Science of Good and Evil Read online

  As for the Kentucky high school killings, why was it God’s will to spare the minister’s son, but not the three girls who died? Was it God’s will that their lives be snuffed out as young teenagers? At the Columbine High School massacre, one of the victims, a young woman named Cassie Bernall, was gunned down after proclaiming her belief in God. A book about her life and proclamation, She Said Yes, rode the New York Times best-seller list for weeks.6 Are we to presume that this was her “reward” for having the courage to openly display her Christian faith? That hardly seems fair. And, on the other side of the story, what about all those nonbelieving high schoolers who lived? That hardly seems divinely just to believers. These events would seem to make God’s will both good and evil, or God’s power limited, or both.

  In the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, we saw similar declarations of a divine force that intervened to spare those who survived. Most of the survivors spoke of being saved by divine grace. In fact, a more likely explanation is that the law of large numbers kicked in. In a situation in which the lives of thousands of people are endangered, any who survive do so by an extraordinary turn of events, any one of which seems so improbable as to be a miracle. Yet, as in the lottery, even when the odds of winning are astronomically stacked against any one person taking home the loot, someone is going to win. Put your life in place of that money and the stakes are elevated that much higher, and it isn’t surprising that divine intervention will be credited. But, as much as we may be willing to believe in miracles, from whence does our willingness to believe in evil arise?

  The Myth of Pure Evil

  The myth of pure evil is the belief that evil exists separately from individuals, or that evil exists within people as something like what we traditionally think of as an evil “force,” driving them to perform evil acts. If pure evil exists, however, then how can we hold people morally culpable for their actions? Evil is intimately linked to the problem of free will and determinism: if we do not have complete free will in our actions, how can we be held morally accountable? Further (and even more distressing), if evil does exist, then will we always be plagued by violence, war, genocide, crime, rape, and other evils?

  One solution to the problem of evil is a semantic one. Evil as a descriptive adjective merely modifies something else, as in evil thoughts or evil deeds. But evil as a noun implies an existence all its own, as in an “evil force” or even an “evil person,” or “the force in nature that governs and gives rise to wickedness and sin,” or “the wicked or immoral part of someone or something,” and so on.7 In this latter sense I claim that there is no such thing as evil. There is no supernatural force operating outside the realm of the known laws of nature and human behavior that we can call evil. Calling something or someone “evil” gets us nowhere. It leads to no greater understanding. In a scientific sense it is a term ultimately indefinable. That is, there is no way to establish quantifiable criteria by which we may distinguish between something or someone that is “evil” or “not evil,” or shades of evil in between. The tendency to use the term at all comes from our Western Platonic tendency to think in terms of essences, or nonchanging “things” or “types” that are what they are by their very nature. This is one reason people have such a difficult time accepting the theory of evolution—we tend to view a species as an essence, a type, a fixed and unchanging entity. But, in fact, they do change, however slowly, and their essences are only temporary. Analogously, evil is not a fixed entity or essence. It is not a thing. Evil is a descriptive term for a range of environmental events and human behaviors that we describe and interpret as bad, wrong, awful, undesirable, or whatever appropriately descriptive adjective or synonym for evil is chosen. To call something “evil” does not lead us to a deeper understanding of the cause of evil behavior.

  In this chapter, I want to focus not on evil as a metaphysical concept that exists outside the natural realm, but on evil as a physical concept that exists entirely within the natural realm as behavior. This is a shift from the supernatural to the natural. (On a larger scale, I go so far as to claim that there is no such thing as the paranormal and supernatural. There is only the normal and the natural, and mysteries we have yet to explain through them.) If there were no humans there would be no evil. Earthquakes that kill people are not, in and of themselves, evil. A shift between two tectonic plates that causes the earth to make a sudden and dramatic movement cannot possibly be considered evil outside the effects such an earthquake might have on the humans living near the fault line. It is the effects of the earthquake on our fellow humans that we judge to be evil. Evil as a physical concept requires human evaluation of a behavior and its effects on humans. As such, bacterial diseases cannot be inherently evil. By causing humans to sneeze, cough, vomit, and have diarrhea, bacteria are highly successful organisms, spreading themselves far and wide. As their human hosts, we may label the effects of a disease as evil, but the disease itself has no moral existence. Good and evil are human constructs. Which is not to say that a person is not morally responsible for his or her choices and their effects.

