The Moral Landscape, How Science Can Determine Human Values

Praise for THE MORAL LANDSCAPE

“Sam Harris breathes intellectual fire into an ancient debate. Reading this

thrilling, audacious book, you feel the ground shifting beneath your feet. Reason has

never had a more passionate advocate.”

—Ian McEwan, author of Atonement and winner of the Man Booker Prize for

Amsterdam

“A lively, provocative, and timely new look at one of the deepest problems in the

world of ideas. Harris makes a powerful case for a morality that is based on human

flourishing and thoroughly enmeshed with science and rationality. It is a tremendously

appealing vision, and one that no thinking person can afford to ignore.”

—Steven Pinker, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and author of

How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate

“Beautifully written as they were (the elegance of his prose is a distilled blend of

honesty and clarity) there was little in Sam Harris’s previous books that couldn’t have

been written by any of his fellow ‘horsemen’ of the ‘new atheism.’ This book is different,

though every bit as readable as the other two. I was one of those who had unthinkingly

bought into the hectoring myth that science can say nothing about morals. To my

surprise, The Moral Landscape has changed all that for me. It should change it for

philosophers too. Philosophers of mind have already discovered that they can’t duck the

study of neuroscience, and the best of them have raised their game as a result. Sam Harris

shows that the same should be true of moral philosophers, and it will turn their world

exhilaratingly upside down. As for religion, and the preposterous idea that we need God

to be good, nobody wields a sharper bayonet than Sam Harris.”

—Richard Dawkins, University of Oxford

“Reading Sam Harris is like drinking water from a cool stream on a hot day. He

has the rare ability to frame arguments that are not only stimulating, they are downright

nourishing, even if you don’t always agree with him! In this new book he argues from a

philosophical and a neurobiological perspective that science can and should determine

morality. His discussions will provoke secular liberals and religious conservatives alike,

who jointly argue from different perspectives that there always will be an unbridgeable

chasm between merely knowing what is and discerning what should be. As was the case

with Harris’s previous books, readers are bound to come away with previously firm

convictions about the world challenged, and a vital new awareness about the nature and

value of science and reason in our lives.”

—Lawrence M. Krauss, Foundation Professor and Director of the Origins

Project at Arizona State University and author of The Physics of Star Trek and Quantum

Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science

ALSO BY SAM HARRIS

The End of Faith

Letter to a Christian Nation

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For Emma

CONTENTS

Introduction The Moral Landscape

Chapter 1 Moral Truth

Chapter 2 Good and Evil

Chapter 3 Belief

Chapter 4 Religion

Chapter 5 The Future of Happiness

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Index

Introduction

THE MORAL LANDSCAPE

The people of Albania have a venerable tradition of vendetta called Kanun: if a

man commits a murder, his victim’s family can kill any one of his male relatives in

reprisal. If a boy has the misfortune of being the son or brother of a murderer, he must

spend his days and nights in hiding, forgoing a proper education, adequate health care,

and the pleasures of a normal life. Untold numbers of Albanian men and boys live as

prisoners of their homes even now.

Can we say that the Albanians are morally wrong to

have structured their society in this way? Is their tradition of blood feud a form of evil?

Are their values inferior to our own?

Most people imagine that science cannot pose, much less answer, questions of this

sort. How could we ever say, as a matter of scientific fact, that one way of life is better,

or more moral, than another? Whose definition of “better” or “moral” would we use?

While many scientists now study the evolution of morality, as well as its underlying

neurobiology, the purpose of their research is merely to describe how human beings think

and behave. No one expects science to tell us how we ought to think and behave.

Controversies about human values are controversies about which science officially has no

opinion.

I will argue, however, that questions about values—about meaning, morality, and

life’s larger purpose—are really questions about the well-being of conscious creatures.

Values, therefore, translate into facts that can be scientifically understood: regarding

positive and negative social emotions, retributive impulses, the effects of specific laws

and social institutions on human relationships, the neurophysiology of happiness and

suffering, etc. The most important of these facts are bound to transcend culture—just as

facts about physical and mental health do. Cancer in the highlands of New Guinea is still

cancer; cholera is still cholera; schizophrenia is still schizophrenia; and so, too, I will

argue, compassion is still compassion, and well-being is still well-being.

And if there

are important cultural differences in how people flourish—if, for instance, there are

incompatible but equivalent ways to raise happy, intelligent, and creative children—these

differences are also facts that must depend upon the organization of the human brain. In

principle, therefore, we can account for the ways in which culture defines us within the

context of neuroscience and psychology. The more we understand ourselves at the level

of the brain, the more we will see that there are right and wrong answers to questions of

human values.

Of course, we will have to confront some ancient disagreements about the status

of moral truth: people who draw their worldview from religion generally believe that

moral truth exists, but only because God has woven it into the very fabric of reality;

while those who lack such faith tend to think that notions of “good” and “evil” must be

the products of evolutionary pressure and cultural invention. On the first account, to

speak of “moral truth” is, of necessity, to invoke God; on the second, it is merely to give

voice to one’s apish urges, cultural biases, and philosophical confusion. My purpose is to

persuade you that both sides in this debate are wrong. The goal of this book is to begin a

conversation about how moral truth can be understood in the context of science.

While the argument I make in this book is bound to be controversial, it rests on a

very simple premise: human well-being entirely depends on events in the world and on

states of the human brain. Consequently, there must be scientific truths to be known

about it. A more detailed understanding of these truths will force us to draw clear

distinctions between different ways of living in society with one another, judging some to

be better or worse, more or less true to the facts, and more or less ethical. Clearly, such

insights could help us to improve the quality of human life—and this is where academic

debate ends and choices affecting the lives of millions of people begin.

I am not suggesting that we are guaranteed to resolve every moral controversy

through science. Differences of opinion will remain—but opinions will be increasingly

constrained by facts. And it is important to realize that our inability to answer a question

says nothing about whether the question itself has an answer. Exactly how many people

were bitten by mosquitoes in the last sixty seconds? How many of these people will

contract malaria? How many will die as a result? Given the technical challenges

involved, no team of scientists could possibly respond to such questions. And yet we

know that they admit of simple numerical answers. Does our inability to gather the

relevant data oblige us to respect all opinions equally? Of course not. In the same way,

the fact that we may not be able to resolve specific moral dilemmas does not suggest that

all competing responses to them are equally valid. In my experience, mistaking no

answers in practice for no answers in principle is a great source of moral confusion.

There are, for instance, twenty-one U.S. states that still allow corporal punishment

in their schools. These are places where it is actually legal for a teacher to beat a child

with a wooden board hard enough to raise large bruises and even to break the skin.

Hundreds of thousands of children are subjected to this violence each year, almost

exclusively in the South. Needless to say, the rationale for this behavior is explicitly

religious: for the Creator of the Universe Himself has told us not to spare the rod, lest we

spoil the child (Proverbs 13:24, 20:30, and 23:13–14). However, if we are actually

concerned about human well-being, and would treat children in such a way as to promote

it, we might wonder whether it is generally wise to subject little boys and girls to pain,

terror, and public humiliation as a means of encouraging their cognitive and emotional

development. Is there any doubt that this question has an answer? Is there any doubt that

it matters that we get it right? In fact, all the research indicates that corporal punishment

is a disastrous practice, leading to more violence and social pathology—and, perversely,

to greater support for corporal punishment.

But the deeper point is that there simply must be answers to questions of this kind,

whether we know them or not. And these are not areas where we can afford to simply

respect the “traditions” of others and agree to disagree. Why will science increasingly

decide such questions? Because the discrepant answers people give to them—along with

the consequences that follow in terms of human relationships, states of mind, acts of

violence, entanglements with the law, etc.—translate into differences in our brains, in the

brains of others, and in the world at large. I hope to show that when talking about values,

we are actually talking about an interdependent world of facts.

There are facts to be understood about how thoughts and intentions arise in the

human brain; there are facts to be learned about how these mental states translate into

behavior; there are further facts to be known about how these behaviors influence the

world and the experience of other conscious beings. We will see that facts of this sort

exhaust what we can reasonably mean by terms like “good” and “evil.” They will also

increasingly fall within the purview of science and run far deeper than a person’s

religious affiliation. Just as there is no such thing as Christian physics or Muslim algebra,

we will see that there is no such thing as Christian or Muslim morality. Indeed, I will

argue that morality should be considered an undeveloped branch of science.

Since the publication of my first book, The End of Faith, I have had a privileged

view of the “culture wars”—both in the United States, between secular liberals and

Christian conservatives, and in Europe, between largely irreligious societies and their

growing Muslim populations. Having received tens of thousands of letters and emails

from people at every point on the continuum between faith and doubt, I can say with

some confidence that a shared belief in the limitations of reason lies at the bottom of

these cultural divides. Both sides believe that reason is powerless to answer the most

important questions in human life. And how a person perceives the gulf between facts

and values seems to influence his views on almost every issue of social importance—

from the fighting of wars to the education of children.

This rupture in our thinking has different consequences at each end of the political

spectrum: religious conservatives tend to believe that there are right answers to questions

of meaning and morality, but only because the God of Abraham deems it so.

They

concede that ordinary facts can be discovered through rational inquiry, but they believe

that values must come from a voice in a whirlwind. Scriptural literalism, intolerance of

diversity, mistrust of science, disregard for the real causes of human and animal

suffering—too often, this is how the division between facts and values expresses itself on

the religious right.

Secular liberals, on the other hand, tend to imagine that no objective answers to

moral questions exist. While John Stuart Mill might conform to our cultural ideal of

goodness better than Osama bin Laden does, most secularists suspect that Mill’s ideas

about right and wrong reach no closer to the Truth. Multiculturalism, moral relativism,

political correctness, tolerance even of intolerance—these are the familiar consequences

of separating facts and values on the left.

It should concern us that these two orientations are not equally empowering.

Increasingly, secular democracies are left supine before the unreasoning zeal of old-time

religion. The juxtaposition of conservative dogmatism and liberal doubt accounts for the

decade that has been lost in the United States to a ban on federal funding for embryonic

stem-cell research; it explains the years of political distraction we have suffered, and will

continue to suffer, over issues like abortion and gay marriage; it lies at the bottom of

current efforts to pass antiblasphemy laws at the United Nations (which would make it

illegal for the citizens of member states to criticize religion); it has hobbled the West in

its generational war against radical Islam; and it may yet refashion the societies of Europe

into a new Caliphate.

Knowing what the Creator of the Universe believes about right and

wrong inspires religious conservatives to enforce this vision in the public sphere at

almost any cost; not knowing what is right—or that anything can ever be truly right—

often leads secular liberals to surrender their intellectual standards and political freedoms

with both hands.

The scientific community is predominantly secular and liberal—and the

concessions that scientists have made to religious dogmatism have been breathtaking. As

we will see, the problem reaches as high as the National Academies of Science and the

National Institutes of Health. Even the journal Nature, the most influential scientific

publication on earth, has been unable to reliably police the boundary between reasoned

discourse and pious fiction. I recently reviewed every appearance of the term “religion”

in the journal going back ten years and found that Nature’s editors have generally

accepted Stephen J. Gould’s doomed notion of “nonoverlapping magisteria”—the idea

that science and religion, properly construed, cannot be in conflict because they constitute

different domains of expertise.

As one editorial put it, problems arise only when these

disciplines “stray onto each other’s territories and stir up trouble.”

The underlying claim

is that while science is the best authority on the workings of the physical universe,

religion is the best authority on meaning, values, morality, and the good life. I hope to

persuade you that this is not only untrue, it could not possibly be true. Meaning, values,

morality, and the good life must relate to facts about the well-being of conscious

creatures—and, in our case, must lawfully depend upon events in the world and upon

states of the human brain. Rational, open-ended, honest inquiry has always been the true

source of insight into such processes. Faith, if it is ever right about anything, is right by

accident.

The scientific community’s reluctance to take a stand on moral issues has come at

a price. It has made science appear divorced, in principle, from the most important

questions of human life. From the point of view of popular culture, science often seems

like little more than a hatchery for technology. While most educated people will concede

that the scientific method has delivered centuries of fresh embarrassment to religion on

matters of fact, it is now an article of almost unquestioned certainty, both inside and

outside scientific circles, that science has nothing to say about what constitutes a good

life. Religious thinkers in all faiths, and on both ends of the political spectrum, are united

on precisely this point; the defense one most often hears for belief in God is not that there

is compelling evidence for His existence, but that faith in Him is the only reliable source

of meaning and moral guidance. Mutually incompatible religious traditions now take

refuge behind the same non sequitur.

It seems inevitable, however, that science will gradually encompass life’s deepest

questions—and this is guaranteed to provoke a backlash. How we respond to the resulting

collision of worldviews will influence the progress of science, of course, but it may also

determine whether we succeed in building a global civilization based on shared values.

The question of how human beings should live in the twenty-first century has many

competing answers—and most of them are surely wrong. Only a rational understanding

of human well-being will allow billions of us to coexist peacefully, converging on the

same social, political, economic, and environmental goals. A science of human

flourishing may seem a long way off, but to achieve it, we must first acknowledge that

the intellectual terrain actually exists.

Throughout this book I make reference to a hypothetical space that I call “the

moral landscape”—a space of real and potential outcomes whose peaks correspond to the

heights of potential well-being and whose valleys represent the deepest possible

suffering. Different ways of thinking and behaving—different cultural practices, ethical

codes, modes of government, etc.—will translate into movements across this landscape

and, therefore, into different degrees of human flourishing. I’m not suggesting that we

will necessarily discover one right answer to every moral question or a single best way

for human beings to live. Some questions may admit of many answers, each more or less

equivalent. However, the existence of multiple peaks on the moral landscape does not

make them any less real or worthy of discovery. Nor would it make the difference

between being on a peak and being stuck deep in a valley any less clear or consequential.

To see that multiple answers to moral questions need not pose a problem for us,

consider how we currently think about food: no one would argue that there must be one

right food to eat. And yet there is still an objective difference between healthy food and

poison. There are exceptions—some people will die if they eat peanuts, for instance—but

we can account for these within the context of a rational discussion about chemistry,

biology, and human health. The world’s profusion of foods never tempts us to say that

there are no facts to be known about human nutrition or that all culinary styles must be

equally healthy in principle.

Movement across the moral landscape can be analyzed on many levels—ranging

from biochemistry to economics—but where human beings are concerned, change will

necessarily depend upon states and capacities of the human brain. While I fully support

the notion of “consilience” in science

—and, therefore, view the boundaries between

scientific specialties as primarily a function of university architecture and limitations on

how much any one person can learn in a lifetime—the primacy of neuroscience and the

other sciences of mind on questions of human experience cannot be denied. Human

experience shows every sign of being determined by, and realized in, states of the human

brain.

Many people seem to think that a universal conception of morality requires that

we find moral principles that admit of no exceptions. If, for instance, it is truly wrong to

lie, it must always be wrong to lie—and if one can find a single exception, any notion of

moral truth must be abandoned. But the existence of moral truth—that is, the connection

between how we think and behave and our well-being—does not require that we define

morality in terms of unvarying moral precepts. Morality could be a lot like chess: there

are surely principles that generally apply, but they might admit of important exceptions.

If you want to play good chess, a principle like “Don’t lose your Queen” is almost always

worth following. But it admits of exceptions: sometimes sacrificing your Queen is a

brilliant thing to do; occasionally, it is the only thing you can do. It remains a fact,

however, that from any position in a game of chess there will be a range of objectively

good moves and objectively bad ones. If there are objective truths to be known about

human well-being—if kindness, for instance, is generally more conducive to happiness

than cruelty is—then science should one day be able to make very precise claims about

which of our behaviors and uses of attention are morally good, which are neutral, and

which are worth abandoning.

While it is too early to say that we have a full understanding of how human beings

flourish, a piecemeal account is emerging. Consider, for instance, the connection between

early childhood experience, emotional bonding, and a person’s ability to form healthy

relationships later in life. We know, of course, that emotional neglect and abuse are not

good for us, psychologically or socially. We also know that the effects of early childhood

experience must be realized in the brain. Research on rodents suggests that parental care,

social attachment, and stress regulation are governed, in part, by the hormones

vasopressin and oxytocin,

because they influence activity in the brain’s reward system.

When asking why early childhood neglect is harmful to our psychological and social

development, it seems reasonable to think that it might result from a disturbance in this

same system.

While it would be unethical to deprive young children of normal care for the

purposes of experiment, society inadvertently performs such experiments every day. To

study the effects of emotional deprivation in early childhood, one group of researchers

measured the blood concentrations of oxytocin and vasopressin in two populations:

children raised in traditional homes and children who spent their first years in an

orphanage.

As you might expect, children raised by the State generally do not receive

normal levels of nurturing. They also tend to have social and emotional difficulties later

in life. As predicted, these children failed to show a normal surge of oxytocin and

vasopressin in response to physical contact with their adoptive mothers.

The relevant neuroscience is in its infancy, but we know that our emotions, social

interactions, and moral intuitions mutually influence one another. We grow attuned to our

fellow human beings through these systems, creating culture in the process. Culture

becomes a mechanism for further social, emotional, and moral development. There is

simply no doubt that the human brain is the nexus of these influences. Cultural norms

influence our thinking and behavior by altering the structure and function of our brains.

Do you feel that sons are more desirable than daughters? Is obedience to parental

authority more important than honest inquiry? Would you cease to love your child if you

learned that he or she was gay? The ways parents view such questions, and the

subsequent effects in the lives of their children, must translate into facts about their

brains.

My goal is to convince you that human knowledge and human values can no

longer be kept apart. The world of measurement and the world of meaning must

eventually be reconciled. And science and religion—being antithetical ways of thinking

about the same reality—will never come to terms. As with all matters of fact, differences

of opinion on moral questions merely reveal the incompleteness of our knowledge; they

do not oblige us to respect a diversity of views indefinitely.

Facts and Values

The eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume famously argued that

no description of the way the world is (facts) can tell us how we ought to behave

(morality).

Following Hume, the philosopher G. E. Moore declared that any attempt to

locate moral truths in the natural world was to commit a “naturalistic fallacy.”

Moore

argued that goodness could not be equated with any property of human experience (e.g.,

pleasure, happiness, evolutionary fitness) because it would always be appropriate to ask

whether the property on offer was itself good. If, for instance, we were to say that

goodness is synonymous with whatever gives people pleasure, it would still be possible

to worry whether a specific instance of pleasure is actually good. This is known as

Moore’s “open question argument.” And while I think this verbal trap is easily avoided

when we focus on human well-being, most scientists and public intellectuals appear to

have fallen into it. Other influential philosophers, including Karl Popper,

have echoed

Hume and Moore on this point, and the effect has been to create a firewall between facts

and values throughout our intellectual discourse.

While psychologists and neuroscientists now routinely study human happiness,

positive emotions, and moral reasoning, they rarely draw conclusions about how human

beings ought to think or behave in light of their findings. In fact, it seems to be generally

considered intellectually disreputable, even vaguely authoritarian, for a scientist to

suggest that his or her work offers some guidance about how people should live. The

philosopher and psychologist Jerry Fodor crystallizes the view:

Science is about facts, not norms; it might tell us how we are, but it couldn’t tell

us what is wrong with how we are. There couldn’t be a science of the human condition.

While it is rarely stated this clearly, this faith in the intrinsic limits of reason is

now the received opinion in intellectual circles.

Despite the reticence of most scientists on the subject of good and evil, the

scientific study of morality and human happiness is well underway. This research is

bound to bring science into conflict with religious orthodoxy and popular opinion—just

as our growing understanding of evolution has—because the divide between facts and

values is illusory in at least three senses: (1) whatever can be known about maximizing

the well-being of conscious creatures—which is, I will argue, the only thing we can

reasonably value—must at some point translate into facts about brains and their

interaction with the world at large; (2) the very idea of “objective” knowledge (i.e.,

knowledge acquired through honest observation and reasoning) has values built into it, as

every effort we make to discuss facts depends upon principles that we must first value

(e.g., logical consistency, reliance on evidence, parsimony, etc.); (3) beliefs about facts

and beliefs about values seem to arise from similar processes at the level of the brain: it

appears that we have a common system for judging truth and falsity in both domains. I

will discuss each of these points in greater detail below. Both in terms of what there is to

know about the world and the brain mechanisms that allow us to know it, we will see that

a clear boundary between facts and values simply does not exist.

Many readers might wonder how can we base our values on something as difficult

to define as “well-being”? It seems to me, however, that the concept of well-being is like

the concept of physical health: it resists precise definition, and yet it is indispensable.

In fact, the meanings of both terms seem likely to remain perpetually open to revision as

we make progress in science. Today, a person can consider himself physically healthy if

he is free of detectable disease, able to exercise, and destined to live into his eighties

without suffering obvious decrepitude. But this standard may change. If the

biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey is correct in viewing aging as an engineering problem

that admits of a full solution,

being able to walk a mile on your hundredth birthday will

not always constitute “health.” There may come a time when not being able to run a

marathon at age five hundred will be considered a profound disability. Such a radical

transformation of our view of human health would not suggest that current notions of

health and sickness are arbitrary, merely subjective, or culturally constructed. Indeed, the

difference between a healthy person and a dead one is about as clear and consequential a

distinction as we ever make in science. The differences between the heights of human

fulfillment and the depths of human misery are no less clear, even if new frontiers await

us in both directions.

If we define “good” as that which supports well-being, as I will argue we must,

the regress initiated by Moore’s “open question argument” really does stop. While I agree

with Moore that it is reasonable to wonder whether maximizing pleasure in any given

instance is “good,” it makes no sense at all to ask whether maximizing well-being is

“good.” It seems clear that what we are really asking when we wonder whether a certain

state of pleasure is “good,” is whether it is conducive to, or obstructive of, some deeper

form of well-being. This question is perfectly coherent; it surely has an answer (whether

or not we are in a position to answer it); and yet, it keeps notions of goodness anchored to

the experience of sentient beings.

Defining goodness in this way does not resolve all questions of value; it merely

directs our attention to what values actually are—the set of attitudes, choices, and

behaviors that potentially affect our well-being, as well as that of other conscious minds.

While this leaves the question of what constitutes well-being genuinely open, there is

every reason to think that this question has a finite range of answers. Given that change in

the well-being of conscious creatures is bound to be a product of natural laws, we must

expect that this space of possibilities—the moral landscape—will increasingly be

illuminated by science.

It is important to emphasize that a scientific account of human values—i.e., one

that places them squarely within the web of influences that link states of the world and

states of the human brain—is not the same as an evolutionary account. Most of what

constitutes human well-being at this moment escapes any narrow Darwinian calculus.

While the possibilities of human experience must be realized in the brains that evolution

has built for us, our brains were not designed with a view to our ultimate fulfillment.

Evolution could never have foreseen the wisdom or necessity of creating stable

democracies, mitigating climate change, saving other species from extinction, containing

the spread of nuclear weapons, or of doing much else that is now crucial to our happiness

in this century.

As the psychologist Steven Pinker has observed,

if conforming to the dictates of

evolution were the foundation of subjective well-being, most men would discover no

higher calling in life than to make daily contributions to their local sperm bank. After all,

from the perspective of a man’s genes, there could be nothing more fulfilling than

spawning thousands of children without incurring any associated costs or responsibilities.

But our minds do not merely conform to the logic of natural selection. In fact, anyone

who wears eyeglasses or uses sunscreen has confessed his disinclination to live the life

that his genes have made for him. While we have inherited a multitude of yearnings that

probably helped our ancestors survive and reproduce in small bands of hunter-gatherers,

much of our inner life is frankly incompatible with our finding happiness in today’s

world. The temptation to start each day with several glazed donuts and to end it with an

extramarital affair might be difficult for some people to resist, for reasons that are easily

understood in evolutionary terms, but there are surely better ways to maximize one’s

long-term well-being. I hope it is clear that the view of “good” and “bad” I am

advocating, while fully constrained by our current biology (as well as by its future

possibilities), cannot be directly reduced to instinctual drives and evolutionary

imperatives. As with mathematics, science, art, and almost everything else that interests

us, our modern concerns about meaning and morality have flown the perch built by

evolution.

The Importance of Belief

The human brain is an engine of belief. Our minds continually consume, produce,

and attempt to integrate ideas about ourselves and the world that purport to be true: Iran

is developing nuclear weapons; the seasonal flu can be spread through casual contact; I

actually look better with gray hair. What must we do to believe such statements? What,

in other words, must a brain do to accept such propositions as true? This question marks

the intersection of many fields: psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, economics,

political science, and even jurisprudence.

Belief also bridges the gap between facts and values. We form beliefs about facts:

and belief in this sense constitutes most of what we know about the world—through

science, history, journalism, etc. But we also form beliefs about values: judgments about

morality, meaning, personal goals, and life’s larger purpose. While they might differ in

certain respects, beliefs in these two domains share very important features. Both types of

belief make tacit claims about right and wrong: claims not merely about how we think

and behave, but about how we should think and behave. Factual beliefs like “water is two

parts hydrogen and one part oxygen” and ethical beliefs like “cruelty is wrong” are not

expressions of mere preference. To really believe either proposition is also to believe that

you have accepted it for legitimate reasons. It is, therefore, to believe that you are in

compliance with certain norms—that you are sane, rational, not lying to yourself, not

confused, not overly biased, etc. When we believe that something is factually true or

morally good, we also believe that another person, similarly placed, should share our

belief. This seems unlikely to change. In chapter 3, we will see that both the logical and

neurological properties of belief further suggest that the divide between facts and values

is illusory.

The Bad Life and the Good Life

For my argument about the moral landscape to hold, I think one need only grant

two points: (1) some people have better lives than others, and (2) these differences relate,

in some lawful and not entirely arbitrary way, to states of the human brain and to states of

the world. To make these premises less abstract, consider two generic lives that lie

somewhere near the extremes on this continuum:

The Bad Life

You are a young widow who has lived her entire life in the midst of civil war.

Today, your seven-year-old daughter was raped and dismembered before your eyes.

Worse still, the perpetrator was your fourteen-year-old son, who was goaded to this evil

at the point of a machete by a press gang of drug-addled soldiers. You are now running

barefoot through the jungle with killers in pursuit. While this is the worst day of your life,

it is not entirely out of character with the other days of your life: since the moment you

were born, your world has been a theater of cruelty and violence. You have never learned

to read, taken a hot shower, or traveled beyond the green hell of the jungle. Even the

luckiest people you have known have experienced little more than an occasional respite

from chronic hunger, fear, apathy, and confusion. Unfortunately, you’ve been very

unlucky, even by these bleak standards. Your life has been one long emergency, and now

it is nearly over.

The Good Life

You are married to the most loving, intelligent, and charismatic person you have

ever met. Both of you have careers that are intellectually stimulating and financially

rewarding. For decades, your wealth and social connections have allowed you to devote

yourself to activities that bring you immense personal satisfaction. One of your greatest

sources of happiness has been to find creative ways to help people who have not had your

good fortune in life. In fact, you have just won a billion-dollar grant to benefit children in

the developing world. If asked, you would say that you could not imagine how your time

on earth could be better spent. Due to a combination of good genes and optimal

circumstances, you and your closest friends and family will live very long, healthy lives,

untouched by crime, sudden bereavements, and other misfortunes.

The examples I have picked, while generic, are nonetheless real—in that they

represent lives that some human beings are likely to be leading at this moment. While

there are surely ways in which this spectrum of suffering and happiness might be

extended, I think these cases indicate the general range of experience that is accessible, in

principle, to most of us. I also think it is indisputable that most of what we do with our

lives is predicated on there being nothing more important, at least for ourselves and for

those closest to us, than the difference between the Bad Life and the Good Life.

Let me simply concede that if you don’t see a distinction between these two lives

that is worth valuing (premise 1 above), there may be nothing I can say that will attract

you to my view of the moral landscape. Likewise, if you admit that these lives are

different, and that one is surely better than the other, but you believe these differences

have no lawful relationship to human behavior, societal conditions, or states of the brain

(premise 2), then you will also fail to see the point of my argument. While I don’t see

how either premise 1 or 2 can be reasonably doubted, my experience discussing these

issues suggests that I should address such skepticism, however far-fetched it may seem.

There are actually people who claim to be unimpressed by the difference between

the Bad Life and the Good Life. I have even met people who will go so far as to deny that

any difference exists. While they will acknowledge that we habitually speak and act as if

there were a continuum of experience that can be described by words like “misery,”

“terror,” “agony,” “madness,” etc., on one end and “well-being,” “happiness,” “peace,”

“bliss,” etc., on the other, when the conversation turns to philosophical and scientific

matters, such people will say learned things like, “but, of course, that is just how we play

our particular language game. It doesn’t mean there is a difference in reality.” One hopes

that these people take life’s difficulties in stride. They also use words like “love” and

“happiness,” from time to time, but we should wonder what these terms could signify that

does not entail a preference for the Good Life over the Bad Life. Anyone who claims to

see no difference between these two states of being (and their concomitant worlds),

should be just as likely to consign himself and those he “loves” to one or the other at

random and call the result “happiness.”

