Abstract

Contents

There has been a controversy started of late… concerning the general foundation of morals—whether they be derived from reason or from sentiment, whether we attain the knowledge of them by a chain of argument and induction or by an immediate feeling and finer internal sense, whether, like all sound judgment of truth and falsehood, they should be the same to every rational intelligent being, or whether, like the perception of beauty and deformity, they be founded entirely on the particular fabric and constitution of the human species.

David Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Saturday, 2 January 2010
Saturday, 30 January 2010

Morality

Morality is a big thing. Disregard for morality is still frowned upon even in our societies of dubious morals. For many of us, it still gives us the reason to imagine we and our friends and relatives are worthy human beings, why we choose the right politicians, how we justify our choices in our religions, and most of us still think it worth teaching to our children. But we are hypocritical about it, or at least prone to accept paradoxes about it in our moral reasoning. We judge atrocities against us as coming from an absence of morality, but the atrocities we commit on others are to uphold our own morality. So, morality sometimes seems an arbitrary thing.

Where does morality come from? Philosophers say from reason. Philosophy is not an isolated discipline. David Hume insisted that moral philosophy had to be grounded in facts about human nature, in psychology, and history. Even Kant, abstract and abstruse as he could be, mixed his moral philosophy with practical observations and suggestions. Any moral philosophy that ignored human capabilities must be a poor one. Living a good life consists of possessing virtues like honesty and kindness, and a good society should aspire to cultivate these virtues.

Believers say morality comes from God. Making God responsible for morality certainly solves the problem of where it comes from, and for many of us absolves us from any further personal responsibility. All we have to do is show we are devoted to God, then murdering foreign devils, and even refusing assistance to our own poor, is perfectly all right. The Greeks, 2400 years ago, had already shown that God was no answer to anything. Does God decide what acts are moral and what are immoral? If so, it means that when God commands us to torture a child, then it is moral! If we argue God would not command us to do something immoral, then morality is a higher law even than God. God Himself is subject to it, and so cannot defy it by commanding an evil morality. Why then do we not appeal to the higher moral law directly, rather than to God?

Now, scientists—biologists and psychologists—are getting to the source of our moral sense. The now classic obedience experiments of Stanley Milgram show an average Joe or Jane can to do terrible things, in obedience to authority and given sufficiently psychological distance from the deed, even torture and murder. Morality is not a passing fad.

Edvard A Westermarck (1862-1939)[†]E A Westermarck. As a young man, Westermarck read Mill’s essay on religion, deeply influencing his thinking. Therefter, he remained an agnostic. He considered sexual shame (The Origins of Sexual Modesty,1921) to be a by product of a Darwinian adaptation—the natural instinct of aversion to incest—emerging erroneously in those of a prudish nature as disgust for sex itself, though it is a necessary function. In Christianity and Morals he was tolerant towards homosexuality: “Among mammals the male possesses useless nipples, which occasionally even develop into breasts, and the female possesses a clitoris, which is merely a rudimentary penis, and may also develop. So, too, a homosexual tendency may be regarded as simply the psychical manifestation of special characters of the other sex, susceptible of being evolved under certain circumstances, such as may occur about the age of puberty. Thus the sexual instinct of boys and girls shows plain signs of a homosexual tendency, and is often more or less undifferentiated. When facts of this kind become more commonly known, they can scarcely fail to influence public opinion about homosexuality.” Westermarck never married, and was thought to have been a homosexual himself when he lived in London, about the time Oscar Wilde was persecuted for his homosexuality. thought that morality was a product of a long period of development, based on emotions of approval. They became moral when human society began to form. Humans evolved emotions to approve of whatever helps them, and disapprove of whatever harms them, to approve of what is fair to each, and disapprove of what unfairly favored some over others. Moral judgments can be taken as arguments from feelings, but this relativism does not lead to subjectivism, because moral feelings must be altruistic. So, morality is a social phenomenon that can be traced to altruistic and objective feelings of approval and disapproval. Empirical behavioral games reveal a disposition in about 80 percent of us to share with others, the rest being cheats. But a disposition also to detect and punish cheats, while being more generous to those who prove trustworthy. Neuroscience shows that emotional defects hinder practical decision making—properly working emotions are needed for the rational brain to work.

Jonathan Haidt

Jonathan Haidt agrees with the primacy of moral emotions rather than moral reasoning in shaping our moral judgments, and that moral emotions are emotions that are linked to the interests or welfare of social groups. Evolutionary studies and studies of primates suggest that moral emotions have evolved as social instincts to support co-operation. Evolution is not just a physical fight to the death, motivated by the utmost selfishness, as many seem to think. It involves divers strategies, some of which require co-operation, and human beings are a good example. Living in groups provides animals with a lot of security that solitary living misses. It means social groups of animals are often better fitted to survive than animals that forage or hunt for themselves, and sometimes for their children. Social animals have to curb selfishness to get the advantage of social living. Animals that might fight over a bone in the solitary state have to check their basic instinct to grab food entirely for themselves, and instead share it with others. This is the basis of morality.

Believers see evolution only as undermining morality, but it is always with us, though human honesty and kindness are influenced to a surprising degree by the situation. When you read words like “honor” and “respect” you incline to be more polite for awhile, than when you read words like “obnoxious” and “yobbish”. You will be more willing to help when someone drops some papers outside a phone booth, if you have just found a dime in the return slot, or when the person before you offers you a biscuit while they are calling.

Haidt, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, is a positive psychologist who has been building an evolutionary view of morality and its connections to religion and politics. Positive psychology was initiated by Martin Seligman, of the University of Pennsylvania, around 1997, by noticing that psychiatry emphasized illness not wellbeing. Medicine has traditionally focused on what needs to be done to cure illness, and much less on what should be done to maintain health. With the success in overcoming the vested interests of the tobacco industry in proving that cigarettes were lethal, then further successes on pesticides and pollution, then overeating, and, more recently, in the UK at least, on over indulgence on booze, medicine has began to move incredibly tortuously to prescribing good lifestyle and preventative measures, rather than just curing whatever illness we got. Seligman was the first to do this properly in psychology. Large numbers of people are depressed, and are treated one way or another, but what can people do to be happy?

Haidt began his career investigating the sense people had of disgust. “I first found divinity in disgust”. Often the way we arrive at our moral judgements is questionable. When we have a conviction, we like to think it is for a good reason. In moral dilemmas invented to test people’s sense of disgust against whether they felt something was actually harmful or up to individual choice, Haidt found that disgust won nearly always—in Brazil, India, and the United States—except for politically liberal college students, who stood by personal rights as long as no one was harmed. Haidt was asking what people felt about situations that often evoked a reaction of disgust and what it was that disgusted them, situations like:

• A woman is cleaning out her closet and she finds her old American flag. She doesn’t want the flag anymore, so she cuts it up into pieces and uses the rags to clean her bathroom
• A family’s dog is killed by a car in front of their house. They heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog’s body and cook it and eat it for dinner

Many people were disgusted by the scene described. They felt strongly that something was wrong but could not explain why. They were morally dumbfounded. People don’t generally engage in moral reasoning, Haidt argues, but moral rationalization. They begin with the conclusion, brought up by an unconscious emotion, and then work backward to a plausible justification.

