppet, and while he didn’t get off scot-free, his punishment was far less draconian than that of Robert-François Damiens, whom the French court held was responsible for his crime because he freely chose to commit it, even though his justification might just as easily be construed today as being insane. (Perhaps a modern attorney would argue that Damiens was the victim of “regirage”—uncontrollable anger over being subjected to the rule of a king.) Which view of human nature is correct? Are we free or are we determined? And if we are determined, how can we make free moral choices and be held accountable for them? This is what I call the paradox of moral determinism, a subset of the larger free will/determinism problem.

  Appointment in Samara: Free Will and the Problem of Determinism

  The English novelist William Somerset Maugham aptly expressed the paradox of free will and determinism in his thought-provoking parable “Appointment in Samara”:

  Death speaks:

  There was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, “Master, just now when I was in the market place I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture. Now, please lend me your horse and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samara and there Death will not find me.”

  The merchant lent him his horse and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop, he went. Then the merchant went down to the market place and saw me standing in the crowd and approached me and said, “Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning?”

  “That was not a threatening gesture,” I replied. “It was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I have an appointment with him tonight in Samara.”7

  Although the meaning of Maugham’s homily is more in line with predestination, the point is made that there is a sense of inevitability in life’s drama. Although we may think we are freely going about our business, we are actually under the control of hidden masters. Consider the intricate workings of a finely crafted watch. If the hands of the watch possessed consciousness and self-awareness, they might feel like they were freely moving about the watch face, but we the watchmakers would know better. We know that the watch hands are determined because we know that the spring, cogs, wheels, and various parts all work together to cause the hands of the watch to move. We know that the watch is not a volitional being. It does not freely choose to keep accurate time. If the watch is running slow, we do not assign to it such anthropomorphic traits as indolence. It doesn’t want to be late. It simply can’t help it, and we take it to a jeweler to determine the cause of the problem. We do not assert that the problem with the watch is an insoluble one due to its volitional nature.

  This is the axiom of determinism, the doctrine that every event in the universe has a prior cause, and that all effects are predictable if all causes are known. The free will/determinism problem is an ancient one, but for our purposes we begin in the seventeenth century with the rise of modern philosophy through such philosophers as René Descartes, and the ascent of modern science through such scientists as Isaac Newton. With the advent of the Cartesian/Newtonian mechanistic worldview, philosophers and scientists began to think of the universe and everything in it, including us, as determined in a mechanistic manner. The metaphor of choice, in fact, was that the universe is like a clock. The origin and action of every atom, molecule, cell, organism, person, planet, and star are the effects of some mechanical cause or series of mechanistic causes. This view became so pervasive that it was codified by the French mathematician Marquis de Laplace in what has since become known as Laplace’s demon: “Let us imagine an Intelligence who would know at a given instant of time all forces acting in nature and the position of all things of which the world consists; let us assume, further, that this Intelligence would be capable of subjecting all these data to mathematical analysis. Then it could derive a result that would embrace in one and the same formula the motion of the largest bodies in the universe and of the lightest atoms. Nothing would be uncertain for this Intelligence. The past and the future would be present to its eyes.”8 Alexander Pope elegantly rhymed the problem this way:

  Think we, like some weak prince, the Eternal Cause,

  Prone for his favourites to reverse his laws?

  Shall burning Etna, if a sage requires,

  Forget to thunder, and recall her fires?

  On air or sea new motions be imprest,

  O
blameless Bethel, to relieve thy breast?

  When the loose mountain trembles from on high,

  Shall gravitation cease, if you go by?9

  By the twentieth century, philosophers spoke of a “causal net”—a network of causes linked to effects throughout the past and into the future. The causal net encompasses all phenomena, past, present, and future, throughout the cosmos, from atoms to galaxies and everything in between, including us. Without the doctrine of determinism, science could not strive for an ultimate understanding of past events or make predictions about future phenomena. The causal net was cast over the legal profession when attorneys began to use it as a tool in defense of their clients. John Hinckley’s case shows how science and the law have each dealt with this problem. From what we have already seen about John Hinckley, it is clear that he was not “normal” in any sense of the word. So what was he, sane or insane? The answer turns out to be neither, and both.

  John Hinckley and the Paradox of Moral Determinism

  In philosophy there is a well-known fallacy of logic called post hoc, ergo propter hoc, literally, “after this, therefore because of this.” In cognitive psychology there is a related problem called the “hindsight bias,” where it seems that once we know the outcome, there is a sense that “I knew it all along.” Much of what we believe about the world seems right only after the fact. Before the fact, however, things are not always so clear. Before the FBI’s assault on the Waco compound of the Branch Davidians, for example, charging the building with armed guards seemed like the right thing to do. After four FBI agents were shot, it was abundantly clear to everyone that disaster was a foregone conclusion. Monday morning quarterbacking is everyone’s favorite hobby. Causality is easy to infer after the effect; it is nearly impossible to know before. That is why the experimental methods of science demand rigid controls over intervening variables that might compound and confuse the results of an experiment.