Ask yourself, if the difference between the Bad Life and the Good Life doesn’t

matter to a person, what could possibly matter to him? Is it conceivable that something

might matter more than this difference, expressed on the widest possible scale? What

would we think of a person who said, “Well, I could have delivered all seven billion of us

into the Good Life, but I had other priorities.” Would it be possible to have other

priorities? Wouldn’t any real priority be best served amid the freedom and opportunity

afforded by the Good Life? Even if you happen to be a masochist who fancies an

occasional taunting with a machete, wouldn’t this desire be best satisfied in the context of

the Good Life?

Imagine someone who spends all his energy trying to move as many people as

possible toward the Bad Life, while another person is equally committed to undoing this

damage and moving people in the opposite direction: Is it conceivable that you or anyone

you know could overlook the differences between these two projects? Is there any

possibility of confusing them or their underlying motivations? And won’t there

necessarily be objective conditions for these differences? If, for instance, one’s goal were

to place a whole population securely in the Good Life, wouldn’t there be more and less

effective ways of doing this? How would forcing boys to rape and murder their female

relatives fit into the picture?

I do not mean to belabor the point, but the point is crucial—and there is a

pervasive assumption among educated people that either such differences don’t exist, or

that they are too variable, complex, or culturally idiosyncratic to admit of general value

judgments. However, the moment one grants there is a difference between the Bad Life

and the Good Life that lawfully relates to states of the human brain, to human behavior,

and to states of the world, one has admitted that there are right and wrong answers to

questions of morality. To make sure this point is nailed down, permit me to consider a

few more objections:

What if, seen in some larger context, the Bad Life is actually better than the Good

Life—e.g., what if all those child soldiers will be happier in some afterlife, because they

have been purified of sin or have learned to call God by the right name, while the people

in the Good Life will get tortured in some physical hell for eternity?

If the universe is really organized this way, much of what I believe will stand

corrected on the Day of Judgment. However, my basic claim about the connection

between facts and values would remain unchallenged. The rewards and punishments of

an afterlife would simply alter the temporal characteristics of the moral landscape. If the

Bad Life is actually better over the long run than the Good Life—because it wins you

endless happiness, while the Good Life represents a mere dollop of pleasure presaging an

eternity of suffering—then the Bad Life would surely be better than the Good Life. If this

were the way the universe worked, we would be morally obligated to engineer an

appropriately pious Bad Life for as many people as possible. Under such a scheme, there

would still be right and wrong answers to questions of morality, and these would still be

assessed according to the experience of conscious beings. The only thing left to be

decided is how reasonable it is to worry that the universe might be structured in so bizarre

a way. It is not reasonable at all, I think—but that is a different discussion.

What if certain people would actually prefer the Bad Life to the Good Life?

Perhaps there are psychopaths and sadists who can expect to thrive in the context of the

Bad Life and would enjoy nothing more than killing other people with machetes.

Worries like this merely raise the question of how we should value dissenting

opinions. Jeffrey Dahmer’s idea of a life well lived was to kill young men, have sex with

their corpses, dismember them, and keep their body parts as souvenirs. We will confront

the problem of psychopathy in greater detail in chapter 3. For the moment, it seems

sufficient to notice that in any domain of knowledge, we are free to say that certain

opinions do not count. In fact, we must say this for knowledge or expertise to count at all.

Why should it be any different on the subject of human well-being?

Anyone who doesn’t see that the Good Life is preferable to the Bad Life is

unlikely to have anything to contribute to a discussion about human well-being. Must we

really argue that beneficence, trust, creativity, etc., enjoyed in the context of a prosperous

civil society are better than the horrors of civil war endured in a steaming jungle filled

with aggressive insects carrying dangerous pathogens? I don’t think so. In the next

chapter, I will argue that anyone who would seriously maintain that the opposite is the

case—or even that it might be the case—is either misusing words or not taking the time

to consider the details.

If we were to discover a new tribe in the Amazon tomorrow, there is not a

scientist alive who would assume a priori that these people must enjoy optimal physical

health and material prosperity. Rather, we would ask questions about this tribe’s average

lifespan, daily calorie intake, the percentage of women dying in childbirth, the prevalence

of infectious disease, the presence of material culture, etc. Such questions would have

answers, and they would likely reveal that life in the Stone Age entails a few

compromises. And yet news that these jolly people enjoy sacrificing their firstborn

children to imaginary gods would prompt many (even most) anthropologists to say that

this tribe was in possession of an alternate moral code every bit as valid and impervious

to refutation as our own. However, the moment one draws the link between morality and

well-being, one sees that this is tantamount to saying that the members of this tribe must

be as fulfilled, psychologically and socially, as any people on earth. The disparity

between how we think about physical health and mental/societal health reveals a bizarre

double standard: one that is predicated on our not knowing—or, rather, on our pretending

not to know—anything at all about human well-being.

Of course, some anthropologists have refused to follow their colleagues over the

cliff. Robert Edgerton performed a book-length exorcism on the myth of the “noble

savage,” detailing the ways in which the most influential anthropologists of the 1920s and

1930s—such as Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict—systematically

exaggerated the harmony of folk societies and ignored their all too frequent barbarism or

reflexively attributed it to the malign influence of colonialists, traders, missionaries, and

the like.

Edgerton details how this romance with mere difference set the course for the

entire field. Thereafter, to compare societies in moral terms was deemed impossible.

Rather, it was believed that one could only hope to understand and accept a culture on its

own terms. Such cultural relativism became so entrenched that by 1939 one prominent

Harvard anthropologist wrote that this suspension of judgment was “probably the most

meaningful contribution which anthropological studies have made to general

knowledge.”

Let’s hope not. In any case, it is a contribution from which we are still

struggling to awaken.

Many social scientists incorrectly believe that all long-standing human practices

must be evolutionarily adaptive: for how else could they persist? Thus, even the most

bizarre and unproductive behaviors—female genital excision, blood feuds, infanticide,

the torture of animals, scarification, foot binding, cannibalism, ceremonial rape, human

sacrifice, dangerous male initiations, restricting the diet of pregnant and lactating

mothers, slavery, potlatch, the killing of the elderly, sati, irrational dietary and

agricultural taboos attended by chronic hunger and malnourishment, the use of heavy

metals to treat illness, etc.—have been rationalized, or even idealized, in the fire-lit

scribblings of one or another dazzled ethnographer. But the mere endurance of a belief

system or custom does not suggest that it is adaptive, much less wise. It merely suggests

that it hasn’t led directly to a society’s collapse or killed its practitioners outright.

The obvious difference between genes and memes (e.g., beliefs, ideas, cultural

practices) is also important to keep in view. The latter are communicated; they do not

travel with the gametes of their human hosts. The survival of memes, therefore, is not

dependent on their conferring some actual benefit (reproductive or otherwise) on

individuals or groups. It is quite possible for people to traffic in ideas and other cultural

products that diminish their well-being for centuries on end.

Clearly, people can adopt a form of life that needlessly undermines their physical

health—as the average lifespan in many primitive societies is scarcely a third of what it

has been in the developed world since the middle of the twentieth century.

Why isn’t it

equally obvious that an ignorant and isolated people might undermine their psychological

well-being or that their social institutions could become engines of pointless cruelty,

despair, and superstition? Why is it even slightly controversial to imagine that some tribe

or society could harbor beliefs about reality that are not only false but demonstrably

harmful?

Every society that has ever existed has had to channel and subdue certain aspects

of human nature—envy, territorial violence, avarice, deceit, laziness, cheating, etc.—

through social mechanisms and institutions. It would be a miracle if all societies—

irrespective of size, geographical location, their place in history, or the genomes of their

members—had done this equally well. And yet the prevailing bias of cultural relativism

assumes that such a miracle has occurred not just once, but always.

Let’s take a moment to get our bearings. From a factual point of view, is it

possible for a person to believe the wrong things? Yes. It is possible for a person to value

the wrong things (that is, to believe the wrong things about human well-being)? I am

arguing that the answer to this question is an equally emphatic “yes” and, therefore, that

science should increasingly inform our values. Is it possible that certain people are

incapable of wanting what they should want? Of course—just as there will always be

people who are unable to grasp specific facts or believe certain true propositions. As with

every other description of a mental capacity or incapacity, these are ultimately statements

about the human brain.

Can Suffering Be Good?

It seems clear that ascending the slopes of the moral landscape may sometimes

require suffering. It may also require negative social emotions, like guilt and indignation.

Again, the analogy with physical health seems useful: we must occasionally experience

some unpleasantness—medication, surgery, etc.—in order to avoid greater suffering or

death. This principle seems to apply throughout our lives. Merely learning to read or to

play a new sport can produce feelings of deep frustration. And yet there is little question

that acquiring such skills generally improves our lives. Even periods of depression may

lead to better life decisions and to creative insights.

This seems to be the way our

minds work. So be it.

Of course, this principle also applies to civilization as a whole. Merely making

necessary improvements to a city’s infrastructure greatly inconveniences millions of

people. And unintended effects are always possible. For instance, the most dangerous

road on earth now appears to be a two-lane highway between Kabul and Jalalabad. When

it was unpaved, cratered, and strewn with boulders, it was comparatively safe. But once

some helpful Western contractors improved it, the driving skills of the local Afghans

were finally liberated from the laws of physics. Many now have a habit of passing slow-

moving trucks on blind curves, only to find themselves suddenly granted a lethally

unimpeded view of a thousand-foot gorge.

Are there lessons to be learned from such

missteps in the name of progress? Of course. But they do not negate the reality of

progress. Again, the difference between the Good Life and the Bad Life could not be

clearer: the question, for both individuals and groups, is how can we most reliably move

in one direction and avoid moving in the other?

The Problem of Religion

Anyone who wants to understand the world should be open to new facts and new

arguments, even on subjects where his or her views are very well established. Similarly,

anyone truly interested in morality—in the principles of behavior that allow people to

flourish—should be open to new evidence and new arguments that bear upon questions

of happiness and suffering. Clearly, the chief enemy of open conversation is dogmatism

in all its forms. Dogmatism is a well-recognized obstacle to scientific reasoning; and yet,

because scientists have been reluctant even to imagine that they might have something

prescriptive to say about values, dogmatism is still granted remarkable scope on

questions of both truth and goodness under the banner of religion.

In the fall of 2006, I participated in a three-day conference at the Salk Institute

entitled Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason, and Survival. This event was

organized by Roger Bingham and conducted as a town-hall meeting before an audience

of invited guests. Speakers included Steven Weinberg, Harold Kroto, Richard Dawkins,

and many other scientists and philosophers who have been, and remain, energetic

opponents of religious dogmatism and superstition. It was a room full of highly

intelligent, scientifically literate people—molecular biologists, anthropologists,

physicists, and engineers—and yet, to my amazement, three days were insufficient to

force agreement on the simple question of whether there is any conflict at all between

religion and science. Imagine a meeting of mountaineers unable to agree about whether

their sport ever entails walking uphill, and you will get a sense of how bizarre our

deliberations began to seem.

While at Salk, I witnessed scientists giving voice to some of the most dishonest

religious apologies I have ever heard. It is one thing to be told that the pope is a peerless

champion of reason and that his opposition to embryonic stem-cell research is both

morally principled and completely uncontaminated by religious dogmatism; it is quite

another to be told this by a Stanford physician who sits on the President’s Council on

Bioethics.

Over the course of the conference, I had the pleasure of hearing that Hitler,

Stalin, and Mao were examples of secular reason run amok, that the Islamic doctrines of

martyrdom and jihad are not the cause of Islamic terrorism, that people can never be

argued out of their beliefs because we live in an irrational world, that science has made

no important contributions to our ethical lives (and cannot), and that it is not the job of

scientists to undermine ancient mythologies and, thereby, “take away people’s hope”—all

from atheist scientists who, while insisting on their own skeptical hardheadedness, were

equally adamant that there was something feckless and foolhardy, even indecent, about

criticizing religious belief. There were several moments during our panel discussions that

brought to mind the final scene of Invasion of the Body Snatchers: people who looked

like scientists, had published as scientists, and would soon be returning to their labs,

nevertheless gave voice to the alien hiss of religious obscurantism at the slightest

prodding. I had previously imagined that the front lines in our culture wars were to be

found at the entrance to a megachurch. I now realized that we have considerable work to

do in a nearer trench.

I have made the case elsewhere that religion and science are in a zero-sum

conflict with respect to facts.

Here, I have begun to argue that the division between

facts and values is intellectually unsustainable, especially from the perspective of

neuroscience. Consequently, it should come as no surprise that I see very little room for

compromise between faith and reason on questions of morality. While religion is not the

primary focus of this book, any discussion about the relationship between facts and

values, the nature of belief, and the role of science in public discourse must continually

labor under the burden of religious opinion. I will, therefore, examine the conflict

between religion and science in greater depth in chapter 4.

But there is no mystery why many scientists feel that they must pretend that

religion and science are compatible. We have recently emerged—some of us leaping,

some shuffling, others crawling—out of many dark centuries of religious bewilderment

and persecution, into an age when mainstream science is still occasionally treated with

overt hostility by the general public and even by governments.

While few scientists

living in the West now fear torture or death at the hands of religious fanatics, many will

voice concerns about losing their funding if they give offense to religion, particularly in

the United States. It also seems that, given the relative poverty of science, wealthy

organizations like the Templeton Foundation (whose endowment currently stands at $1.5

billion) have managed to convince some scientists and science journalists that it is wise to

split the difference between intellectual integrity and the fantasies of a prior age.

Because there are no easy remedies for social inequality, many scientists and

public intellectuals also believe that the great masses of humanity are best kept sedated

by pious delusions. Many assert that, while they can get along just fine without an

imaginary friend, most human beings will always need to believe in God. In my

experience, people holding this opinion never seem to notice how condescending,

unimaginative, and pessimistic a view it is of the rest of humanity—and of generations to

come.

There are social, economic, environmental, and geopolitical costs to this strategy

of benign neglect—ranging from personal hypocrisy to public policies that needlessly

undermine the health and safety of millions. Nevertheless, many scientists seem to worry

that subjecting people’s religious beliefs to criticism will start a war of ideas that science

cannot win. I believe that they are wrong. More important, I am confident that we will

eventually have no choice in the matter. Zero-sum conflicts have a way of becoming

explicit.

Here is our situation: if the basic claims of religion are true, the scientific

worldview is so blinkered and susceptible to supernatural modification as to be rendered

nearly ridiculous; if the basic claims of religion are false, most people are profoundly

confused about the nature of reality, confounded by irrational hopes and fears, and

tending to waste precious time and attention—often with tragic results. Is this really a

dichotomy about which science can claim to be neutral?

The deference and condescension of most scientists on these subjects is part of a

larger problem in public discourse: people tend not to speak honestly about the nature of

belief, about the invidious gulf between science and religion as modes of thought, or

about the real sources of moral progress. Whatever is true about us, ethically and

spiritually, is discoverable in the present and can be talked about in terms that are not an

outright affront to our growing understanding of the world. It makes no sense at all to

have the most important features of our lives anchored to divisive claims about the

unique sanctity of ancient books or to rumors of ancient miracles. There is simply no

question that how we speak about human values—and how we study or fail to study the

relevant phenomena at the level of the brain—will profoundly influence our collective

future.

Chapter 1

MORAL TRUTH

Many people believe that something in the last few centuries of intellectual

progress prevents us from speaking in terms of “moral truth” and, therefore, from making

cross-cultural moral judgments—or moral judgments at all. Having discussed this subject

in a variety of public forums, I have heard from literally thousands of highly educated

men and women that morality is a myth, that statements about human values are without

truth conditions (and are, therefore, nonsensical), and that concepts like well-being and

misery are so poorly defined, or so susceptible to personal whim and cultural influence,

that it is impossible to know anything about them.

Many of these people also claim that a scientific foundation for morality would

serve no purpose in any case. They think we can combat human evil all the while

knowing that our notions of “good” and “evil” are completely unwarranted. It is always

amusing when these same people then hesitate to condemn specific instances of patently

abominable behavior. I don’t think one has fully enjoyed the life of the mind until one

has seen a celebrated scholar defend the “contextual” legitimacy of the burqa, or of

female genital mutilation, a mere thirty seconds after announcing that moral relativism

does nothing to diminish a person’s commitment to making the world a better place.

And so it is obvious that before we can make any progress toward a science of

morality, we will have to clear some philosophical brush. In this chapter, I attempt to do

this within the limits of what I imagine to be most readers’ tolerance for such projects.

Those who leave this section with their doubts intact are encouraged to consult the

endnotes.

First, I want to be very clear about my general thesis: I am not suggesting that

science can give us an evolutionary or neurobiological account of what people do in the

name of “morality.” Nor am I merely saying that science can help us get what we want

out of life. These would be quite banal claims to make—unless one happens to doubt the

truth of evolution, the mind’s dependency on the brain, or the general utility of science.

Rather I am arguing that science can, in principle, help us understand what we should do

and should want—and, therefore, what other people should do and should want in order

to live the best lives possible. My claim is that there are right and wrong answers to moral

questions, just as there are right and wrong answers to questions of physics, and such

answers may one day fall within reach of the maturing sciences of mind.

Once we see that a concern for well-being (defined as deeply and as inclusively as

possible) is the only intelligible basis for morality and values, we will see that there must

be a science of morality, whether or not we ever succeed in developing it: because the

well-being of conscious creatures depends upon how the universe is, altogether. Given

that changes in the physical universe and in our experience of it can be understood,

science should increasingly enable us to answer specific moral questions. For instance,

would it be better to spend our next billion dollars eradicating racism or malaria? Which

is generally more harmful to our personal relationships, “white” lies or gossip? Such

questions may seem impossible to get a hold of at this moment, but they may not stay that

way forever. As we come to understand how human beings can best collaborate and

thrive in this world, science can help us find a path leading away from the lowest depths

of misery and toward the heights of happiness for the greatest number of people. Of

course, there will be practical impediments to evaluating the consequences of certain

actions, and different paths through life may be morally equivalent (i.e., there may be

many peaks on the moral landscape), but I am arguing that there are no obstacles, in

principle, to our speaking about moral truth.

It seems to me, however, that most educated, secular people (and this includes

most scientists, academics, and journalists) believe that there is no such thing as moral

truth—only moral preference, moral opinion, and emotional reactions that we mistake for

genuine knowledge of right and wrong. While we can understand how human beings

think and behave in the name of “morality,” it is widely imagined that there are no right

answers to moral questions for science to discover.

Some people maintain this view by defining “science” in exceedingly narrow

terms, as though it were synonymous with mathematical modeling or immediate access to

experimental data. However, this is to mistake science for a few of its tools. Science

simply represents our best effort to understand what is going on in this universe, and the

boundary between it and the rest of rational thought cannot always be drawn. There are

many tools one must get in hand to think scientifically—ideas about cause and effect,

respect for evidence and logical coherence, a dash of curiosity and intellectual honesty,

the inclination to make falsifiable predictions, etc.—and these must be put to use long

before one starts worrying about mathematical models or specific data.

Many people are also confused about what it means to speak with scientific

“objectivity” about the human condition. As the philosopher John Searle once pointed

out, there are two very different senses of the terms “objective” and “subjective.”

The

first sense relates to how we know (i.e., epistemology), the second to what there is to

know (i.e., ontology). When we say that we are reasoning or speaking “objectively,” we

generally mean that we are free of obvious bias, open to counterarguments, cognizant of

the relevant facts, and so on. This is to make a claim about how we are thinking. In this

sense, there is no impediment to our studying subjective (i.e., first-person) facts

“objectively.”

For instance, it is true to say that I am experiencing tinnitus (ringing in my ear) at

this moment. This is a subjective fact about me, but in stating this fact, I am being

entirely objective: I am not lying; I am not exaggerating for effect; I am not expressing a

mere preference or personal bias. I am simply stating a fact about what I am hearing at

this moment. I have also been to an otologist and had the associated hearing loss in my

right ear confirmed. No doubt, my experience of tinnitus must have an objective (third-

person) cause that could be discovered (likely, damage to my cochlea). There is simply

no question that I can speak about my tinnitus in the spirit of scientific objectivity—and,

indeed, the sciences of mind are largely predicated on our being able to correlate first-

person reports of subjective experience with third-person states of the brain. This is the

only way to study a phenomenon like depression: the underlying brain states must be

distinguished with reference to a person’s subjective experience.

However, many people seem to think that because moral facts relate to our

experience (and are, therefore, ontologically “subjective”), all talk of morality must be

“subjective” in the epistemological sense (i.e., biased, merely personal, etc.). This is

simply untrue. I hope it is clear that when I speak about “objective” moral truths, or about

the “objective” causes of human well-being, I am not denying the necessarily subjective

(i.e., experiential) component of the facts under discussion. I am certainly not claiming

that moral truths exist independent of the experience of conscious beings—like the

Platonic Form of the Good

—or that certain actions are intrinsically wrong.

I am

simply saying that, given that there are facts— real facts—to be known about how

conscious creatures can experience the worst possible misery and the greatest possible

well-being, it is objectively true to say that there are right and wrong answers to moral

questions, whether or not we can always answer these questions in practice.

And, as I have said, people consistently fail to distinguish between there being

answers in practice and answers in principle to specific questions about the nature of

reality. When thinking about the application of science to questions of human well-being,

it is crucial that we not lose sight of this distinction. After all, there are countless

phenomena that are subjectively real, which we can discuss objectively (i.e., honestly and

rationally), but which remain impossible to describe with precision. Consider the

complete set of “birthday wishes” corresponding to every conscious hope that people

have entertained silently while blowing out candles on birthday cakes. Will we ever be

able to retrieve these unspoken thoughts? Of course not. Many of us would be hard-

pressed to recall even one of our own birthday wishes. Does this mean that these wishes

never existed or that we can’t make true or false statements about them? What if I were to

say that every one of these wishes was phrased in Latin, focused on improvements in

solar panel technology, and produced by the activity of exactly 10,000 neurons in each

person’s brain? Is this a vacuous assertion? No, it is quite precise and surely wrong. But

only a lunatic could believe such a thing about his fellow human beings. Clearly, we can

make true or false claims about human (and animal) subjectivity, and we can often

evaluate these claims without having access to the facts in question. This is a perfectly

reasonable, scientific, and often necessary thing to do. And yet many scientists will say

that moral truths do not exist, simply because certain facts about human experience

cannot be readily known, or may never be known. As I hope to show, this

misunderstanding has created tremendous confusion about the relationship between

human knowledge and human values.

Another thing that makes the idea of moral truth difficult to discuss is that people

often employ a double standard when thinking about consensus: most people take

scientific consensus to mean that scientific truths exist, and they consider scientific

controversy to be merely a sign that further work remains to be done; and yet many of

these same people believe that moral controversy proves that there can be no such thing

as moral truth, while moral consensus shows only that human beings often harbor the

same biases. Clearly, this double standard rigs the game against a universal conception of

morality.

The deeper issue, however, is that truth has nothing, in principle, to do with

consensus: one person can be right, and everyone else can be wrong. Consensus is a

guide to discovering what is going on in the world, but that is all that it is. Its presence or

absence in no way constrains what may or may not be true.

There are surely physical,

chemical, and biological facts about which we are ignorant or mistaken. In speaking of

“moral truth,” I am saying that there must be facts regarding human and animal well-

being about which we can also be ignorant or mistaken. In both cases, science—and

rational thought generally—is the tool we can use to uncover these facts.

And here is where the real controversy begins, for many people strongly object to

my claim that morality and values relate to facts about the well-being of conscious

creatures. My critics seem to think that consciousness holds no special place where

values are concerned, or that any state of consciousness stands the same chance of being

valued as any other. The most common objection to my argument is some version of the

following:

But you haven’t said why the well-being of conscious beings ought to matter to

us. If someone wants to torture all conscious beings to the point of madness, what is to

say that he isn’t just as “moral” as you are?

While I do not think anyone sincerely believes that this kind of moral skepticism

makes sense, there is no shortage of people who will press this point with a ferocity that

often passes for sincerity.

Let us begin with the fact of consciousness: I think we can know, through reason

alone, that consciousness is the only intelligible domain of value. What is the alternative?

I invite you to try to think of a source of value that has absolutely nothing to do with the

(actual or potential) experience of conscious beings. Take a moment to think about what

this would entail: whatever this alternative is, it cannot affect the experience of any

creature (in this life or in any other). Put this thing in a box, and what you have in that

box is—it would seem, by definition—the least interesting thing in the universe.

So how much time should we spend worrying about such a transcendent source of

value? I think the time I will spend typing this sentence is already too much. All other

notions of value will bear some relationship to the actual or potential experience of

conscious beings. So my claim that consciousness is the basis of human values and

morality is not an arbitrary starting point.

Now that we have consciousness on the table, my further claim is that the concept

of “well-being” captures all that we can intelligibly value. And “morality”—whatever

people’s associations with this term happen to be— really relates to the intentions and

behaviors that affect the well-being of conscious creatures.

On this point, religious conceptions of moral law are often put forward as

counterexamples: for when asked why it is important to follow God’s law, many people

will cannily say, “for its own sake.” Of course, it is possible to say this, but this seems

neither an honest nor a coherent claim. What if a more powerful God would punish us for

eternity for following Yahweh’s law? Would it then make sense to follow Yahweh’s law

“for its own sake”? The inescapable fact is that religious people are as eager to find

happiness and to avoid misery as anyone else: many of them just happen to believe that

the most important changes in conscious experience occur after death (i.e., in heaven or

in hell). And while Judaism is sometimes held up as an exception—because it tends not

to focus on the afterlife—the Hebrew Bible makes it absolutely clear that Jews should

follow Yahweh’s law out of concern for the negative consequences of not following it.

People who do not believe in God or an afterlife, and yet still think it important to

subscribe to a religious tradition, only believe this because living this way seems to make

some positive contribution to their well-being or to the well-being of others.

Religious notions of morality, therefore, are not exceptions to our common

concern for well-being. And all other philosophical efforts to describe morality in terms

of duty, fairness, justice, or some other principle that is not explicitly tied to the well-

being of conscious creatures, draw upon some conception of well-being in the end.

The doubts that immediately erupt on this point invariably depend upon bizarre

and restrictive notions of what the term “well-being” might mean.

I think there is little

doubt that most of what matters to the average person—like fairness, justice, compassion,

and a general awareness of terrestrial reality—will be integral to our creating a thriving

global civilization and, therefore, to the greater well-being of humanity.

And, as I have

said, there may be many different ways for individuals and communities to thrive—many

peaks on the moral landscape—so if there is real diversity in how people can be deeply

fulfilled in this life, such diversity can be accounted for and honored in the context of

science. The concept of “well-being,” like the concept of “health,” is truly open for

revision and discovery. Just how fulfilled is it possible for us to be, personally and

collectively? What are the conditions—ranging from changes in the genome to changes

in economic systems—that will produce such happiness? We simply do not know.

But what if certain people insist that their “values” or “morality” have nothing to

do with well-being? Or, more realistically, what if their conception of well-being is so

idiosyncratic and circumscribed as to be hostile, in principle, to the well-being of all

others? For instance, what if a man like Jeffrey Dahmer says, “The only peaks on the

moral landscape that interest me are ones where I get to murder young men and have sex

with their corpses.” This possibility—the prospect of radically different moral

commitments—is at the heart of many people’s doubts about moral truth.

Again, we should observe the double standard in place regarding the significance

of consensus: those who do not share our scientific goals have no influence on scientific

discourse whatsoever; but, for some reason, people who do not share our moral goals

render us incapable of even speaking about moral truth. It is, perhaps, worth

remembering that there are trained “scientists” who are Biblical Creationists, and their

“scientific” thinking is purposed toward interpreting the data of science to fit the Book of

Genesis. Such people claim to be doing “science,” of course, but real scientists are free,

and indeed obligated, to point out that they are misusing the term. Similarly, there are

people who claim to be highly concerned about “morality” and “human values,” but

when we see that their beliefs cause tremendous misery, nothing need prevent us from

saying that they are misusing the term “morality” or that their values are distorted. How

have we convinced ourselves that, on the most important questions in human life, all

views must count equally?

Consider the Catholic Church: an organization which advertises itself as the

greatest force for good and as the only true bulwark against evil in the universe. Even

among non-Catholics, its doctrines are widely associated with the concepts of “morality”

and “human values.” However, the Vatican is an organization that excommunicates

women for attempting to become priests

but does not excommunicate male priests for

raping children.

It excommunicates doctors who perform abortions to save a mother’s

life—even if the mother is a nine-year-old girl raped by her stepfather and pregnant with

twins

—but it did not excommunicate a single member of the Third Reich for

committing genocide. Are we really obliged to consider such a diabolical inversion of

priorities to be evidence of an alternative “moral” framework? No. It seems clear that the

Catholic Church is as misguided in speaking about the “moral” peril of contraception, for

instance, as it would be in speaking about the “physics” of Transubstantiation. In both

domains, it is true to say that the Church is grotesquely confused about which things in

this world are worth paying attention to.