He decided two systems were at work, one of which preceded the evolution of language, and the other followed it. The first was moral instinct, the second was moral judgement. Moral instincts occurs instantaneously—they are primitive emotional reactions that evolved for quick decisions to enhance survival in a potentially dangerous world. Later, moral judgement allowed us to explain why we reacted in the way we did. Moral instinct evolved by the selection of some feeling, disgust perhaps, or pleasure, quite independent of anything conscious like religion. Moral judgement arose when people had the tools—conscious rationality and language—to think about why the felt some things were good and others were bad.

Moral dumbfounding is when moral judgement cannot adequately explain why people have some moral instinct. The primary morality is therefore the instinctive affective morality, conditioned by evolution via feelings. Then as humans slowly began to think, they found themselves like children learning more about the world. They lived in a natural world full of curious and unexplained things, and among them was their own society, and the instincts that they lived by to keep it. They had to try to explain all these things, because they now had a center of reason in their brains, and language and an instinct to gossip by which they could explain their ideas to others. So, moral judgement emerged as a reasoning about the mysterious moral instincts that helped keep their community intact.

Haidt saw disgust as coming from ideas of physical and religious purity, which he considered a moral system for acting in a religiously approved way. What was metaphorically disgusting in this social sense was not approved by the religious community, and so expressed the desire of the group for conformity. Yet the basis of morality was much older, set in the emotions by natural selection. Conscious thinking about an abstract religious purity can only be a conscious metaphor of the real feeling of disgust one gets from something truly physically disgusting, like a decaying corpse. We ought not to be focusing on verbal reasons that we invent in the rational part of our brain to explain our judgements.

The true emotion of disgust is a sensitive characteristic that wimpish ape men moving from woodland to savannah felt about the meat they had to scavenge instead of the fruit they had hitherto mainly been eating. Bad fruit are rarely harmful, but bad meat can be when contaminated with bacteria and even be lethal. Ape men and women who were less cautious and more ready to try to scavenge from rotting animals sometimes caught food poisoning and died. The apes who survived passed on their cautious characteristic to their young who were also careful, and eventually all the ape men were cautious, a feature that represented itself in their extreme wimpishness about smelly and unwholesome looking food. It disgusted them. Disgust was eventually extended metaphorically to many other categories, to people who were unclean, to unacceptable sexual practices and to a wide class of bodily functions and behaviors that were seen as separating humans from animals.

After visiting India and seeing traditional Hindu approach to morality and religion, Haidt returned and read widely about the religious morality of ancient religions and sages. He noted that much of morality is directed at preservation of tranquility within the social group. The group has to be beneficial to the individual member, or there is no point in being social. So morality must see that individuals are not harmed within the group, and that the dealings within the group are fair.

The Innateness of Morality

Morality is universal, and objective—an innate part of human nature. A moral sense has been shown to exist in early childhood. Toddlers offer toys and comfort to people in distress. Some children, even in normal families, seem incapable of empathy or remorse. They bully younger children, torture animals, and habitually lie, showing early signs of a moral blindness which often becomes antisocial personality disorder or even psychopathy in adulthood, when they emerge as heartless thieves, murderers and even torturers. Brain damage can cause the same effect, but other studies show certain character traits correlate in identical twins, who share the same genes, though separated at birth and brought up in different environments. Adopted children, who do not have common genes, raised together in the same environment, do not share these characteristics. It suggests these signal traits are passed on by genes, rather than being induced by a common environment.

Psychologists, Elliot Turiel and Judith Smetana, find preschool children already are aware of some difference between social conventions and moral principles. Four year olds agree it is not all right to wear pyjamas to school—a social convention—and not all right to bash a little girl—a moral principle. How then do these differ? When asked whether these actions would be all right if the teacher allowed them, most of the children thought wearing pyjamas was all right, but bashing a little girl would still not be. Such abilities at a young age suggest the moral sense is innate, and science attributes it to evolution.

Moral judgements are peculiar because they are individual, yet are to do with society. Prohibitions of rape and murder go beyond local custom. Surveying moral concerns across the globe, anthropologist, Donald E Brown, collected ideas that were common to all people, human universals, including moral ones such these cited by Steven Pinker—right and wrong, empathy, fairness, generosity, rights and duties, proscription of violence like murder and rape, redress of wrongs, sanctions for wrongs against the community, shame, and taboos.

People everywhere think it is bad to harm others and good to help them. They have a sense of fairness, that one should reciprocate favors, reward benefactors and punish cheaters. They value loyalty to the group, sharing and solidarity among its members, and conformity to its norms. To maintain group solidarity, they must defer to its leadership, its authority figure, and respect those with a status that might bring leadership upon them. In loyalty to the group, they must accept its decisions on such matters as whatever is considered the group’s and not anyone’s personal possession. Group possessions not so to be used are defined as pure, clean and holy, so any such public object misused or even touched is rendered profane and polluted. Anyone who caused contamination of group possessions by misuse committed an act of sacrilege.

People feel that transgressors of morality should not be allowed to get away with it. They should be punished and often the punishment is meant to be public and exemplary, lest others should see it is possible to ignore moral behavior. Few people think murder is morally acceptable within their own society, but many people think judicial murder as punishment is moral, and continue to think it even when the evidence is dubious. The bible tells us that the Romans crucified Christ because they considered him to have been a traitor to the Roman emperor—a rival king. Challenging authority was treason, so he was given an exemplary punishment, intended not only to punish him, but to show others who wanted to do the same what they too could expect.

Many people will say it is morally acceptable to pull a switch to divert a runaway trolley, killing one person instead of five trapped on the main line. But to save the same five lives by throwing a person in the train’s path is almost universally deemed wrong. It suggests we have a subconscious inhibition against causing direct physical harm to other people, an inhibition that makes sense only because others are valuable to you—you are social! An equally strong moral sanction has not yet evolved for harming someone indirectly. People, therefore, are not too worried if someone else commits the homicide, such as the state, or if it can be done at a distance, such as by rocketry, from a battleship or from an aeroplane. The moral sense is as yet incomplete.

Group Morality

Bound by ties of kinship, humans evolved, like most mammals, to care for and avoid harming their kin. Then, as social animals with reciprocal relationships, they evolved to co-operate with those they trusted and punish those they did not. So, the two foundations of morality were a desire to care, and a desire for fairness and justice.

These concerns for care and fairness supported the evolution of co-operation in small foraging societies based on intimate personal relationships, but could not have sustained co-operation in large groups of strangers. For German sociologist, Ferdinand Tönnies, social evolution from small community (Gemeinschaft) to mass society (Gesellschaft) could not avoid tearing apart the fabric of human relations. He meant the change from traditional rural to modern industrial societies, but disruptive characteristics of mass society had occurred much earlier.

Tönnies, distinguished Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft as different kinds of human groups. Gemeinschaften were small and intimate groups, such as families, small villages, clubs and churches. Today, social control is left to consensus, custom, and religious belief, and the individual is subordinate to the group. Within the Gemeinschaft form of social order, an homogeneity of view, culture, the ties of kinship, a common language, and a sense of place are the basis for an organic unity. Alliances are based on closeness and mutual aid, while authority is personal and often paternalistic, commonly being held by the elder, the master, the patriarch.

Gesellschaften were larger, more impersonal groups meant to facilitate exchange and business, rather than personal needs, and exemplified today by cities, companies, corporations and nation states. Social control is a matter of law and formal contracts, both civil and criminal, specifying the rights and responsibilities of individuals to others and the commonwealth. Within the Gesellschaft, the identity born of community surrenders to the anonymity of mass society. The emerging economic order within its cities and centralized power is held in one piece by artificial relationships, more impermanent and changeable as the needs of the business, city or state change, based on class interests, civic needs and personal ambition or greed. The provision of goods and services changed from the craft production of a community of members bound by joint consumption and a common purpose. Economic exchange became a function of an impersonal market.

