Science of Good and Evil Read online

  To my beloved parents:

  My late mother, Lois Godbold,

  and my stepfather, Richard Godbold

  My late father, Richard Shermer,

  and my stepmother, Betty Shermer

  Sine quibus non

  In the very literal sense

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  Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed upon Psyche as an incessant labor to cull out, and sort asunder, were not more intermixed.

  —John Milton, Areopagitica, 1644

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Figures

  Epigraph

  PROLOGUE: - ONE LONG ARGUMENT

  I - THE ORIGINS OF MORALITY

  1 - TRANSCENDENT MORALITY: HOW EVOLUTION ENNOBLES ETHICS

  A Moral Dilemma

  Ennobling Evolutionary Ethics: A Moral Dilemma Resolved

  An Exegesis of Why and How We Are Moral

  Free Rider: Facing the Judge

  2 - WHY WE ARE MORAL: THE EVOLUTIONARY ORIGINS OF MORALITY

  The Evolution of Premorality

  The Evolution of Morality

  Morality and the Magic Number 150

  Gossip and the Enmityville Horror

  The Bio-Cultural Evolutionary Pyramid: A Model for the Origins of Morality

  Group Selection and the Evolution of Morality

  The Psychology of Morality: Emotions, Tipping, and the Prisoner’s Dilemma

  Human Moral Universals: The Transcendency of Morality and Universality of Moral Sentiments

  The Nature of Human Moral Nature

  3 - WHY WE ARE IMMORAL: WAR, VIOLENCE, AND THE IGNOBLE SAVAGE WITHIN

  The Problem of Evil

  The Myth of Pure Evil

  Oskar Schindler or Amon Goeth?

  Explaining Evil

  Fuzzy Logic, Fuzzy Evil

  The Erotic-Fierce People: A Case Study in Fuzzy Logic

  The Myth of Pure Good: Noble Savages and Beautiful People

  The Ignoble Savage and the Nature of War

  In the Heart of Every Human

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

  Appointment in Samara: Free Will and the Problem of Determinism

  John Hinckley and the Paradox of Moral Determinism

  Moral Determinism and the Law

  Free Will as a Useful Fiction: Is the Free Will/Determinism Problem an Insoluble One?

  Free Will and Indeterminism

  Free Will, Fuzzy Logic, and Hinckley’s Guilt

  Free Will and Neuroscience

  Free Will and Genetics

  Free Will and Evolution

  Free Will and Chaos and Complexity Theory

  II - A SCIENCE OF PROVISIONAL ETHICS

  5 - CAN WE BE GOOD WITHOUT GOD? : SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND MORALITY

  Good God

  The Grand Inquisitors Say No

  Theism, Atheism, and Morality

  What Would You Do if There Were No God?

  How We Can Be Good Without God

  6 - HOW WE ARE MORAL: ABSOLUTE, RELATIVE, AND PROVISIONAL ETHICS

  Absolute Morality

  Relative Morality

  Provisional Ethics

  Fuzzy Provisionalism

  Moral Intuition and the Captain Kirk Principle

  Provisional Morality and Moral Justice: The Best We Can Do

  7 - HOW WE ARE IMMORAL: RIGHT AND WRONG AND HOW TO TELL THE DIFFERENCE

  The Ask God Principle: Religious Right and Wrong

  The Ask First Principle: Secular Right and Wrong

  The Happiness Principle: Personal Right and Wrong

  The Liberty Principle: Social and Political Right and Wrong

  The Moderation Principle: Extremism Is No Virtue, Moderation Is No Vice

  Provisional Ethics Put to the Test

  Provisional Morality and Truth Telling and Lying

  Provisional Morality and Adultery

  Provisional Morality and Pornography

  Provisional Morality and Abortion

  Provisional Morality and Cloning and Genetic Engineering

  Provisional Morality and Animal Rights

  Cicero’s Warning

  8 - RISE ABOVE: TOLERANCE, FREEDOM, AND THE PROSPECTS FOR HUMANITY

  The Domesticated Primate

  From Intolerance to Tolerance: How the Mind Works

  From Enmity to Amity: How the World Works

  Moral Heroism: Skepticism as a Virtue

  Also by Michael Shermer

  APPENDIX I - THE DEVIL UNDER FORM OF BABOON: THE EVOLUTION OF EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS

  APPENDIX II - MORAL AND RELIGIOUS UNIVERSALS AS A SUBSET OF HUMAN UNIVERSALS

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INDEX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Noted science historian Michael Shermer explores the science behind belief in these titles available from Owl Books

  Copyright Page

  PROLOGUE:

  ONE LONG ARGUMENT

  Our whole dignity consists in thought. Let us endeavor, then, to think well: this is the principle of ethics.