However, many people will continue to insist that we cannot speak about moral

truth, or anchor morality to a deeper concern for well-being, because concepts like

“morality” and “well-being” must be defined with reference to specific goals and other

criteria—and nothing prevents people from disagreeing about these definitions. I might

claim that morality is really about maximizing well-being and that well-being entails a

wide range of psychological virtues and wholesome pleasures, but someone else will be

free to say that morality depends upon worshipping the gods of the Aztecs and that well-

being, if it matters at all, entails always having a terrified person locked in one’s

basement, waiting to be sacrificed.

Of course, goals and conceptual definitions matter. But this holds for all

phenomena and for every method we might use to study them. My father, for instance,

has been dead for twenty-five years. What do I mean by “dead”? Do I mean “dead” with

reference to specific goals? Well, if you must, yes—goals like respiration, energy

metabolism, responsiveness to stimuli, etc. The definition of “life” remains, to this day,

difficult to pin down. Does this mean we can’t study life scientifically? No. The science

of biology thrives despite such ambiguities. Again, the concept of “health” is looser still:

it, too, must be defined with reference to specific goals—not suffering chronic pain, not

always vomiting, etc.—and these goals are continually changing. Our notion of “health”

may one day be defined by goals that we cannot currently entertain with a straight face

(like the goal of spontaneously regenerating a lost limb). Does this mean we can’t study

health scientifically?

I wonder if there is anyone on earth who would be tempted to attack the

philosophical underpinnings of medicine with questions like: “What about all the people

who don’t share your goal of avoiding disease and early death? Who is to say that living

a long life free of pain and debilitating illness is ‘healthy’? What makes you think that

you could convince a person suffering from fatal gangrene that he is not as healthy as you

are?” And yet these are precisely the kinds of objections I face when I speak about

morality in terms of human and animal well-being. Is it possible to voice such doubts in

human speech? Yes. But that doesn’t mean we should take them seriously.

One of my critics put the concern this way: “Morals are relative to the time and

place in which they appear. If you do not already accept well-being as a value, then there

seems to be no argument for why one should promote well-being.” As proof of this

assertion, he observed that I would be unable to convince the Taliban that they value the

wrong things. By this standard, however, the truths of science are also “relative to the

time and place in which they appear,” and there is no way to convince someone who does

not value empirical evidence that he should value it.

Despite 150 years of working at it,

we still can’t convince a majority of Americans that evolution is a fact. Does this mean

biology isn’t a proper science?

Everyone has an intuitive “physics,” but much of our intuitive physics is wrong

(with respect to the goal of describing the behavior of matter). Only physicists have a

deep understanding of the laws that govern the behavior of matter in our universe. I am

arguing that everyone also has an intuitive “morality,” but much of our intuitive morality

is clearly wrong (with respect to the goal of maximizing personal and collective well-

being). And only genuine moral experts would have a deep understanding of the causes

and conditions of human and animal well-being.

Yes, we must have a goal to define

what counts as “right” or “wrong” when speaking about physics or morality, but this

criterion visits us equally in both domains. And yes, I think it is quite clear that members

of the Taliban are seeking well-being in this world (as well as hoping for it in the next).

But their religious beliefs have led them to create a culture that is almost perfectly hostile

to human flourishing. Whatever they think they want out of life—like keeping all women

and girls subjugated and illiterate—they simply do not understand how much better life

would be for them if they had different priorities.

Science cannot tell us why, scientifically, we should value health. But once we

admit that health is the proper concern of medicine, we can then study and promote it

through science. Medicine can resolve specific questions about human health—and it can

do this even while the very definition of “health” continues to change. Indeed, the science

of medicine can make marvelous progress without knowing how much its own progress

will alter our conception of health in the future.

I think our concern for well-being is even less in need of justification than our

concern for health is—as health is merely one of its many facets. And once we begin

thinking seriously about human well-being, we will find that science can resolve specific

questions about morality and human values, even while our conception of “well-being”

evolves.

It is essential to see that the demand for radical justification leveled by the moral

skeptic could not be met by any branch of science. Science is defined with reference to

the goal of understanding the processes at work in the universe. Can we justify this goal

scientifically? Of course not. Does this make science itself unscientific? If so, we appear

to have pulled ourselves down by our bootstraps.

It would be impossible to prove that our definition of science is correct, because

our standards of proof will be built into any proof we would offer. What evidence could

prove that we should value evidence? What logic could demonstrate the importance of

logic?

We might observe that standard science is better at predicting the behavior of

matter than Creationist “science” is. But what could we say to a “scientist” whose only

goal is to authenticate the Word of God? Here, we seem to reach an impasse. And yet, no

one thinks that the failure of standard science to silence all possible dissent has any

significance whatsoever; why should we demand more of a science of morality?

Many moral skeptics piously cite Hume’s is/ought distinction as though it were

well known to be the last word on the subject of morality until the end of the world.

They insist that notions of what we ought to do or value can be justified only in terms of

other “oughts,” never in terms of facts about the way the world is. After all, in a world of

physics and chemistry, how could things like moral obligations or values really exist?

How could it be objectively true, for instance, that we ought to be kind to children?

But this notion of “ought” is an artificial and needlessly confusing way to think

about moral choice. In fact, it seems to be another dismal product of Abrahamic

religion—which, strangely enough, now constrains the thinking of even atheists. If this

notion of “ought” means anything we can possibly care about, it must translate into a

concern about the actual or potential experience of conscious beings (either in this life or

in some other). For instance, to say that we ought to treat children with kindness seems

identical to saying that everyone will tend to be better off if we do. The person who

claims that he does not want to be better off is either wrong about what he does, in fact,

want (i.e., he doesn’t know what he’s missing), or he is lying, or he is not making sense.

The person who insists that he is committed to treating children with kindness for reasons

that have nothing to do with anyone’s well-being is also not making sense. It is worth

noting in this context that the God of Abraham never told us to treat children with

kindness, but He did tell us to kill them for talking back to us (Exodus 21:15, Leviticus

20:9, Deuteronomy 21:18–21, Mark 7:9–13, and Matthew 15:4–7). And yet everyone

finds this “moral” imperative perfectly insane. Which is to say that no one—not even

fundamentalist Christians and orthodox Jews—can so fully ignore the link between

morality and human well-being as to be truly bound by God’s law.

The Worst Possible Misery for Everyone

I have argued that values only exist relative to actual and potential changes in the

well-being of conscious creatures. However, as I have said, many people seem to have

strange associations with the concept of “well-being”—imagining that it must be at odds

with principles like justice, autonomy, fairness, scientific curiosity, etc., when it simply

isn’t. They also worry that the concept of “well-being” is poorly defined. Again, I have

indicated why I do not think this is a problem (just as it’s not a problem with concepts

like “life” and “health”). However, it is also useful to notice that a universal morality can

be defined with reference to the negative end of the spectrum of conscious experience: I

refer to this extreme as “the worst possible misery for everyone.”

Even if each conscious being has a unique nadir on the moral landscape, we can

still conceive of a state of the universe in which everyone suffers as much as he or she (or

it) possibly can. If you think we cannot say this would be “bad,” then I don’t know what

you could mean by the word “bad” (and I don’t think you know what you mean by it

either). Once we conceive of “the worst possible misery for everyone,” then we can talk

about taking incremental steps toward this abyss: What could it mean for life on earth to

get worse for all human beings simultaneously? Notice that this need have nothing to do

with people enforcing their culturally conditioned moral precepts. Perhaps a neurotoxic

dust could fall to earth from space and make everyone extremely uncomfortable. All we

need imagine is a scenario in which everyone loses a little, or a lot, without there being

compensatory gains (i.e., no one learns any important lessons, no one profits from others’

losses, etc.). It seems uncontroversial to say that a change that leaves everyone worse off,

by any rational standard, can be reasonably called “bad,” if this word is to have any

meaning at all.

We simply must stand somewhere. I am arguing that, in the moral sphere, it is

safe to begin with the premise that it is good to avoid behaving in such a way as to

produce the worst possible misery for everyone. I am not claiming that most of us

personally care about the experience of all conscious beings; I am saying that a universe

in which all conscious beings suffer the worst possible misery is worse than a universe in

which they experience well-being. This is all we need to speak about “moral truth” in the

context of science. Once we admit that the extremes of absolute misery and absolute

flourishing—whatever these states amount to for each particular being in the end—are

different and dependent on facts about the universe, then we have admitted that there are

right and wrong answers to questions of morality.

Granted, genuine ethical difficulties arise when we ask questions like, “How

much should I care about other people’s children? How much should I be willing to

sacrifice, or demand that my own children sacrifice, in order to help other people in

need?” We are not, by nature, impartial—and much of our moral reasoning must be

applied to situations in which there is tension between our concern for ourselves, or for

those closest to us, and our sense that it would be better to be more committed to helping

others. And yet “better” must still refer, in this context, to positive changes in the

experience of sentient creatures.

Imagine if there were only two people living on earth: we can call them Adam

and Eve. Clearly, we can ask how these two people might maximize their well-being. Are

there wrong answers to this question? Of course. (Wrong answer number 1: smash each

other in the face with a large rock.) And while there are ways for their personal interests

to be in conflict, most solutions to the problem of how two people can thrive on earth will

not be zero-sum. Surely the best solutions will not be zero-sum. Yes, both of these people

could be blind to the deeper possibilities of collaboration: each might attempt to kill and

eat the other, for instance. Would they be wrong to behave this way? Yes, if by “wrong”

we mean that they would be forsaking far deeper and more durable sources of

satisfaction. It seems uncontroversial to say that a man and woman alone on earth would

be better off if they recognized their common interests—like getting food, building

shelter, and defending themselves against larger predators. If Adam and Eve were

industrious enough, they might realize the benefits of exploring the world, begetting

future generations of humanity, and creating technology, art, and medicine. Are there

good and bad paths to take across this landscape of possibilities? Of course. In fact, there

are, by definition, paths that lead to the worst misery and paths that lead to the greatest

fulfillment possible for these two people—given the structure of their respective brains,

the immediate facts of their environment, and the laws of Nature. The underlying facts

here are the facts of physics, chemistry, and biology as they bear on the experience of the

only two people in existence. Unless the human mind is fully separable from the

principles of physics, chemistry, and biology, any fact about Adam and Eve’s subjective

experience (morally salient or not) is a fact about (part of) the universe.

In talking about the causes of Adam and Eve’s first-person experience, we are

talking about an extraordinarily complex interplay between brain states and

environmental stimuli. However complex these processes are, it is clearly possible to

understand them to a greater or lesser degree (i.e., there are right and wrong answers to

questions about Adam’s and Eve’s well-being). Even if there are a thousand different

ways for these two people to thrive, there will be many ways for them not to thrive—and

the differences between luxuriating on a peak of well-being and languishing in a valley of

internecine horror will translate into facts that can be scientifically understood. Why

would the difference between right and wrong answers suddenly disappear once we add

6.7 billion more people to this experiment?

Grounding our values in a continuum of conscious states—one that has the worst

possible misery for everyone at its depths and differing degrees of well-being at all other

points—seems like the only legitimate context in which to conceive of values and moral

norms. Of course, anyone who has an alternative set of moral axioms is free to put them

forward, just as they are free to define “science” any way they want. But some definitions

will be useless, or worse—and many current definitions of “morality” are so bad that we

can know, far in advance of any breakthrough in the sciences of mind, that they have no

place in a serious conversation about how we should live in this world. The Knights of

the Ku Klux Klan have nothing meaningful to say about particle physics, cell physiology,

epidemiology, linguistics, economic policy, etc. How is their ignorance any less obvious

on the subject of human well-being?

The moment we admit that consciousness is the context in which any discussion

of values makes sense, we must admit that there are facts to be known about how the

experience of conscious creatures can change. Human and animal well-being are natural

phenomena. As such, they can be studied, in principle, with the tools of science and

spoken about with greater or lesser precision. Do pigs suffer more than cows do when

being led to slaughter? Would humanity suffer more or less, on balance, if the United

States unilaterally gave up all its nuclear weapons? Questions like these are very difficult

to answer. But this does not mean that they don’t have answers.

The fact that it could be difficult or impossible to know exactly how to maximize

human well-being does not mean that there are no right or wrong ways to do this—nor

does it mean that we cannot exclude certain answers as obviously bad. For instance, there

is often a tension between the autonomy of the individual and the common good, and

many moral problems turn on just how to prioritize these competing values. However,

autonomy brings obvious benefit to people and is, therefore, an important component of

the common good. The fact that it might be difficult to decide exactly how to balance

individual rights against collective interests, or that there might be a thousand equivalent

ways of doing this, does not mean that there aren’t objectively terrible ways of doing

this. The difficulty of getting precise answers to certain moral questions does not mean

that we must hesitate to condemn the morality of the Taliban—not just personally, but

from the point of view of science. The moment we admit that we know anything about

human well-being scientifically, we must admit that certain individuals or cultures can be

absolutely wrong about it.

Moral Blindness in the Name of “Tolerance”

There are very practical concerns that follow from the glib idea that anyone is free

to value anything—the most consequential being that it is precisely what allows highly

educated, secular, and otherwise well-intentioned people to pause thoughtfully, and often

interminably, before condemning practices like compulsory veiling, genital excision,

bride burning, forced marriage, and the other cheerful products of alternative “morality”

found elsewhere in the world. Fanciers of Hume’s is/ought distinction never seem to

realize what the stakes are, and they do not see how abject failures of compassion are

enabled by this intellectual “tolerance” of moral difference. While much of the debate on

these issues must be had in academic terms, this is not merely an academic debate. There

are girls getting their faces burned off with acid at this moment for daring to learn to read,

or for not consenting to marry men they have never met, or even for the “crime” of

getting raped. The amazing thing is that some Western intellectuals won’t even blink

when asked to defend these practices on philosophical grounds. I once spoke at an

academic conference on themes similar to those discussed here. Near the end of my

lecture, I made what I thought would be a quite incontestable assertion: We already have

good reason to believe that certain cultures are less suited to maximizing well-being than

others. I cited the ruthless misogyny and religious bamboozlement of the Taliban as an

example of a worldview that seems less than perfectly conducive to human flourishing.

As it turns out, to denigrate the Taliban at a scientific meeting is to court

controversy. At the conclusion of my talk, I fell into debate with another invited speaker,

who seemed, at first glance, to be very well positioned to reason effectively about the

implications of science for our understanding of morality. In fact, this person has since

been appointed to the President’s Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues and is

now one of only thirteen people who will advise President Obama on “issues that may

emerge from advances in biomedicine and related areas of science and technology” in

order to ensure that “scientific research, health care delivery, and technological

innovation are conducted in an ethically responsible manner.”

Here is a snippet of our

conversation, more or less verbatim:

She: What makes you think that science will ever be able to say that forcing

women to wear burqas is wrong?

Me: Because I think that right and wrong are a matter of increasing or decreasing

well-being—and it is obvious that forcing half the population to live in cloth bags, and

beating or killing them if they refuse, is not a good strategy for maximizing human well-

being.

She: But that’s only your opinion.

Me: Okay … Let’s make it even simpler. What if we found a culture that ritually

blinded every third child by literally plucking out his or her eyes at birth, would you then

agree that we had found a culture that was needlessly diminishing human well-being?

She: It would depend on why they were doing it.

Me [slowly returning my eyebrows from the back of my head]: Let’s say they

were doing it on the basis of religious superstition. In their scripture, God says, “Every

third must walk in darkness.”

She: Then you could never say that they were wrong.

Such opinions are not uncommon in the Ivory Tower. I was talking to a woman

(it’s hard not to feel that her gender makes her views all the more disconcerting) who had

just delivered an entirely lucid lecture on some of the moral implications of recent

advances in neuroscience. She was concerned that our intelligence services might one

day use neuroimaging technology for the purposes of lie detection, which she considered

a likely violation of cognitive liberty. She was especially exercised over rumors that our

government might have exposed captured terrorists to aerosols containing the hormone

oxytocin in an effort to make them more cooperative.

Though she did not say it, I

suspect that she would even have opposed subjecting these prisoners to the smell of

freshly baked bread, which has been shown to have a similar effect.

While listening to

her talk, as yet unaware of her liberal views on compulsory veiling and ritual enucleation,

I thought her slightly overcautious, but a basically sane and eloquent authority on

scientific ethics. I confess that once we did speak, and I peered into the terrible gulf that

separated us on these issues, I found that I could not utter another word to her. In fact, our

conversation ended with my blindly enacting two neurological clichés: my jaw quite

literally dropped open, and I spun on my heels before walking away.

While human beings have different moral codes, each competing view presumes

its own universality. This seems to be true even of moral relativism. While few

philosophers have ever answered to the name of “moral relativist,” it is by no means

uncommon to find local eruptions of this view whenever scientists and other academics

encounter moral diversity. Forcing women and girls to wear burqas may be wrong in

Boston or Palo Alto, so the argument will run, but we cannot say that it is wrong for

Muslims in Kabul. To demand that the proud denizens of an ancient culture conform to

our view of gender equality would be culturally imperialistic and philosophically naïve.

This is a surprisingly common view, especially among anthropologists.

Moral relativism, however, tends to be self-contradictory. Relativists may say that

moral truths exist only relative to a specific cultural framework—but this claim about the

status of moral truth purports to be true across all possible frameworks. In practice,

relativism almost always amounts to the claim that we should be tolerant of moral

difference because no moral truth can supersede any other. And yet this commitment to

tolerance is not put forward as simply one relative preference among others deemed

equally valid. Rather, tolerance is held to be more in line with the (universal) truth about

morality than intolerance is. The contradiction here is unsurprising. Given how deeply

disposed we are to make universal moral claims, I think one can reasonably doubt

whether any consistent moral relativist has ever existed.

Moral relativism is clearly an attempt to pay intellectual reparations for the crimes

of Western colonialism, ethnocentrism, and racism. This is, I think, the only charitable

thing to be said about it. I hope it is clear that I am not defending the idiosyncrasies of the

West as any more enlightened, in principle, than those of any other culture. Rather, I am

arguing that the most basic facts about human flourishing must transcend culture, just as

most other facts do. And if there are facts that are truly a matter of cultural

construction—if, for instance, learning a specific language or tattooing your face

fundamentally alters the possibilities of human experience—well, then these facts also

arise from (neurophysiological) processes that transcend culture.

In his wonderful book The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker includes a quotation from

the anthropologist Donald Symons that captures the problem of multiculturalism

especially well:

If only one person in the world held down a terrified, struggling, screaming little

girl, cut off her genitals with a septic blade, and sewed her back up, leaving only a tiny

hole for urine and menstrual flow, the only question would be how severely that person

should be punished, and whether the death penalty would be a sufficiently severe

sanction. But when millions of people do this, instead of the enormity being magnified

millions-fold, suddenly it becomes “culture,” and thereby magically becomes less, rather

than more, horrible, and is even defended by some Western “moral thinkers,” including

feminists.

It is precisely such instances of learned confusion (one is tempted to say “learned

psychopathy”) that lend credence to the claim that a universal morality requires the

support of faith-based religion. The categorical distinction between facts and values has

opened a sinkhole beneath secular liberalism—leading to moral relativism and

masochistic depths of political correctness. Think of the champions of “tolerance” who

reflexively blamed Salman Rushdie for his fatwa, or Ayaan Hirsi Ali for her ongoing

security concerns, or the Danish cartoonists for their “controversy,” and you will

understand what happens when educated liberals think there is no universal foundation

for human values. Among conservatives in the West, the same skepticism about the

power of reason leads, more often than not, directly to the feet of Jesus Christ, Savior of

the Universe. The purpose of this book is to help cut a third path through this wilderness.

Moral Science

Charges of “scientism” cannot be long in coming. No doubt, there are still some

people who will reject any description of human nature that was not first communicated

in iambic pentameter. Many readers may also fear that the case I am making is vaguely,

or even explicitly, utopian. It isn’t, as should become clear in due course.

However, other doubts about the authority of science are even more fundamental.

There are academics who have built entire careers on the allegation that the foundations

of science are rotten with bias—sexist, racist, imperialist, Northern, etc. Sandra Harding,

a feminist philosopher of science, is probably the most famous proponent of this view.

On her account, these prejudices have driven science into an epistemological cul-de-sac

called “weak objectivity.” To remedy this dire situation, Harding recommends that

scientists immediately give “feminist” and “multicultural” epistemologies their due.

First, let’s be careful not to confuse this quite crazy claim for its sane cousin:

There is no question that scientists have occasionally demonstrated sexist and racist

biases. The composition of some branches of science is still disproportionately white and

male (though some are now disproportionately female), and one can reasonably wonder

whether bias is the cause. There are also legitimate questions to be asked about the

direction and application of science: in medicine, for instance, it seems clear that

women’s health issues have been sometimes neglected because the prototypical human

being has been considered male. One can also argue that the contributions of women and

minority groups to science have occasionally been ignored or undervalued: the case of

Rosalind Franklin standing in the shadows of Crick and Watson might be an example of

this. But none of these facts, alone or in combination, or however multiplied, remotely

suggests that our notions of scientific objectivity are vitiated by racism or sexism.

Is there really such a thing as a feminist or multicultural epistemology? Harding’s

case is not helped when she finally divulges that there is not just one feminist

epistemology, but many. On this view, why was Hitler’s notion of “Jewish physics” (or

Stalin’s idea of “capitalist biology”) anything less than a thrilling insight into the richness

of epistemology? Should we now consider the possibility of not only Jewish physics, but

of Jewish women’s physics? How could such a balkanization of science be a step toward

“strong objectivity”? And if political inclusiveness is our primary concern, where could

such efforts to broaden our conception of scientific truth possibly end? Physicists tend to

have an unusual aptitude for complex mathematics, and anyone who doesn’t cannot

expect to make much of a contribution to the field. Why not remedy this situation as

well? Why not create an epistemology for physicists who failed calculus? Why not be

bolder still and establish a branch of physics for people suffering from debilitating brain

injuries? Who could reasonably expect that such efforts at inclusiveness would increase

our understanding of a phenomenon like gravity?

As Steven Weinberg once said

regarding similar doubts about the objectivity of science, “You have to be very learned to

be that wrong.”

Indeed, one does—and many are.

There is no denying, however, that the effort to reduce all human values to

biology can produce howlers. For instance, when the entomologist E. O. Wilson (in

collaboration with the philosopher Michael Ruse) wrote that “morality, or more strictly

our belief in morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive

ends,” the philosopher Daniel Dennett rightly dismissed it as “nonsense.”

The fact that

our moral intuitions probably conferred some adaptive advantage upon our ancestors

does not mean that the present purpose of morality is successful reproduction, or that

“our belief in morality” is just a useful delusion. (Is the purpose of astronomy successful

reproduction? What about the practice of contraception? Is that all about reproduction,

too?) Nor does it mean that our notion of “morality” cannot grow deeper and more

refined as our understanding of ourselves develops.

Many universal features of human life need not have been selected for at all; they

may simply be, as Dennett says, “good tricks” communicated by culture or “forced

moves” that naturally emerge out of the regularities in our world. As Dennett says, it is

doubtful that there is a gene for knowing that you should throw a spear “pointy end first.”

And it is, likewise, doubtful that our ancestors had to spend much time imparting this

knowledge to each successive generation.

We have good reason to believe that much of what we do in the name of

“morality”—decrying sexual infidelity, punishing cheaters, valuing cooperation, etc.—is

borne of unconscious processes that were shaped by natural selection.

But this does not

mean that evolution designed us to lead deeply fulfilling lives. Again, in talking about a

science of morality, I am not referring to an evolutionary account of all the cognitive and

emotional processes that govern what people do when they say they are being “moral”; I

am referring to the totality of scientific facts that govern the range of conscious

experiences that are possible for us. To say that there are truths about morality and human

values is simply to say that there are facts about well-being that await our discovery—

regardless of our evolutionary history. While such facts necessarily relate to the

experience of conscious beings, they cannot be the mere invention of any person or

culture.

It seems to me, therefore, that there are at least three projects that we should not

confuse:

1. We can explain why people tend to follow certain patterns of thought and

behavior (many of them demonstrably silly and harmful) in the name of “morality.”

2. We can think more clearly about the nature of moral truth and determine which

patterns of thought and behavior we should follow in the name of “morality.”

3. We can convince people who are committed to silly and harmful patterns of

thought and behavior in the name of “morality” to break these commitments and to live

better lives.

These are distinct and independently worthy endeavors. Most scientists who study

morality in evolutionary, psychological, or neurobiological terms are exclusively devoted

to the first project: their goal is to describe and understand how people think and behave

in light of morally salient emotions like anger, disgust, empathy, love, guilt, humiliation,

etc. This research is fascinating, of course, but it is not my focus. And while our common

evolutionary origins and resultant physiological similarity to one another suggest that

human well-being will admit of general principles that can be scientifically understood, I

consider this first project all but irrelevant to projects 2 and 3. In the past, I have found

myself in conflict with some of the leaders in this field because many of them, like the

psychologist Jonathan Haidt, believe that this first project represents the only legitimate

point of contact between science and morality.

I happen to believe that the third project—changing people’s ethical

commitments—is the most important task facing humanity in the twenty-first century.

Nearly every other important goal—from combating climate change, to fighting

terrorism, to curing cancer, to saving the whales—falls within its purview. Of course,

moral persuasion is a difficult business, but it strikes me as especially difficult if we

haven’t figured out in what sense moral truths exist. Hence, my main focus is on project

To see the difference between these three projects, it is best to consider specific

examples: we can, for instance, give a plausible evolutionary account of why human

societies have tended to treat women as the property of men (1); it is, however, quite

another thing to give a scientific account of whether, why, and to what degree human

societies change for the better when they outgrow this tendency (2); it is yet another thing

altogether to decide how best to change people’s attitudes at this moment in history and

to empower women on a global scale (3).

It is easy to see why the study of the evolutionary origins of “morality” might lead

to the conclusion that morality has nothing at all to do with Truth. If morality is simply an

adaptive means of organizing human social behavior and mitigating conflict, there would

be no reason to think that our current sense of right and wrong would reflect any deeper

understanding about the nature of reality. Hence, a narrow focus explaining why people

think and behave as they do can lead a person to find the idea of “moral truth” literally

unintelligible.

But notice that the first two projects give quite different accounts of how

“morality” fits into the natural world. In 1, “morality” is the collection of impulses and

behaviors (along with their cultural expressions and neurobiological underpinnings) that

have been hammered into us by evolution. In 2, “morality” refers to the impulses and

behaviors we can follow so as to maximize our well-being in the future.

To give a concrete example: Imagine that a handsome stranger tries to seduce

another man’s wife at the gym. When the woman politely informs her admirer that she is

married, the cad persists, as though a happy marriage could be no impediment to his

charms. The woman breaks off the conversation soon thereafter, but far less abruptly than

might have been compatible with the laws of physics.

I write now, in the rude glare of recent experience. I can say that when my wife

reported these events to me yesterday, they immediately struck me as morally salient. In

fact, she had not completed her third sentence before the dark fluids of moral indignation

began coursing through my brain—jealousy, embarrassment, anger, etc.—albeit only at a

trickle. First, I was annoyed by the man’s behavior—and had I been present to witness it,

I suspect that my annoyance would have been far greater. If this Don Juan had been as

dismissive of me in my presence as he was in my absence, I could imagine how such an

encounter could result in physical violence.

No evolutionary psychologist would find it difficult to account for my response to

this situation—and almost all scientists who study “morality” would confine their

attention to this set of facts: my inner ape had swung into view, and any thoughts I might

entertain about “moral truth” would be linguistic effluvium masking far more zoological

concerns. I am the product of an evolutionary history in which every male of the species

has had to guard against squandering his resources on another man’s offspring. Had we

scanned my brain and correlated my subjective feelings with changes in my

neurophysiology, the scientific description of these events would be nearly complete. So

ends project 1.

But there are many different ways for an ape to respond to the fact that other apes

find his wife desirable. Had this happened in a traditional honor culture, the jealous

husband might beat his wife, drag her to the gym, and force her to identify her suitor so

that he could put a bullet in his brain. In fact, in an honor society, the employees of the

gym might sympathize with this project and help to organize a proper duel. Or perhaps

the husband would be satisfied to act more obliquely, killing one of his rival’s relatives

and initiating a classic blood feud. In either case, assuming he didn’t get himself killed in

the process, he might then murder his wife for emphasis, leaving his children motherless.

There are many communities on earth where men commonly behave this way, and

hundreds of millions of boys are beginning to run this ancient software on their brains

even now.

