David Brooks: Where Does Morality Come From?

One of the exceptional characteristics inherent in humanity—and absent in all other known life forms—is our moral agency.  We, and only we, work out what is right and what is wrong based on a rational—and one must also say, emotional and sometimes irrational—contemplation, debate, reasoning, etc.  Only we come up with moral principles.  Only we have the capacity to work out methods to temper the injustices that strict adherence to principle can occasionally cause, what was known in English law as “equity.” Only we have the capacity to deliver true mercy.

Where does this uniquely human capacity come from?  That it is inherent in us as a species is clear.  But why?  David Brooks contemplates the matter in today’s NYT.  From his column, “The Moral Naturalists:”

Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? Most people think it is a gift from God, who revealed His laws and elevates us with His love. A smaller number think that we figure the rules out for ourselves, using our capacity to reason and choosing a philosophical system to live by.

Moral naturalists, on the other hand, believe that we have moral sentiments that have emerged from a long history of relationships. To learn about morality, you don’t rely upon revelation or metaphysics; you observe people as they live.

The latter group look at morality as just another evolved trait:

By the time humans came around, evolution had forged a pretty firm foundation for a moral sense. Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia argues that this moral sense is like our sense of taste. We have natural receptors that help us pick up sweetness and saltiness. In the same way, we have natural receptors that help us recognize fairness and cruelty. Just as a few universal tastes can grow into many different cuisines, a few moral senses can grow into many different moral cultures.

Brooks notes the reductionism:

For people wary of abstract theorizing, it’s nice to see people investigating morality in ways that are concrete and empirical. But their approach does have certain implicit tendencies. They emphasize group cohesion over individual dissent. They emphasize the cooperative virtues, like empathy, over the competitive virtues, like the thirst for recognition and superiority. At this conference, they barely mentioned the yearning for transcendence and the sacred, which plays such a major role in every human society.

Obviously Brooks couldn’t do justice to the moral naturalists’ thinking in a short opinion column.  But it doesn’t compute.  Not all societies embrace “fairness” as we do in the West, for example.  The concept of justice also varies widely, which seems to me is much more than differences in taste preferences.  Indeed, some societies allow murder as appropriate in certain circumstances.  The Roman system of pater familias, for example, permitted a husband to kill his wife and children without consequence because they were his property.  Some fundamentalist Muslim cultures today allow so-called “honor killings” as a means of suppressing women. Moreover, there certainly widely divergent views on what constitutes “cruelty.”  Just look at the animal rights debates.

Perhaps I am wrong, but moral naturalism seems to go hand in hand with those who deny human free will, who claim morality is a fiction dictated to us by our genes and chemicals, which we have discussed here before.

As a non scientist/expert on evolution—I think those who use the biological theory of Darwinism as a way to explain the uniqueness of human moral agency stretch the theory of random natural selection beyond the breaking point. Something happened to us when we evolved/were intelligently designed/were created as a conscious and rational species.  That “something” was a remarkable change from all other life that removed us from the pure Darwinian mode of raw survival to the point that we sought meaning and purpose and strived to create rules governing how best to live.

Some might call that evidence of a divine spark.  Others not.  But it sure is part of what makes us exceptional. Those who try to push us into a mold that would make us less than the sum of our capacities—that is, as unexceptional—miss the mark.