As humans began to think consciously in the long period leading up to the change in the nature of human society, care and fairness emerged from the instinctive underground of the mind into consciousness. The bands of prehumans instinctively felt these two necessities of sociality, and the slowly emerging consciousness addressed them as mysteries, like all other mysteries of life, and tried to explain and justify them. They became part of the tribal culture of the newly thinking human beings, and were absorbed by the children of any tribe as they absorbed their mother’s milk.

Haidt and Craig Joseph, of Northwestern University, from a review of anthropological and evolutionary literatures, found three additional psychological foundations of morality, besides care and fairness:

1. ingroup loyalty
2. authority
3. purity or sanctity.

Overpopulation and competition for resources forced the evolution of the larger mass societies (Gesellschaften), and the drive towards empire. Through tribal warfare, the more successful groups would tend to be those whose members were loyal, submissive, and reverent towards their group. And thus the virtues of patriotism, obedience, and piety would be favored by natural selection working on instinctive traits and cultural traditions.

Loyalty implies inter group competition, authority or respect could reflect primate hierarchy, but does not seem so deeply ingrained as to be instinctive, many people being utterly opposed to and resentful of hierarchies, and purity or sanctity, Haidt admits is recent, and he attributes to an origin in disgust associated with feelings of superiority or nobility across groups. Yet it seems to be primarily an ingroup taboo demarking community ceremonial objects, property and space, as opposed to personal possessions and gardens. Haidt and Joseph thought of these five moral foundations as like Kant’s mental categories, and called them after Dan Sperber, “learning modules”—evolved mental modules that feed into culture, to produce many more specific modules of virtues and vices which children easily grasp.

Virtues are constructed and learned socially, but build on categories already present in the evolved mind. Haidt calls them binding foundations, after their function of binding people together in social groups which require some degree of regulation of behavior in members, but they are contrasted with care and fairness aimed at protecting individuals from each other and allowing them to live in harmony as autonomous agents who can focus on their own goals. It seems an unnecessary distinction. If people were autonomous, then they would never bind by definition. The act of binding is what allows societies to work, and it includes protection from harm within the community and fairness. If there is a distinction between these two and the three others, it is that these two are more set into our evolved nature and so more fundamental.

Anyway, now Haidt had five instinctive components of group morality—care, fairness, group loyalty, authority and purity. Some of them have parallels in the nonhuman animal world. We are reluctant to harm others, but rhesus monkeys will starve rather than obtain food from a device that simultaneously gives an electric shock to a nearby monkey. Respect for authority appears as dominance and appeasement behavior in animals and the pecking order of birds.

Fairness is important in the west. Liberalism highly regards the person, and tolerates a degree of disorder in society so that people can have greater personal freedom. Haidt thinks the difference between American secular liberals and religious conservatives is the different moralities of their politics—liberals believe morality protects individual autonomy, conservatives think morality is also to bind people in communal loyalty, respect for authority, and religious purity. Secular liberals and modern cultures assume that the only concerns of morality are principles of harm and fairness, so that individuals should be free to live as they please as long as they are not harmful or unfair in their treatment of others. It is Haidt’s “contractual” social morality taken by secular liberals (more below), and Tönnies’ Gesellschaften.

Religious conservatives and traditional cultures prefer group loyalty, respect for authority, and religious purity as moral virtues, Haidt’s “beehive” social morality (more below), or Tönnies’ Gemeinschaften. When education was formalized, instinctive moral principles were taught too. What differed was that different people and cultures emphasized different ones of the five components.

The science of the moral sense alerts us to ways in which our psychological makeup can get in the way of our arriving at the most defensible moral conclusions. The moral sense, we are learning, is as vulnerable to illusions as the other senses. It is apt to confuse morality per se with purity, status and conformity. It tends to reframe practical problems as moral crusades and thus see their solution in punitive aggression. It imposes taboos that make certain ideas indiscussible. And it has the nasty habit of always putting the self on the side of the angels.

S Pinker

Haidt accepts that ingroup loyalty, authority, and purity—may underpin psychological systems that feed into fascism, racism, and homophobia. The reason is the development later of inter group rivalry, when group loyalty, authoritarian structure and belief in the purity of the group, strongly expressed, made for greater unity and success in the conflicts arising with other groups. It is the period of transition from small groups, Gemeinschaften, of about 150, to bigger groups, (Gesellschaften)—cities, nations and empires, which is late—in the last 10,000 years. In that sense, liberals are right to reject the three additional components of social morality as more cultural than instinctive, and Haidt is wrong to associate them with earlier groups. They are characteristics of the later phase, and if he finds them in modern “traditional” societies, they are actually not comparable with early human groups, but with the aggressive, expansionist phase of later inter tribal rivalry. Such morality is not evolved but cultural:

The example of African women who have chosen to eliminate female circumcision, even when this has been a sacred custom, illustrates how people in traditional moral cultures can change cultural practices that harm their children.

Prof L Arnhart

Anyway, Haidt summarized his new synthesis in moral psychology in four principles:

1. Instinct or intuition
2. Moral thinking is for social doing
3. Morality binds and builds
4. Morality concerns more than care and fairness

Haidt says religion has been important in strengthening the cohesion provided by the moral systems, but he seems to take the role of religion too far back. He says:

If we didn’t have religious minds we would not have stepped through the transition to groupishness. We’d still be just small bands roving around.

That is true, but human groups formed millions of years ago, and it is only in the last few thousand years that religion as we understand it has existed, distinct from the communal practices of the tribe. In these pages, we have complained before that anthropologists use the word religion, presumably in the way we now understand it, for primitive group behavior that was not considered as religious by the people doing it. It is rather as if alien observers of modern humans labeled attendance at the saturday game a religious event because many in the group ritually attended it. One can easily imagine that the saturday game could evolve into a religious event, and that is what happened to some forms of tribal behavior undertaken for other reasons—periodic communal celebrations, for example.

Those who found ways to bind themselves together were more successful.

J Haidt

Quite so. Feasts and festivals may have been simple occasions for joyously reinforcing group bonding, to bind the tribe, with nothing religious about it, but once the primitive humans adopted a totem or an ancestor as their tribal symbol[†]Totem and Ancestor. They stood for the tribe, for its customs and culture. The tribe was venerated as the source of shelter, security, help and healing. When the tribe became symbolized in this way, its symbol was venerated. Eventually it became the God., then the festivals would easily have become celebrations of the one or the other, and started to become religious in our modern sense.

These festivals required certain objects and spaces as well as times to be set aside, so that everyone knew what was happening, when and where, and these spaces, objects and periods had to be reserved for communal use. No individual in the tribe could use them. They were taboo. Reserving them for communal use meant the were sacred or holy, and to misuse sacred things was taboo. “Sacred” had no religious connotation in our modern sense, but our modern sense of it evolved once these places were kept for uses reserved for the totem, ancestor, and, eventually, tribal god. So, as Emile Durkheim saw, morality and sacredness became intertwined, but religion is the child and morality and tribal communal practices are its parent.

Religion per se is just too recent an innovation to have induced much in the way of natural selection, though in the last few thousand years it might have had an impact through unnatural selection—the mass murder of those who disagreed with religious hierarchies.

