The Darwinian evolutionary analysis proper will begin in Chapter 6, initially focusing on moral origins in a natural Garden of Eden and more specifically on the conscience and how this uniquely self-conscious agency came into being as a result of a punitive social environment.37 This development has profound adaptive implications for our species, both prehistorically, when it made large-game hunting a more viable and useful enterprise for our predecessors, and today, when we remain moral and continue to benefit from being moral.
If we think of a society of modern people with no conscience or sense of right and wrong, it becomes difficult to imagine existing in present-day large, anonymous urban environments, where crimes against both society and individuals are so difficult to detect. That most people have strong and active consciences benefits all of us; at least potential wrongdoers can’t hide from their own consciences even if these settings all but invite them to act as social predators.
Earlier, this moralistic type of consciousness helped culturally modern hunter-gatherers to navigate their courses socially in small intimate bands, where police detectives weren’t needed because social deviants were so readily identified, and controlled, by their gossiping peers. In such bands the fact that people had well-developed consciences enhanced group social life because this inner voice slowed down the antisocial deviant tendencies that individuals in these groups harbored, and thereby helped to reduce conflict within the group and make cooperation more viable.
My modern-day emulation of Darwin’s historical type of analysis in the chapters to come will be both somewhat novel and, I hope, plausible. And once the important question of conscience origins is resolved, we’ll be in a far better position to explain how humans acquired the unusual (and to some, all but inexplicable) degrees of sociality and sympathetic generosity that allow us to cooperate as willingly as we do. As will be seen, if we had never gained some kind of a conscience, which gave us a primitive sense of right and wrong, we would never have evolved the remarkable degree of “empathy” and the accompanying traits of extrafamilial generosity that enrich human social life as we know it today.38
LIVING THE VIRTUOUS LIFE
2
WHICH IS UNIVERSAL: SHAME OR GUILT?
There are two ways of trying to create a good life. One is by punishing evil, and the other is by actively promoting virtue. My evolutionary theory is that the punishment of deviant behavior is older, so several chapters in this book will be devoted to crime and punishment and their deep evolutionary background. Later, in Chapter 7, I will take up the positive side of social interactions, which includes preaching in favor of being generous to others and of being helpful even if the recipients are not members of a person’s own extended family and are not necessarily helping back.
To begin this discussion, we’ll need to consider the human emotions that make for a sense of right and wrong.1 An evolutionary view needs to be global, and to achieve this, ethnocentrism must be avoided. Guilt is frequently on the tongues of Americans and for that matter on the tongues of Christians and Jews everywhere, but it is not very much on those of Buddhists or Hindus or of Confucians or followers of Islam. Although the word is not easy to define and definitions may vary, for most people “guilt” seems to mean an inward, private focus arising from the experience of negative feelings about past misdeeds or sins. “Shame” has more the meaning that a past malfeasance has become known to others, or might well become public. Although either guilt or shame may lead to remorse, shame, with its more outward focus, seems to be more salient for many people raised in Asia, where the idea of “face” is important, or in the Middle East, where “honor cultures” are so prominent. The Garden of Eden fable tells us that shame also is important for Christians and Jews insofar as the Middle-Eastern-based Old Testament has trained us to think in terms of fig leaves and blushing—with shame.
To avoid confusion, and also to avoid placing my own Western perspective at the fore, I’m going to make a choice and use “shame,” rather than “guilt,” when speaking of uneasy or painful feelings people have about their present or past morally reprehensible deeds. I’ve made this simplifying decision not because Asians and Middle Easterners outnumber guilt-ridden Judeo-Christian Europeans and Americans, but for a quite different set of reasons that strike me as being anthropologically sound.
First, a moral word similar to “guilt” is not to be found in many world languages, including those of hunter-gatherers and tribal people. However, “shame words” do appear everywhere,2 and they seem to be quite prominent in people’s minds. Furthermore, shame feelings are directly linked to a universal human physiological response that is triggered by a sense of moral culpritude—blushing— whereas guilt has no such physical correlate as far as we know. When Darwin saw this connection between shame and blushing and deemed it important, he was right. Shame will be a key universal concept here as we begin to deal with the evolutionary basis of the human conscience.
DO DOMESTICATED DOGS HAVE A SENSE OF SHAME?
In thinking about moral behavior, Darwin opened his mind to ask if other animals might also have a sense of right and wrong.3 After devoting considerable thought to the matter, I’ve come to the personal conclusion that, although chimpanzees and for that matter domestic dogs are very good as learners of rules, humans may be the only animal species to deal moralistically in virtue and evil and to internalize rules on that basis. If any other animal had such abilities, most likely it would be a highly social animal like an African great ape or perhaps a socially sensitive carnivore like a wolf or a dolphin.
I’m quite certain that many people with beloved pets would disagree, dog owners in particular. Many sense that their animal companions are feeling morally chastised when told, “You should be ashamed of yourself,” just as they may seem to respond proudly and virtuously to “That’s a very good dog!” I’ve experienced such anthropomorphic reactions myself, with delight born out of a sense of kinship, but obviously that doesn’t make such a reaction scientifically the case.