  Oskar Schindler or Amon Goeth?

  One morning in 1995 I had breakfast with Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler’s List. Out of curiosity I asked him what he thought was the difference between Oskar Schindler, rescuer of Jews and hero of his story, and Amon Goeth, the antihero Nazi commandant of the Plaszow concentration camp. His answer was revealing. Not much, he said. Had there been no war, Schindler and Goeth might have been drinking buddies and business partners, morally questionable at times, perhaps, but relatively harmless and ineffectual as historical personages. What a difference a war makes.

  This question, on a larger scale, is what spurred the debate in 1996 over the publication of Daniel Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners. Goldhagen’s thesis is that ordinary Germans participated in the mass murder of Jews, that anti-Semitism was pervasive and nearly exclusively German, and that we cannot blame a handful of extremists in the Nazi party for the Holocaust—all Germans share the blame. “My explanation … is that the perpetrators, ‘ordinary Germans,’ … having consulted their own convictions and morality and having judged the mass annihilation of Jews to be right, did not want to say ‘no.’”8 The problem with this thesis is that it does not explain the exceptions—the Germans who helped Jews and the non-Germans who participated in the Holocaust. Max Frankel, in assessing the Goldhagen thesis, recalls how his Jewish mother escaped Nazi Germany thanks to the help of no less than a Gestapo police chief who, after giving her the name of the Gestapo contact who would aid in her escape, told her, in reference to her goal of reaching America, “If you get there, will you tell them we’re not all bad?”9

  It’s true, not all Germans—not even all Nazis—were bad. Likewise, and extrapolating to the larger issue on the table, humans are neither all bad nor all good. Most of us most of the time are good in most situations. Under extreme circumstances, however, the flexibility of our behavior may push us in the other direction. The Holocaust was not the product of “ordinary” Germans, but of Nazi Germans in extraordinary circumstances and conditions. A narrow focus on the proximate causes of the Holocaust misses the ultimate, evolutionary lesson that this tragic event in human history can teach us about the malleable condition of human nature.

  Humans evolved to be moral animals, but by no means always moral. There are times when we are amoral, and even immoral. We have the potential for all three, and like any human trait, the degree of expression of the quality varies between individuals. Some people, for whatever reason, are more moral than others. A number of historical contingencies (and who knows what else in his genes and environment) drove Oskar Schindler to follow a completely different path from Amon Goeth, even though he could just as easily have gone the other way. From there the cascading consequences of their decisions took them down their alternately chosen tracks; the road not taken makes all the difference.

  This is not mere just-so storytelling. Yale Univ
ersity social psychologist Stanley Milgram observed this range of moral flexibility in his famous “shock” experiments in the 1960s, conducted in the wake of the Adolf Eichmann trial in an attempt to make a scientific study of the banality of evil. How was it possible for educated, intelligent, and cultured human beings to commit mass murder? What environmental conditions would override our evolutionary propensity toward moral behavior and the repulsion most of us would (or at least should) feel in causing or witnessing the pain of another human? Milgram presented his subjects with a “learning” experiment that was purportedly to test the possible effect of punishment on memory. The subject would read a list of paired words to the “learner,” then present the first word of each pair again, upon which the learner had to recall the second word. If the learner was wrong the teacher—the real subject in this experiment—was to deliver an electric shock. No one was really shocked of course (the learners were shills working for Milgram who purposely gave them wrong answers), but the subjects believed the shocks were real. Sitting in front of the subject was a panel of toggle switches that read: Slight Shock, Moderate Shock, Strong Shock, Very Strong Shock, Intense Shock, Extreme Intensity Shock, DANGER: Severe Shock, XXXX (this final category was labeled at 450 volts). The results were, well, shocking: 65 percent administered the strongest shock possible—XXXX—and 100 percent administered at least a Strong Shock of 135 volts (figure 8).