However, my own mind shows some precarious traces of civilization: one being

that I view the emotion of jealously with suspicion. What is more, I happen to love my

wife and genuinely want her to be happy, and this entails a certain empathetic

understanding of her point of view. Given a moment to think about it, I can feel glad that

her self-esteem received a boost from this man’s attention; I can also feel compassion for

the fact that, after recently having our first child, her self-esteem needed any boost at all.

I also know that she would not want to be rude, and that this probably made her

somewhat slow to extricate herself from a conversation that had taken a wrong turn. And

I am under no illusions that I am the only man on earth whom she will find attractive, or

momentarily distracting, nor do I imagine that her devotion to me should consist in this

impossible narrowing of her focus. And how do I feel about the man? Well, I still find his

behavior objectionable—because I cannot sympathize with his effort to break up a

marriage, and I know that I would not behave as he did—but I sympathize with

everything else he must have felt, because I also happen to think that my wife is

beautiful, and I know what it’s like to be a single ape in the jungle.

Most important, however, I value my own well-being, as well as that of my wife

and daughter, and I want to live in a society that maximizes the possibility of human

well-being generally. Here begins project 2: Are there right and wrong answers to the

question of how to maximize well-being? How would my life have been affected if I had

killed my wife in response to this episode? We do not need a completed neuroscience to

know that my happiness, as well as that of many other people, would have been

profoundly diminished. And what about the collective well-being of people in an honor

society that might support such behavior? It seems to me that members of these societies

are obviously worse off. If I am wrong about this, however, and there are ways to

organize an honor culture that allow for precisely the same level of human flourishing

enjoyed elsewhere—then so be it. This would represent another peak on the moral

landscape. Again, the existence of multiple peaks would not render the truths of morality

merely subjective.

The framework of a moral landscape guarantees that many people will have

flawed conceptions of morality, just as many people have flawed conceptions of physics.

Some people think “physics” includes (or validates) practices like astrology, voodoo, and

homeopathy. These people are, by all appearances, simply wrong about physics. In the

United States, a majority of people (57 percent) believe that preventing homosexuals

from marrying is a “moral” imperative.

However, if this belief rests on a flawed sense

of how we can maximize our well-being, such people may simply be wrong about

morality. And the fact that millions of people use the term “morality” as a synonym for

religious dogmatism, racism, sexism, or other failures of insight and compassion should

not oblige us to merely accept their terminology until the end of time.

What will it mean for us to acquire a deep, consistent, and fully scientific

understanding of the human mind? While many of the details remain unclear, the

challenge is for us to begin speaking sensibly about right and wrong, and good and evil,

given what we already know about our world. Such a conversation seems bound to shape

our morality and public policy in the years to come.

Chapter 2

GOOD AND EVIL

There may be nothing more important than human cooperation. Whenever more

pressing concerns seem to arise—like the threat of a deadly pandemic, an asteroid

impact, or some other global catastrophe—human cooperation is the only remedy (if a

remedy exists). Cooperation is the stuff of which meaningful human lives and viable

societies are made. Consequently, few topics will be more relevant to a maturing science

of human well-being.

Open a newspaper, today or any day for the rest of your life, and you will witness

failures of human cooperation, great and small, announced from every corner of the

world. The results of these failures are no less tragic for being utterly commonplace:

deception, theft, violence, and their associated miseries arise in a continuous flux of

misspent human energy. When one considers the proportion of our limited time and

resources that must be squandered merely to guard against theft and violence (to say

nothing of addressing their effects), the problem of human cooperation seems almost the

only problem worth thinking about.

“Ethics” and “morality” (I use these terms

interchangeably) are the names we give to our deliberate thinking on these matters.

Clearly, few subjects have greater bearing upon the question of human well-being.

As we better understand the brain, we will increasingly understand all of the

forces—kindness, reciprocity, trust, openness to argument, respect for evidence,

intuitions of fairness, impulse control, the mitigation of aggression, etc.—that allow

friends and strangers to collaborate successfully on the common projects of civilization.

Understanding ourselves in this way, and using this knowledge to improve human life,

will be among the most important challenges to science in the decades to come.

Many people imagine that the theory of evolution entails selfishness as a

biological imperative. This popular misconception has been very harmful to the

reputation of science. In truth, human cooperation and its attendant moral emotions are

fully compatible with biological evolution. Selection pressure at the level of “selfish”

genes would surely incline creatures like ourselves to make sacrifices for our relatives,

for the simple reason that one’s relatives can be counted on to share one’s genes: while

this truth might not be obvious through introspection, your brother’s or sister’s

reproductive success is, in part, your own. This phenomenon, known as kin selection, was

not given a formal analysis until the 1960s in the work of William Hamilton,

but it was

at least implicit in the understanding of earlier biologists. Legend has it that J. B. S.

Haldane was once asked if he would risk his life to save a drowning brother, to which he

quipped, “No, but I would save two brothers or eight cousins.”

The work of evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers on reciprocal altruism has

gone a long way toward explaining cooperation among unrelated friends and strangers.

Trivers’s model incorporates many of the psychological and social factors related to

altruism and reciprocity, including: friendship, moralistic aggression (i.e., the punishment

of cheaters), guilt, sympathy, and gratitude, along with a tendency to deceive others by

mimicking these states. As first suggested by Darwin, and recently elaborated by the

psychologist Geoffrey Miller, sexual selection may have further encouraged the

development of moral behavior. Because moral virtue is attractive to both sexes, it might

function as a kind of peacock’s tail: costly to produce and maintain, but beneficial to

one’s genes in the end.

Clearly, our selfish and selfless interests do not always conflict. In fact, the well-

being of others, especially those closest to us, is one of our primary (and, indeed, most

selfish) interests. While much remains to be understood about the biology of our moral

impulses, kin selection, reciprocal altruism, and sexual selection explain how we have

evolved to be, not merely atomized selves in thrall to our self-interest, but social selves

disposed to serve a common interest with others.

Certain biological traits appear to have been shaped by, and to have further

enhanced, the human capacity for cooperation. For instance, unlike the rest of the earth’s

creatures, including our fellow primates, the sclera of our eyes (the region surrounding

the colored iris) is white and exposed. This makes the direction of the human gaze very

easy to detect, allowing us to notice even the subtlest shifts in one another’s visual

attention. The psychologist Michael Tomasello suggests the following adaptive logic:

If I am, in effect, advertising the direction of my eyes, I must be in a social

environment full of others who are not often inclined to take advantage of this to my

detriment—by, say, beating me to the food or escaping aggression before me. Indeed, I

must be in a cooperative social environment in which others following the direction of

my eyes somehow benefits me.

Tomasello has found that even twelve-month old children will follow a person’s

gaze, while chimpanzees tend to be interested only in head movements. He suggests that

our unique sensitivity to gaze direction facilitated human cooperation and language

development.

While each of us is selfish, we are not merely so. Our own happiness requires that

we extend the circle of our self-interest to others—to family, friends, and even to perfect

strangers whose pleasures and pains matter to us. While few thinkers have placed greater

focus on the role that competing self-interests play in society, even Adam Smith

recognized that each of us cares deeply about the happiness of others.

He also

recognized, however, that our ability to care about others has its limits and that these

limits are themselves the object of our personal and collective concern:

Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants,

was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity

in Europe, who had no sort of connection with that part of the world, would be affected

upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all,

express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would

make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity

of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would too,

perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the

effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade

and business of the world in general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when

all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business

or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquility, as if

no such accident had happened. The most frivolous disaster which could befall himself

would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he

would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most

profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction

of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry

misfortune of his own. To prevent, therefore, this paltry misfortune to himself, would a

man of humanity be willing to sacrifice the lives of a hundred millions of his brethren,

provided he had never seen them? Human nature startles with horror at the thought, and

the world, in its greatest depravity and corruption, never produced such a villain as could

be capable of entertaining it. But what makes this difference?

Smith captures the tension between our reflexive selfishness and our broader

moral intuitions about as well as anyone can here. The truth about us is plain to see: most

of us are powerfully absorbed by selfish desires almost every moment of our lives; our

attention to our own pains and pleasures could scarcely be more acute; only the most

piercing cries of anonymous suffering capture our interest, and then fleetingly. And yet,

when we consciously reflect on what we should do, an angel of beneficence and

impartiality seems to spread its wings within us: we genuinely want fair and just

societies; we want others to have their hopes realized; we want to leave the world better

than we found it.

Questions of human well-being run deeper than any explicit code of morality.

Morality—in terms of consciously held precepts, social contracts, notions of justice,

etc.—is a relatively recent development. Such conventions require, at a minimum,

complex language and a willingness to cooperate with strangers, and this takes us a stride

or two beyond the Hobbesian “state of nature.” However, any biological changes that

served to mitigate the internecine misery of our ancestors would fall within the scope of

an analysis of morality as a guide to personal and collective well-being. To simplify

matters enormously:

1. Genetic changes in the brain gave rise to social emotions, moral intuitions, and

language …

2. These allowed for increasingly complex cooperative behavior, the keeping of

promises, concern about one’s reputation, etc.…

3. Which became the basis for cultural norms, laws, and social institutions whose

purpose has been to render this growing system of cooperation durable in the face of

countervailing forces.

Some version of this progression has occurred in our case, and each step

represents an undeniable enhancement of our personal and collective well-being. To be

sure, catastrophic regressions are always possible. We could, either by design or

negligence, employ the hard-won fruits of civilization, and the emotional and social

leverage wrought of millennia of biological and cultural evolution, to immiserate

ourselves more fully than unaided Nature ever could. Imagine a global North Korea,

where the better part of a starving humanity serve as slaves to a lunatic with bouffant

hair: this might be worse than a world filled merely with warring australopithecines.

What would “worse” mean in this context? Just what our intuitions suggest: more painful,

less satisfying, more conducive to terror and despair, and so on. While it may never be

feasible to compare such counterfactual states of the world, this does not mean that there

are no experiential truths to be compared. Once again, there is a difference between

answers in practice and answers in principle.

The moment one begins thinking about morality in terms of well-being, it

becomes remarkably easy to discern a moral hierarchy across human societies. Consider

the following account of the Dobu islanders from Ruth Benedict:

Life in Dobu fosters extreme forms of animosity and malignancy which most

societies have minimized by their institutions. Dobuan institutions, on the other hand,

exalt them to the highest degree. The Dobuan lives out without repression man’s worst

nightmares of the ill-will of the universe, and according to his view of life virtue consists

in selecting a victim upon whom he can vent the malignancy he attributes alike to human

society and to the powers of nature. All existence appears to him as a cutthroat struggle in

which deadly antagonists are pitted against one another in contest for each one of the

goods of life. Suspicion and cruelty are his trusted weapons in the strife and he gives no

mercy, as he asks none.

The Dobu appear to have been as blind to the possibility of true cooperation as

they were to the truths of modern science. While innumerable things would have been

worthy of their attention—the Dobu were, after all, extremely poor and mightily

ignorant—their main preoccupation seems to have been malicious sorcery. Every

Dobuan’s primary interest was to cast spells on other members of the tribe in an effort to

sicken or kill them and in the hopes of magically appropriating their crops. The relevant

spells were generally passed down from a maternal uncle and became every Dobuan’s

most important possessions. Needless to say, those who received no such inheritance

were believed to be at a terrible disadvantage. Spells could be purchased, however, and

the economic life of the Dobu was almost entirely devoted to trade in these fantastical

commodities.

Certain members of the tribe were understood to have a monopoly over both the

causes and cures for specific illnesses. Such people were greatly feared and ceaselessly

propitiated. In fact, the conscious application of magic was believed necessary for the

most mundane tasks. Even the work of gravity had to be supplemented by relentless

wizardry: absent the right spell, a man’s vegetables were expected to rise out of the soil

and vanish under their own power.

To make matters worse, the Dobu imagined that good fortune conformed to a

rigid law of thermodynamics: if one man succeeded in growing more yams than his

neighbor, his surplus crop must have been pilfered through sorcery. As all Dobu

continuously endeavored to steal one another’s crops by such methods, the lucky

gardener is likely to have viewed his surplus in precisely these terms. A good harvest,

therefore, was tantamount to “a confession of theft.”

This strange marriage of covetousness and magical thinking created a perfect

obsession with secrecy in Dobu society. Whatever possibility of love and real friendship

remained seems to have been fully extinguished by a final doctrine: the power of sorcery

was believed to grow in proportion to one’s intimacy with the intended victim. This

belief gave every Dobuan an incandescent mistrust of all others, which burned brightest

on those closest. Therefore, if a man fell seriously ill or died, his misfortune was

immediately blamed on his wife, and vice versa. The picture is of a society completely in

thrall to antisocial delusions.

Did the Dobu love their friends and family as much as we love ours? Many

people seem to think that the answer to such a question must, in principle, be “yes,” or

that the question itself is vacuous. I think it is clear, however, that the question is well

posed and easily answered. The answer is “no.” Being fellow Homo sapiens, we must

presume that the Dobu islanders had brains sufficiently similar to our own to invite

comparison. Is there any doubt that the selfishness and general malevolence of the Dobu

would have been expressed at the level of their brains? Only if you think the brain does

nothing more than filter oxygen and glucose out of the blood. Once we more fully

understand the neurophysiology of states like love, compassion, and trust, it will be

possible to spell out the differences between ourselves and people like the Dobu in

greater detail. But we need not await any breakthroughs in neuroscience to bring the

general principle in view: just as it is possible for individuals and groups to be wrong

about how best to maintain their physical health, it is possible for them to be wrong about

how to maximize their personal and social well-being.

I believe that we will increasingly understand good and evil, right and wrong, in

scientific terms, because moral concerns translate into facts about how our thoughts and

behaviors affect the well-being of conscious creatures like ourselves. If there are facts to

be known about the well-being of such creatures—and there are—then there must be

right and wrong answers to moral questions. Students of philosophy will notice that this

commits me to some form of moral realism (viz. moral claims can really be true or false)

and some form of consequentialism (viz. the rightness of an act depends on how it

impacts the well-being of conscious creatures). While moral realism and

consequentialism have both come under pressure in philosophical circles, they have the

virtue of corresponding to many of our intuitions about how the world works.

Here is my (consequentialist) starting point: all questions of value (right and

wrong, good and evil, etc.) depend upon the possibility of experiencing such value.

Without potential consequences at the level of experience—happiness, suffering, joy,

despair, etc.—all talk of value is empty. Therefore, to say that an act is morally

necessary, or evil, or blameless, is to make (tacit) claims about its consequences in the

lives of conscious creatures (whether actual or potential). I am unaware of any interesting

exception to this rule. Needless to say, if one is worried about pleasing God or His

angels, this assumes that such invisible entities are conscious (in some sense) and

cognizant of human behavior. It also generally assumes that it is possible to suffer their

wrath or enjoy their approval, either in this world or the world to come. Even within

religion, therefore, consequences and conscious states remain the foundation of all

values.

Consider the thinking of a Muslim suicide bomber who decides to obliterate

himself along with a crowd of infidels: this would appear to be a perfect repudiation of

the consequentialist attitude. And yet, when we look at the rationale for seeking

martyrdom within Islam, we see that the consequences of such actions, both real and

imagined, are entirely the point. Aspiring martyrs expect to please God and experience an

eternity of happiness after death. If one fully accepts the metaphysical presuppositions of

traditional Islam, martyrdom must be viewed as the ultimate attempt at career

advancement. The martyr is also the greatest of altruists: for not only does he secure a

place for himself in Paradise, he wins admittance for seventy of his closest relatives as

well. Aspiring martyrs also believe that they are furthering God’s work here on earth,

with desirable consequences for the living. We know quite a lot about how such people

think—indeed, they advertise their views and intentions ceaselessly—and it has

everything to do with their belief that God has told them, in the Qur’an and the hadith,

precisely what the consequences of certain thoughts and actions will be. Of course, it

seems profoundly unlikely that our universe has been designed to reward individual

primates for killing one another while believing in the divine origin of a specific book.

The fact that would-be martyrs are almost surely wrong about the consequences of their

behavior is precisely what renders it such an astounding and immoral misuse of human

life.

Because most religions conceive of morality as a matter of being obedient to the

word of God (generally for the sake of receiving a supernatural reward), their precepts

often have nothing to do with maximizing well-being in this world. Religious believers

can, therefore, assert the immorality of contraception, masturbation, homosexuality, etc.,

without ever feeling obliged to argue that these practices actually cause suffering. They

can also pursue aims that are flagrantly immoral, in that they needlessly perpetuate

human misery, while believing that these actions are morally obligatory. This pious

uncoupling of moral concern from the reality of human and animal suffering has caused

tremendous harm.

Clearly, there are mental states and capacities that contribute to our general well-

being (happiness, compassion, kindness, etc.) as well as mental states and incapacities

that diminish it (cruelty, hatred, terror, etc.). It is, therefore, meaningful to ask whether a

specific action or way of thinking will affect a person’s well-being and/or the well-being

of others, and there is much that we might eventually learn about the biology of such

effects. Where a person finds himself on this continuum of possible states will be

determined by many factors—genetic, environmental, social, cognitive, political,

economic, etc.—and while our understanding of such influences may never be complete,

their effects are realized at the level of the human brain. Our growing understanding of

the brain, therefore, will have increasing relevance for any claims we make about how

thoughts and actions affect the welfare of human beings.

Notice that I do not mention morality in the preceding paragraph, and perhaps I

need not. I began this book by arguing that, despite a century of timidity on the part of

scientists and philosophers, morality can be linked directly to facts about the happiness

and suffering of conscious creatures. However, it is interesting to consider what would

happen if we simply ignored this step and merely spoke about “well-being.” What would

our world be like if we ceased to worry about “right” and “wrong,” or “good” and “evil,”

and simply acted so as to maximize well-being, our own and that of others? Would we

lose anything important? And if important, wouldn’t it be, by definition, a matter of

someone’s well-being?

Can We Ever Be “Right” About Right and Wrong?

The philosopher and neuroscientist Joshua Greene has done some of the most

influential neuroimaging research on morality.

While Greene wants to understand the

brain processes that govern our moral lives, he believes that we should be skeptical of

moral realism on metaphysical grounds. For Greene, the question is not, “How can you

know for sure that your moral beliefs are true?” but rather, “How could it be that

anyone’s moral beliefs are true?” In other words, what is it about the world that could

make a moral claim true or false?

He appears to believe that the answer to this question

is “nothing.”

However, it seems to me that this question is easily answered. Moral view A is

truer than moral view B, if A entails a more accurate understanding of the connections

between human thoughts/intentions/behavior and human well-being. Does forcing

women and girls to wear burqas make a net positive contribution to human well-being?

Does it produce happier boys and girls? Does it produce more compassionate men or

more contented women? Does it make for better relationships between men and women,

between boys and their mothers, or between girls and their fathers? I would bet my life

that the answer to each of these questions is “no.” So, I think, would many scientists. And

yet, as we have seen, most scientists have been trained to think that such judgments are

mere expressions of cultural bias—and, thus, unscientific in principle. Very few of us

seem willing to admit that such simple, moral truths increasingly fall within the scope of

our scientific worldview. Greene articulates the prevailing skepticism quite well:

Moral judgment is, for the most part, driven not by moral reasoning, but by moral

intuitions of an emotional nature. Our capacity for moral judgment is a complex

evolutionary adaptation to an intensely social life. We are, in fact, so well adapted to

making moral judgments that our making them is, from our point of view, rather easy, a

part of “common sense.” And like many of our common sense abilities, our ability to

make moral judgments feels to us like a perceptual ability, an ability, in this case, to

discern immediately and reliably mind-independent moral facts. As a result, we are

naturally inclined toward a mistaken belief in moral realism. The psychological

tendencies that encourage this false belief serve an important biological purpose, and that

explains why we should find moral realism so attractive even though it is false. Moral

realism is, once again, a mistake we were born to make.

Greene alleges that moral realism assumes that “there is sufficient uniformity in

people’s underlying moral outlooks to warrant speaking as if there is a fact of the matter

about what’s ‘right’ or ‘wrong,’ ‘just’ or ‘unjust.’”

But do we really need to assume

such uniformity for there to be right answers to moral questions? Is physical or biological

realism predicated on “sufficient uniformity in people’s underlying [physical or

biological] outlooks”? Taking humanity as a whole, I am quite certain that there is a

greater consensus that cruelty is wrong (a common moral precept) than the passage of

time varies with velocity (special relativity) or that humans and lobsters share a common

ancestor (evolution). Should we doubt whether there is a “fact of the matter” with respect

to these physical and biological truth claims? Does the general ignorance about the

special theory of relativity or the pervasive disinclination of Americans to accept the

scientific consensus on evolution put our scientific worldview, even slightly, in question?

Greene notes that it is often difficult to get people to agree about moral truth, or to

even get an individual to agree with himself in different contexts. These tensions lead

him to the following conclusion:

[M]oral theorizing fails because our intuitions do not reflect a coherent set of

moral truths and were not designed by natural selection or anything else to behave as if

they were … If you want to make sense of your moral sense, turn to biology, psychology,

and sociology—not normative ethics.

This objection to moral realism may seem reasonable, until one notices that it can

be applied, with the same leveling effect, to any domain of human knowledge. For

instance, it is just as true to say that our logical, mathematical, and physical intuitions

have not been designed by natural selection to track the Truth.

Does this mean that we

must cease to be realists with respect to physical reality? We need not look far in science

to find ideas and opinions that defy easy synthesis. There are many scientific frameworks

(and levels of description) that resist integration and which divide our discourse into

areas of specialization, even pitting Nobel laureates in the same discipline against one

another. Does this mean that we can never hope to understand what is really going on in

the world? No. It means the conversation must continue.

Total uniformity in the moral sphere—either interpersonally or intrapersonally—

may be hopeless. So what? This is precisely the lack of closure we face in all areas of

human knowledge. Full consensus as a scientific goal only exists in the limit, at a

hypothetical end of inquiry. Why not tolerate the same open-endedness in our thinking

about human well-being?

Again, this does not mean that all opinions about morality are justified. To the

contrary—the moment we accept that there are right and wrong answers to questions of

human well-being, we must admit that many people are simply wrong about morality.

The eunuchs who tended the royal family in China’s Forbidden City, dynasty after

dynasty, seem to have felt generally well compensated for their lives of arrested

development and isolation by the influence they achieved at court—as well as by the

knowledge that their genitalia, which had been preserved in jars all the while, would be

buried with them after their deaths, ensuring them rebirth as human beings. When

confronted with such an exotic point of view, a moral realist would like to say we are

witnessing more than a mere difference of opinion: we are in the presence of moral error.

It seems to me that we can be reasonably confident that it is bad for parents to sell their

sons into the service of a government that intends to cut off their genitalia “using only hot

chili sauce as a local anesthetic.”

This would mean that Sun Yaoting, the emperor’s last

eunuch, who died in 1996 at the age of ninety-four, was wrong to harbor, as his greatest

regret, “the fall of the imperial system he had aspired to serve.” Most scientists seem to

believe that no matter how maladaptive or masochistic a person’s moral commitments, it

is impossible to say that he is ever mistaken about what constitutes a good life.

Moral Paradox

One of the problems with consequentialism in practice is that we cannot always

determine whether the effects of an action will be bad or good. In fact, it can be

surprisingly difficult to decide this even in retrospect. Dennett has dubbed this problem

“the Three Mile Island Effect.”

Was the meltdown at Three Mile Island a bad outcome

or a good one? At first glance, it surely seems bad, but it might have also put us on a path

toward greater nuclear safety, thereby saving many lives. Or it might have caused us to

grow dependent on more polluting technologies, contributing to higher rates of cancer

and to global climate change. Or it might have produced a multitude of effects, some

mutually reinforcing, and some mutually canceling. If we cannot determine the net result

of even such a well-analyzed event, how can we judge the likely consequences of the

countless decisions we must make throughout our lives?

One difficulty we face in determining the moral valence of an event is that it often

seems impossible to determine whose well-being should most concern us. People have

competing interests, mutually incompatible notions of happiness, and there are many

well-known paradoxes that leap into our path the moment we begin thinking about the

welfare of whole populations. As we are about to see, population ethics is a notorious

engine of paradox, and no one, to my knowledge, has come up with a way of assessing

collective well-being that conserves all of our intuitions. As the philosopher Patricia

Churchland puts it, “no one has the slightest idea how to compare the mild headache of

five million against the broken legs of two, or the needs of one’s own two children

against the needs of a hundred unrelated brain-damaged children in Serbia.”

Such puzzles may seem of mere academic interest, until we realize that

population ethics governs the most important decisions societies ever make. What are our

moral responsibilities in times of war, when diseases spread, when millions suffer

famine, or when global resources are scarce? These are moments in which we have to

assess changes in collective welfare in ways that purport to be rational and ethical. Just

how motivated should we be to act when 250,000 people die in an earthquake on the

island of Haiti? Whether we know it or not, intuitions about the welfare of whole

populations determine our thinking on these matters.

Except, that is, when we simply ignore population ethics—as, it seems, we are

psychologically disposed to do. The work of the psychologist Paul Slovic and colleagues

has uncovered some rather startling limitations on our capacity for moral reasoning when

thinking about large groups of people—or, indeed, about groups larger than one.

Slovic observes, when human life is threatened, it seems both rational and moral for our

concern to increase with the number of lives at stake. And if we think that losing many

lives might have some additional negative consequences (like the collapse of

civilization), the curve of our concern should grow steeper still. But this is not how we

characteristically respond to the suffering of other human beings.

Slovic’s experimental work suggests that we intuitively care most about a single,

identifiable human life, less about two, and we grow more callous as the body count rises.

Slovic believes that this “psychic numbing” explains the widely lamented fact that we are

generally more distressed by the suffering of single child (or even a single animal) than

by a proper genocide. What Slovic has termed “genocide neglect”—our reliable failure to

respond, both practically and emotionally, to the most horrific instances of unnecessary

human suffering—represents one of the more perplexing and consequential failures of

our moral intuition.

Slovic found that when given a chance to donate money in support of needy

children, subjects give most generously and feel the greatest empathy when told only

about a single child’s suffering. When presented with two needy cases, their compassion

wanes. And this diabolical trend continues: the greater the need, the less people are

emotionally affected and the less they are inclined to give.

Of course, charities have long understood that putting a face on the data will

connect their constituents to the reality of human suffering and increase donations.

Slovic’s work has confirmed this suspicion, which is now known as the “identifiable

victim effect.”

Amazingly, however, adding information about the scope of a problem

to these personal appeals proves to be counterproductive. Slovic has shown that setting

the story of a single needy person in the context of wider human need reliably diminishes

altruism.

The fact that people seem to be reliably less concerned when faced with an

increase in human suffering represents an obvious violation of moral norms. The

important point, however, is that we immediately recognize how indefensible this

allocation of emotional and material resources is once it is brought to our attention. What

makes these experimental findings so striking is that they are patently inconsistent: if you

care about what happens to one little girl, and you care about what happens to her

brother, you must, at the very least, care as much about their combined fate. Your

concern should be (in some sense) cumulative.

When your violation of this principle is

revealed, you will feel that you have committed a moral error. This explains why results

of this kind can only be obtained between subjects (where one group is asked to donate to

help one child and another group is asked to support two); we can be sure that if we

presented both questions to each participant in the study, the effect would disappear

(unless subjects could be prevented from noticing when they were violating the norms of

moral reasoning).

Clearly, one of the great tasks of civilization is to create cultural mechanisms that

protect us from the moment-to-moment failures of our ethical intuitions. We must build

our better selves into our laws, tax codes, and institutions. Knowing that we are generally

incapable of valuing two children more than either child alone, we must build a structure

that reflects and enforces our deeper understanding of human well-being. This is where a

science of morality could be indispensable to us: the more we understand the causes and

constituents of human fulfillment, and the more we know about the experiences of our

fellow human beings, the more we will be able to make intelligent decisions about which

social policies to adopt.

For instance, there are an estimated 90,000 people living on the streets of Los

Angeles. Why are they homeless? How many of these people are mentally ill? How many

are addicted to drugs or alcohol? How many have simply fallen through the cracks in our

economy? Such questions have answers. And each of these problems admits of a range of

responses, as well as false solutions and neglect. Are there policies we could adopt that

would make it easy for every person in the United States to help alleviate the problem of

homelessness in their own communities? Is there some brilliant idea that no one has

thought of that would make people want to alleviate the problem of homelessness more

than they want to watch television or play video games? Would it be possible to design a

video game that could help solve the problem of homelessness in the real world?

Again, such questions open onto a world of facts, whether or not we can bring the

relevant facts into view.

Clearly, morality is shaped by cultural norms to a great degree, and it can be

difficult to do what one believes to be right on one’s own. A friend’s four-year-old

daughter recently observed the role that social support plays in making moral decisions:

“It’s so sad to eat baby lambies,” she said as she gnawed greedily on a lamb chop.

“So, why don’t you stop eating them?” her father asked.