  —Blaise Pascal, Pensées, II, 1670

  In 1959 professional astronomers were polled for their opinions on the then-undecided debate between two competing cosmological theories: “Did the universe begin with a Big Bang several thousand million years ago?” One-third answered yes. “Is matter continuously created in space?” Nearly half answered yes. Most telling, to the question “Is a Gallup poll of this kind helpful to scientific progress?” one hundred percent answered no.1

  The reason for unanimity on the final question is that scientific debates are not settled by consensus opinion. Unfortunately, in complex human and social issues, separating fact from opinion is not so easy, and for no subject is this more apparent than morality and ethics. Thus, throughout this book I apply a principle I call Darwin’s Dictum , which states: All observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service. The British naturalist and evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin, in a letter to his friend Henry Fawcett, dated September 18, 1861, responded to an accusation made against him in a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Fawcett, who attended in Darwin’s defense, reported that a critic claimed that The Origin of Species was too theoretical, and that he should have just “put his facts before us and let them rest.” Darwin’s response is now a classic: “About thirty years ago there was much talk that geologists ought only to observe and not theorize; and I well remember someone saying that at this rate a man might as well go into a gravel-pit and count the pebbles and describe the colours. How odd it
is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service!”2

  All observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service. My approach in this book is to apply Darwin’s Dictum with a judicious use of data and theory in an attempt to understand both the why and the how of morality, acknowledging that since we are doing science, all claims to any validity for both data and theory are provisional. It is much like Caltech physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman’s observation: “I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives. We will not become enthusiastic for the fact, the knowledge, the absolute truth of the day, but remain always uncertain … . In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar.” This applies, I think, to moral principles themselves as well as to any theory that purports to explain the how and the why of moral principles and behavior.

  This balance between doubt and certainty, between open-mindedness and closed-mindedness, is what I call skepticism. “Modest doubt is call’d the beacon of the wise,” William Shakespeare cleverly noted in Troilus and Cressida (act 2, scene 2). In many ways, the search for the origins of morality and the basis of right and wrong moral principles is as important as any discovery we might make; with morality, the journey counts as much as the destination. The two, more so, are inseparable. To be a fully functioning moral agent, one cannot passively accept moral principles handed down by fiat. Moral principles require moral reasoning. Unlike many other fields of human endeavor, where one may reasonably hope to arrive at a consistent set of principles, morality is so fraught with complexities and subtleties that few moral principles are without exception, and contradictions are as common as consistencies. While I have struggled mightily to be consistent in my thinking on the issues encountered in this book—many of which are the deepest of all questions of the human condition—I am reminded of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1841 observation in “Self-Reliance” that “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Walt Whitman, in his elegant Song of Myself, offered this out that I take as my own defense in those (hopefully few) places where constancy does not always carry the day:

  Do I contradict myself?

  Very well, then, I contradict myself;

  (I am large—I contain multitudes.)

  Given this caveat, as brief intellectual autobiography in the form of an apologia pro vita sua (an apology for one’s own life), the how and the why of morality form the basis of the third volume in a trilogy on the power of belief. The first volume, Why People Believe Weird Things,3 dealt with a variety of subjects within the primary penumbra of my job as the editor in chief of Skeptic magazine and contributing editor and a monthly columnist for Scientific American. In exploring, explaining, and occasionally debunking pseudoscience and superstitions, the book lays the foundation for good science and, in showing how thinking goes wrong, indicates, by implication, how thinking goes right. Because the book deals with certain subjects uncomfortably close and tangentially interdigitated with religion—such as reincarnation, ghosts, near-death experiences, theories of immortality, psychic mediums who claim to talk to the dead, creationism, and alleged scientific proofs of God’s existence—I was inevitably challenged to present my views on the nature and existence of God, the possibility of an afterlife, and the relationship of science and religion. At first I was flippant in my responses. “What’s your position on life after death?” a questioner would inquire. “I’m for it,” I would quip with a wink. But over the years it dawned on me, after hundreds of public lectures and thousands of letters, that for most people, life’s ultimate questions are no joking matter.

  A couple of years of serious research and reflection—tying together the experiences and thoughts of a lifetime spent thinking about, reading on, and actively committing myself to a variety of religious belief systems (from born-again Christian to born-again atheist to my current position of agnostic nontheist)—resulted in the second volume in the trilogy, How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God.4 In this work I explicated the nature of belief systems, particularly with regard to the God question, and outlined the various positions one can take in attempting an answer. The general categories are obvious: theism is “belief in a deity, or deities” and “belief in one God as creator and supreme ruler of the universe.” Atheism is “disbelief in, or denial of, the existence of a God.” And agnosticism is “unknowing, unknown, unknowable.” I present these common and historical usages from the Oxford English Dictionary because they represent how people have understood and used these terms, not how theologians and philosophers have finely nuanced them (in How We Believe I provide an extensive bibliographic essay just on these terms and how they can be parsed into dozens of finely graded positions). Since I shall be discussing morality primarily from the position of an agnostic and a nontheist, I should clarify what I mean by these terms.