Haidt also found that the differences between liberals and conservatives consists of the what kinds of behavior each approves of. Checking the five categories in 7,000 people in the United States and other Western countries, people tend to align their moralization with their own lifestyles. Many formerly moral behaviors are no longer considered necessary for good morals—divorce, illegitimacy, being a working mother, marijuana use, and homosexuality. What used to be God’s retribution is now bad luck, like syphilis and AIDS, now considered morally neutral, as sexually transmitted diseases, except by religious extremists.

People who self identify as liberals primarily favoured the two moral systems he classified as protective of individuals—those of not harming others and of doing as you would be done by, but they felt less about the three moral categories he considered as protecting the group—loyalty, respect for authority and purity. Self described conservatives endorsed all five categories about equally, but favored less than liberals the categories Haidt thought singlarly protected individuals. Haidt thought political disagreements reflected the different preferences they held for the five moral categories:

A liberal morality will encourage much greater creativity but will weaken social structure and deplete social capital. I am really glad we have New York and San Francisco—most of our creativity comes out of cities like these. But a nation that was just New York and San Francisco could not survive very long. Conservatives give more to charity and tend to be more supportive of essential institutions like the military and law enforcement.

Haidt is getting into a tangle here, stepping beyond his level of competence, outside of science, and apparently into realms of political preference. He describes himself as a moderate liberal, but argues that liberal moral thinking is unbalanced towards the individual and away from the group, whereas conservatives are more balanced because they understand all the five categories of Haidtian morality equally. So conservatives have a better understanding of liberal views than liberals do of conservative views. To make liberals feel better Haidt assures them societies need both types of people.

The political terms themselves are thoroughly confused these days. A European liberal to an American conservative would be a Marxist, as the accusations of many Republicans that Obama is a Marxist show. To a European, Obama seems liberalish, but still pretty conservative, as his reluctance to stick to his promises over Guantanamo, and the Iraq and Afghan occupations show. Three hundred years ago, a liberal favoured individual rights intensely, and any sort of control by the state was oppressive. Nowadays, that seems to be the US conservative position.

In the UK, neoliberal means right wing, matching much of the political stance of the US neoconservatives, who in Europe are considered neofascists. Haidt’s characterization of US conservatives makes them sound almost socialist, when they think of themselves as determined enemies of socialism. No career politician in the US can call themself a socialist. They have to settle for liberal, though Haidt finds liberals morally antisocial in the majority of his five categories. The tangle illustrates much of the fault of Haidt’s methodology and the methodology of much US social psychological research. The US is not a typical society. Haidt seemed to realize it when he took his cues from seeing Indian society, but has lost it again. Too many generations of intense right wing propaganda has completely distorted US opinion, politically and religiously.

Frans B M de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University, concurs, giving a plain example.

It is obvious that liberals emphasize the common good—safety laws for coal mines, health care for all, support for the poor—that are not nearly as well recognized by conservatives.

Moreover, something is amiss if the five categories are deep seated in the instinct, because such deeply seated feelings ought not to be so easily ignored. Dr John T Jost, a political psychologist at New York University, thought the fact that liberals and conservatives agree on the first two of Haidt’s categories—do no harm, and do unto others as you would have them do unto you—meant they are genuine moral virtues, but the failure of liberals and conservatives to agree on other principles shows they are not “general moral virtues but specific ideological commitments or values”.

Haidt replies:

It is at least possible that conservatives and traditional societies have some moral or sociological insights that secular liberals do not understand.

Maybe, but conservative societies lack so many insights about liberal society, that they habitually represent it as immoral, and socialist society as veritably evil. In short, Haidt seems to be losing his objectivity. It seems to be true too of Haidt’s assessment of religion in human society.

Religiosity

The main players in the new religion wars are secular liberals called “new atheists” criticizing religious conservatives. As the critical atheists place their emphasis on science, Haidt says it is appropriate to hold them to a higher standard than religious conservatives. Are they really being scientifically objective, or are they just arguing from a different moral standpoint from their opponents. The new atheism has no legitimacy whatsoever unless it is grounded in scientific reason and evidence. Science is mostly free of distortion because it is multiply tested by other scientists who hold each other to account. Individual scientists, though, are as human as the rest of us, and can get passionate about their ideas and therefore become subject to distortion. David Sloan Wilson, who also takes a stance against the new atheists, points out questions that need to be answered about religion:

• Is there any empirically verifiable evidence for the existence of supernatural agents?
• If not, how can we explain the phenomenon of religion in naturalistic terms?
• What are the impacts of religion, good or bad, on human welfare?
• How can we use our understanding of religion to advance the goals of a stable and peaceful society?

So, Haidt begins his prizewinning essay, Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion—available online at Edge—with the assumption that, whether or not God exists, religiosity is a big feature of human life, and some combination of evolutionary, developmental, neuropsychological, and anthropological theories must explain why human religious practices take the various forms they do. Though he firmly declares he is an atheist, he only “doubts” the existence of God, and he has accepted considerable donations from the Templeton Foundation, a fund set up by a Christian multimillionaire to find relevance for religions, particularly Christianity, in modern society. Every man has his price, and it seems unlikely that the Templeton Foundation will give away its large financial prizes without expecting some return. But Haidt’s essay has clout because he is a leading scientist of the study of morality and religion, who “takes it for granted that religion is a part of the natural world appropriately studied by the the methods of science”. His critique therefore represents the scientific process in action—scientists holding each other accountable for their factual claims. That is fair enough. Science must be objective!

Having set out his assumptions, Haidt considers new atheist arguments through the four principles of psychological morality he has picked out.

1. Instinct. New atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are passionate about their views, but passion tends to bypass objectivity, making it difficult to search for and evaluate fairly evidence that opposes their intuitive feelings about religion.

2. Moral thinking is for social doing. The normal person animated by emotion engages in moral reasoning to find ammunition, not truth, and attack the motives and character of their opponents when it suits. The scientist respects evidence as the authority, and avoids ad hominem arguments. The new atheist books fail in this. Three examples will suffice. The new atheists…

   1. …emphasize religious belief, yet anthropologists and sociologists who study religion think ritual and community are more important than beliefs like the creation or life after death.
   2. …think believers, particularly fundamentalists, take their sacred texts literally, yet ethnographies of fundamentalist communities show they do not, but are actually flexible, drawing on the bible selectively, and even ignoring it, to justify humane responses to complex social situations.
   3. …review recent research on religion and conclude that it is a human evolutionary byproduct—not an adaptation but a maladaptation, bad for us, even though we think otherwise.

   Though Haidt thinks ritual is more important than beliefs, most religious practices reflect people’s beliefs of how the world is, or was. Rituals are adopted for a purpose, perhaps unrelated to any religion, but out of something believed at the time. Once rituals are adopted, the primitive mind thinks like the lottery ticket buyer who is compelled to buy the same numbers every week. If they do not, they fear they will lose a potential win. So rituals must be performed for fear of harm, commonly outlive their original purpose, then myths have to be invented to explain them. All of it is therefore false, except the binding effect of communal practice, the original reason, in all probability, why the rituals began.

   Even if belief in gods was initially a byproduct of sociality, as Pascal Boyer and Scott Atran have shown, providing it affected behavior, then natural selection could operate on phenotypic variation and favor those who used genetic or cultural ways to get an advantage out of their belief, perhaps by enhancing co-operation, trust, and mutual aid.