  Figure 8. A Shocking Experiment on Obedience to Authority

  In a quest to understand how highly educated and richly cultured Germans could be turned into Nazi mass murderers, psychologist Stanley Milgram undertook the study of obedience to authority. Here subjects, playing the role of “teachers,” were told by a scientist/authority figure to shock “learners” who made mistakes on a test. Sitting in front of the subject was a panel of toggle switches that read: Slight Shock, Moderate Shock, Strong Shock, Very Strong Shock, Intense Shock, Extreme Intensity Shock, DANGER: Severe Shock, XXXX (450 volts). Milgram discovered that 65 percent administered the strongest shock possible—XXXX—and 100 percent administered at least a Strong Shock of 135 volts. (From Stanley Milgram, Obedience, 1965. Courtesy of Penn State Media Sales)

  Milgram varied the conditions in order to control for other variables that might influence the outcome of the experiment. The physical proximity of the victim, for example, had an effect on how far the teachers would go in shocking the learners—closer, less shock; farther away, more shock. Group pressure was also a factor—when two other “teachers” (Milgram’s confederates) encouraged the subject to continue shocking the learner, they did so with impunity; but when the confederates refused to shock their own learners, the subject tended to refuse as well. In other words, Milgram discovered that moral behavior is extremely malleable. He expressed his own and others’ amazement at what these experiments revealed about our moral natures: “What is surprising is how far ordinary individuals will go in complying with the experimenter’s instructions. Despite the fact that many subjects experience stress, despite the fact that many protest to the experimenter, a substantial proportion continue to the last shock on the generator.” Why? Because, Milgram continued, “It is psychologically easy to ignore responsibility when one is only an intermediate link in a chain of evil action but is far from the final consequences of the action.” Even Eichmann, he noted, was repulsed when he first witnessed a camp killing, but to implement the Holocaust he had only to push papers across a desk. The SS guards who actually did the deed justified their behavior by claiming they were only following orders. “I am forever astonished when lecturing on the obedience experiments in colleges across the country,” Milgram concluded. “I faced young men who were aghast at the behavior of experimental subjects and proclaimed they would never behave in such a way, but who in a matter of months, were brought into the military and performed without compunction actions that made shocking the victim seem pallid. In this respect, they are no better and no worse than human beings of any other era who lend themselves to the purposes of authority and become instruments in its destructive processes.”10

  Depending on the circumstances, perhaps any of us could become Nazis. Who is to say otherwise? Raised in a free, democratic society like America, how do any of us know how we might react in a totalitarian regime like Nazi Germany, in a time of war and under pressure to obey one’s superior (what Milgram termed “obedience to authority”)?

  Stanford University social psychologist Philip Zimbardo tested this hypothesis in the “Stanford County Jail,” a mock prison set up in the basement of his psychology building where randomly chosen students were assigned to be “prisoners” or “guards.” To make it as real as possible, Zimbardo gave the guards sunglasses, a whistle, a club, and cell keys. Prisoners were arrested, sprayed for lice, forced to stand naked during orientation, given bland uniforms, and stuck in dreary six-by-nine-foot cells. What unfolded in a matter of days was disturbing. These psychologically normal undergraduate American students were transformed into the role of either violent, authoritative guards or demoralized, impassive prisoners. The experiment was to last for two weeks. Zimbardo was forced to call it off after six days, not just because he feared that the lives of his students would be permanently transformed by this Lord of the Flies experience, but because of what he discovered about the reality of the human moral condition: “I called off the experiment not because of the horror I saw out there in the prison yard, but because of the horror of realizing that I could have easily traded places with the most brutal guard or become the weakest prisoner full of hatred at being so powerless that I could not eat, sleep, or go to the toilet without permission of authorities.”11