“Why would they kill such a soft animal? Why wouldn’t they kill some other kind

of animal?”

“Because,” her father said, “people like to eat the meat. Like you are, right now.”

His daughter reflected for a moment—still chewing her lamb—and then replied:

“It’s not good. But I can’t stop eating them if they keeping killing them.”

And the practical difficulties for consequentialism do not end here. When thinking

about maximizing the well-being of a population, are we thinking in terms of total or

average well-being? The philosopher Derek Parfit has shown that both bases of

calculation lead to troubling paradoxes.

If we are concerned only about total welfare,

we should prefer a world with hundreds of billions of people whose lives are just barely

worth living to a world in which 7 billion of us live in perfect ecstasy. This is the result of

Parfit’s famous argument known as “The Repugnant Conclusion.”

If, on the other

hand, we are concerned about the average welfare of a population, we should prefer a

world containing a single, happy inhabitant to a world of billions who are only slightly

less happy; it would even suggest that we might want to painlessly kill many of the least

happy people currently alive, thereby increasing the average of human well-being.

Privileging average welfare would also lead us to prefer a world in which billions live

under the misery of constant torture to a world in which only one person is tortured ever-

so-slightly more. It could also render the morality of an action dependent upon the

experience of unaffected people. As Parfit points out, if we care about the average over

time, we might deem it morally wrong to have a child today whose life, while eminently

worth living, would not compare favorably to the lives of the ancient Egyptians. Parfit

has even devised scenarios in which everyone alive could have a lower quality of life

than they otherwise would and yet the average quality of life will have increased.

Clearly, this proves that we cannot rely on a simple summation or averaging of welfare as

our only metric. And yet, at the extremes, we can see that human welfare must aggregate

in some way: it really is better for all of us to be deeply fulfilled than it is for everyone to

live in absolute agony.

Placing only consequences in our moral balance also leads to indelicate questions.

For instance, do we have a moral obligation to come to the aid of wealthy, healthy, and

intelligent hostages before poor, sickly, and slow-witted ones? After all, the former are

more likely to make a positive contribution to society upon their release. And what about

remaining partial to one’s friends and family? Is it wrong for me to save the life of my

only child if, in the process, I neglect to save a stranger’s brood of eight? Wrestling with

such questions has convinced many people that morality does not obey the simple laws of

arithmetic.

However, such puzzles merely suggest that certain moral questions could be

difficult or impossible to answer in practice; they do not suggest that morality depends

upon something other than the consequences of our actions and intentions. This is a

frequent source of confusion: consequentialism is less a method of answering moral

questions than it is a claim about the status of moral truth. Our assessment of

consequences in the moral domain must proceed as it does in all others: under the shadow

of uncertainty, guided by theory, data, and honest conversation. The fact that it may often

be difficult, or even impossible, to know what the consequences of our thoughts and

actions will be does not mean that there is some other basis for human values that is

worth worrying about.

Such difficulties notwithstanding, it seems to me quite possible that we will one

day resolve moral questions that are often thought to be unanswerable. For instance, we

might agree that having a preference for one’s intimates is better (in that it increases

general welfare) than being fully disinterested as to how consequences accrue. Which is

to say that there may be some forms of love and happiness that are best served by each of

us being specially connected to a subset of humanity. This certainly appears to be

descriptively true of us at present. Communal experiments that ignore parents’ special

attachment to their own children, for instance, do not seem to work very well. The Israeli

kibbutzim learned this the hard way: after discovering that raising children communally

made both parents and children less happy, they reinstated the nuclear family.

Most

people may be happier in a world in which a natural bias toward one’s own children is

conserved—presumably in the context of laws and social norms that disregard this bias.

When I take my daughter to the hospital, I am naturally more concerned about her than I

am about the other children in the lobby. I do not, however, expect the hospital staff to

share my bias. In fact, given time to reflect about it, I realize that I would not want them

to. How could such a denial of my self-interest actually be in the service of my self-

interest? Well, first, there are many more ways for a system to be biased against me than

in my favor, and I know that I will benefit from a fair system far more than I will from

one that can be easily corrupted. I also happen to care about other people, and this

experience of empathy deeply matters to me. I feel better as a person valuing fairness,

and I want my daughter to become a person who shares this value. And how would I feel

if the physician attending my daughter actually shared my bias for her and viewed her as

far more important than the other patients under his care? Frankly, it would give me the

creeps.

But perhaps there are two possible worlds that maximize the well-being of their

inhabitants to precisely the same degree: in world X everyone is focused on the welfare

of all others without bias, while in world Y everyone shows some degree of moral

preference for their friends and family. Perhaps these worlds are equally good, in that

their inhabitants enjoy precisely the same level of well-being. These could be thought of

as two peaks on the moral landscape. Perhaps there are others. Does this pose a threat to

moral realism or to consequentialism? No, because there would still be right and wrong

ways to move from our current position on the moral landscape toward one peak or the

other, and movement would still be a matter of increasing well-being in the end.

To bring the discussion back to the especially low-hanging fruit of conservative

Islam: there is absolutely no reason to think that demonizing homosexuals, stoning

adulterers, veiling women, soliciting the murder of artists and intellectuals, and

celebrating the exploits of suicide bombers will move humanity toward a peak on the

moral landscape. This is, I think, as objective a claim as we ever make in science.

Consider the Danish cartoon controversy: an eruption of religious insanity that

still flows to this day. Kurt Westergaard, the cartoonist who drew what was arguably the

most inflammatory of these utterly benign cartoons has lived in hiding since pious

Muslims first began calling for his murder in 2006. A few weeks ago—more than three

years after the controversy first began—a Somali man broke into Westergaard’s home

with an axe. Only the construction of a specially designed “safe room” allowed

Westergaard to escape being slaughtered for the glory of God (his five-year-old

granddaughter also witnessed the attack). Westergaard now lives with continuous police

protection—as do the other eighty-seven men in Denmark who have the misfortune of

being named “Kurt Westergaard.”

The peculiar concerns of Islam have created communities in almost every society

on earth that grow so unhinged in the face of criticism that they will reliably riot, burn

embassies, and seek to kill peaceful people, over cartoons. This is something they will

not do, incidentally, in protest over the continuous atrocities committed against them by

their fellow Muslims. The reasons why such a terrifying inversion of priorities does not

tend to maximize human happiness are susceptible to many levels of analysis—ranging

from biochemistry to economics. But do we need further information in this case? It

seems to me that we already know enough about the human condition to know that

killing cartoonists for blasphemy does not lead anywhere worth going on the moral

landscape.

There are other results in psychology and behavioral economics that make it

difficult to assess changes in human well-being. For instance, people tend to consider

losses to be far more significant than forsaken gains, even when the net result is the same.

For instance, when presented with a wager where they stand a 50 percent chance of

losing $100, most people will consider anything less than a potential gain of $200 to be

unattractive. This bias relates to what has come to be known as “the endowment effect”:

people demand more money in exchange for an object that has been given to them than

they would spend to acquire the object in the first place. In psychologist Daniel

Kahneman’s words, “a good is worth more when it is considered as something that could

be lost or given up than when it is evaluated as a potential gain.”

This aversion to loss

causes human beings to generally err on the side of maintaining the status quo. It is also

an important impediment to conflict resolution through negotiation: for if each party

values his opponent’s concessions as gains and his own as losses, each is bound to

perceive his sacrifice as being greater.

Loss aversion has been studied with functional magnetic resonance imaging

(fMRI). If this bias were the result of negative feelings associated with potential loss, we

would expect brain regions known to govern negative emotion to be involved. However,

researchers have not found increased activity in any areas of the brain as losses increase.

Instead, those regions that represent gains show decreasing activity as the size of the

potential losses increases. In fact, these brain structures themselves exhibit a pattern of

“neural loss aversion”: their activity decreases at a steeper rate in the face of potential

losses than they increase for potential gains.

There are clearly cases in which such biases seem to produce moral illusions—

where a person’s view of right and wrong will depend on whether an outcome is

described in terms of gains or losses. Some of these illusions might not be susceptible to

full correction. As with many perceptual illusions, it may be impossible to “see” two

circumstances as morally equivalent, even while “knowing” that they are. In such cases,

it may be ethical to ignore how things seem. Or it may be that the path we take to arrive

at identical outcomes really does matter to us—and, therefore, that losses and gains will

remain incommensurable.

Imagine, for instance, that you are empaneled as the member of a jury in a civil

trial and asked to determine how much a hospital should pay in damages to the parents of

children who received substandard care in their facility. There are two scenarios to

consider:

Couple A learned that their three-year-old daughter was inadvertently given a

neurotoxin by the hospital staff. Before being admitted, their daughter was a musical

prodigy with an IQ of 195. She has since lost all her intellectual gifts. She can no longer

play music with any facility and her IQ is now a perfectly average 100.

Couple B learned that the hospital neglected to give their three-year-old daughter,

who has an IQ of 100, a perfectly safe and inexpensive genetic enhancement that would

have given her remarkable musical talent and nearly doubled her IQ. Their daughter’s

intelligence remains average, and she lacks any noticeable musical gifts. The critical

period for giving this enhancement has passed.

Obviously the end result under either scenario is the same. But what if the mental

suffering associated with loss is simply bound to be greater than that associated with

forsaken gains? If so, it may be appropriate to take this difference into account, even

when we cannot give a rational explanation of why it is worse to lose something than not

to gain it. This is another source of difficulty in the moral domain: unlike dilemmas in

behavioral economics, it is often difficult to establish the criteria by which two outcomes

can be judged equivalent.

There is probably another principle at work in this example,

however: people tend to view sins of commission more harshly than sins of omission. It

is not clear how we should account for this bias either. But, once again, to say that there

are right answers to questions of how to maximize human well-being is not to say that we

will always be in a position to answer such questions. There will be peaks and valleys on

the moral landscape, and movement between them is clearly possible, whether or not we

always know which way is up.

There are many other features of our subjectivity that have implications for

morality. For instance, people tend to evaluate an experience based on its peak intensity

(whether positive or negative) and the quality of its final moments. In psychology, this is

known as the “peak/end rule.” Testing this rule in a clinical environment, one group

found that patients undergoing colonoscopies (in the days when this procedure was done

without anesthetic) could have their perception of suffering markedly reduced, and their

likelihood of returning for a follow-up exam increased, if their physician needlessly

prolonged the procedure at its lowest level of discomfort by leaving the colonoscope

inserted for a few extra minutes.

The same principle seems to hold for aversive sounds

and for exposure to cold.

Such findings suggest that, under certain conditions, it is

compassionate to prolong a person’s pain unnecessarily so as to reduce his memory of

suffering later on. Indeed, it might be unethical to do otherwise. Needless to say, this is a

profoundly counterintuitive result. But this is precisely what is so important about

science: it allows us to investigate the world, and our place within it, in ways that get

behind first appearances. Why shouldn’t we do this with morality and human values

generally?

Fairness and Hierarchy

It is widely believed that focusing on the consequences of a person’s actions is

merely one of several approaches to ethics—one that is beset by paradox and often

impossible to implement. Imagined alternatives are either highly rational, as in the work

of a modern philosopher like John Rawls,

or decidedly otherwise, as we see in the

disparate and often contradictory precepts that issue from the world’s major religions.

My reasons for dismissing revealed religion as a source of moral guidance have

been spelled out elsewhere,

so I will not ride this hobbyhorse here, apart from pointing

out the obvious: (1) there are many revealed religions available to us, and they offer

mutually incompatible doctrines; (2) the scriptures of many religions, including the most

well subscribed (i.e., Christianity and Islam), countenance patently unethical practices

like slavery; (3) the faculty we use to validate religious precepts, judging the Golden Rule

to be wise and the murder of apostates to be foolish, is something we bring to scripture; it

does not, therefore, come from scripture; (4) the reasons for believing that any of the

world’s religions were “revealed” to our ancestors (rather than merely invented by men

and women who did not have the benefit of a twenty-first-century education) are either

risible or nonexistent—and the idea that each of these mutually contradictory doctrines is

inerrant remains a logical impossibility. Here we can take refuge in Bertrand Russell’s

famous remark that even if we could be certain that one of the world’s religions was

perfectly true, given the sheer number of conflicting faiths on offer, every believer should

expect damnation purely as a matter of probability.

Among the rational challenges to consequentialism, the “contractualism” of John

Rawls has been the most influential in recent decades. In his book A Theory of Justice

Rawls offered an approach to building a fair society that he considered an alternative to

the aim of maximizing human welfare.

His primary method, for which this work is

duly famous, was to ask how reasonable people would structure a society, guided by their

self-interest, if they couldn’t know what sort of person they would be in it. Rawls called

this novel starting point “the original position,” from which each person must judge the

fairness of every law and social arrangement from behind a “veil of ignorance.” In other

words, we can design any society we like as long as we do not presume to know, in

advance, whether we will be black or white, male or female, young or old, healthy or

sick, of high or low intelligence, beautiful or ugly, etc.

As a method for judging questions of fairness, this thought experiment is

undeniably brilliant. But is it really an alternative to thinking about the actual

consequences of our behavior? How would we feel if, after structuring our ideal society

from behind a veil of ignorance, we were told by an omniscient being that we had made a

few choices that, though eminently fair, would lead to the unnecessary misery of

millions, while parameters that were ever-so-slightly less fair would entail no such

suffering? Could we be indifferent to this information? The moment we conceive of

justice as being fully separable from human well-being, we are faced with the prospect of

there being morally “right” actions and social systems that are, on balance, detrimental to

the welfare of everyone affected by them. To simply bite the bullet on this point, as

Rawls seemed to do, saying “there is no reason to think that just institutions will

maximize the good”

seems a mere embrace of moral and philosophical defeat.

Some people worry that a commitment to maximizing a society’s welfare could

lead us to sacrifice the rights and liberties of the few wherever these losses would be

offset by the greater gains of the many. Why not have a society in which a few slaves are

continually worked to death for the pleasure of the rest? The worry is that a focus on

collective welfare does not seem to respect people as ends in themselves. And whose

welfare should we care about? The pleasure that a racist takes in abusing some minority

group, for instance, seems on all fours with the pleasure a saint takes in risking his life to

help a stranger. If there are more racists than saints, it seems the racists will win, and we

will be obliged to build a society that maximizes the pleasure of unjust men.

But such concerns clearly rest on an incomplete picture of human well-being. To

the degree that treating people as ends in themselves is a good way to safeguard human

well-being, it is precisely what we should do. Fairness is not merely an abstract

principle—it is a felt experience. We all know this from the inside, of course, but

neuroimaging has also shown that fairness drives reward-related activity in the brain,

while accepting unfair proposals requires the regulation of negative emotion.

Taking

others’ interests into account, making impartial decisions (and knowing that others will

make them), rendering help to the needy—these are experiences that contribute to our

psychological and social well-being. It seems perfectly reasonable, within a

consequentialist framework, for each of us to submit to a system of justice in which our

immediate, selfish interests will often be superseded by considerations of fairness. It is

only reasonable, however, on the assumption that everyone will tend to be better off

under such a system. As, it seems, they will.

While each individual’s search for happiness may not be compatible in every

instance with our efforts to build a just society, we should not lose sight of the fact that

societies do not suffer; people do. The only thing wrong with injustice is that it is, on

some level, actually or potentially bad for people.

Injustice makes its victims

demonstrably less happy, and it could be easily argued that it tends to make its

perpetrators less happy than they would be if they cared about the well-being of others.

Injustice also destroys trust, making it difficult for strangers to cooperate. Of course, here

we are talking about the nature of conscious experience, and so we are, of necessity,

talking about processes at work in the brains of human beings. The neuroscience of

morality and social emotions is only just beginning, but there seems no question that it

will one day deliver morally relevant insights regarding the material causes of our

happiness and suffering. While there may be some surprises in store for us down this

path, there is every reason to expect that kindness, compassion, fairness, and other

classically “good” traits will be vindicated neuroscientifically—which is to say that we

will only discover further reasons to believe that they are good for us, in that they

generally enhance our lives.

We have already begun to see that morality, like rationality, implies the existence

of certain norms—that is, it does not merely describe how we tend to think and behave; it

tells us how we should think and behave. One norm that morality and rationality share is

the interchangeability of perspective.

The solution to a problem should not depend on

whether you are the husband or the wife, the employer or employee, the creditor or

debtor, etc. This is why one cannot argue for the rightness of one’s views on the basis of

mere preference. In the moral sphere, this requirement lies at the core of what we mean

by “fairness.” It also reveals why it is generally not a good thing to have a different

ethical code for friends and strangers.

We have all met people who behave quite differently in business than in their

personal lives. While they would never lie to their friends, they might lie without a qualm

to their clients or customers. Why is this a moral failing? At the very least, it is

vulnerable to what could be called the principle of the unpleasant surprise. Consider

what happens to such a person when he discovers that one of his customers is actually a

friend: “Oh, why didn’t you say you were Jennifer’s sister! Uh … Okay, don’t buy that

model; this one is a much better deal.” Such moments expose a rift in a person’s ethics

that is always unflattering. People with two ethical codes are perpetually susceptible to

embarrassments of this kind. They are also less trustworthy—and trust is a measure of

how much a person can be relied upon to safeguard other people’s well-being. Even if

you happen to be a close friend of such a person—that is, on the right side of his ethics—

you can’t trust him to interact with others you may care about (“I didn’t know she was

your daughter. Sorry about that”).

Or consider the position of a Nazi living under the Third Reich, having fully

committed himself to exterminating the world’s Jews, only to learn, as many did, that he

was Jewish himself. Unless some compelling argument for the moral necessity of his

suicide were forthcoming, we can imagine that it would be difficult for our protagonist to

square his Nazi ethics with his actual identity. Clearly, his sense of right and wrong was

predicated on a false belief about his own genealogy. A genuine ethics should not be

vulnerable to such unpleasant surprises. This seems another way of arriving at Rawls’s

“original position.” That which is right cannot be dependent upon one’s being a member

of a certain tribe—if for no other reason than one can be mistaken about the fact of one’s

membership.

Kant’s “categorical imperative,” perhaps the most famous prescription in all of

moral philosophy, captures some of these same concerns:

Hence there is only one categorical imperative and it is this: “Act only according

to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal

law.”

While Kant believed that this criterion of universal applicability was the product

of pure reason, it appeals to us because it relies on basic intuitions about fairness and

justification.

One cannot claim to be “right” about anything—whether as a matter of

reason or a matter of ethics—unless one’s views can be generalized to others.

Is Being Good Just Too Difficult?

Most of us spend some time over the course of our lives deciding how (or

whether) to respond to the fact that other people on earth needlessly starve to death. Most

of us also spend some time deciding which delightful foods we want to consume at home

and in our favorite restaurants. Which of these projects absorbs more of your time and

material resources on a yearly basis? If you are like most people living in the developed

world, such a comparison will not recommend you for sainthood. Can the disparity

between our commitment to fulfilling our selfish desires and our commitment to

alleviating the unnecessary misery and death of millions be morally justified? Of course

not. These failures of ethical consistency are often considered a strike against

consequentialism. They shouldn’t be. Who ever said that being truly good, or even

ethically consistent, must be easy?

I have no doubt that I am less good than I could be. Which is to say, I am not

living in a way that truly maximizes the well-being of others. I am nearly as sure,

however, that I am also failing to live in a way that maximizes my own well-being. This

is one of the paradoxes of human psychology: we often fail to do what we ostensibly

want to do and what is most in our self-interest to do. We often fail to do what we most

want to do—or, at the very least, we fail to do what, at the end of the day (or year, or

lifetime) we will most wish we had done.

Just think of the heroic struggles many people must endure simply to quit

smoking or lose weight. The right course of action is generally obvious: if you are

smoking two packs of cigarettes a day or are fifty pounds overweight, you are surely not

maximizing your well-being. Perhaps this isn’t so clear to you now, but imagine: if you

could successfully stop smoking or lose weight, what are the chances that you would

regret this decision a year hence? Probably zero. And yet, if you are like most people,

you will find it extraordinarily difficult to make the simple behavioral changes required

to get what you want.

Most of us are in this predicament in moral terms. I know that helping people who

are starving is far more important than most of what I do. I also have no doubt that doing

what is most important would give me more pleasure and emotional satisfaction than I

get from most of what I do by way of seeking pleasure and emotional satisfaction. But

this knowledge does not change me. I still want to do what I do for pleasure more than I

want to help the starving. I strongly believe that I would be happier if I wanted to help the

starving more—and I have no doubt that they would be happier if I spent more time and

money helping them—but these beliefs are not sufficient to change me. I know that I

would be happier and the world would be a (marginally) better place if I were different in

these respects. I am, therefore, virtually certain that I am neither as moral, nor as happy,

as I could be.

I know all of these things, and I want to maximize my happiness, but I am

generally not moved to do what I believe will make me happier than I now am.

At bottom, these are claims both about the architecture of my mind and about the

social architecture of our world. It is quite clear to me that given the current state of my

mind—that is, given how my actions and uses of attention affect my life—I would be

happier if I were less selfish. This means I would be more wisely and effectively selfish if

I were less selfish. This is not a paradox.

What if I could change the architecture of my mind? On some level, this has

always been possible, as everything we devote attention to, every discipline we adopt, or

piece of knowledge we acquire changes our minds. Each of us also now has access to a

swelling armamentarium of drugs that regulate mood, attention, and wakefulness. And

the possibility of far more sweeping (as well as more precise) changes to our mental

capacities may be within reach. Would it be good to make changes to our minds that

affect our sense of right and wrong? And would our ability to alter our moral sense

undercut the case I am making for moral realism? What if, for instance, I could rewire my

brain so that eating ice cream was not only extremely pleasurable, but also felt like the

most important thing I could do?

Despite the ready availability of ice cream, it seems that my new disposition

would present certain challenges to self-actualization. I would gain weight. I would

ignore social obligations and intellectual pursuits. No doubt, I would soon scandalize

others with my skewed priorities. But what if advances in neuroscience eventually allow

us to change the way every brain responds to morally relevant experiences? What if we

could program the entire species to hate fairness, to admire cheating, to love cruelty, to

despise compassion, etc. Would this be morally good? Again, the devil is in the details. Is

this really a world of equivalent and genuine well-being, where the concept of “well-

being” is susceptible to ongoing examination and refinement as it is in our world? If so,

so be it. What could be more important than genuine well-being? But, given all that the

concept of “well-being” entails in our world, it is very difficult to imagine that its

properties could be entirely fungible as we move across the moral landscape.

A miniature version of this dilemma is surely on the horizon: increasingly, we

will need to consider the ethics of using medications to mitigate mental suffering. For

instance, would it be good for a person to take a drug that made her indifferent to the

death of her child? Surely not while she still had responsibilities as a parent. But what if a

mother lost her only child and was thereafter inconsolable? How much better than

inconsolable should her doctor make her feel? How much better should she want to feel?

Would any of us want to feel perfectly happy in this circumstance? Given a choice—and

this choice, in some form, is surely coming—I think that most of us will want our mental

states to be coupled, however loosely, to the reality of our lives. How else could our

bonds with one another be maintained? How, for instance, can we love our children and

yet be totally indifferent to their suffering and death? I suspect we cannot. But what will

we do once our pharmacies begin stocking a genuine antidote to grief?

If we cannot always resolve such conundrums, how should we proceed? We

cannot perfectly measure or reconcile the competing needs of billions of creatures. We

often cannot effectively prioritize our own competing needs. What we can do is try,

within practical limits, to follow a path that seems likely to maximize both our own well-

being and the well-being of others. This is what it means to live wisely and ethically. As

we will see, we have already begun to discover which regions of the brain allow us to do

this. A fuller understanding of what moral life entails, however, would require a science

of morality.

Bewildered by Diversity

The psychologist Jonathan Haidt has put forward a very influential thesis about

moral judgment known as the “social-intuitionist model.” In a widely referenced article

entitled “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail,” Haidt summarizes our predicament

this way:

[O]ur moral life is plagued by two illusions. The first illusion can be called the

“wag-the-dog” illusion: We believe that our own moral judgment (the dog) is driven by

our own moral reasoning (the tail). The second illusion can be called the “wag-the-other-

dog’s-tail” illusion: In a moral argument, we expect the successful rebuttal of our

opponents’ arguments to change our opponents’ minds. Such a belief is analogous to

believing that forcing a dog’s tail to wag by moving it with your hand should make the

dog happy.

Haidt does not go so far as to say that reasoning never produces moral judgments;

he simply argues that this happens far less often than people think. Haidt is pessimistic

about our ever making realistic claims about right and wrong, or good and evil, because

he has observed that human beings tend to make moral decisions on the basis of emotion,

justify these decisions with post hoc reasoning, and stick to their guns even when their

reasoning demonstrably fails. He notes that when asked to justify their responses to

specific moral (and pseudo-moral) dilemmas, people are often “morally dumbfounded.”

His experimental subjects would “stutter, laugh, and express surprise at their inability to

find supporting reasons, yet they would not change their initial judgments …”

The same can be said, however, about our failures to reason effectively. Consider

the Monty Hall Problem (based on the television game show Let’s Make a Deal).

Imagine that you are a contestant on a game show and presented with three closed doors:

behind one sits a new car; the other two conceal goats. Pick the correct door, and the car

is yours.

The game proceeds this way: Assume that you have chosen Door #1. Your host

then opens Door #2, revealing a goat. He now gives you a chance to switch your bet from

Door #1 to the remaining Door #3. Should you switch? The correct answer is “yes.” But

most people find this answer very perplexing, as it violates the common intuition that,

with two unopened doors remaining, the odds must be 1 in 2 that the car will be behind

either one of them. If you stick with your initial choice, however, your odds of winning

are actually 1 in 3. If you switch, your odds increase to 2 in 3.

It would be fair to say that the Monty Hall problem leaves many of its victims

“logically dumbfounded.” Even when people understand conceptually why they should

switch doors, they can’t shake their initial intuition that each door represents a 1/2 chance

of success. This reliable failure of human reasoning is just that—a failure of reasoning. It

does not suggest that there is no correct answer to the Monty Hall problem.

And yet scientists like Joshua Greene and Jonathan Haidt seem to think that the

very existence of moral controversy nullifies the possibility of moral truth. In their

opinion, all we can do is study what human beings do in the name of “morality.” Thus, if

religious conservatives find the prospect of gay marriage abhorrent, and secular liberals

find it perfectly acceptable, we are confronted by a mere difference of moral

preference—not a difference that relates to any deeper truths about human life.

In opposition to the liberal notion of morality as being a system of “prescriptive

judgments of justice, rights, and welfare pertaining to how people ought to relate to each

other,” Haidt asks us to ponder mysteries of the following sort:

[I]f morality is about how we treat each other, then why did so many ancient texts

devote so much space to rules about menstruation, who can eat what, and who can have

sex with whom?

Interesting question. Are these the same ancient texts that view slavery as morally

unproblematic? Perhaps slavery has no moral implications after all—otherwise, surely

these ancient texts would have something of substance to say against it. Could abolition

have been the ultimate instance of liberal bias? Or, following Haidt’s logic, why not ask,

“if physics is just a system of laws that explains the structure of the universe in terms of

mass and energy, why do so many ancient texts devote so much space to immaterial

influences and miraculous acts of God?” Why indeed.

Haidt appears to consider it an intellectual virtue to accept, uncritically, the moral

categories of his subjects. But where is it written that everything that people do or decide

in the name of “morality” deserves to be considered part of its subject matter? A majority

of Americans believe that the Bible provides an accurate account of the ancient world.

Many millions of Americans also believe that a principal cause of cancer is “repressed

anger.” Happily, we do not allow these opinions to anchor us when it comes time to have

serious discussions about history and oncology. It seems abundantly clear that many

people are simply wrong about morality—just as many people are wrong about physics,

biology, history, and everything else worth understanding. What scientific purpose is

served by averting our eyes from this fact? If morality is a system of thinking about (and

maximizing) the well-being of conscious creatures like ourselves, many people’s moral

concerns must be immoral.

Moral skeptics like Haidt generally emphasize the intractability of moral

disagreements:

The bitterness, futility, and self-righteousness of most moral arguments can now

be explicated. In a debate about abortion, politics, consensual incest, or what my friend

did to your friend, both sides believe that their positions are based on reasoning about the

facts and issues involved (the wag-the-dog illusion). Both sides present what they take to

be excellent arguments in support of their positions. Both sides expect the other side to be

responsive to such reasons (the wag-the-other-dog’s-tail illusion). When the other side

fails to be affected by such good reasons, each side concludes that the other side must be

closed minded or insincere. In this way the culture wars over issues such as

homosexuality and abortion can generate morally motivated players on both sides who

believe that their opponents are not morally motivated.

But the dynamic Haidt describes will be familiar to anyone who has ever entered

into a debate on any subject. Such failures of persuasion do not suggest that both sides of

every controversy are equally credible. For instance, the above passage perfectly captures

my occasional collisions with 9/11 conspiracy theorists. A nationwide poll conducted by

the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University found that more than a third of

Americans suspect that the federal government “assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or

took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East” and

16 percent believe that this proposition is “very likely” to be true.