Darwin focused on dogs because they’re unusually congenial to us psychologically and because dog owners have such a well of experience, so many tales to tell about their humanlike pets. In fact, he gathered a large corpus of stories that were suggestive of canine sympathy, loyalty, and self-sacrificial protectiveness, along with a few anecdotes that might have suggested the presence of guilt feelings or shame. But this open-minded scientist did not jump to conclusions.
It is with a wistful sense of personal regret that I must inform other loyal dog owners that when their charges seem to be giving them guilty looks, in all probability they (the owners) are projecting their own moralistic human reactions onto an amoral canine. An empathetic dog may be feeling uncomfortable in the face of disapproval, or submissively fearful of punishment for breaking a rule, and it may be showing this eloquently by means of body language, but I’m reasonably certain that a humanlike sense of being ashamed—and I mean feeling shame because there exists a strong and moralistic emotional identification with a serious and important rule that has been broken—plays no part in this picture.
Charitable interpretations with respect to doggie shame or doggie guilt are scarcely surprising, precisely because we humans have been breeding dogs to have feelings similar to our own for at least fifteen thousand years. Today this is done very methodically, but in the distant past simply favoring puppies that made the best pets, and then doing so over many generations, would have modified the “basic personality” of domesticated canines.4
As a fanatical dog lover, I would be the first to say that the dogs we’ve domesticated truly are friendly, affectionate, loyal, empathetic, eager for approval, and, if their masters are in trouble, often protective and self-sacrificing. If properly trained, they are as good as we are at following rules, and with all of these similarities it is natural to expect them to also have feelings of shame. But moral they are not, for a rule-internalizing conscience and sense of shame would appear to be missing. I rea
lize that my skepticism is a matter of opinion and that a human can never get inside the head of a dog. However, there are at least a few facts that tend to support this hard-nosed viewpoint.
It’s easy enough to think you’re seeing a dog conscience in action when you come home to find not only a mess on the floor but also a cowering canine with head bowed, ears back, and tail between its legs. It also seems logical that if you then punish this humanlike culprit in the presence of its misdeed, it will recognize the shameful error of its past ways and desist in the future, just as a human would, because shame feelings are unpleasant and are to be avoided. And it’s certainly true that nasty nose rubs or training whacks with rolled-up newspapers will be remembered by your dog—as evidence of a beloved master’s obvious disapproval. In that sense dogs can learn our kind of rules, for we’ve bred them to be sensitive this way for thousands and thousands of generations by favoring the more docile individuals.
However, the idea that after-the-fact punishment can produce a positive shift in the dog’s behavior, just as it does with humans, is quite erroneous. Any professional dog trainer will tell you that you must punish your canine pet right in the commission of the deviant act—or at most within just six-tenths of a second after the dog’s unappreciated deed is done.5 Otherwise, apparently your dog will be confused because it will see you, a person it is closely bonded to, being hostile or hurting it for no good reason. People, on the other hand, understand perfectly well when they are punished now for a previous rule infraction, and as we’ll be seeing in Chapter 5, so can an African great ape. But in this respect dogs seem to live only in the present.
A devoted dog owner could argue that nevertheless dogs must be feeling shame—just look at their body language and those eyes. I can’t prove that to be false. What I can point out objectively, however, is that dogs neither blush with shame as we do nor seem to respond to punishment after the fact. Thus, in spite of being selected for humanlike qualities during the course of many thousands of dog generations, dogs remain on a significantly different wavelength regarding ex post facto condemnation and punishment.
“Might makes right” is what prevails among the ancestors of all dogs, the wolves. In every pack there are alphas who impose their rules of dominance upon subordinates, and if a subordinate successfully breaks a rule—when it gets away with something behind the alpha’s back—there’s absolutely no evidence of “shame” or “remorse” in the sneaky, willful subordinate’s body language. A subordinate caught in such an act will certainly try to appease the superior, but this has nothing to do with feeling morally reprehensible. It’s simply a matter of manipulative self-protection, and this, too, is found in humans. The difference is that we’re also moral.
It appears that the minds of dogs continue to be genetically set up to make them respond to punishment in only a very immediate way and that for some reason, yet to be discovered, this particular piece of brain wiring has resisted the attempts of egoistic humans to modify their domestic dogs and make them into obedient companions who totally remind us of ourselves. One major hint is that in dogs the prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain that helps in making social decisions that result in self-control—is much smaller, proportionately, than it is in human brains. Perhaps the potential just wasn’t there, even though as dog breeders we humans have tried hard enough to make our pets as prosocially oriented as we are.
MORALLY DAMAGED MINDS
Some of the most interesting things we know about our brains and their connection with morals come from what we can learn about a very small proportion of our human populations—people who most decidedly, to judge from their attitudes and behavior, are quite “amoral.” Although many seem to be born that way, a few others have suffered brain traumas with remarkable and revealing effects. If early in life the prefrontal cortex (residing just behind the forehead) of healthy, “normal” children is physically damaged, they may then grow up without the ability to understand and follow rules or to deal with authorities. Because their sense of right and wrong is impaired, they may find it difficult or even impossible to plan reasonably successful social lives.
