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| | Description | Marc Hauser's eminently readable and comprehensive book Moral Minds is revolutionary. He argues that humans have evolved a universal moral instinct, unconsciously propelling us to deliver judgments of right and wrong independent of gender, education, and religion. Experience tunes up our moral actions, guiding what we do as opposed to how we deliver our moral verdicts. For hundreds of years, scholars have argued that moral judgments arise from rational and voluntary deliberations about what ought to be. The common belief today is that we reach moral decisions by consciously reasoning from principled explanations of what society determines is right or wrong. This perspective has generated the further belief that our moral psychology is founded entirely on experience and education, developing slowly and subject to considerable variation across cultures. In his groundbreaking book, Hauser shows that this dominant view is illusory. Combining his own cutting-edge research with findings in cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, economics, and anthropology, he examines the implications of his theory for issues of bioethics, religion, law, and our everyday lives. | |
| | Product Details | | Author: | Marc Hauser | | Hardcover: | 512 pages | | Publisher: | Ecco | | Publication Date: | August 22, 2006 | | Language: | English | | ISBN: | 0060780703 | | Product Length: | 9.26 inches | | Product Width: | 6.34 inches | | Product Height: | 1.6 inches | | Product Weight: | 1.69 pounds | | Package Length: | 8.9 inches | | Package Width: | 5.75 inches | | Package Height: | 1.57 inches | | Package Weight: | 1.46 pounds | | Average Customer Rating: |  based on 23 reviews |
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| | Customer Reviews | Average Customer Review: ( 23 customer reviews )
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117 of 129 found the following review helpful:
 The Science of Morality Comes of Age Sep 09, 2006
By Herbert Gintis
When Darwin discovered natural selection, he was quick and remarkably insightful as to how this might affect our understanding of our own species, Homo sapiens. Alfred Russel Wallace, the impressive co-discover of the theory, never agreed to its application to humans. He considered our mental faculties far too advanced to be accounted for by the same forces that gave rise to pond scum and even chimpanzees. The debate continues to this very day, and will not be resolved in the forseeable future.
Nevertheless, there is now little doubt but that we share many of our mental faculties with other species, including, as Marc Hauser shows us in this fine volume, some of our moral capacities. Even those we do not share with our evolutionary relatives, he claims, are clearly the product of biological evolutionary forces. I think his argument accurately reflects our current state of knowledge, and is impressive indeed. Sociobiology, which was roundly rejected and indeed excoriate by most behavioral scientists when first proposed by Edward O. Wilson in 1975, has been fully vindicated.
The past decade has seen a strong push for the notion that ethics is a part of science, and the philosophy of ethics, in principle, ought not to be that different from the philosophy of physics. In particular, our ethical notions do not come from some rarified Platonic realm, or the capacity to perceive synthetic a prioris, or our superior informational processing power, but rather from our evolution as a species that has spend most of its history living in small bands of mobile, propertyless, stateless, hunter-gatherers.
Hauser deals with our current understanding of virtally all aspects of the mental life of humans, cognitive, affective, and moral, and he consistently weaves an intellectual web in which the mental capacities of animals and humans are inextricably interwoven. His specific claim, and unique to my knowledge, is that we can understand human morality in much the same manner as we have come to understand human language, based on the work of Chomsky and his coworkers. Humans are genetically endowed with a universal moral grammar, a tool kit for building specific human moralities, the latter being the product of cultural specificity. Thus, just as we cannot understand a foreign tongue, so we cannot appreciate a foreign morality, even though we know it springs from the same basic human capacities.
I think the analogy of ethics with language is a fruitful one, and well argued by Hauser on the basis of the facts (e.g., people cannot defend their ethical beliefs any more than they can explain the rules of grammar that they follow, unless they have been trained to do so). I am less sure that it is true. This is because the actual content of ethical principles is largely the same across all societies, and certainly across major religious and cultural groups (see Donald Brown, Human Universals, and Hauser's discussion of religion, pp. 421ff). We humans certainly can amplify our petty differences (e.g., what to eat, what to call our God, when to wear what), and there are important non-petty differences (tolerance, gender equality, abortion and homosexuality), but these vary systematically with level of economic development, and are not the cocophony of human languages.
This book is written for the novice, and is a wonderful introduction to the recent liturature on the human mind, by an eminent researcher whose knowledge of "wild minds" (the title of his previous book) is unsurpassed, and who has enriched us all by turning his gaze to human primates.
54 of 60 found the following review helpful:
 A Mess. Hauser Is Both Confusing and Deeply Confused Aug 09, 2008
By Nan Chen
"cineaste"
This is a horribly written (at times incoherent) and poorly argued for book. Hauser's main thesis is that humans have a "moral grammar" analogous to the universal grammar made famous by Chomsky's theory of human language acquisition. Unfortunately Hauser offers little evidence to support his "theory" of universal moral grammar. His theory is actually a loosely held together notion that is more armchair speculation than actual systematic scientific theory.