   Haidt defends biblical literalists because they do not actually literally believe their holy books even though they claim they have to be followed to the last word as the very word of God. The reason is that ancient holy books are ignorant and self contradictory, and in not doing as they preach, literalists are hypocrites. Polls show 36 percent of British Moslems, aged 16-24, think apostates should be murdered. Is it wrong to be contemptuous of beliefs like these that demand death for unbelief. How can this be prosocial in modern mixed societies? Are religions not to be criticized even when they violently opposed to our social values and even laws? How far can religions go before their privileged position is challenged?

3. Morality binds and builds. Dawkins’s goal is to raise consciousness. The virtuous will be united against cant and wickedness, and for the atheistic cause. It is group binding common in the new atheist books. Then traitors have to be punished or humiliated, and that too appears—atheists who defend the utility of religion, like Haidt himself, or want détente between science and religion are appeasers, a dirty word since Neville Chamberlain. It is akin to a religious orthodoxy, especially in respect of group selection.

   Durkheim’s view of religion was that it promoted group cohesion, and David Sloan Wilson thinks it helped humans pull through a “major transition” in evolutionary history. Dawkins discounts group selection because it will always fail from the baneful influence of free riders. But religions increase the costs of defection through punishment and ostracism, increase the contributions of individuals to group efforts through cultural and emotional mechanisms that increase trust, and sharpen the biological and cultural boundaries between groups. The old consensus against group selection is outdated. Yet Dawkins, in The God Delusion, dismisses it without reason, a hallmarks of standard moral thinking, not scientific thinking, Haidt writes.

   P Z Myers criticizes this argument. Dawkins, after several pages on group selection, did not dogmatically reject it, but wrote:

   Those of us who belittle group selection admit that in principle it can happen. The question is whether it amounts to a significant force in evolution.

   Nor did he, as Haidt said, dismiss “a credible position without reasons”. He gave reasons. Myers did not agree with Haidt that group selection served any purpose in the evolution of religion, because there is no evidence that religion is adaptive. Whatever evidence there is for group selection will not depend on any arguments from religion. The inheritability of religion is unlikely or weak to judge by countries like those in Europe where few people are religious once the constraints enforcing it slacken.

4. Morality concerns more than care and fairness. Sam Harris gives a liberal definition of morality:

   Questions of morality are questions about happiness and suffering. To the degree that our actions can affect the experience of other creatures positively or negatively, questions of morality apply.

   The Bible and the Quran, taken literally, are immoral because they are not primarily about happiness and suffering, and advocate harming people. Haidt thinks the Harris definition is biased, and gives this instead:

   Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, practices, institutions, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible.

Haidt proposes two ways that cultures suppress and regulate selfishness, two visions of what society is and how it ought to work. He calls them the contractual approach and the beehive approach:

Some Replies

Is this convincing? Should a social institution be assessed by how happy its members profess to be. Haidt’s own excellent definition of morality does not explicitly include happiness or longevity. Atheists are not arguing whether the faithful are happier, healthier, or live longer but about the truth of their specifically religious claims. Why must we trust religious institutions however social, that are founded on falsehood and are by definition incorrigible. Must science refuse to question the follies of priests for a vague, impossible to prove, notion that religion is the foundation of society? Because priests hand out charity, should we overlook their claim to know God, and which among their scented congregations are sinners. Should we believe that they know about some life after death, and the Utopia it is lived in, if you are good enough to get there?

Haidt says the difference between a “contractual” and a “beehive” society is that the first emphasizes almost exclusively the caring and justice components of his five fold morality, while the other considers about equally all five. But Haidt has equalized the five in his conceptual scheme, even though the latter three—loyalty, authority, and purity—seem to be conscious refinements of aspects of the first two. Lack of loyalty, acceptance of authority, and improper impurity are wicked because they invite the wrath of God, and application of his justice—withdrawal of His care, or punishment by direct harm. The people of Haiti blamed the earthquake on to God withdrawing his care, and allowing them to be harmed for their wrongdoing. The Romans worried that Christians were offending their traditional deities by calling them devils, and the outcome could only be bad. It seems to be Haidt, and not the new atheists he is defending religion from, who have the biased meaning of religion.

A religion can be defined as much more than a belief in gods and impossible worlds. In the cold war between the USA and communism, communism was called a religion. A religion in this sense is any set of beliefs you live by, so conservatism or liberalism is a religion. The liberal wants to protect liberal society from those who would destroy it in favour of compulsory beliefs. If some freedoms have to be sacrificed to achieve it, it has always been so. The freedom to start an exclusive religion might have to be forgone, just as the freedom to rob a fellow member of an early tribe was lost so the tribe could offer every one of its members security. Modern liberals want maximum personal freedom, but accept that transgressions of society’s necessary laws have to be punished to preserve justice in society, and it might mean having new laws to jail Christians or Moslems for threatening society with their extremism, while hoping they will not be called for. The defence of a free society might require stricter laws and communal loyalty. So, the two forms of society are ultimately no different—the reason for refinements to morality or the law are the same in both—defence of society through security and justice. If any form of society gets to such a state of oppression that its members see no benefit in being in it, then it will fall apart by revolution or conquest.

Haidt says, the new atheists conduct prejudiced reviews of the literature and conclude that there is no good evidence of any benefits except the health benefits of religion. Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell) thought a survey would perhaps show that atheists and agnostics are more respectful of the law, more sensitive to the needs of others, or more ethical than religious people.

Certainly no reliable survey has yet been done that shows otherwise. It might be that the best that can be said for religion is that it helps some people achieve the level of citizenship and morality typically found in brights. If you find that conjecture offensive, you need to adjust your perspective.

Surveys have shown for decades that religious believers are more charitable than those who are not. Religious practice is a strong predictor of charitable giving. Atheists may have many other virtues, but on one of the least controversial and most objective measures of moral behavior, giving time, money, and blood to help strangers in need, religious people appear to be morally superior to secular ones.

Arthur C Brooks (Who Really Cares, 2006) shows that religious conservatives donate 30 percent more money than liberals and nonreligious people. Even when controlled for income, they give more blood, give more time volunteering, and are four times more generous than secularists, not just to religious charities but to all of them—they are 10 percent more munificent to nonreligious charities, and 57 percent more likely than a secularist to help a homeless person. Even if you excuse secular liberals from charity because they vote for government welfare programs, it is hard to explain why secular liberals give so little blood. Charitable givers are 43 percent more likely to say they are “very happy” than nongivers, and 25 percent more likely than nongivers to say their health is excellent or very good. Brooks concludes that all forms of giving are increased by religious participation and slightly increased by conservative ideology, after controlling for religiosity.

Marc Hauser thought Brooks’ result is of interest, but wondered whether religions culturally influence moral judgement? Without knowing, evolutionary effects cannot be separated from cultural ones. And atheists, contrary to Haidt’s implications know these surveys. Dennett spoke of “reliable surveys”. Critics consider them weak, biased, and interpreted to favor religion. The surveys reflect the long domination of the US by the conservative religious right, leaving the small atheistic minority scared to speak in many parts of the US for fear of abuse by Christians. Haidt thinks of right and left in terms of party, but the Republicans and Democrats have such a shared agenda in many important aspects of social choice, that for decades Americans have been offered an essentially common view on many things, and religion and capitalism are two of the most important. The Christian majority in America is happy with its dominance and having institutions to care for its own. And as Dawkins says, conceding the benefits of Christian belief:

I wish it were not necessary to add that such beneficial effects in no way boost the truth value of religion’s claims.

