Marc Hauser: Champions of Plurality | Edge
Marc Hauser is an evolutionary biologist who teaches in the psychology department at Harvard University. From his Edge essay, "It Seems Biology (Not Religion) Equals Morality":
Recent discoveries suggest that all humans ... are endowed with a gift from nature, a biological code for living a moral life. This code, a universal moral grammar, provides us with an unconscious suite of principles for judging what is morally right and wrong. ...
If this code is universal and impartial, then why are there are so many moral atrocities in the world? The answer comes from thinking about our emotions, the feelings we recruit to fuel in-group favouritism, out-group hatred and, ultimately, dehumanisation. ...
The good news about the psychology of prejudice, of creating distinctive classes of individuals who are in the tribe and outside of it, is that it is flexible, capable of change and — viewed from an evolutionary perspective — as abstract and content-free as the rules that enter into our moral grammar. All animals, humans included, have evolved the capacity to create a distinction between members of the in-group and those in the out-group. But the features that are selected are not set in the genome. Rather, it is open to experience. ...
[L]iving a moral life requires us to be restless with our present moral norms, always challenging us to discover what might and ought to be. And here is where nurture can re-enter the conversation. We need education because we need a world in which people listen to the universal voice of their species, while stopping to wonder whether there are alternatives. And if there are alternatives, we need rational and reasonable people who will be vigilant of partiality and champions of plurality.