My first complaint is stylistic. I am usually not a stickler for style in scientific writing but the book is so bad in this area that something must be said to warn the potential reader. The reader is subjected to prose that meanders between the redundant to the trivial to the nonsensical. For example, odd phraseology such as describing at one point how one can "literally" pull "propositions" out of a hat slow the reading down and makes the reader wonder about the English proficiency of the writer. Hauser also repeatedly makes seemingly absurd claims without any justification such as claiming that Swedes would wage warfare on anyone who would dare to try to tell them to change religions (p. 416). I am not being nitpicky here; the book is filed with these kinds of stupid, nonsensical, and absolutely bizarre statements.
Content wise, the book also fails. Hauser tries to establish his "theory" by listing a hodgepodge of empirical studies from ethology, neuroscience, psychology, anthropology and economics which he claims support it. Unfortunately the reader is not given any reason whatsoever to believe this. It's an uncontroversial truth that humans do have innate moral instincts given us by our evolutionary history but philosophers have known about the natural inclinations toward morality for, literally, thousands of years (Aristotle, Confucius, Mencius, for example all described how humans are naturally endowed with moral instincts, capacities, dispositions and emotions). This thesis is not new and it does have justification in the empirical sciences. But to claim that there are universal grammars analogous to universal linguistic grammars is to make a far stronger and more audacious claim, a claim that Hauser does not prove in this work (it seems to me he doesn't even offer much of an attempt). Many of the experiments he uses to "support" his thesis are only tenuously linked to it at best. At times Hauser strains to establish a connection and at other times no connection is apparent at all. His strategy seems to be to impress readers by throwing as much information as possible at them in the hope of impressing them with red herrings. At times, even Hauser seems to get confused by his own examples and how they are linked to his thesis. The critical reader gets the impression that Hauser's repeated uses of ad hoc interpretations of the experimental data are desperate attempts to save what little substance there is in the book.
In arguing his case, he also makes use of ideas developed from moral philosophers. But his understanding of moral philosophy is grossly inadequate. His "Humean Creature" would have been completely alien to David Hume; his "Rawlsian Creature" likewise to John Rawls. It seems to me that he could have completely omitted all the talk of these moral creatures and stuck with the sciences, subject matters he has had far more experience with albeit uses incompetently to establish a very nebulous claim.
31 of 36 found the following review helpful:
 Disgusted with Hauser Jul 10, 2008
By Mark E. Rhodes
"writer/guitarist"
Hauser ends his book "Moral Minds" as follows.
"The notion of a universal moral grammar with parametric variation provides one way to think about pluralism. It requires us to understand how, in development, particular parameters are fixed by experience. It also requires us to appreciate that once fixed, we may be as perplexed by another community's moral system as we are by their language. Appreciating the fact that we share a universal moral grammar, and that at birth we could have acquired any of the world's moral systems, should provide us with a sense of comfort, a sense that perhaps we can understand each other." (p 406)
I have rarely started a book with such delight only to end it with such disgust.
Hauser is not only wrong but lazy when he says we may be "as perplexed by another community's moral system as we are by their language." It is *impossible* to be as perplexed by another community's morality as we are by its language. (Though female genital mutilation and honor killings horrify me, they do not perplex me: I "get it" but I also reject it.)
As for acquiring "any of the world's moral systems," Hauser never identifies and distinguishes them. I would like to know if he's thinking there are six major moral systems, or fifty, or several hundred if not thousands. The only moral systems he has a serious interest in are those of Kant, Hume, and Rawls, but Hauser never makes clear in what sense those three men were speaking different moral languages. Further, he attributes the three systems to these specific individuals and not the communities wherein these men grew up and presumably had the parameters of their native moral tongues permanently fixed. (One would think that Hauser would realize that by attributing the three most important ethical theories going--in his view, anyway--to individuals rather than communities, he has undercut his assumption that we take in our morality the way we take in our native languages. No one "grows up" Kantian; one chooses it.)
Hauser does speak of the ethics of hunter-gatherer communities, and of herding communities. He blames excessive violence in the American South on the region's Irish and Scotch settlers--herders--whose honor-based morality contrasts sharply with that of peaceful German and Dutch farmers who settled the North. But if a Southern (Irish) woman marries a Northern (Dutch) man, what is the moral language of their children?
Hauser sees UMG explaining why people from many backgrounds give the same answer to moral dilemmas. I think this is a conceptual mistake. Granted, I'm no linguist and may misperceive the analogy, but it seems to me that Chomsky's universal grammar focuses on the *structure* of spoken languages whereas Hauser focuses on the *content* of moral judgments.
Further, Hauser focuses only on moral emergencies. This would be like a linguistic theory that explained only expletives. (Grammatically, expletives are *exceptional* cases.) We have a multitude of chances to cheat on our taxes or spread rumors about colleagues but few chances to make an instantaneous life or death decision. Consider how Hauser treats a *slow* life and death decision, the Terri Schiavo case.
Hauser favored the removal of feeding tubes. Further, he argues that those opposed to this were basing their judgments on religious teachings and that morality and religion should be "divorced." But he argues elsewhere that moral judgments are *immune* to religious instruction; yet if that were so, such a divorce would make absolutely no difference at all. (Most who favor the divorce of religion and morality think that religion has a negative moral impact and *that* is why they want the divorce; it makes no sense to ask for a divorce if religion is *irrelevant* to one's moral judgments.)
