Marc Hauser cited experiments with cotton-top tamarins in which individuals learned to manipulate a tool to provide a monkey in an adjoining cage with food if they believed that the other monkey would return the favor. Staff photo Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard News Office |
Is doing the right thing hard-wired?Hauser argues that moral sense is part of evolutionary inheritanceMay 3, 2007By Ken Gewertz
What gives people the ability to tell right from wrong? Is the moral sense instilled in us by God? Is it inculcated through religious training? Or does moral judgment vary according to the culture in which we were raised? In a talk April 26, psychology professor Marc Hauser argued that our moral sense is part of our evolutionary inheritance. Like the “language instinct” hypothesized by linguistic theorist Noam Chomsky, the capacity for moral judgment is a universal human trait, “relatively immune” to cultural differences. Hauser described it as a “cold calculus,” independent of emotion, whose workings are largely inaccessible to our conscious minds. Hauser, whose most recent book is “Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong” (2006), draws his conclusions from experiments with nonhuman primates as well the Internet-based “Moral Sense Test,” administered to 150,000 subjects in 120 countries. |