Many of these people

believe that the Twin Towers collapsed not because fully fueled passenger jets smashed

into them but because agents of the Bush administration had secretly rigged these

buildings to explode (6 percent of all respondents judged this “very likely,” 10 percent

judged it “somewhat likely”). Whenever I encounter people harboring these convictions,

the impasse that Haidt describes is well in place: both sides “present what they take to be

excellent arguments in support of their positions. Both sides expect the other side to be

responsive to such reasons (the wag-the-other-dog’s-tail illusion). When the other side

fails to be affected by such good reasons, each side concludes that the other side must be

closed minded or insincere.” It is undeniable, however, that if one side in this debate is

right about what actually happened on September 11, 2001, the other side must be

absolutely wrong.

Of course, it is now well known that our feeling of reasoning objectively is often

illusory.

This does not mean, however, that we cannot learn to reason more effectively,

pay greater attention to evidence, and grow more mindful of the ever-present possibility

of error. Haidt is right to notice that the brain’s emotional circuitry often governs our

moral intuitions, and the way in which feeling drives judgment is surely worthy of study.

But it does not follow that there are no right and wrong answers to questions of morality.

Just as people are often less than rational when claiming to be rational, they can be less

than moral when claiming to be moral.

In describing the different forms of morality available to us, Haidt offers a choice

between “contractual” and “beehive” approaches: the first is said to be the province of

liberals, who care mainly about harm and fairness; the second represents the conservative

(generally religious) social order, which incorporates further concerns about group

loyalty, respect for authority, and religious purity. The opposition between these two

conceptions of the good life may be worth discussing, and Haidt’s data on the differences

between liberals and conservatives is interesting, but is his interpretation correct? It

seems possible, for instance, that his five foundations of morality are simply facets of a

more general concern about harm.

What, after all, is the problem with desecrating a copy of the Qur’an? There

would be no problem but for the fact that people believe that the Qur’an is a divinely

authored text. Such people almost surely believe that some harm could come to them or

to their tribe as a result of such sacrileges—if not in this world, then in the next. A more

esoteric view might be that any person who desecrates scripture will have harmed himself

directly: a lack of reverence might be its own punishment, dimming the eyes of faith.

Whatever interpretation one favors, sacredness and respect for religious authority seem to

reduce to a concern about harm just the same.

The same point can be made in the opposite direction: even a liberal like myself,

enamored as I am of thinking in terms of harm and fairness, can readily see that my

vision of the good life must be safeguarded from the aggressive tribalism of others. When

I search my heart, I discover that I want to keep the barbarians beyond the city walls just

as much as my conservative neighbors do, and I recognize that sacrifices of my own

freedom may be warranted for this purpose. I expect that epiphanies of this sort could

well multiply in the coming years. Just imagine, for instance, how liberals might be

disposed to think about the threat of Islam after an incident of nuclear terrorism. Liberal

hankering for happiness and freedom might one day produce some very strident calls for

stricter laws and tribal loyalty. Will this mean that liberals have become religious

conservatives pining for the beehive? Or is the liberal notion of avoiding harm flexible

enough to encompass the need for order and differences between in-group and out-group?

There is also the question of whether conservatism contains an extra measure of

cognitive bias—or outright hypocrisy—as the moral convictions of social conservatives

are so regularly belied by their louche behavior. The most conservative regions of the

United States tend to have the highest rates of divorce and teenage pregnancy, as well as

the greatest appetite for pornography.

Of course, it could be argued that social

conservatism is the consequence of so much ambient sinning. But this seems an unlikely

explanation—especially in those cases where a high level of conservative moralism and a

predilection for sin can be found in a single person. If one wants examples of such

hypocrisy, Evangelical ministers and conservative politicians seem to rarely disappoint.

When is a belief system not only false but so encouraging of falsity and needless

suffering as to be worthy of our condemnation? According to a recent poll, 36 percent of

British Muslims (ages sixteen to twenty-four) think apostates should be put to death for

their unbelief.

Are these people “morally motivated,” in Haidt’s sense, or just morally

confused?

And what if certain cultures are found to harbor moral codes that look terrible no

matter how we jigger Haidt’s five variables of harm, fairness, group loyalty, respect for

authority, and spiritual purity? What if we find a group of people who aren’t especially

sensitive to harm and fairness, or cognizant of the sacred, or morally astute in any other

way? Would Haidt’s conception of morality then allow us to stop these benighted people

from abusing their children? Or would that be unscientific?

The Moral Brain

Imagine that you are having dinner in a restaurant and spot your best friend’s wife

seated some distance away. As you stand to say hello, you notice that the man seated

across from her is not your best friend, but a handsome stranger. You hesitate. Is he a

colleague of hers from work? Her brother from out of town? Something about the scene

strikes you as illicit. While you cannot hear what they are saying, there is an

unmistakable sexual chemistry between them. You now recall that your best friend is

away at a conference. Is his wife having an affair? What should you do?

Several regions of the brain will contribute to this impression of moral salience

and to the subsequent stirrings of moral emotion. There are many separate strands of

cognition and feeling that intersect here: sensitivity to context, reasoning about other

people’s beliefs, the interpretation of facial expressions and body language, suspicion,

indignation, impulse control, etc. At what point do these disparate processes constitute an

instance of moral cognition? It is difficult to say. At a minimum, we know that we have

entered moral territory once thoughts about morally relevant events (e.g., the possibility

of a friend’s betrayal) have been consciously entertained. For the purposes of this

discussion, we need draw the line no more precisely than this.

The brain regions involved in moral cognition span many areas of the prefrontal

cortex and the temporal lobes. The neuroscientists Jorge Moll, Ricardo de Oliveira-

Souza, and colleagues have written the most comprehensive reviews of this research.

They divide human actions into four categories:

1. Self-serving actions that do not affect others

2. Self-serving actions that negatively affect others

3. Actions that are beneficial to others, with a high probability of reciprocation

(“reciprocal altruism”)

4. Actions that are beneficial to others, with no direct personal benefits (material

or reputation gains) and no expected reciprocation (“genuine altruism”). This includes

altruistic helping as well as costly punishment of norm violators (“altruistic

punishment”)

As Moll and colleagues point out, we share behaviors 1 through 3 with other

social mammals, while 4 seems to be the special province of human beings. (We should

probably add that this altruism must be intentional/conscious, so as to exclude the truly

heroic self-sacrifice seen among eusocial insects like bees, ants, and termites.) While

Moll et al. admit to ignoring the reward component of genuine altruism (often called the

“warm glow” associated with cooperation), we know from neuroimaging studies that

cooperation is associated with heightened activity in the brain’s reward regions.

Here,

once again, the traditional opposition between selfish and selfless motivation seems to

break down. If helping others can be rewarding, rather than merely painful, it should be

thought of as serving the self in another mode.

It is easy to see the role that negative and positive motivations play in the moral

domain: we feel contempt/anger for the moral transgressions of others, guilt/shame over

our own moral failings, and the warm glow of reward when we find ourselves playing

nicely with other people. Without the engagement of such motivational mechanisms,

moral prescriptions (purely rational notions of “ought”) would be very unlikely to

translate into actual behaviors. The fact that motivation is a separate variable explains the

conundrum briefly touched on above: we often know what would make us happy, or what

would make the world a better place, and yet we find that we are not motivated to seek

these ends; conversely, we are often motivated to behave in ways that we know we will

later regret. Clearly, moral motivation can be uncoupled from the fruits of moral

reasoning. A science of morality would, of necessity, require a deeper understanding of

human motivation.

The regions of the brain that govern judgments of right and wrong include a broad

network of cortical and subcortical structures. The contribution of these areas to moral

thought and behavior differs with respect to emotional tone: lateral regions of the frontal

lobes seem to govern the indignation associated with punishing transgressors, while

medial frontal regions produce the feelings of reward associated with trust and

reciprocation.

As we will see, there is also a distinction between personal and

impersonal moral decisions. The resulting picture is complicated: factors like moral

sensitivity, moral motivation, moral judgment, and moral reasoning rely on separable,

mutually overlapping processes.

The medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) is central to most discussions of morality

and the brain. As discussed further in chapters 3 and 4, this region is involved in emotion,

reward, and judgments of self-relevance. It also seems to register the difference between

belief and disbelief. Injuries here have been associated with a variety of deficits including

poor impulse control, emotional blunting, and the attenuation of social emotions like

empathy, shame, embarrassment, and guilt. When frontal damage is limited to the MPFC,

reasoning ability as well as the conceptual knowledge of moral norms are generally

spared, but the ability to behave appropriately toward others tends to be disrupted.

Interestingly, patients suffering from MPFC damage are more inclined to

consequentialist reasoning than normal subjects are when evaluating certain moral

dilemmas—when, for instance, the means of sacrificing one person’s life to save many

others is personal rather than impersonal.

Consider the following two scenarios:

1. You are at the wheel of a runaway trolley quickly approaching a fork in the

tracks. On the tracks extending to the left is a group of five railway workmen. On the

tracks extending to the right is a single railway workman.

If you do nothing the trolley will proceed to the left, causing the deaths of the five

workmen. The only way to avoid the deaths of these workmen is to hit a switch on your

dashboard that will cause the trolley to proceed to the right, causing the death of the

single workman.

Is it appropriate for you to hit the switch in order to avoid the deaths of the five

workmen?

2. A runaway trolley is heading down the tracks toward five workmen who will

be killed if the trolley proceeds on its present course. You are on a footbridge over the

tracks, in between the approaching trolley and the five workmen. Next to you on this

footbridge is a stranger who happens to be very large.

The only way to save the lives of the five workmen is to push this stranger off the

bridge and onto the tracks below where his large body will stop the trolley. The stranger

will die if you do this, but the five workmen will be saved.

Is it appropriate for you to push the stranger onto the tracks in order to save the

five workmen?

Most people strongly support sacrificing one person to save five in the first

scenario, while considering such a sacrifice morally abhorrent in the second. This

paradox has been well known in philosophical circles for years.

Joshua Greene and

colleagues were the first to look at the brain’s response to these dilemmas using fMRI.

They found that the personal forms of these dilemmas, like the one described in scenario

two, more strongly activate brain regions associated with emotion. Another group has

since found that the disparity between people’s responses to the two scenarios can be

modulated, however slightly, by emotional context. Subjects who spent a few minutes

watching a pleasant video prior to confronting the footbridge dilemma were more apt to

push the man to his death.

The fact that patients suffering from MPFC injuries find it easier to sacrifice the

one for the many is open to differing interpretations. Greene views this as evidence that

emotional and cognitive processes often work in opposition.

There are reasons to worry,

however, that mere opposition between consequentialist thinking and negative emotion

does not adequately account for the data.

I suspect that a more detailed understanding of the brain processes involved in

making moral judgments of this type could affect our sense of right and wrong. And yet

superficial differences between moral dilemmas may continue to play a role in our

reasoning. If losses will always cause more suffering than forsaken gains, or if pushing a

person to his death is guaranteed to traumatize us in a way that throwing a switch will

not, these distinctions become variables that constrain how we can move across the moral

landscape toward higher states of well-being. It seems to me, however, that a science of

morality can absorb these details: scenarios that appear, on paper, to lead to the same

outcome (e.g., one life lost, five lives saved), may actually have different consequences in

the real world.

Psychopaths

In order to understand the relationship between the mind and the brain, it is often

useful to study subjects who, whether through illness or injury, lack specific mental

capacities. As luck would have it, Mother Nature has provided us with a nearly perfect

dissection of conventional morality. The resulting persons are generally referred to as

“psychopaths” or “sociopaths,”

and there seem to be many more of them living among

us than most of us realize. Studying their brains has yielded considerable insight into the

neural basis of conventional morality.

As a personality disorder, psychopathy has been so sensationalized in the media

that it is difficult to research it without feeling that one is pandering, either to oneself or

to one’s audience. However, there is no question that psychopaths exist, and many of

them speak openly about the pleasure they take in terrorizing and torturing innocent

people. The extreme examples, which include serial killers and sexual sadists, seem to

defy any sympathetic understanding on our parts. Indeed, if you immerse yourself in this

literature, each case begins to seem more horrible and incomprehensible than the last.

While I am reluctant to traffic in the details of these crimes, I fear that speaking in

abstractions may obscure the underlying reality. Despite a steady diet of news, which

provides a daily reminder of human evil, it can be difficult to remember that certain

people truly lack the capacity to care about their fellow human beings. Consider the

statement of a man who was convicted of repeatedly raping and torturing his nine-year-

old stepson:

After about two years of molesting my son, and all the pornography that I had

been buying, renting, swapping, I had got my hands on some “bondage discipline”

pornography with children involved. Some of the reading that I had done and the pictures

that I had seen showed total submission. Forcing the children to do what I wanted.

And I eventually started using some of this bondage discipline with my own son,

and it had escalated to the point where I was putting a large Zip-loc bag over his head and

taping it around his neck with black duct tape or black electrical tape and raping and

molesting him … to the point where he would turn blue, pass out. At that point I would

rip the bag off his head, not for fear of hurting him, but because of the excitement.

I was extremely aroused by inflicting pain. And when I see him pass out and

change colors, that was very arousing and heightening to me, and I would rip the bag off

his head and then I’d jump on his chest and masturbate in his face and make him suck my

penis while he … started to come back awake. While he was coughing and choking, I

would rape him in the mouth.

I used this same sadistic style of plastic bag and the tape two or three times a

week, and it went on for I’d say a little over a year.

I suspect that this brief glimpse of one man’s private passions will suffice to make

the point. Be assured that this is not the worst abuse a man or woman has ever inflicted

upon a child just for the fun of it. And one remarkable feature of the literature on

psychopaths is the extent to which even the worst people are able to find collaborators.

For instance, the role played by violent pornography in these cases is difficult to

overlook. Child pornography alone—which, as many have noted, is the visual record of

an actual crime—is now a global, multibillion-dollar industry, involving kidnapping, “sex

tourism,” organized crime, and great technical sophistication in the use of the internet.

Apparently, there are enough people who are eager to see children—and, increasingly,

toddlers and infants—raped and tortured so as to create an entire subculture.

While psychopaths are especially well represented in our prisons,

many live

below the threshold of overt criminality. For every psychopath who murders a child,

there are tens of thousands who are guilty of far more conventional mischief. Robert

Hare, the creator of the standard diagnostic instrument to assess psychopathy, the

Psychopathy Checklist–Revised (PCL–R), estimates that while there are probably no

more than a hundred serial killers in the United States at any moment, there are probably

3 million psychopaths (about 1 percent of the population).

If Hare is correct, each of us

crosses paths with such people all the time.

For instance, I recently met a man who took considerable pride in having arranged

his life so as to cheat on his wife with impunity. In fact, he was also cheating on the many

women with whom he was cheating—for each believed him to be faithful. All this

gallantry involved aliases, fake businesses, and, needless to say, a blizzard of lies. While

I can’t say for certain this man was a psychopath, it was quite apparent that he lacked

what most of us would consider a normal conscience. A life of continuous deception and

selfish machination seemed to cause him no discomfort whatsoever.

Psychopaths are distinguished by their extraordinary egocentricity and their total

lack of concern for the suffering of others. A list of their most frequent characteristics

reads like a personal ad from hell: they are said to be callous, manipulative, deceptive,

impulsive, secretive, grandiose, thrill-seeking, sexually promiscuous, unfaithful,

irresponsible, prone to both reactive and calculated aggression,

and lacking in

emotional depth. They also show reduced emotional sensitivity to punishment (whether

actual or anticipated). Most important, psychopaths do not experience a normal range of

anxiety and fear, and this may account for their lack of conscience.

The first neuroimaging experiment done on psychopaths found that, when

compared to nonpsychopathic criminals and noncriminal controls, they exhibit

significantly less activity in regions of the brain that generally respond to emotional

stimuli.

While anxiety and fear are emotions that most of us would prefer to live

without, they serve as anchors to social and moral norms.

Without an ability to feel

anxious about one’s own transgressions, real or imagined, norms become nothing more

than “rules that others make up.”

The developmental literature also supports this

interpretation: fearful children have been shown to display greater moral understanding.

It remains an open question, therefore, just how free of anxiety we can reasonably want

to be. Again, this is something that only an empirical science of morality could decide.

And as more effective remedies for anxiety appear on the horizon, this is an issue that we

will have to confront in some form.

Further neuroimaging work suggests that psychopathy is also a product of

pathological arousal and reward.

People scoring high on the psychopathic personality

inventory show abnormally high activity in the reward regions of their brain (in

particular, the nucleus accumbens) in response to amphetamine and while anticipating

monetary gains. Hypersensitivity of this circuitry is especially linked to the impulsive-

antisocial dimension of psychopathy, which leads to risky and predatory behavior.

Researchers speculate that an excessive response to anticipated reward can prevent a

person from learning from the negative emotions of others.

Unlike others who suffer from mental illness or mood disorders, psychopaths

generally do not feel that anything is wrong with them. They also meet the legal

definition of sanity, in that they possess an intellectual understanding of the difference

between right and wrong. However, psychopaths generally fail to distinguish between

conventional and moral transgressions. When asked “Would it be okay to eat at your desk

if the teacher gave you permission?” vs. “Would it be okay to hit another student in the

face if the teacher gave you permission?” normal children age thirty-nine months and

above tend to see these questions as fundamentally distinct and consider the latter

transgression intrinsically wrong. In this, they appear to be guided by an awareness of

potential human suffering. Children at risk for psychopathy tend to view these questions

as morally indistinguishable.

When asked to identify the mental states of other people on the basis of

photographs of their eyes alone, psychopaths show no general impairment.

Their

“theory of mind” processing (as the ability to understand the mental states of others is

generally known) seems to be basically intact, with subtle deficits resulting from their

simply not caring about how other people feel.

The one crucial exception, however, is

that psychopaths are often unable to recognize expressions of fear and sadness in others.

And this may be the difference that makes all the difference.

Neuroscientist James Blair and colleagues suggest that psychopathy results from a

failure of emotional learning due to genetic impairments of the amygdala and

orbitofrontal cortex, regions vital to the processing of emotion.

The negative emotions

of others, rather than parental punishment, may be what goad us to normal socialization.

Psychopathy, therefore, could result from a failure to learn from the fear and sadness of

other people.

A child at risk for psychopathy, being emotionally blind to the suffering he

causes, may increasingly resort to antisocial behavior in pursuit of his goals throughout

adolescence and adulthood.

As Blair points out, parenting strategies that increase

empathy tend to successfully mitigate antisocial behavior in healthy children; such

strategies inevitably fail with children who present with the callousness/unemotional

(CU) trait that is characteristic of psychopathy. While it may be difficult to accept, the

research strongly suggests that some people cannot learn to care about others.

Perhaps

we will one day develop interventions to change this. For the purposes of this discussion,

however, it seems sufficient to point out that we are beginning to understand the kinds of

brain pathologies that lead to the most extreme forms of human evil. And just as some

people have obvious moral deficits, others must possess moral talent, moral expertise,

and even moral genius. As with any human ability, these gradations must be expressed at

the level of the brain.

Game theory suggests that evolution probably selected for two stable orientations

toward human cooperation: tit for tat (often called “strong reciprocity”) and permanent

defection.

Tit for tat is generally what we see throughout society: you show me some

kindness, and I am eager to return the favor; you do something rude or injurious, and the

temptation to respond in kind becomes difficult to resist. But consider how permanent

defection would appear at the level of human relationships: the defector would probably

engage in continuous cheating and manipulation, sham moralistic aggression (to provoke

guilt and altruism in others), and strategic mimicry of positive social emotions like

sympathy (as well as of negative emotions like guilt). This begins to sound like garden-

variety psychopathy. The existence of psychopaths, while otherwise quite mysterious,

would seem to be predicted by game theory. And yet, the psychopath who lives his entire

life in a tiny village must be at a terrible disadvantage. The stability of permanent

defection as a strategy would require that a defector be able to find people to fleece who

are not yet aware of his terrible reputation. Needless to say, the growth of cities has made

this way of life far more practicable than it has ever been.

Evil

When confronted with psychopathy at its most extreme, it is very difficult not to

think in terms of good and evil. But what if we adopt a more naturalistic view? Consider

the prospect of being locked in a cage with a wild grizzly: why would this be a problem?

Well, clearly, wild grizzlies suffer some rather glaring cognitive and emotional deficits.

Your new roommate will not be easy to reason with or placate; he is unlikely to recognize

that you have interests analogous to his own, or that the two of you might have shared

interests; and if he could understand such things, he would probably lack the emotional

resources to care. From his point of view, you will be a distraction at best, a cowering

annoyance, and something tender to probe with his teeth. We might say that a wild bear

is, like a psychopath, morally insane. However, we are very unlikely to refer to his

condition as a form of “evil.”

Human evil is a natural phenomenon, and some level of predatory violence is

innate in us. Humans and chimpanzees tend to display the same level of hostility toward

outsiders, but chimps are far more aggressive than humans are within a group (by a factor

of about 200).

Therefore, we seem to have prosocial abilities that chimps lack. And,

despite appearances, human beings have grown steadily less violent. As Jared Diamond

explains:

It’s true, of course, that twentieth-century state societies, having developed potent

technologies of mass killing, have broken all historical records for violent deaths. But this

is because they enjoy the advantage of having by far the largest populations of potential

victims in human history; the actual percentage of the population that died violently was

on the average higher in traditional pre-state societies than it was even in Poland during

the Second World War or Cambodia under Pol Pot.

We must continually remind ourselves that there is a difference between what is

natural and what is actually good for us. Cancer is perfectly natural, and yet its

eradication is a primary goal of modern medicine. Evolution may have selected for

territorial violence, rape, and other patently unethical behaviors as strategies to propagate

one’s genes—but our collective well-being clearly depends on our opposing such natural

tendencies.

Territorial violence might have even been necessary for the development of

altruism. The economist Samuel Bowles has argued that lethal, “out-group” hostility and

“in-group” altruism are two sides of the same coin.

His computer models suggest that

altruism cannot emerge without some level of conflict between groups. If true, this is one

of the many places where we must transcend evolutionary pressures through reason—

because, barring an attack from outer space, we now lack a proper “out-group” to inspire

us to further altruism.

In fact, Bowles’s work has interesting implications for my account of the moral

landscape. Consider the following from Patricia Churchland:

Assuming our woodland ape ancestors as well as our own human ancestors

engaged in out-group raids, as chimps and several South American tribes still do, can we

be confident in moral condemnation of their behavior? I see no basis in reality for such a

judgment. If, as Samuel Bowles argues, the altruism typical of modern humans plausibly

co-evolved with lethal out-group competition, such a judgment will be problematic.

Of course, the purpose of my argument is to suggest a “basis in reality” for

universal judgments of value. However, as Churchland points out, if there was simply no

other way for our ancestors to progress toward altruism without developing a penchant

for out-group hostility, then so be it. Assuming that the development of altruism

represents an extraordinarily important advance in moral terms (I believe it does), this

would be analogous to our ancestors descending into an unpleasant valley on the moral

landscape only to make progress toward a higher peak. But it is important to reiterate that

such evolutionary constraints no longer hold. In fact, given recent developments in

biology, we are now poised to consciously engineer our further evolution. Should we do

this, and if so, in which ways? Only a scientific understanding of the possibilities of

human well-being could guide us.

The Illusion of Free Will

Brains allow organisms to alter their behavior and internal states in response to

changes in the environment. The evolution of these structures, tending toward increased

size and complexity, has led to vast differences in how the earth’s species live.

The human brain responds to information coming from several domains: from the

external world, from internal states of the body, and, increasingly, from a sphere of

meaning—which includes spoken and written language, social cues, cultural norms,

rituals of interaction, assumptions about the rationality of others, judgments of taste and

style, etc. Generally, these domains seem unified in our experience: You spot your best

friend standing on the street corner looking strangely disheveled. You recognize that she

is crying and frantically dialing her cell phone. Did someone assault her? You rush to her

side, feeling an acute desire to help. Your “self” seems to stand at the intersection of

these lines of input and output. From this point of view, you tend to feel that you are the

source of your own thoughts and actions. You decide what to do and not to do. You seem

to be an agent acting of your own free will. As we will see, however, this point of view

cannot be reconciled with what we know about the human brain.

We are conscious of only a tiny fraction of the information that our brains process

in each moment. While we continually notice changes in our experience—in thought,

mood, perception, behavior, etc.—we are utterly unaware of the neural events that

produce these changes. In fact, by merely glancing at your face or listening to your tone

of voice, others are often more aware of your internal states and motivations than you are.

And yet most of us still feel that we are the authors of our own thoughts and actions.

All of our behavior can be traced to biological events about which we have no

conscious knowledge: this has always suggested that free will is an illusion. For instance,

the physiologist Benjamin Libet famously demonstrated that activity in the brain’s motor

regions can be detected some 350 milliseconds before a person feels that he has decided

to move.

Another lab recently used fMRI data to show that some “conscious” decisions

can be predicted up to 10 seconds before they enter awareness (long before the

preparatory motor activity detected by Libet).

Clearly, findings of this kind are difficult

to reconcile with the sense that one is the conscious source of one’s actions. Notice that

distinction between “higher” and “lower” systems in the brain gets us nowhere: for I no

more initiate events in executive regions of my prefrontal cortex than I cause the

creaturely outbursts of my limbic system. The truth seems inescapable: I, as the subject of

my experience, cannot know what I will next think or do until a thought or intention

arises; and thoughts and intentions are caused by physical events and mental stirrings of

which I am not aware.

Many scientists and philosophers realized long ago that free will could not be

squared with our growing understanding of the physical world.

Nevertheless, many still

deny this fact.

The biologist Martin Heisenberg recently observed that some

fundamental processes in the brain, like the opening and closing of ion channels and the

release of synaptic vesicles, occur at random, and cannot, therefore, be determined by

environmental stimuli. Thus, much of our behavior can be considered “self-generated,”

and therein, he imagines, lies a basis for free will.

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But “self-generated” in this sense

means only that these events originate in the brain. The same can be said for the brain

states of a chicken.

If I were to learn that my decision to have a third cup of coffee this morning was

due to a random release of neurotransmitters, how could the indeterminacy of the

initiating event count as the free exercise of my will? Such indeterminacy, if it were

generally effective throughout the brain, would obliterate any semblance of human

agency. Imagine what your life would be like if all your actions, intentions, beliefs, and

desires were “self-generated” in this way: you would scarcely seem to have a mind at all.

You would live as one blown about by an internal wind. Actions, intentions, beliefs, and

desires are the sorts of things that can exist only in a system that is significantly

constrained by patterns of behavior and the laws of stimulus-response. In fact, the

possibility of reasoning with other human beings—or, indeed, of finding their behaviors

and utterances comprehensible at all—depends on the assumption that their thoughts and

actions will obediently ride the rails of a shared reality. In the limit, Heisenberg’s “self-

generated” mental events would amount to utter madness.

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The problem is that no account of causality leaves room for free will. Thoughts,

moods, and desires of every sort simply spring into view—and move us, or fail to move

us, for reasons that are, from a subjective point of view, perfectly inscrutable. Why did I

use the term “inscrutable” in the previous sentence? I must confess that I do not know.

Was I free to do otherwise? What could such a claim possibly mean? Why, after all,

didn’t the word “opaque” come to mind? Well, it just didn’t—and now that it vies for a

place on the page, I find that I am still partial to my original choice. Am I free with

respect to this preference? Am I free to feel that “opaque” is the better word, when I just

do not feel that it is the better word? Am I free to change my mind? Of course not. It can

only change me.

It means nothing to say that a person would have done otherwise had he chosen to

do otherwise, because a person’s “choices” merely appear in his mental stream as though

sprung from the void. In this sense, each of us is like a phenomenological glockenspiel

played by an unseen hand. From the perspective of your conscious mind, you are no more

responsible for the next thing you think (and therefore do) than you are for the fact that

you were born into this world.

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Our belief in free will arises from our moment-to-moment ignorance of specific

prior causes. The phrase “free will” describes what it feels like to be identified with the

content of each thought as it arises in consciousness. Trains of thought like, “What should

I get my daughter for her birthday? I know, I’ll take her to a pet store and have her pick

out some tropical fish,” convey the apparent reality of choices, freely made. But from a

deeper perspective (speaking both subjectively and objectively), thoughts simply arise

(what else could they do?) unauthored and yet author to our actions.

As Daniel Dennett has pointed out, many people confuse determinism with

fatalism.