Hauser is having it both ways: arguing that moral judgments are immune to religious instruction but then saying that the Terri Schiavo controversy arose because some people were making moral judgments based on religious instruction while other people (-in the same culture, no less) were not. Also, he clearly thinks those who wanted to remove the tubes were right and those who did not were wrong, but he provides no basis for judging the relative merits of claims made in different moral languages.
I understand that Hauser is using language as an analogy and that no analogy is perfect, but I finished this book wondering in what ways he thought the analogy held. There are thousands of languages but apparently just a few moral systems. Some of these moral systems may be attributed to a specific individual, which no one's native language can be. If morality is like language, why aren't there as many moral systems as languages? What is the moral equivalent of being bi-lingual? One can translate Greek philosophy into Latin, or German, or English, but how can one translate "herder morality" into "farmer morality"? Or Christian morality into atheist terms? Or Rawlsian morality into Kantian terms?
Hauser has gathered much fascinating research but his assessment is more than shaky.
31 of 36 found the following review helpful:
Taking the "Trolley Test" . . . and beyond Dec 14, 2006
By Stephen A. Haines
The most dangerous question Charles Darwin implied [but didn't ask] was what Nature imposed on humans. It was bad enough for Victorians to be confronted with the idea of an ape-like ancestor. If this was so, what did it say about our sense of values? Whatever else Darwin challenged about our fixed notions of who we are, that one remains in central place. There have been several attempts recently to address the question. Marc Hauser's is not only the most recent, but perhaps the most thorough, of these efforts. In this gracefully written account, he takes us through his reasoning and the evidence supporting it.
Following his earlier "Wild Minds" on other animals, Hauser turns to what makes up human values and how they're achieved. To anyone understanding the process of natural selection, the idea of "morals" as the product of evolution should be a given. Unsatisfied with assumptions, Hauser collects a wealth of information in support of how we derive our values. He sets the data against some "standard" views of what is right and proper behaviour. Drawing on well-known thinkers, he synopsises their views into fabricated entities: the Kantian, Humean, and Rawlsian "creatures". Each represents a different approach in determining what is "fair" and just in the works of Immanuel Kant, David Hume and John Rawls [Hauser provides little cartoon figures as visual aids to help remember these. The publisher had the wit to keep these minimally sized.]. As might be expected, none of these stances are absolutes, and Hauser often confronts us with amalgamations of the positions. What's important isn't the melding itself, but why it has taken place. As humans, we can avoid absolutes and do so on a daily basis. There is, however, a mechanism that was built up over the millennia of our evolutionary track, providing the common foundation for these decisions and our ability to rationalise them.
"Morality", he argues derives from what humans consider "fair" in our interactions with each other. Making the judgement of what is "fair" is an example of how humans break rigid biological bonds which is, in large part, what distinguishes us from others in the animal kingdom. There are fundamentally common aspects to our sense of what is "moral", but there are also variants, generally culturally based. The commonalities we observe are related, in Hauser's view, to Noam Chomsky's "language module". Dubbing it a "moral organ", he's careful not to assign it specific location or even clear function, but it must be an aspect of how our brains consider the world and our place in it.
The pivotal element in his analysis is "The Trolley Test". This classic example pits the lives of five people against one. How are the five to be saved? Are you responsible for the one if you divert the trolley that takes her life? What optional versions provide further insights into what we consider valuable in our interpersonal relations? And, for this study, what is the underlying basis for developing the idea of "morals" at all? Hauser turns to studies of children at various ages, from close to birth through adolescence for explanations. Children perceive much more than we credit them for, due mostly to their lacking skills to communicate. It's clear that while children may often be selfish monsters, they also exhibit early a sense of empathy that extends beyond or by-passes parental input. Actions, here, definitely speak louder than words. They also show that any sense of "morals" cannot be a rigid structure. There must be flexibility and adaptability.
Hauser's proposal can only stir further discussion and investigation. That, indeed, is his stated purpose. While we are unable to reach back into our evolutionary past to record how the proposed "moral organ" developed and how much it determines our behaviour and judgements. Many aspects of our society will be influenced by this book. It should give parents some pause when they find their dictates and a child's response clashing. Lawmakers and judges should consider this book required reading, since it necessarily means abandonment of some fundamental assumptions in the legal system. Hauser's examples even reach into the realm of international affairs and diplomacy. What else could be the result of looking at the question of "morals" in a global framework? It's a compelling study, requiring close reading with an open mind. How many of us are equipped for the task? [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
17 of 19 found the following review helpful:
great idea, poor execution Mar 31, 2007
By Tomas Kellner
"Astralavista"
I agree with Rick: great idea, poor execution. Various moral and social systems have long tried to codify and explain away through religious and other naratives what is only natural to us. Kudos to Mark Hauser for bringing our innate "moral organ" to broad attention.
His writing however is another matter. I suggest, read his introductory chapter "What Is Wrong?" and then cherry-pick from the rest of the book as much of the following material is highly repetitive. This is topic waiting to be tackled again by another, stronger writer.
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