Many atheists tend to be isolated, simply because they are a small minority, and Haidt is right—people are social animals and desire social contact, atheists being no different. Religion per se might not enhance health, but the religious community might. Atheism is not likely to be unhealthy as such, but feeling isolated is. The difference lies in the minority status of one versus the other. It is not a situation in which atheists are likely to be over the moon. The surveys show that scattered people who are excluded from communities do not receive the benefits of society, so are not willing to contribute to a society that excludes them.

Atheists may not donate because they do not trust religious organizations making the demands, or the charities associated with them. Haidt takes charitable giving as a moral virtue, but those who are positively opposed to religious humbug do not want to contribute to the employment of priests and ministers, the funding of missionaries, or the upkeep of churches. Preserving falsehood does not seem worthy of charitable status. And charities that are controlled by churches, but are ostensibly for other purposes, are no more to be trusted. What cut do the churches get from such charities? What do the executives and trustees of the charity—probably pastors and church officials—take from it? Liberals object to people who are wealthy or comfortably off taking money meant for the poor and deprived, but do not mind society taking taxes for essential charitable benefits for the poor and suffering, but proportionately, so that it is not the poor or relatively poor who carry the charitable burden, but society as a whole in a progressively taxed way.

Moreover, previous evidence has shown that only a few religious people, called intrinsically religious, who might be regarded as true godfearers, get the benefits of belief. Most average believers, extrinsic believers, for whom religion is a social club rather than a deep moral commitment, do not benefit. We can guess that those who are intrinsically religious will have already found religion, so any spread of religious conversion will be recruiting nonbelievers to become extrinsic believers, who benefit little. Society benefits people—all of them—not religion which is exclusive.

And why is donating morally superior, so that the religious doners are deemed morally superior to nonreligious people who do not give? Religious believers might fear actual retribution by God, perhaps at the Judgement Day, or by striking them down with illness, and health bills they cannot pay. Religious conditioning—an outside influence—does not make them morally superior over someone who chose to give, albeit less, without coercion. Perhaps churches, because of their common reputation for doing good irrespective of all the counter evidence, attract good people, including the better doners to charities. Haidt is among those who are devising experiments to test such questions, but by displaying a propensity to take sides over religion, he might not be the best man to try to answer them.

If Haidt is right, secular liberal societies should be made more religious and conservative in a utopian bid to increase happiness, charity, longevity, and social capital. But he recognizes too many valuable rights would be at risk, too many people would be excluded, and societies are so complex that it’s impossible to do such social engineering and get only what you intended. He concludes, every longstanding ideology and way of life contains some wisdom, some insights into ways of suppressing selfishness, enhancing co-operation, and ultimately enhancing human flourishing. Sam Harris points out that many societies ritually murdered human beings because their religion required it to propitiate its gods. Where is the ancient wisdom in that? How does it fit in with the idea of evolved morality?

Haidt’s review of moral psychology and apology for religion against the new atheists is not outlandishly unfair, but is far from being the objective look he accuses the atheistic scientists of neglecting. His many data, his surveys and social gaming, are much biased to the US, with some from Europe, and little from elsewhere despite occasional references to other cultures. The problem with the west, especially the US, is that it is not typical of the world, and is surely not typical of primitive societies, especially those emerging into humanity. The new moral psychology is fascinating and exciting, and Haidt is responsible for a chunk of it, but apologetics like this gives a distasteful feeling that the religious community has been getting worried about what its implications might be, and has recruited one of the prominent proponents as an apologist, or at least to again muddy waters that were beginning to clarify. Anyway, his views have been addressed by some of those he criticises.

P Z Myers thinks Haidt successfully shows how emotion and experience play an important role in morality, making judgements rapidly and instinctively. Morality has strong adaptive value in binding people together in a society and fostering co-operation. Humans, as a social primate, evolved moral emotions that promoted:

• within group morality—sociality and co-operation with other humans
• between group morality—informal behavior control working well when group numbers are small and groups are spread out.

When small tribes coalesced into large nations and states over the past 10,000 years, the latter became superiority towards humans outside the in group, and their groups, and xenophobia. Meanwhile, two social institutions evolved to codify and enforce the rules of social co-operation—government and religion. For almost a myriad years both have controlled how humans should live with one another in large state societies, approaching ten thousand years…

Yet, it is only a few centuries since the Enlightenment and scientific revolution. Pre-Enlightenment ways of thinking still prevail, so liberals have yet to convince the world that reason and science should replace ancient superstitions to reinforce the values our feelings and reason suggest to us. Applying moral discoveries to recent criticisms of religion fails. Haidt makes many assumptions that he does not justify about both religion and the new atheists, and particularly seems to misrepresent the critics of religion as being against morality. Atheism is not about throwing away moral systems or introducing new dogma, it is about refusing to allow people to hide absurd ideas from criticism behind the foolish plea of faith. In fact Haidt’s definition of morality is admirable, and acceptable to atheists.

Their argument is that religion a not a good moral system, because religions have become antipathetic to secure society, are confusing in being based on fantastic fairy tales that contradict science to be believed, and, in major ways, they make modern social life more difficult. While it might be true that religion was in some way beneficial to the building of cities, nations and empires, we are now in a post imperial world, in which religious bloks just perpetuate dangerous divisions in a global tribe. Michael Shermer cites Gregory Paul, in the Journal of Religion and Society, as showing an inverse correlation between religiosity—measured by belief in God, biblical literalism, and frequency of prayer and service attendance—and social health—measured by rates of homicide, suicide, childhood mortality, life expectancy, sexually transmitted diseases, abortion, and teen pregnancy—in 18 advanced democracies, where the US scores the highest in religiosity and much the highest in homicides, STDs, abortions, and teen pregnancies.

Haidt overlooks the importance of the changes in the modern situation. Religion does not now equate with morality, if it ever did in the vast expanses of prehistory we have to speculate about. Modern atheists reject the false virtues of faith, not just for being untrue but for being dangerous. As an atheist, Haidt must realize this, surely, yet continues with his apologetic as if he had not noticed. Haidt repeats the old canard that atheism for the new critics of religion is itself a religion, yet atheism is not a set of beliefs to live by, but merely a few beliefs about God and religion. A nonreligious weltanschauung might well be an effective religion as mentioned above, and atheism might be part of it, but atheism cannot be a religion itself. Presumably Haidt, though an atheist, does not think he is a religious atheist… because he is not a new atheist! One gets the shocking feeling that this sort of argument is the payback for Templeton’s gold.

Many religious people are good people. Religion has incorporated moral systems that contribute to people’s well being. There is wisdom in some ancient books. But religion has also been a shelter for rogues, it depends on superstition and dogma, and the ancient books also contain a lot of terrible morality—immorality. Yet the incorrigibility of religion stops anyone from purging it of its errors. Religion is not synonymous with morality and should not be respected:

Religion remains the only mode of discourse that encourages grown men and women to pretend to know things they manifestly do not and cannot know. If ever there were an attitude at odds with science, this is it. And the faithful are encouraged to keep shouldering this unwieldy burden of falsehood and self deception by everyone they meet—by their co-religionists, of course, and by people of differing faith, and now, with startling frequency, by scientists who claim to have no faith.

Sam Harris

Part of Haidt’s defence of religion seems to be that it is a useful delusion. It gets people to donate time, money, and blood to their neighbors. But science is not about fostering delusions, however useful they are. If delusions can be useful, it must be possible to find something true that is better.

The Last Word

Jonathan Haidt replied that anyone who writes about religion while taking a stand on it should have their work checked by others! But he was not an apologist for religion. He avers he is motivated neither to convict nor to acquit, but, if religion is to be subject to trial by science, he wanted the trial to be fair. Until we acknowledge a latent prejudice, however, we will have trouble understanding the accused.