  The word agnostic (along with its derivative agnosticism) was coined by the British evolutionary biologist Thomas Henry Huxley in 1869 as: “one who holds that the existence of anything beyond and behind material phenomena is unknown and so far as can be judged unknowable, and especially that a First Cause and an unseen world are subjects of which we know nothing.”5 Based on this usage, and my own lifelong quest (ending in utter futility) to prove or disprove God’s existence, I defined the God question as the art of the insoluble, and made what I think is an important distinction between a statement about the universe and a statement about one’s personal beliefs. As a statement about the universe, agnostic seems to me to be the most rational position to take on the God question because, by the criteria of science and reason, God is an unknowable concept. We cannot prove or disprove God’s existence through empirical evidence or rational analysis (although, in my opinion, atheists have slightly better arguments for the nonexistence of God than theists have for the deity’s reality). Therefore, from a scientific perspective, theism and atheism are both indefensible positions as statements about the universe. One must think and act on a personal belief or a disbelief, however, so when forced to apply a label (which I generally try to avoid) I call myself a nontheist; if forced to bet on whether there is a God or not, I bet that there is not, and I live my life accordingly. Nontheism has the added advantage of making an end run around a common misunderstanding about agnosticism: that it is a position of waiting for more evidence about God’s existence (or nonexistence) before making a decision, assuming that additional evidence will (or may) suddenly arise to prove or disprove God’s existence. I could be wrong, of course, and proof may materialize, but until then I shall assume that there is no God and that the God question is an insoluble one. Is there a God? is not even the appropriate way to ask the question. A better question is this: Is it possible to know if there is a God or not? My answer is firmly negative. Nontheism also avoids the pejorative spin doctoring typically applied to atheism, associating it with communism, liberalism, postmodernism, and the general decay of morals and culture. Such associations are risible and insulting to atheists, but are common in modern culture.

  In How We Believe I addressed many more issues than God’s existence or nonexistence, including the nature and structure of belief systems; the psychology, anthropology, and sociology of religion; why people believe in God and why they think other people believe in God; the relationship of science and religion; the origins of myths and the storytelling impulse; the relationship of religion and morality; and how we can find meaning in a gloriously contingent universe. As with my experiences following the publication of Why People Believe Weird Things, How We Believe’s release in 1999 triggered a surfeit of correspondence challenging my claim that the primary function of religion can be found in the twofold purpose that religions serve in both traditional hunter-gatherer communities and modern
state societies: (I) explanation and (2) social cohesion. In fulfilling the first purpose, myths explicate the origin and nature of the world and life, and have been, for the most part, displaced by science. We live in the Age of Science, and scientism is our mythology. Explanations of the origin and nature of the world and life are not final truths passed down through generations by mendicant monks preserving the knowledge and wisdom of the ancients; instead, they are always provisional and ever changing, and are best couched in empirical evidence, experimental testing, and logical reasoning.

  Despite the triumph of science and the cultural diffusion of scientism, religion thrives as never before. In America in particular, but in many other countries as well, never have so many—and such a high percentage of the population—professed a belief in a deity. Although explanations for this remarkable trend are as varied and complex as the theorists proffering them, a general causal vector can be found in the second purpose of religion, that is, its social mode. Ever since the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment, religion has slowly but irrevocably gotten out of the business of explaining the world and instead has focused on what it has always done best—providing a foundation for social order and moral edification. Most people don’t go to church to hear an explanation for the origin of the cosmos and life (and if they did, and they knew something about the findings of modern science, they would be dismayed to be told that the Genesis myth of a six-day creation less than ten thousand years ago was to be taken literally). Instead, most folks go to socialize with like-minded friends, neighbors, and colleagues to contemplate the meaning of their lives and of life and to glean moral messages from the homilies presented in stories, myths, and anecdotes of the knotty problems that daily life presents to us all. To date science—even scientism—has had little to do or say in this social mode, and it is here, especially, where we find no conflict between religion and science. When commentators argue that there is a conflict, they are thinking of religion in the explanatory mode where, for example, arguing that the earth is only 6,000 years old will indeed find you in direct contradiction with data from geology and astronomy indicating that it is in excess of 4.5 billion years old, or older. As long as religion does not make quasi-scientific claims about the factual nature of the world, then there is no conflict between science and religion.