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This gives rise to questions like, “If everything is determined, why should I

do anything? Why not just sit back and see what happens?” But the fact that our choices

depend on prior causes does not mean that they do not matter. If I had not decided to

write this book, it wouldn’t have written itself. My choice to write it was unquestionably

the primary cause of its coming into being. Decisions, intentions, efforts, goals,

willpower, etc., are causal states of the brain, leading to specific behaviors, and behaviors

lead to outcomes in the world. Human choice, therefore, is as important as fanciers of

free will believe. And to “just sit back and see what happens” is itself a choice that will

produce its own consequences. It is also extremely difficult to do: just try staying in bed

all day waiting for something to happen; you will find yourself assailed by the impulse to

get up and do something, which will require increasingly heroic efforts to resist.

Of course, there is a distinction between voluntary and involuntary actions, but it

does nothing to support the common idea of free will (nor does it depend upon it). The

former are associated with felt intentions (desires, goals, expectations, etc.) while the

latter are not. All of the conventional distinctions we like to make between degrees of

intent—from the bizarre neurological complaint of alien hand syndrome

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to the

premeditated actions of a sniper—can be maintained: for they simply describe what else

was arising in the mind at the time an action occurred. A voluntary action is accompanied

by the felt intention to carry it out, while an involuntary action isn’t. Where our intentions

themselves come from, however, and what determines their character in every instant,

remains perfectly mysterious in subjective terms. Our sense of free will arises from a

failure to appreciate this fact: we do not know what we will intend to do until the

intention itself arises. To see this is to realize that you are not the author of your thoughts

and actions in the way that people generally suppose. This insight does not make social

and political freedom any less important, however. The freedom to do what one intends,

and not to do otherwise, is no less valuable than it ever was.

Moral Responsibility

The question of free will is no mere curio of philosophy seminars. The belief in

free will underwrites both the religious notion of “sin” and our enduring commitment to

retributive justice.

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The Supreme Court has called free will a “universal and persistent”

foundation for our system of law, distinct from “a deterministic view of human conduct

that is inconsistent with the underlying precepts of our criminal justice system” ( United

States v. Grayson, 1978).

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Any scientific developments that threatened our notion of

free will would seem to put the ethics of punishing people for their bad behavior in

question.

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But, of course, human goodness and human evil are the product of natural events.

The great worry is that any honest discussion of the underlying causes of human behavior

seems to erode the notion of moral responsibility. If we view people as neuronal weather

patterns, how can we coherently speak about morality? And if we remain committed to

seeing people as people, some who can be reasoned with and some who cannot, it seems

that we must find some notion of personal responsibility that fits the facts.

What does it really mean to take responsibility for an action? For instance,

yesterday I went to the market; as it turns out, I was fully clothed, did not steal anything,

and did not buy anchovies. To say that I was responsible for my behavior is simply to say

that what I did was sufficiently in keeping with my thoughts, intentions, beliefs, and

desires to be considered an extension of them. If, on the other hand, I had found myself

standing in the market naked, intent upon stealing as many tins of anchovies as I could

carry, this behavior would be totally out of character; I would feel that I was not in my

right mind, or that I was otherwise not responsible for my actions. Judgments of

responsibility, therefore, depend upon the overall complexion of one’s mind, not on the

metaphysics of mental cause and effect.

Consider the following examples of human violence:

1. A four-year-old boy was playing with his father’s gun and killed a young

woman. The gun had been kept loaded and unsecured in a dresser drawer.

2. A twelve-year-old boy, who had been the victim of continuous physical and

emotional abuse, took his father’s gun and intentionally shot and killed a young woman

because she was teasing him.

3. A twenty-five-year-old man, who had been the victim of continuous abuse as a

child, intentionally shot and killed his girlfriend because she left him for another man.

4. A twenty-five-year-old man, who had been raised by wonderful parents and

never abused, intentionally shot and killed a young woman he had never met “just for the

fun of it.”

5. A twenty-five-year-old man, who had been raised by wonderful parents and

never abused, intentionally shot and killed a young woman he had never met “just for the

fun of it.” An MRI of the man’s brain revealed a tumor the size of a golf ball in his

medial prefrontal cortex (a region responsible for the control of emotion and behavioral

impulses).

In each case a young woman has died, and in each case her death was the result of

events arising in the brain of another human being. The degree of moral outrage we feel

clearly depends on the background conditions described in each case. We suspect that a

four-year-old child cannot truly intend to kill someone and that the intentions of a twelve-

year-old do not run as deep as those of an adult. In both cases 1 and 2, we know that the

brain of the killer has not fully matured and that all the responsibilities of personhood

have not yet been conferred. The history of abuse and precipitating circumstance in

example 3 seem to mitigate the man’s guilt: this was a crime of passion committed by a

person who had himself suffered at the hands of others. In 4, we have no abuse, and the

motive brands the perpetrator a psychopath. In 5, we appear to have the same

psychopathic behavior and motive, but a brain tumor somehow changes the moral

calculus entirely: given its location in the MPFC, it seems to divest the killer of all

responsibility. How can we make sense of these gradations of moral blame when brains

and their background influences are, in every case, and to exactly the same degree, the

real cause of a woman’s death?

It seems to me that we need not have any illusions about a casual agent living

within the human mind to condemn such a mind as unethical, negligent, or even evil, and

therefore liable to occasion further harm. What we condemn in another person is the

intention to do harm—and thus any condition or circumstance (e.g., accident, mental

illness, youth) that makes it unlikely that a person could harbor such an intention would

mitigate guilt, without any recourse to notions of free will. Likewise, degrees of guilt

could be judged, as they are now, by reference to the facts of the case: the personality of

the accused, his prior offenses, his patterns of association with others, his use of

intoxicants, his confessed intentions with regard to the victim, etc. If a person’s actions

seem to have been entirely out of character, this will influence our sense of the risk he

now poses to others. If the accused appears unrepentant and anxious to kill again, we

need entertain no notions of free will to consider him a danger to society.

Of course, we hold one another accountable for more than those actions that we

consciously plan, because most voluntary behavior comes about without explicit

planning.

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But why is the conscious decision to do another person harm particularly

blameworthy? Because consciousness is, among other things, the context in which our

intentions become completely available to us. What we do subsequent to conscious

planning tends to most fully reflect the global properties of our minds—our beliefs,

desires, goals, prejudices, etc. If, after weeks of deliberation, library research, and debate

with your friends, you still decide to kill the king—well, then killing the king really

reflects the sort of person you are. Consequently, it makes sense for the rest of society to

worry about you.

While viewing human beings as forces of nature does not prevent us from

thinking in terms of moral responsibility, it does call the logic of retribution into question.

Clearly, we need to build prisons for people who are intent upon harming others. But if

we could incarcerate earthquakes and hurricanes for their crimes, we would build prisons

for them as well.

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The men and women on death row have some combination of bad

genes, bad parents, bad ideas, and bad luck—which of these quantities, exactly, were they

responsible for? No human being stands as author to his own genes or his upbringing, and

yet we have every reason to believe that these factors determine his character throughout

life. Our system of justice should reflect our understanding that each of us could have

been dealt a very different hand in life. In fact, it seems immoral not to recognize just

how much luck is involved in morality itself.

Consider what would happen if we discovered a cure for human evil. Imagine, for

the sake of argument, that every relevant change in the human brain can be made

cheaply, painlessly, and safely. The cure for psychopathy can be put directly into the food

supply like vitamin D. Evil is now nothing more than a nutritional deficiency.

If we imagine that a cure for evil exists, we can see that our retributive impulse is

profoundly flawed. Consider, for instance, the prospect of withholding the cure for evil

from a murderer as part of his punishment. Would this make any moral sense at all? What

could it possibly mean to say that a person deserves to have this treatment withheld?

What if the treatment had been available prior to the person’s crime? Would he still be

responsible for his actions? It seems far more likely that those who had been aware of his

case would be indicted for negligence. Would it make any sense at all to deny surgery to

the man in example 5 as a punishment if we knew the brain tumor was the proximate

cause of his violence? Of course not. The urge for retribution, therefore, seems to depend

upon our not seeing the underlying causes of human behavior.

Despite our attachment to notions of free will, most us know that disorders of the

brain can trump the best intentions of the mind. This shift in understanding represents

progress toward a deeper, more consistent, and more compassionate view of our common

humanity—and we should note that this is progress away from religious metaphysics. It

seems to me that few concepts have offered greater scope for human cruelty than the idea

of an immortal soul that stands independent of all material influences, ranging from genes

to economic systems.

And yet one of the fears surrounding our progress in neuroscience is that this

knowledge will dehumanize us. Could thinking about the mind as the product of the

physical brain diminish our compassion for one another? While it is reasonable to ask this

question, it seems to me that, on balance, soul/body dualism has been the enemy of

compassion. For instance, the moral stigma that still surrounds disorders of mood and

cognition seems largely the result of viewing the mind as distinct from the brain. When

the pancreas fails to produce insulin, there is no shame in taking synthetic insulin to

compensate for its lost function. Many people do not feel the same way about regulating

mood with antidepressants (for reasons that appear quite distinct from any concern about

potential side effects). If this bias has diminished in recent years, it has been because of

an increased appreciation of the brain as a physical organ.

However, the issue of retribution is a genuinely tricky one. In a fascinating article

in The New Yorker, Jared Diamond recently wrote of the high price we often pay for

leaving vengeance to the state.

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He compares the experience of his friend Daniel, a

New Guinea highlander, who avenged the death of a paternal uncle and felt exquisite

relief, to the tragic experience of his late father-in-law, who had the opportunity to kill

the man who murdered his family during the Holocaust but opted instead to turn him over

to the police. After spending only a year in jail, the killer was released, and Diamond’s

father-in-law spent the last sixty years of his life “tormented by regret and guilt.” While

there is much to be said against the vendetta culture of the New Guinea Highlands, it is

clear that the practice of taking vengeance answers to a common psychological need.

We are deeply disposed to perceive people as the authors of their actions, to hold

them responsible for the wrongs they do us, and to feel that these debts must be repaid.

Often, the only compensation that seems appropriate requires that the perpetrator of a

crime suffer or forfeit his life. It remains to be seen how the best system of justice would

steward these impulses. Clearly, a full account of the causes of human behavior should

undermine our natural response to injustice, at least to some degree. It seems doubtful,

for instance, that Diamond’s father-in-law would have suffered the same pangs of

unrequited vengeance if his family had been trampled by an elephant or laid low by

cholera. Similarly, we can expect that his regret would have been significantly eased if he

had learned that his family’s killer had lived a flawlessly moral life until a virus began

ravaging his medial prefrontal cortex.

It may be that a sham form of retribution could still be moral, if it led people to

behave far better than they otherwise would. Whether it is useful to emphasize the

punishment of certain criminals—rather than their containment or rehabilitation—is a

question for social and psychological science. But it seems quite clear that a retributive

impulse, based upon the idea that each person is the free author of his thoughts and

actions, rests on a cognitive and emotional illusion—and perpetuates a moral one.

It is generally argued that our sense of free will presents a compelling mystery: on

the one hand, it is impossible to make sense of it in causal terms; on the other, there is a

powerful subjective sense that we are the authors of our own actions.

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However, I think

that this mystery is itself a symptom of our confusion. It is not that free will is simply an

illusion: our experience is not merely delivering a distorted view of reality; rather, we are

mistaken about the nature of our experience. We do not feel as free as we think we feel.

Our sense of our own freedom results from our not paying attention to what it is actually

like to be what we are. The moment we do pay attention, we begin to see that free will is

nowhere to be found, and our subjectivity is perfectly compatible with this truth.

Thoughts and intentions simply arise in the mind. What else could they do? The truth

about us is stranger than many suppose: The illusion of free will is itself an illusion.

Chapter 3

BELIEF

A candidate for the presidency of the United States once met a group of potential

supporters at the home of a wealthy benefactor. After brief introductions, he spotted a

bowl of potpourri on the table beside him. Mistaking it for a bowl of trail mix, he

scooped up a fistful of this decorative debris—which consisted of tree bark, incense,

flowers, pinecones, and other inedible bits of woodland—and delivered it greedily into

his mouth.

What our hero did next went unreported (suffice it to say that he did not become

the next president of the United States). We can imagine the psychology of the scene,

however: the candidate wide-eyed in ambush, caught between the look of horror on his

host’s face and the panic of his own tongue, having to quickly decide whether to swallow

the vile material or disgorge it in full view of his audience. We can see the celebrities and

movie producers feigning not to notice the great man’s gaffe and taking a sudden interest

in the walls, ceiling, and floorboards of the room. Some were surely less discreet. We can

imagine their faces from the candidate’s point of view: a pageant of ill-concealed

emotion, ranging from amazement to schadenfreude.

All such responses, their personal and social significance, and their moment-to-

moment physiological effects, arise from mental capacities that are distinctly human: the

recognition of another’s intentions and state of mind, the representation of the self in both

physical and social space, the impulse to save face (or to help others to save it), etc.

While such mental states undoubtedly have analogs in the lives of other animals, we

human beings experience them with a special poignancy. There may be many reasons for

this, but one is clearly paramount: we alone, among all earth’s creatures, possess the

ability to think and communicate with complex language.

The work of archeologists, paleoanthropologists, geneticists, and

neuroscientists—not to mention the relative taciturnity of our primate cousins—suggests

that human language is a very recent adaptation.

Our species diverged from its common

ancestor with the chimpanzees only 6.3 million years ago. And it now seems that the split

with chimps may have been less than decisive, as comparisons between the two genomes,

focusing on the greater-than-expected similarity of our X chromosomes, reveal that our

species diverged, interbred for a time, and then diverged for good.

Such rustic

encounters notwithstanding, all human beings currently alive appear to have descended

from a single population of hunter-gatherers that lived in Africa around 50,000 BCE.

These were the first members of our species to exhibit the technical and social

innovations made possible by language.

Genetic evidence indicates that a band of perhaps 150 of these people left Africa

and gradually populated the rest of the earth. Their migration would not have been

without its hardships, however, as they were not alone: Homo neanderthalensis laid claim

to Europe and the Middle East, and Homo erectus occupied Asia. Both were species of

archaic humans that had developed along separate evolutionary paths after one or more

prior migrations out of Africa. Both possessed large brains, fashioned stone tools similar

to those of Homo sapiens, and were well armed. And yet over the next twenty thousand

years, our ancestors gradually displaced, and may have physically eradicated, all rivals.

Given the larger brains and sturdier build of the Neanderthals, it seems reasonable to

suppose that only our species had the advantage of fully symbolic, complex speech.

While there is still controversy over the biological origins of human language, as

well as over its likely precursors in the communicative behavior of other animals,

there

is no question that syntactic language lies at the root of our ability to understand the

universe, to communicate ideas, to cooperate with one another in complex societies, and

to build (one hopes) a sustainable, global civilization.

But why has language made such

a difference? How has the ability to speak (and to read and write of late) given modern

humans a greater purchase on the world? What, after all, has been worth communicating

these last 50,000 years? I hope it will not seem philistine of me to suggest that our ability

to create fiction has not been the driving force here. The power of language surely results

from the fact that it allows mere words to substitute for direct experience and mere

thoughts to simulate possible states of the world. Utterances like, “I saw some very scary

guys in front of that cave yesterday,” would have come in quite handy 50,000 years ago.

The brain’s capacity to accept such propositions as true—as valid guides to behavior and

emotion, as predictive of future outcomes, etc.—explains the transformative power of

words. There is a common term we use for this type of acceptance; we call it “belief.”

What Is “Belief”?

It is surprising that so little research has been done on belief, as few mental states

exert so sweeping an influence over human life. While we often make a conventional

distinction between “belief” and “knowledge,” these categories are actually quite

misleading. Knowing that George Washington was the first president of the United States

and believing the statement “George Washington was the first president of the United

States” amount to the same thing. When we distinguish between belief and knowledge in

ordinary conversation, it is generally for the purpose of drawing attention to degrees of

certainty: I’m apt to say “I know it” when I am quite certain that one of my beliefs about

the world is true; when I’m less sure, I may say something like “I believe it is probably

true.” Most of our knowledge about the world falls between these extremes. The entire

spectrum of such convictions—ranging from better-than-a-coin-toss to I-would-bet-my-

life-on-it—expresses gradations of “belief.”

It is reasonable to wonder, however, whether “belief” is really a single

phenomenon at the level of the brain. Our growing understanding of human memory

should make us cautious: over the last fifty years, the concept of “memory” has

decomposed into several forms of cognition that are now known to be neurologically and

evolutionarily distinct.

This should make us wonder whether a notion like “belief”

might not also shatter into separate processes when mapped onto the brain. In fact, belief

overlaps with certain types of memory, as memory can be equivalent to a belief about the

past (e.g., “I had breakfast most days last week”),

and certain beliefs are

indistinguishable from what is often called “semantic memory” (e.g., “The earth is the

third planet from the sun”).

There is no reason to think that any of our beliefs about the world are stored as

propositions, or within discrete structures, inside the brain.

Merely understanding a

simple proposition often requires the unconscious activation of considerable background

knowledge

and an active process of hypothesis testing.

For instance, a sentence like

“The team was terribly disappointed because the second stage failed to fire,” while easy

enough to read, cannot be understood without some general concept of a rocket launch

and a team of engineers. So there is more to even basic communication than the mere

decoding of words. We must expect that a similar penumbra of associations will surround

specific beliefs as well.

And yet our beliefs can be represented and expressed as discrete statements.

Imagine hearing any one of the following assertions from a trusted friend:

1. The CDC just announced that cell phones really do cause brain cancer.

2. My brother won $100,000 in Las Vegas over the weekend.

3. Your car is being towed.

We trade in such representations of the world all the time. The acceptance of such

statements as true (or likely to be true) is the mechanism by which we acquire most of

our knowledge about the world. While it would not make any sense to search for

structures in the brain that correspond to specific sentences, we may be able to

understand the brain states that allow us to accept such sentences as true.

When

someone says “Your car is being towed,” it is your acceptance of this statement as true

that sends you racing out the door. “Belief,” therefore, can be thought of as a process

taking place in the present; it is the act of grasping, not the thing grasped.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines multiple senses of the term “belief”:

1. The mental action, condition, or habit, of trusting to or confiding in a person or

thing; trust, dependence, reliance, confidence, faith.

2. Mental acceptance of a proposition, statement, or fact as true, on the ground of

authority or evidence; assent of the mind to a statement, or to the truth of a fact beyond

observation, on the testimony of another, or to a fact or truth on the evidence of

consciousness; the mental condition involved in this assent.

3. The thing believed; the proposition or set of propositions held true.

Definition 2 is exactly what we are after, and 1 may apply as well. These first two

senses of the term are quite different from the data-centered meaning given in 3.

Consider the following claim: Starbucks does not sell plutonium. I suspect that

most of us would be willing to wager a fair amount of money that this statement is

generally true—which is to say that we believe it. However, before reading this

statement, you are very unlikely to have considered the prospect that the world’s most

popular coffee chain might also trade in one of the world’s most dangerous substances.

Therefore, it does not seem possible for there to have been a structure in your brain that

already corresponded to this belief. And yet you clearly harbored some representation of

the world that amounts to this belief.

Many modes of information processing must lay the groundwork for us to judge

the above statement as “true.” Most of us know, in a variety of implicit and explicit ways,

that Starbucks is not a likely proliferator of nuclear material. Several distinct capacities—

episodic memory, semantic knowledge, assumptions about human behavior and

economic incentives, inductive reasoning, etc.—conspire to make us accept the above

proposition. To say that we already believed that one cannot buy plutonium at Starbucks

is to merely put a name to the summation of these processes in the present moment: that

is, “belief,” in this case, is the disposition to accept a proposition as true (or likely to be).

This process of acceptance often does more than express our prior commitments,

however. It can revise our view of the world in an instant. Imagine reading the following

headline in tomorrow’s New York Times: “Most of the World’s Coffee Is Now

Contaminated by Plutonium.” Believing this statement would immediately influence your

thinking on many fronts, as well as your judgment about the truth of the former

proposition. Most of our beliefs have come to us in just this form: as statements that we

accept on the assumption that their source is reliable, or because the sheer number of

sources rules out any significant likelihood of error.

In fact, everything we know outside of our personal experience is the result of our

having encountered specific linguistic propositions—the sun is a star; Julius Caesar was

a Roman emperor; broccoli is good for you—and found no reason (or means) to doubt

them. It is “belief” in this form, as an act of acceptance, which I have sought to better

understand in my neuroscientific research.

Looking for Belief in the Brain

For a physical system to be capable of complex behavior, there must be some

meaningful separation between its input and output. As far as we know, this separation

has been most fully achieved in the frontal lobes of the human brain. Our frontal lobes

are what allow us to select among a vast range of responses to incoming information in

light of our prior goals and present inferences. Such “higher-level” control of emotion

and behavior is the stuff of which human personalities are made. Clearly, the brain’s

capacity to believe or disbelieve statements of fact— You left your wallet on the bar; that

white powder is anthrax; your boss is in love with you—is central to the initiation,

organization, and control of our most complex behaviors.

But we are not likely to find a region of the human brain devoted solely to belief.

The brain is an evolved organ, and there does not seem to be a process in nature that

allows for the creation of new structures dedicated to entirely novel modes of behavior or

cognition. Consequently, the brain’s higher-order functions had to emerge from lower-

order mechanisms. An ancient structure like the insula, for instance, helps monitor events

in our gut, governing the perception of hunger and primary emotions like disgust. But it

is also involved in pain perception, empathy, pride, humiliation, trust, music appreciation,

and addictive behavior.

It may also play an important role in both belief formation and

moral reasoning. Such promiscuity of function is a common feature of many regions of

the brain, especially in the frontal lobes.

No region of the brain evolved in a neural vacuum or in isolation from the other

mutations simultaneously occurring within the genome. The human mind, therefore, is

like a ship that has been built and rebuilt, plank by plank, on the open sea. Changes have

been made to her sails, keel, and rudder even as the waves battered every inch of her hull.

And much of our behavior and cognition, even much that now seems essential to our

humanity, has not been selected for at all. There are no aspects of brain function that

evolved to hold democratic elections, to run financial institutions, or to teach our children

to read. We are, in every cell, the products of nature—but we have also been born again

and again through culture. Much of this cultural inheritance must be realized differently

in individual brains. The way in which two people think about the stock market, or recall

that Christmas is a national holiday, or solve a puzzle like the Tower of Hanoi, will

almost surely differ between individuals. This poses an obvious challenge when

attempting to identify mental states with specific brain states.

Another factor that makes the strict localization of any mental state difficult is

that the human brain is characterized by massive interconnectivity: it is mostly talking to

itself.

And the information it stores must also be more fine-grained than the concepts,

symbols, objects, or states that we subjectively experience. Representation results from a

pattern of activity across networks of neurons and does not generally entail stable, one-to-

one mappings of things/events in the world, or concepts in the mind, to discrete structures

in the brain.

For instance, thinking a simple thought like Jake is married cannot be the

work of any single node in a network of neurons. It must emerge from a pattern of

connections among many nodes. None of this bodes well for one who would seek a belief

“center” in the human brain.

As part of my doctoral research at UCLA, I studied belief, disbelief, and

uncertainty with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

To do this, we had

volunteers read statements from a wide variety of categories while we scanned their

brains. After reading a proposition like, “California is part of the United States” or “You

have brown hair,” participants would judge them to be “true,” “false,” or “undecidable”

with the click of a button. This was, to my knowledge, the first time anyone had

attempted to study belief and disbelief with the tools of neuroscience. Consequently, we

had no basis to form a detailed hypothesis about which regions of the brain govern these

states of mind.

It was, nevertheless, reasonable to expect that the prefrontal cortex

(PFC) would be involved, given its wider role in controlling emotion and complex

behavior.

The seventeenth-century philosopher Spinoza thought that merely understanding a

statement entails the tacit acceptance of its being true, while disbelief requires a

subsequent process of rejection.

Several psychological studies seem to support this

conjecture.

Understanding a proposition may be analogous to perceiving an object in

physical space: we may accept appearances as reality until they prove otherwise. The

behavioral data acquired in our research support this hypothesis, as subjects judged

statements to be “true” more quickly than they judged them to be “false” or

“undecidable.”

When we compared the mental states of belief and disbelief, we found that belief

was associated with greater activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC).

This region

of the frontal lobes is involved in linking factual knowledge with relevant emotional

associations,

in changing behavior in response to reward,

and in goal-based actions.

The MPFC is also associated with ongoing reality monitoring, and injuries here can

cause people to confabulate—that is, to make patently false statements without any

apparent awareness that they are not telling the truth.

Whatever its cause in the brain,

confabulation seems to be a condition in which belief processing has run amok. The

MPFC has often been associated with self-representation,

and one sees more activity

here when subjects think about themselves than when they think about others.

The greater activity we found in the MPFC for belief compared to disbelief may

reflect the greater self-relevance and/or reward value of true statements. When we believe

a proposition to be true, it is as though we have taken it in hand as part of our extended

self: we are saying, in effect, “This is mine. I can use this. This fits my view of the

world.” It seems to me that such cognitive acceptance has a distinctly positive emotional

valence. We actually like the truth, and we may, in fact, dislike falsehood.

The involvement of the MPFC in belief processing suggests an anatomical link

between the purely cognitive aspects of belief and emotion/reward. Even judging the

truth of emotionally neutral propositions engaged regions of the brain that are strongly

connected to the limbic system, which governs our positive and negative affect. In fact,

mathematical belief (e.g., “2 + 6 + 8 = 16”) showed a similar pattern of activity to ethical

belief (e.g., “It is good to let your children know that you love them”), and these were

perhaps the most dissimilar sets of stimuli used in our experiment. This suggests that the

physiology of belief may be the same regardless of a proposition’s content. It also

suggests that the division between facts and values does not make much sense in terms of

underlying brain function.

Of course, we can differentiate my argument concerning the moral landscape

from my fMRI work on belief. I have argued that there is no gulf between facts and

values, because values reduce to a certain type of fact. This is a philosophical claim, and

as such, I can make it before ever venturing into the lab. However, my research on belief

suggests that the split between facts and values should look suspicious: First, belief

appears to be largely mediated by the MPFC, which seems to already constitute an

anatomical bridge between reasoning and value. Second, the MPFC appears to be

similarly engaged, irrespective of a belief’s content. This finding of content-

independence challenges the fact/value distinction very directly: for if, from the point of

view of the brain, believing “the sun is a star” is importantly similar to believing “cruelty

is wrong,” how can we say that scientific and ethical judgments have nothing in

common?

And we can traverse the boundary between facts and values in other ways. As we

are about to see, the norms of reasoning seem to apply equally to beliefs about facts and

to beliefs about values. In both spheres, evidence of inconsistency and bias is always

unflattering. Similarities of this kind suggest that there is a deep analogy, if not identity,

between the two domains.

The Tides of Bias

If one wants to understand how another person thinks, it is rarely sufficient to

know whether or not he believes a specific set of propositions. Two people can hold the

same belief for very different reasons, and such differences generally matter. In the year

2003, it was one thing to believe that the United States should not invade Iraq because

the ongoing war in Afghanistan was more important; it was another to believe it because

you think it is an abomination for infidels to trespass on Muslim land. Knowing what a

person believes on a specific subject is not identical to knowing how that person thinks.

Decades of psychological research suggest that unconscious processes influence

belief formation, and not all of them assist us in our search for truth. When asked to judge

the probability that an event will occur, or the likelihood that one event caused another,

people are frequently misled by a variety of factors, including the unconscious influence

of extraneous information. For instance, if asked to recall the last four digits of their

Social Security numbers and then asked to estimate the number of doctors practicing in

San Francisco, the resulting numbers will show a statistically significant relationship.

Needless to say, when the order of questions is reversed, this effect disappears.

There

have been a few efforts to put a brave face on such departures from rationality, construing

them as random performance errors or as a sign that experimental subjects have

misunderstood the tasks presented to them—or even as proof that research psychologists

themselves have been beguiled by false norms of reasoning. But efforts to exonerate our

mental limitations have generally failed. There are some things that we are just naturally

bad at. And the mistakes people tend to make across a wide range of reasoning tasks are

not mere errors; they are systematic errors that are strongly associated both within and

across tasks. As one might expect, many of these errors decrease as cognitive ability

increases.

We also know that training, using both examples and formal rules, mitigates

many of these problems and can improve a person’s thinking.

Reasoning errors aside, we know that people often acquire their beliefs about the

world for reasons that are more emotional and social than strictly cognitive. Wishful

thinking, self-serving bias, in-group loyalties, and frank self-deception can lead to

monstrous departures from the norms of rationality. Most beliefs are evaluated against a

background of other beliefs and often in the context of an ideology that a person shares

with others. Consequently, people are rarely as open to revising their views as reason

would seem to dictate.

On this front, the internet has simultaneously enabled two opposing influences on

belief: On the one hand, it has reduced intellectual isolation by making it more difficult

for people to remain ignorant of the diversity of opinion on any given subject. But it has

also allowed bad ideas to flourish—as anyone with a computer and too much time on his

hands can broadcast his point of view and, often enough, find an audience. So while

knowledge is increasingly open-source, ignorance is, too.