Neuropsychologist Antonio Damasio reports on several cases. A year-and-a-half-old child had her head run over by a car, with no ostensible negative effects after a few days.6 Her behavioral problems came to light only when as a three-year-old she proved to be unusually unresponsive to parental rules. (I should mention that, morally speaking and otherwise, her parents were perfectly normal people.) Subsequently, she grew up to be an impulsive petty thief who simply couldn’t follow rules well enough to keep a job, showed a pathetic lack of empathy for her own baby, and didn’t really seem to understand the difference between right and wrong. Unable to evaluate and control her own impulses, she couldn’t function properly as a social being, and her life was a mess.
Just as this woman’s brain showed damage to the prefrontal cortex, so, too, did the brain of Phineas Gage, a responsible and amicable late-nineteenth-century railroad worker who became famous in the annals of psychology. Phineas was involved in an accident in which a metal spike went up into his eye socket and out through the front of his head, damaging this same brain region. Gage was able to stand up and think and speak immediately after the accident, but his personality was changed on a permanent basis. He lost his affability and became impulsively irritable, obscene, and impossible to get along with. Tragically, Phineas could no longer hold a regular job, and he ended up as a circus sideshow freak.7
An equally telling case was that of a schoolteacher, happily married at forty, who was caught by his utterly surprised wife looking at Internet pornography involving children and subsequently tried to “come on” to an eleven-year-old girl. His lack of impulse control led to divorce and possible prison. Eventually, the poor fellow was diagnosed with a benign tumor that was pressing on his prefrontal cortex—and when the tumor was removed, he went back to being normal. When the tumor reappeared, his deviant interests again became uncontrollable, so the cause and effect relationship was all too clear.8 As a brain area devoted in general to planning, the prefrontal cortex helps us to assess social consequences and also to control antisocial impulses. These functions go far in defining the human conscience as a faculty that enhances our personal fitness by keeping us out of trouble with our groups.
THE BRAINS OF PSYCHOPATHS
Then there are those who are born “impaired.” Psychologist Robert Hare spent his life studying criminals he objectively evaluated as being “psychopathic.” One aim of his screening test—he was the first to develop one that cunning psychopaths couldn’t outwit—was to identify such people in prison and keep them off the streets.9 Hare’s assumption was that psychopaths had inherited characteristics that kept them from developing normal consciences based on the usual moral emotions, which include a deeply felt sense of right and wrong and feelings of empathy for others. These unusual people range from deadly and unrepentant serial killers, some of whom we all know by name but many of whom we never manage to identify or police never manage to catch, to a much larger number of often glib and sometimes quite charming but utterly egoistic and unempathetic con artists, who lie recklessly and predictably exploit and harm other people without remorse or shame.
Whether psychopaths devote themselves to murder or to street crime or white-collar crime or con games that exploit the gullible, they are unusually given to domination or control, and what they all share are a lack of a normal moral compass and little trace of concern for the damage they are inflicting on the trusting souls they exploit. In lacking a normal conscience that includes making emotional connections with others, they lie without compunction in order to selfishly exploit others—and they fail to feel any sympathy for those they defraud or murder. These people are more frequently male than female, and in general their emotions are shallow, with a lack of the feelings that connect ordinary people with the moral rules they are able to internalize as children. Psychopathy shows up early in life, so in an important,
emotional sense the learning of moral rules is incomplete.
I should hasten to emphasize that the typical psychopath is not the popularly conceived serial killer but is simply a con man who has no empathy for those he despoils. Typically, he’s intelligent, self-centered, and good at putting on a convincing face, even though sometimes his lying becomes obvious. He’s the perfect candidate to be a seller of bogus stocks to retirees or to be a battering husband whose wife doesn’t realize he was born that way and keeps on hoping he’ll reform. However, if killing does attract him, he kills without mercy, and the psychopath’s hall of fame includes the Hillside stranglers—there were two of them, cousins, who mercilessly tortured their California victims—along with, of course, John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer. Silence of the Lambs aside, those are the ones we’ve heard of, but there obviously are many more of them, mostly uncaught, who thrive in modern urban societies, where a cloak of anonymity is available to the nefarious. With no very active conscience functions, and often with no fear of God’s punishment, they only have to stay ahead of the police.
Psychopaths are absolute masters at dissembling, and they understand how moral feelings operate, even though personally they live in an emotional wasteland. Curiously, this enables them to be true experts at manipulating the feelings of others, and that’s why they’ve so often had their way with parole boards, convincing them that if only they are given the opportunity, they’ll reform and become contributing members of society. Remember, psychopaths are born that way, so the normal hookup between positive emotions and a sense of “rules” cannot develop. That’s why Hare’s book is titled Without Conscience. The best we can expect of a psychopath, Hare tells us, is that as old age approaches, his (or her) antisocial tendencies will tend to dwindle somewhat on their own. Otherwise, parole boards beware.
Moral Origins Page 3