The new atheists have taken a stand—they have decided religion poisons everything, and, indeed, religions do have pernicious effects on human welfare, particularly in fostering intergroup conflict and a willingness to do harmful things for religious reasons, like sacrificing humans, and killing infidels and apostates. He also agreed that the historical and cosmological claims of religions are mainly false, to judge from historical and scientific research. But religion is a mechanism for binding people into moral communities with mainly good effects on the communities, and the explanation of human religiosity is partly in the biological evolution of mental and emotional mechanisms, activated by culturally evolved religious practices and institutions.

Haidt thinks methodological individualism has captivated social sciences for too long:

Methodological individualism dominates our neighboring fields of economics, much of sociology, and all of psychology’s excursions into organizational theory. This is the dogma that all human social group processes are to be explained by laws of individual behavior.

Don Campbell, 1994

Getting free of the dogma, lets groups be investigated for the unique properties and regulatory mechanisms they might have as emergent entities in human evolution. It does not displace the earlier preference but allows the possibility of multilevel analysis of social phenomena. Three questions remain prominent.

1. Can group level adaptations evolve?

All agree that multilevel selection is possible in principle. Genes can spread either because they help individuals outcompete their within group neighbors, or because they help groups outcompete other groups. C Williams considered dozens of putative cases among animal species and concluded that it never actually happens. A herd of deer become quick runners individually, not because a herd of slow deer got eaten en masse by a pride of lions. Fast deer outcompete slow deer. Fast herds of deer did not outcompete slow herds.

Humans joined together into bands to give themselves a better chance against predators as a social animal. For thousands of millennia the human groups scarcely impinged on each other, there was so much space, and so few humans. Human groups were not competing, and when two groups got too close for comfort, one moved off into virgin territory—human spread out of Africa to populate the whole world. Eventually, though, the human population began to get big enough that local groups had to compete with each other, particulaly for food and water. Game was getting scarce, and people were keen to live near reliable water supplies. Human groups began competing against each other.

At this point the unity of the tribe became more important than it had ever been, and tribal culture had to adapt to promote unity. United groups tended to be more successful co-operatively, and so economically, militarily, politically, and reproductively, than less united groups. But this is not an evolutionary just so story, as Gould and Lewontin disdainfully called them, providing that:

• the variation in co-operation is heritable, as Hauser questioned
• free riding was effectively suppressed within co-operative human groups.

Haidt accepts that religiosity is not a factor in human personal evolution, but it is in human groups. It helps solving the free rider problem, and in outcompeting less cohesive groups. Religiosity is indeed heritable. Twin studies show something in our genome affecting whether or not we will believe in God as an adult. Haidt disagrees with Dean Hamer (The God Gene) that there is a gene for belief in God, but, more modestly, he thinks genes that gave rise to more religiously inclined minds co-evolved with cultural variations in beliefs, institutions, and practices that we now call religion. Here Haidt is being more precise and correct in noticing that the “beliefs, institutions, and practices” of these early people were not actually religion, at least initially.

Marc Hauser thought Haidt’s psychological perspective on morality and religion was admirable, but his evolutionary theories fell down in some respects. The most important failing is that variation has to be inheritable to be selected. The belief systems have to be passed on genetically, but no convincing evidence shows beliefs are inheritable genetically. Cultural selection is a different matter, so the two have to be properly distinguished. Haidt does not do it. The reason biologists like Dawkins reject group selection for individual or gene level selection is because the torrent of discovery that comes from the latter was and remains immense. So far, the same cannot be said about group selection.

This argument does not exclude other approaches from being productive too, even if not as productive. What matters is what is right. In economics, 20 years ago, Robert Frank and others contradicted the received wisdom of social Darwinism, otherwise known as capitalism, that human beings were not always selfish. Traditional neoliberal economists of the Adam Smith school, pointed to the success of Smith’s thesis. But Frank and others showed by economic gaming that people had altruistic, co-operative feelings as well as selfish ones. Now, evidence for group level selection in human groups is beginning to emerge.

Myers says religion is not adaptive even though religious people live longer, healthier lives and have more children than do nonreligious ones. Haidt asks what more direct evidence could there be of Darwinian adaptation? Religion serves to bind large groups together and to suppress individual selfishness, for the good of the group.

2. Are believers happier and more charitable?

Contrary to Myers, surveys show that it does not matter which party is in power when the charitable surveys are conducted. Conservatives and religious believers have been happier for as long as the surveys have been done. Myers objects that atheists do not trust religious charities, but there are plenty of nonreligious charities, if they were moved to donate at all. Hauser offers valid alternative reasons why religious people might be more generous, so, perhaps, most of the charity work of religious people should be excluded. But Brooks showed that, even excluding religious giving, religious believers gave more money to secular charities than did atheists—though Brooks excluded giving to political causes.

Haidt is admitting some faults in the data of the surveys, and it is true that some things in them are hard for anyone living in the real world to believe. The conflation of conservatives and the religious seems inappropriate. One can accept that intrinsic believers are healthier, happier, and better motivated to give by reason of their chosen lifestyles, but conservatives? They seem anything but Christian in their disdain for poverty, and their greed for aggrandisement. Moreover, many conservative givers are immensely wealthy. Are large donations from wealthy givers skewing the data. Conversely, atheists are present in the population to the extent of only a percentage or so. It cannot be as easy to get an equally representative sample. As Haidt said, the work needs checking… if not doing properly.

All that time and money given to one’s own church in the beehive analogy is, according to Haidt, like the “altruism” of bees who toil to build their common hive. The time and money given to build churches in faraway places is like bees founding new colonies. For believers, their church has become their tribe. But methodological individualists, who deny group level selection and shun group level analyses, find it hard to believe that people could be happier or more generous when they live in bee like ways than when they live on their own, outside of any hive.

3. Are beehive (binding) moralities good?

Religion can be viewed as a complex of co-evolved genes and cultural innovations for binding people together and imbuing them with a sense of community and collective purpose. In accomplishing this goal, religion is good, but now, in the age of imperial religions, there are undeniable costs. Religion as an adaptation for successful intergroup competition, means the suppression of selfishness within groups is at the expense of hatred across groups, and toward internal deviants.

Are certain conceptions of morality especially good at binding community together, but incompatible with modernity?

Sam Harris

Haidt said the answer was yes. He also thought fundamentalist and nonfundamentalist religions ought to have been more clearly distinguished in his apology. Fundamentalism is about applying a small set of fundamental, allegedly sacred, principles in an absolute, uncompromising, inflexible way to a complex world. The religious right and radical Islam are fundamentalist movements, incompatible with modernity, democracy, and diversity in society. In modern societies, they are antisocial and destructive. The world would be a better place without them.

The question then is, what is the basic difference between religion and fundamentalism. Religion itself is about applying a small set of sacred principles to everything. Again, to the extent that religious people do not do it, they are being pragmatic, and that is turning to principles that are not religious. Christ wanted everyone to give up all their wealth. Few Christians do it. They are being pragmatic, they say, but how then are they Christians? If they did do it, then they would not be hypocrites, but would they then be happy? Again, Christians have a desire to convert people everywhere, but most atheists would be glad if they just stuck to their own personal beliefs, and did not try for force us all to conform to their own lack of Christian principles.