  How realistic are these experiments conducted in American universities in the 1960s? The real-world example of Nazi Germany, in some sense, serves as a historical experiment. At the Nuremberg Trials following the war, psychologist G. M. Gilbert was assigned to study the men imprisoned for committing these “crimes against humanity.” He discovered that not only were the perpetrators well-cultured and highly educated, they tested out two to three standard deviations above average on a standardized intelligence test used at the time, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. Where the average IQ is 100, Reichs-Commissioner Seyss-Inquart tested at 141, Reichsmarschall Hermann Goring at 138, Reich Chancellor Franz Von Papen at 134, Poland Governor-General Dr. Hans Frank at 130, Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop at 129, Hitler’s architect and Reichsminister of Armaments Albert Speer at 128. The prison psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, after his evaluations, offered this observation about the moral character of the leading Nazis:

  As far as the leaders go, the Hitlers and the Görings, the Goebbels and all the rest of them were not special types. Their personality patterns indicate that, while they are not socially desirable individuals, their like could very easily be found in America. Neurotic individuals like Adolf Hitler, suffering from hysterical disorders and obsessive complaints, can be found in any psychiatric clinic. And there are countless hundreds of similar ones, thwarted, discouraged, determined to do great deeds, roaming the streets of any American city at this very moment. No, the Nazi leaders were not spectacular types, not personalities such as appear only once in a century. They simply had three quite unremarkable characteristics in common—and the opportunity to seize power. These three characteristics were: overweening ambition, low ethical standards, and a strongly developed nationalism which justified anything done in the name of Germandom.12

  Hitler aside, arguably the most morally corrupt Nazi for the duration of the twelve-year Reich was SS chief Heinrich Himmler, as responsible as anyone for the horrors of the concentration and extermination camps and for the organization and implementation of the Final Solution. Yet even in the case of Himmler we can see how he might have gone down a different moral path, under dissimilar conditions. The renowned Holocaust historian and Himmler biographer Richard Breitman concluded that “The mass murders, the brutality, the sadism— those were not what was unique about the Naz
is. The brutal murder of whole populations, including children, has been with us since the beginning of recorded history and most probably before that.” In fact, Breitman believes, if we cannot explain Himmler then we cannot explain most of human history. “We can put ourselves in the shoes of the perpetrators, as well as the shoes of the victims, because we all have in ourselves the potential for extreme good and extreme evil—at least, what we call good and evil. The real horror of Himmler is not that he was unusual or unique but that he was in many ways quite ordinary, and that he could have lived out his life as a chicken farmer, a good neighbor with perhaps somewhat antiquated ideas about people.”13

  From an evolutionary perspective this makes sense. Individuals in our ancestral environment needed to be both cooperative and competitive, depending on the context and desired outcomes. Cooperation may lead to more successful hunts, food sharing, and group protection from predators and enemies. Competition may lead to more resources for oneself and family, and protection from other competitive individuals who are less inclined to cooperate, especially those from other groups. Social psychologists have adequately demonstrated that moral behavior is tractable and that there is a range of potential for the expression of moral or immoral behavior.14 We evolved to be moral, but have the capacity to be immoral some of the time in some circumstances with some people. Which direction any one of us takes in any given situation will depend on a complex array of variables.

  An asymmetry in our moral observations about what people are really like comes from the fact that we have a tendency to focus on extreme acts of immorality and ignore the fact that most of the time, most people are gracious, considerate, and benevolent. For every act of violence or deception that appears on the nightly news, there are 10,000 acts of kindness that go largely unnoticed. In fact, violence and deception make the news precisely because they are so unusual in our daily experience. In the U.S. population of 280 million people, acts of cruelty happen daily—the law of large numbers says, in fact, that million-to-one odds happen 280 times a day. But how many of us have seen even one murder, carjacking, or kidnapping? Far more of us have probably been victims of some sort of scam or another, but this is because truth telling is the basis of almost all human interactions. The con artist can only be successful because most of us are honest most of the time. And once burned, twice shy. We learn from our mistakes. Shading and nuance, as we have seen in fuzzy logic, are at the foundation of the study of human behavior.