Modern US religious communities are much like primitive tribes. They want to be enmeshed in extended kin networks, in congregations where everyone can ask for help from anyone, and everyone is expected to give such help. They are certainly generous within their own group and maybe in groups that they consider to be kinship groups, theologically. It is tribal. When hurricane Katrina struck, religious groups across the US sent volunteers and supplies, but to what extent are they willing to help the poor by supporting a health bill. Republicans hate it, and that is the party of the religious right and conservatives. Without being thoroughly familiar with the survey methodology and assumptions, it is hard to criticize them, so all one can say from this distance is that they do not seem to match common perceptions, and national voting patterns.

Conclusion

Man will become better when you show him what he is like.

Anton Chekhov

Jonathan Haidt is an original contributor to moral psychology, building on Durkheim’s hypothesis about the social origins of religion, the most realistic one, and the one that is now beginning to get some empirical backing. The social theories of an intra group morality produced by innate feelings of care and justice necessary for successful life in social groups provides the social basis of religion, and the much later evolution of conscious group loyalty, its authority and its sense of sanctity allowed it to gel into religion as we know it, in the era of large group competition forced onto humanity by declining resources in the last ten thousand years or so. Haidt has important contributions here to his credit.

The trouble is that He seems to have sold his soul to the Christian devil, John Templeton, casting grave doubts on his own objectivity. He says he is an atheist, and even atheists can find some good in religion, from the intra group components, though they reject religion for the overwhelming amounts of badness they generate, from the inter group components. Though Haidt pays lip service to these horrors of religion, it hardly dents his general admiration. In his valuable little book, The Happiness Hypothesis, 2006, he says:

Religious people have relationships through their religious communities, and many have a relationship with God.

It is scarcely the statement of an atheist. Haidt is either a bought man, bought by Templeton’s Foundation, or he is, like Paul the apostle, in denial of his own Christian calling. Either way, the objectivity of his investigations of religion are cast into doubt. Nothing requires a skeptical attitude more than the investigation of religion. Faith is held without evidence and yet takes precedence over any scientific evidence that might be elicited. So no believer can properly inquire into the object of their beliefs. As Haidt said himself, “anyone who writes about religion while taking a stand on it should have their work checked by others!”

Haidt holds that all five of his moral foundations are defensible and desirable, but conflicts between them preclude it. Hume saw religion could support morality, but could also promote moral fanaticism, as it did for Luther and Calvin, Hitler and Stalin, and in the Crusades, the Inquisition, the European religious wars, and the English Civil War. Religion brings out the best and the worst in people, but Haidt has little to say on the negative side, as if positive psychology meant ignoring half of reality. Religious prosociality is for the ingroup—the same church, coreligionists—but ferociously excludes other groups and religions. Strangers and apostates are murdered in the name of religion. It is the side that comes from group rivalry. Haidt’s three “binding foundations” of morality suddenly become immoral in the name of morality! They are undesirable in the modern global tribe. The original two are the desirable ones.

Larry Arnhart explains that Haidt thinks the liberal answer is an ideal Gesellschaft, a utopia in which everyone would give up their social commitments and live purely as autonomous individuals. Haidt accepts Arnhart’s characterization, but any such society is a return to solitariness, to individual selfishness and rivalry, the antithesis of society, and will need oppressive laws to keep people in it, especially those who are permanently exploited by those with wealth and power. It is not a utopia but a dystopia, and it cannot survive. Who, besides Haidt, has conceived of it?

Arnhard, who seems to have set himself the impossible task of trying to get US religious conservatives to be reasonable, says they want to combine the “individualizing foundations” with Haidt’s “binding foundations”, by promoting diverse Gemeinschaften within a single Gesellschaft. They are 40 percent right, Larry. Cutting out the “binding foundations” makes it right. What Haidt speaks of sensibly is a global society:

As technological advances make us more aware of the fate of people in faraway lands, our concerns expand and we increasingly want peace, decency, and co-operation to prevail in other groups, and in the human group as well.

We are in a post imperial age just when the US want to destroy any hopes of a global society and instead create a US military and economic empire. We cannot remain in a state of tribal rivalry when more and more tribes have nuclear weapons. We have to aim for a global understanding that amounts to a return to basics, the community rather than the state, but it is, as Haidt says, a global community. Like the many churches of the USA, its many clubs and interest groups, if not parties, there is no reason why they should not follow their own customs and practices, just have the have long done, in the US and most modern civilized societies, as long as they do not break the global law. The global society, the Gesellschaft, will, on a model like Arnhart’s, consist of a multiplicity of Gemeinschaften, all of whom can operate providing that they do not break the global law of the Gesellschaft.

It sounds admirable, but the question is how can they eliminate the rivalries that these small, especially religious, groups habitually work up into hatred, elitism and imperialism. Many small groups do exist within modern societies without making national, imperial or global demands, or bombing their next door church, temple or mosque. Arnhart asks how far does a liberal democratic society go in tolerating the cultural practices of Islamic fundamentalists and other social groups who want to enforce patriarchal authority over their women and children? He could have said right wing authoritarian Christians, happy to immorally murder doctors as immoral for arborting unwanted foetuses. When such demands are made, fanaticism is enjoined, and terrorism begins. Haidt accepted he was concerned about enforcing global Gesellschaft standards, and the damaging effects of multiculturalism and moral diversity:

I see a tension between the human need for thicker, binding, communal lives, and the tendency for such binding to become repressive.

A fanatical desire to force one’s own morality on to others has to be resisted by the Gesellschaft as totalitarian, and it might require the law firmly applied to antisocial demands by some Gemeinschaften, to stop it. David Sloan Wilson wants us to overcome group conflict by developing a “shared value system” that would make the global community a moral community. Arnhart has suggested that international human rights have emerged as something like a global morality of the human community, and these are what needs to be promoted internationally:

Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of their personality is possible. In the exercise of their rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.

The UN Declaration of Human Rights

Liberals would be supportive of this, but conservatives hardly would. They are very fond of their own groups, but utterly disdainful of anyone else’s. But, though social multiculturalism within a global community is a challenge, it is possible. It was possible 2000 years ago under Augustus and subsequent emperors, when many religions, most of them foreign, existed peacefully within the empire. When in Rome, do as the Romans do! Religious fanatics destroyed it—Christianity. The Dark Ages followed, a thousand years of ignorance.

So, success requires the re-emphasis of care and fair, and the curbing of intra group rivalry, within a multicultural global society, and that requires a broad consensus for peaceful coexistence to stop the fanatics—on all sides. The umberella law must be absolute, firm and strong, but fair. Global multiculturism requires an overall fair, and caring standard that is above all of the local communities, and is accepted in that way as being to the benefit of all of them—Wilson’s “shared value system that would make the global community a moral community”. It is a reaffirmation of Enlightenment principles, not an erosion of them. It requires the teaching of the morality of fairness and caring, so that everyone knows what to expect, and how to behave towards others. It is restoring the basic moral principles of the primitive Gemeinschaften as the footings of the global Gesellschaft’s legality.

The Golden Rule, extended to the whole world, as Christ seemed to intend it, would be a great way to initiate a global morality. It is entirely practical and devoid of supernatural requirements. It is based on the basic two community building principles of care and fairness. And most of the main religions, and the great sages of old have upheld it, so it ought to be entirely practicable to spread it globally.

So, the law will be set democratically, and operate around the Golden Rule, with harm to others and unfairness considered as heinous crimes, under Rawls’s Veil of Ignorance—no one is favoured. If Bush and Blair had thought they would be subject to such a law, they and little Hitlers like them would think twice about ordering the deaths of millions on some immoral putative calling by God.

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