It is also true that the less competent a person is in a given domain, the more he

will tend to overestimate his abilities. This often produces an ugly marriage of confidence

and ignorance that is very difficult to correct for.

Conversely, those who are more

knowledgeable about a subject tend to be acutely aware of the greater expertise of others.

This creates a rather unlovely asymmetry in public discourse—one that is generally on

display whenever scientists debate religious apologists. For instance, when a scientist

speaks with appropriate circumspection about controversies in his field, or about the

limits of his own understanding, his opponent will often make wildly unjustified

assertions about just which religious doctrines can be inserted into the space provided.

Thus, one often finds people with no scientific training speaking with apparent certainty

about the theological implications of quantum mechanics, cosmology, or molecular

biology.

This point merits a brief aside: while it is a standard rhetorical move in such

debates to accuse scientists of being “arrogant,” the level of humility in scientific

discourse is, in fact, one of its most striking characteristics. In my experience, arrogance

is about as common at a scientific conference as nudity. At any scientific meeting you

will find presenter after presenter couching his or her remarks with caveats and apologies.

When asked to comment on something that lies to either side of the very knife edge of

their special expertise, even Nobel laureates will say things like, “Well, this isn’t really

my area, but I would suspect that X is …” or “I’m sure there a several people in this room

who know more about this than I do, but as far as I know, X is …” The totality of

scientific knowledge now doubles every few years. Given how much there is to know, all

scientists live with the constant awareness that whenever they open their mouths in the

presence of other scientists, they are guaranteed to be speaking to someone who knows

more about a specific topic than they do.

Cognitive biases cannot help but influence our public discourse. Consider

political conservatism: this is a fairly well-defined perspective that is characterized by a

general discomfort with societal change and a ready acceptance of social inequality. As

simple as political conservatism is to describe, we know that it is governed by many

factors. The psychologist John Jost and colleagues analyzed data from twelve countries,

acquired from 23,000 subjects, and found this attitude to be correlated with dogmatism,

inflexibility, death anxiety, need for closure, and anticorrelated with openness to

experience, cognitive complexity, self-esteem, and social stability.

Even the

manipulation of a single of these variables can affect political opinions and behavior. For

instance, merely reminding people of the fact of death increases their inclination to

punish transgressors and to reward those who uphold cultural norms. One experiment

showed that judges could be led to impose especially harsh penalties on prostitutes if they

were simply prompted to think about death prior to their deliberations.

And yet after reviewing the literature linking political conservatism to many

obvious sources of bias, Jost and his coauthors reach the following conclusion:

Conservative ideologies, like virtually all other belief systems, are adopted in part

because they satisfy various psychological needs. To say that ideological belief systems

have a strong motivational basis is not to say that they are unprincipled, unwarranted, or

unresponsive to reason and evidence.

This has more than a whiff of euphemism about it. Surely we can say that a belief

system known to be especially beholden to dogmatism, inflexibility, death anxiety, and a

need for closure will be less principled, less warranted, and less responsive to reason and

evidence than it would otherwise be.

This is not to say that liberalism isn’t also occluded by certain biases. In a recent

study of moral reasoning,

subjects were asked to judge whether it was morally correct

to sacrifice the life of one person to save one hundred, while being given subtle clues as

to the races of the people involved. Conservatives proved less biased by race than liberals

and, therefore, more even-handed. Liberals, as it turns out, were very eager to sacrifice a

white person to save one hundred nonwhites, but not the other way around—all the while

maintaining that considerations of race had not entered into their thinking. The point, of

course, is that science increasingly allows us to identify aspects of our minds that cause

us to deviate from norms of factual and moral reasoning—norms which, when made

explicit, are generally acknowledged to be valid by all parties.

There is a sense in which all cognition can be said to be motivated: one is

motivated to understand the world, to be in touch with reality, to remove doubt, etc.

Alternately, one might say that motivation is an aspect of cognition itself.

Nevertheless,

motives like wanting to find the truth, not wanting to be mistaken, etc., tend to align with

epistemic goals in a way that many other commitments do not. As we have begun to see,

all reasoning may be inextricable from emotion. But if a person’s primary motivation in

holding a belief is to hew to a positive state of mind—to mitigate feelings of anxiety,

embarrassment, or guilt, for instance—this is precisely what we mean by phrases like

“wishful thinking” and “self-deception.” Such a person will, of necessity, be less

responsive to valid chains of evidence and argument that run counter to the beliefs he is

seeking to maintain. To point out nonepistemic motives in another’s view of the world,

therefore, is always a criticism, as it serves to cast doubt upon a person’s connection to

the world as it is.

Mistaking Our Limits

We have long known, principally through the neurological work of Antonio

Damasio and colleagues, that certain types of reasoning are inseparable from emotion.

To reason effectively, we must have a feeling for the truth. Our first fMRI study of belief

and disbelief seemed to bear this out.

If believing a mathematical equation (vs.

disbelieving another) and believing an ethical proposition (vs. disbelieving another)

produce the same changes in neurophysiology, the boundary between scientific

dispassion and judgments of value becomes difficult to establish.

However, such findings do not in the least diminish the importance of reason, nor

do they blur the distinction between justified and unjustified belief. On the contrary, the

inseparability of reason and emotion confirms that the validity of a belief cannot merely

depend on the conviction felt by its adherents; it rests on the chains of evidence and

argument that link it to reality. Feeling may be necessary to judge the truth, but it cannot

be sufficient.

The neurologist Robert Burton argues that the “feeling of knowing” (i.e., the

conviction that one’s judgment is correct) is a primary positive emotion that often floats

free of rational processes and can occasionally become wholly detached from logical or

sensory evidence.

He infers this from neurological disorders in which subjects display

pathological certainty (e.g., schizophrenia and Cotard’s delusion) and pathological

uncertainty (e.g., obsessive-compulsive disorder). Burton concludes that it is irrational to

expect too much of human rationality. On his account, rationality is mostly aspirational in

character and often little more than a façade masking pure, unprincipled feeling.

Other neuroscientists have made similar claims. Chris Frith, a pioneer in the use

of functional neuroimaging, recently wrote:

[W]here does conscious reasoning come into the picture? It is an attempt to justify

the choice after it has been made. And it is, after all, the only way we have to try to

explain to other people why we made a particular decision. But given our lack of access

to the brain processes involved, our justification is often spurious: a post-hoc

rationalization, or even a confabulation—a “story” born of the confusion between

imagination and memory.

I doubt Frith meant to deny that reason ever plays a role in decision making

(though the title of his essay was “No One Really Uses Reason”). He has, however,

conflated two facts about the mind: while it is true that all conscious processes, including

any effort of reasoning, depend upon events of which we are not conscious, this does not

mean that reasoning amounts to little more than a post hoc justification of brute

sentiment. We are not aware of the neurological processes that allow us to follow the

rules of algebra, but this doesn’t mean that we never follow these rules or that the role

they play in our mathematical calculations is generally post hoc. The fact that we are

unaware of most of what goes on in our brains does not render the distinction between

having good reasons for what one believes and having bad ones any less clear or

consequential. Nor does it suggest that internal consistency, openness to information,

self-criticism, and other cognitive virtues are less valuable than we generally assume.

There are many ways to make too much of the unconscious underpinnings of

human thought. For instance, Burton observes that one’s thinking on many moral

issues—ranging from global warming to capital punishment—will be influenced by one’s

tolerance for risk. In evaluating the problem of global warming, one must weigh the risk

of melting the polar ice caps; in judging the ethics of capital punishment, one must

consider the risk of putting innocent people to death. However, people differ significantly

with respect to risk tolerance, and these differences appear to be governed by a variety of

genes—including genes for the D4 dopamine receptor and the protein stathmin (which is

primarily expressed in the amygdala). Believing that there can be no optimal degree of

risk aversion, Burton concludes that we can never truly reason about such ethical

questions. “Reason” will simply be the name we give to our unconscious (and genetically

determined) biases. But is it really true to say that every degree of risk tolerance will

serve our purposes equally well as we struggle to build a global civilization? Does Burton

really mean to suggest that there is no basis for distinguishing healthy from unhealthy—

or even suicidal—attitudes toward risk?

As it turns out, dopamine receptor genes may play a role in religious belief as

well. People who have inherited the most active form of the D4 receptor are more likely

to believe in miracles and to be skeptical of science; the least active forms correlate with

“rational materialism.”

Skeptics given the drug L-dopa, which increases dopamine

levels, show an increased propensity to accept mystical explanations for novel

phenomena.

The fact that religious belief is both a cultural universal and appears to be

tethered to the genome has led scientists like Burton to conclude that there is simply no

getting rid of faith-based thinking.

It seems to me that Burton and Frith have misunderstood the significance of

unconscious cognitive processes. On Burton’s account, worldviews will remain

idiosyncratic and incommensurable, and the hope that we might persuade one another

through rational argument and, thereby, fuse our cognitive horizons is not only vain but

symptomatic of the very unconscious processes and frank irrationality that we would

presume to expunge. This leads him to conclude that any rational criticism of religious

irrationality is an unseemly waste of time:

The science-religion controversy cannot go away; it is rooted in biology …

Scorpions sting. We talk of religion, afterlife, soul, higher powers, muses, purpose,

reason, objectivity, pointlessness, and randomness. We cannot help ourselves … To insist

that the secular and the scientific be universally adopted flies in the face of what

neuroscience tells us about different personality traits generating idiosyncratic

worldviews … Different genetics, temperaments, and experience led to contrasting

worldviews. Reason isn’t going to bridge this gap between believers and nonbelievers.

The problem, however, is that we could have said the same about witchcraft.

Historically, a preoccupation with witchcraft has been a cultural universal. And yet belief

in magic is now in disrepute almost everywhere in the developed world. Is there a

scientist on earth who would be tempted to argue that belief in the evil eye or in the

demonic origins of epilepsy is bound to remain impervious to reason?

Lest the analogy between religion and witchcraft seem quaint, it is worth

remembering that belief in magic and demonic possession is still epidemic in Africa. In

Kenya elderly men and women are regularly burned alive as witches.

In Angola,

Congo, and Nigeria the hysteria has mostly targeted children: thousands of unlucky boys

and girls have been blinded, injected with battery acid, and otherwise put to torture in an

effort to purge them of demons; others have been killed outright; many more have been

disowned by their families and rendered homeless.

Needless to say, much of this

lunacy has spread in the name of Christianity. The problem is especially intractable

because the government officials charged with protecting these suspected witches also

believe in witchcraft. As was the case in the Middle Ages, when the belief in witchcraft

was omnipresent in Europe, only a truly panoramic ignorance about the physical causes

of disease, crop failure, and life’s other indignities allows this delusion to thrive.

What if we were to connect the fear of witches with the expression of a certain

receptor subtype in the brain? Who would be tempted to say that the belief in witchcraft

is, therefore, ineradicable?

As someone who has received many thousands of letters and emails from people

who have ceased to believe in the God of Abraham, I know that pessimism about the

power of reason is unwarranted. People can be led to notice the incongruities in their

faith, the self-deception and wishful thinking of their coreligionists, and the growing

conflict between the claims of scripture and the findings of modern science. Such

reasoning can inspire them to question their attachment to doctrines that, in the vast

majority of cases, were simply drummed into them on mother’s knee. The truth is that

people can transcend mere sentiment and clarify their thinking on almost any subject.

Allowing competing views to collide—through open debate, a willingness to receive

criticism, etc.—performs just such a function, often by exposing inconsistencies in a

belief system that make its adherents profoundly uncomfortable. There are standards to

guide us, even when opinions differ, and the violation of such standards generally seems

consequential to everyone involved. Self-contradiction, for instance, is viewed as a

problem no matter what one is talking about. And anyone who considers it a virtue is

very unlikely to be taken seriously. Again, reason is not starkly opposed to feeling on this

front; it entails a feeling for the truth.

Conversely, there are occasions when a true proposition just doesn’t seem right no

matter how one squints one’s eyes or cocks one’s head, and yet its truth can be

acknowledged by anyone willing to do the necessary intellectual work. It is very difficult

to grasp that tiny quantities of matter contain vast amounts of explosive energy, but the

equations of physics—along with the destructive yield of our nuclear bombs—confirms

that this is so. Similarly, we know that most people cannot produce or even recognize a

series of digits or coin tosses that meets a statistical test for randomness. But this has not

stopped us from understanding randomness mathematically—or from factoring our innate

blindness to randomness into our growing understanding of cognition and economic

behavior.

The fact that reason must be rooted in our biology does not negate the principles

of reason. Wittgenstein once observed that the logic of our language allows us to ask,

“Was that gunfire?” but not “Was that a noise?”

This seems to be a contingent fact of

neurology, rather than an absolute constraint upon logic. A synesthete, for instance, who

experiences crosstalk between his primary senses (seeing sounds, tasting colors, etc.),

might be able to pose the latter question without any contradiction. How the world seems

to us (and what can be logically said about its seemings) depends upon facts about our

brains. Our inability to say that an object is “red and green all over” is a fact about the

biology of vision before it is a fact of logic. But that doesn’t prevent us from seeing

beyond this very contingency. As science advances, we are increasingly coming to

understand the natural limits of our understanding.

Belief and Reasoning

There is a close relationship between belief and reasoning. Many of our beliefs

are the product of inferences drawn from particular instances (induction) or from general

principles (deduction), or both. Induction is the process by which we extrapolate from

past observations to novel instances, anticipate future states of the world, and draw

analogies from one domain to another.

Believing that you probably have a pancreas

(because people generally have the same parts), or interpreting the look of disgust on

your son’s face to mean that he doesn’t like Marmite, are examples of induction. This

mode of thinking is especially important for ordinary cognition and for the practice of

science, and there have been a variety of efforts to model it computationally.

Deduction, while less central to our lives, is an essential component of any logical

argument.

If you believe that gold is more expensive than silver, and silver more

expensive than tin, deduction reveals that you also believe gold to be more expensive

than tin. Induction allows us to move beyond the facts already in hand; deduction allows

us to make the implications of our current beliefs more explicit, to search for

counterexamples, and to see whether our views are logically coherent. Of course, the

boundaries between these (and other) forms of reasoning are not always easy to specify,

and people succumb to a wide range of biases in both modes.

It is worth reflecting on what a reasoning bias actually is: a bias is not merely a

source of error; it is a reliable pattern of error. Every bias, therefore, reveals something

about the structure of the human mind. And diagnosing a pattern of errors as a “bias” can

only occur with reference to specific norms—and norms can sometimes be in conflict.

The norms of logic, for instance, don’t always correspond to the norms of practical

reasoning. An argument can be logically valid, but unsound in that it contains a false

premise and, therefore, leads to a false conclusion (e.g., Scientists are smart; smart people

do not make mistakes; therefore, scientists do not make mistakes).

Much research on

deductive reasoning suggests that people have a “bias” for sound conclusions and will

judge a valid argument to be invalid if its conclusion lacks credibility. It’s not clear that

this “belief bias” should be considered a symptom of native irrationality. Rather, it seems

an instance in which the norms of abstract logic and practical reason may simply be in

conflict.

Neuroimaging studies have been performed on various types of human

reasoning.

As we have seen, however, accepting the fruits of such reasoning (i.e.,

belief) seems to be an independent process. While this is suggested by my own

neuroimaging research, it also follows directly from the fact that reasoning accounts only

for a subset of our beliefs about the world. Consider the following statements:

1. All known soil samples contain bacteria; so the soil in my garden probably

contains bacteria as well (induction).

2. Dan is a philosopher, all philosophers have opinions about Nietzsche; therefore,

Dan has an opinion about Nietzsche (deduction).

3. Mexico shares a border with the United States.

4. You are reading at this moment.

Each of these statements must be evaluated by different channels of neural

processing (and only the first two require reasoning). And yet each has the same

cognitive valence: being true, each inspires belief (or being believed, each is deemed

“true”). Such cognitive acceptance allows any apparent truth to take its place in the

economy of our thoughts and actions, at which time it becomes as potent as its

propositional content demands.

A World Without Lying?

Knowing what a person believes is equivalent to knowing whether or not he is

telling the truth. Consequently, any external means of determining which propositions a

subject believes would constitute a de facto “lie detector.” Neuroimaging research on

belief and disbelief may one day enable researchers to put this equivalence to use in the

study of deception.

It is possible that this new approach could circumvent many of the

impediments that have hindered the study of deception in the past.

When evaluating the social cost of deception, we need to consider all of the

misdeeds—premeditated murders, terrorist atrocities, genocides, Ponzi schemes, etc.—

that must be nurtured and shored up, at every turn, by lies. Viewed in this wider context,

deception commends itself, perhaps even above violence, as the principal enemy of

human cooperation. Imagine how our world would change if, when the truth really

mattered, it became impossible to lie. What would international relations be like if every

time a person shaded the truth on the floor of the United Nations an alarm went off

throughout the building?

The forensic use of DNA evidence has already made the act of denying one’s

culpability for certain actions comically ineffectual. Recall how Bill Clinton’s cantatas of

indignation were abruptly silenced the moment he learned that a semen-stained dress was

en route to the lab. The mere threat of a DNA analysis produced what no grand jury ever

could—instantaneous communication with the great man’s conscience, which appeared

to be located in another galaxy. We can be sure that a dependable method of lie detection

would produce similar transformations, on far more consequential subjects.

The development of mind-reading technology is just beginning—but reliable lie

detection will be much easier to achieve than accurate mind reading. Whether or not we

ever crack the neural code, enabling us to download a person’s private thoughts,

memories, and perceptions without distortion, we will almost surely be able to determine,

to a moral certainty, whether a person is representing his thoughts, memories, and

perceptions honestly in conversation. The development of a reliable lie detector would

only require a very modest advance over what is currently possible through

neuroimaging.

Traditional methods for detecting deception through polygraphy never achieved

widespread acceptance,

as they measure the peripheral signs of emotional arousal rather

than the neural activity associated with deception itself. In 2002, in a 245-page report, the

National Research Council (an arm of the National Academy of Sciences) dismissed the

entire body of research underlying polygraphy as “weak” and “lacking in scientific

rigor.”

More modern approaches to lie detection, using thermal imaging of the eyes,

suffer a similar lack of specificity. Techniques that employ electrical signals at the scalp

to detect “guilty knowledge” have limited application, and it is unclear how one can use

these methods to differentiate guilty knowledge from other forms of knowledge in any

case.

Methodological problems notwithstanding, it is difficult to exaggerate how fully

our world would change if lie detectors ever became reliable, affordable, and

unobtrusive. Rather than spirit criminal defendants and hedge fund managers off to the

lab for a disconcerting hour of brain scanning, there may come a time when every

courtroom or boardroom will have the requisite technology discreetly concealed behind

its wood paneling. Thereafter, civilized men and women might share a common

presumption: that wherever important conversations are held, the truthfulness of all

participants will be monitored. Well-intentioned people would happily pass between

zones of obligatory candor, and these transitions will cease to be remarkable. Just as

we’ve come to expect that certain public spaces will be free of nudity, sex, loud swearing,

and cigarette smoke—and now think nothing of the behavioral constraints imposed upon

us whenever we leave the privacy of our homes—we may come to expect that certain

places and occasions will require scrupulous truth telling. Many of us might no more feel

deprived of the freedom to lie during a job interview or at a press conference than we

currently feel deprived of the freedom to remove our pants in the supermarket. Whether

or not the technology works as well as we hope, the belief that it generally does work

would change our culture profoundly.

In a legal context, some scholars have already begun to worry that reliable lie

detection will constitute an infringement of a person’s Fifth Amendment privilege against

self-incrimination.

However, the Fifth Amendment has already succumbed to advances

in technology. The Supreme Court has ruled that defendants can be forced to provide

samples of their blood, saliva, and other physical evidence that may incriminate them.

Will neuroimaging data be added to this list, or will it be considered a form of forced

testimony? Diaries, emails, and other records of a person’s thoughts are already freely

admissible as evidence. It is not at all clear that there is a distinction between these

diverse sources of information that should be ethically or legally relevant to us.

In fact, the prohibition against compelled testimony itself appears to be a relic of a

more superstitious age. It was once widely believed that lying under oath would damn a

person’s soul for eternity, and it was thought that no one, not even a murderer, should be

placed between the rock of Justice and so hard a place as hell. But I doubt whether even

many fundamentalist Christians currently imagine that an oath sworn on a courtroom

Bible has such cosmic significance.

Of course, no technology is ever perfect. Once we have a proper lie detector in

hand, well-intentioned people will begin to suffer its propensity for positive and negative

error. This will raise ethical and legal concerns. It is inevitable, however, that we will

deem some rate of error to be acceptable. If you doubt this, remember that we currently

lock people away in prison for decades—or kill them—all the while knowing that some

percentage of the condemned must be innocent, while some percentage of those returned

to our streets will be dangerous psychopaths guaranteed to reoffend. We are currently

living with a system in which the occasional unlucky person gets falsely convicted of

murder, suffers for years in prison in the company of terrifying predators, only to be

finally executed by the state. Consider the tragic case of Cameron Todd Willingham, who

was convicted of setting fire to the family home and thereby murdering his three children.

While protesting his innocence, Willingham served over a decade on death row and was

finally executed. It now seems that he was almost surely innocent—the victim of a

chance electrical fire, forensic pseudoscience, and of a justice system that has no reliable

means of determining when people are telling the truth.

We have no choice but to rely upon our criminal justice system, despite the fact

that judges and juries are very poorly calibrated truth detectors, prone to both type I (false

positive) and type II (false negative) errors. Anything that can improve the performance

of this antiquated system, even slightly, will raise the quotient of justice in our world.

Do We Have Freedom of Belief?

While belief might prove difficult to pinpoint in the brain, many of its mental

properties are plain to see. For instance, people do not knowingly believe propositions for

bad reasons. If you doubt this, imagine hearing the following account of a failed New

Year’s resolution:

This year, I vowed to be more rational, but by the end of January, I found that I

had fallen back into my old ways, believing things for bad reasons. Currently, I believe

that robbing others is a harmless activity, that my dead brother will return to life, and that

I am destined to marry Angelina Jolie, just because these beliefs make me feel good.

This is not how our minds work. A belief—to be actually believed—entails the

corollary belief that we have accepted it because it seems to be true. To really believe a

proposition—whether about facts or values—we must also believe that we are in touch

with reality in such a way that if it were not true, one would not believe it. We must

believe, therefore, that we are not flagrantly in error, deluded, insane, self-deceived, etc.

While the preceding sentences do not suffice as a full account of epistemology, they go a

long way toward uniting science and common sense, as well as reconciling their frequent

disagreements. There can be no doubt that there is an important difference between a

belief that is motivated by an unconscious emotional bias (or other nonepistemic

commitments) and a belief that is comparatively free of such bias.

And yet many secularists and academics imagine that people of faith knowingly

believe things for reasons that have nothing to do with their perception of the truth. A

written debate I had with Philip Ball—who is a scientist, a science journalist, and an

editor at Nature—brought this issue into focus. Ball thought it reasonable for a person to

believe a proposition just because it makes him “feel better,” and he seemed to think that

people are perfectly free to acquire beliefs in this way. People often do this

unconsciously, of course, and such motivated reasoning has been discussed above. But

Ball seemed to think that beliefs can be consciously adopted simply because a person

feels better while under their spell. Let’s see how this might work. Imagine someone

making the following statement of religious conviction:

I believe Jesus was born of a virgin, was resurrected, and now answers prayers

because believing these things makes me feel better. By adopting this faith, I am merely

exercising my freedom to believe in propositions that make me feel good.

How would such a person respond to information that contradicted his cherished

belief? Given that his belief is based purely on how it makes him feel, and not on

evidence or argument, he shouldn’t care about any new evidence or argument that might

come his way. In fact, the only thing that should change his view of Jesus is a change in

how the above propositions make him feel. Imagine our believer undergoing the

following epiphany:

For the last few months, I’ve found that my belief in the divinity of Jesus no

longer makes me feel good. The truth is, I just met a Muslim woman who I greatly

admire, and I want to ask her out on a date. As Muslims believe Jesus was not divine, I

am worried that my belief in the divinity of Jesus could hinder my chances with her. As I

do not like feeling this way, and very much want to go out with this woman, I now

believe that Jesus was not divine.

Has a person like this ever existed? I highly doubt it. Why do these thoughts not

make any sense? Because beliefs are intrinsically epistemic: they purport to represent the

world as it is. In this case, our man is making specific claims about the historical Jesus,

about the manner of his birth and death, and about his special connection to the Creator

of the Universe. And yet while claiming to represent the world in this way, it is perfectly

clear that he is making no effort to stay in touch with the features of the world that should

inform his belief. He is only concerned about how he feels. Given this disparity, it should

be clear that his beliefs are not based on any foundation that would (or should) justify

them to others, or even to himself.

Of course, people do often believe things in part because these beliefs make them

feel better. But they do not do this in the full light of consciousness. Self-deception,

emotional bias, and muddled thinking are facts of human cognition. And it is a common

practice to act as if a proposition were true, in the spirit of: “I’m going to act on X

because I like what it does for me and, who knows, X might be true.” But these

phenomena are not at all the same as knowingly believing a proposition simply because

one wants it to be true.

Strangely, people often view such claims about the constraints of rationality as a

sign of “intolerance.” Consider the following from Ball:

I do wonder what [Sam Harris] is implying here. It is hard to see it as anything

other than an injunction that “you should not be free to choose what you believe.” I guess

that if all Sam means is that we should not leave people so ill-informed that they have no

reasonable basis on which to make those decisions, then fair enough. But it does seem to

go further—to say that “you should not be permitted to choose what you believe, simply

because it makes you feel better.” Doesn’t this sound a little like a Marxist denouncement

of “false consciousness,” with the implication that it needs to be corrected forthwith? I

think (I hope?) we can at least agree that there are different categories of belief—that to

believe one’s children are the loveliest in the world because that makes you feel better is

a permissible (even laudable) thing. But I slightly shudder at the notion, hinted here, that

a well-informed person should not be allowed to choose their belief freely … surely we

cannot let ourselves become proscriptive to this degree?

What cognitive freedom is Ball talking about? I happen to believe that George

Washington was the first president of the United States. Have I, on Ball’s terms, chosen

this belief “freely”? No. Am I free to believe otherwise? Of course not. I am a slave to the

evidence. I live under the lash of historical opinion. While I may want to believe

otherwise, I simply cannot overlook the incessant pairing of the name “George

Washington” with the phrase “first president of the United States” in any discussion of

American history. If I wanted to be thought an idiot, I could profess some other belief,

but I would be lying. Likewise, if the evidence were to suddenly change—if, for instance,

compelling evidence of a great hoax emerged and historians reconsidered Washington’s

biography, I would be helplessly stripped of my belief—again, through no choice of my

own. Choosing beliefs freely is not what rational minds do.

This does not mean, of course, that we have no mental freedom whatsoever. We

can choose to focus on certain facts to the exclusion of others, to emphasize the good

rather than the bad, etc. And such choices have consequences for how we view the world.

One can, for instance, view Kim Jong-il as an evil dictator; one can also view him as a

man who was once the child of a dangerous psychopath. Both statements are, to a first

approximation, true. (Obviously, when I speak about “freedom” and “choices” of this

sort, I am not endorsing a metaphysical notion of “free will.”)

As to whether there are “different categories of belief”: perhaps, but not in the

way that Ball suggests. I happen to have a young daughter who does strike me as the

“loveliest in the world.” But is this an accurate account of what I believe? Do I, in other

words, believe that my daughter is really the loveliest girl in the world? If I learned that

another father thought his daughter the loveliest in the world, would I insist that he was

mistaken? Of course not. Ball has mischaracterized what a proud (and sane and

intellectually honest) father actually believes. Here is what I believe: I believe that I have

a special attachment to my daughter that largely determines my view of her (which is as it

should be). I fully expect other fathers to have a similar bias toward their own daughters.

Therefore, I do not believe that my daughter is the loveliest girl in the world in any

objective sense. Ball is simply describing what it’s like to love one’s daughter more than

other girls; he is not describing belief as a representation of the world. What I really

believe is that my daughter is the loveliest girl in the world for me.

One thing that both factual and moral beliefs generally share is the presumption

that we have not been misled by extraneous information.

Situational variables, like the

order in which unrelated facts are presented, or whether identical outcomes are described

in terms of gains or losses, should not influence the decision process. Of course, the fact

that such manipulations can strongly influence our judgment has given rise to some of the

most interesting work in psychology. However, a person’s vulnerability to such

manipulations is never considered a cognitive virtue; rather, it is a source of

inconsistency that cries out for remedy.

Consider one of the more famous cases from the experimental literature, The

Asian Disease Problem:

Imagine that the United States is preparing for the outbreak of an unusual Asian

disease, which is expected to kill 600 people. Two alternative programs to combat the

disease have been proposed. Assume that the exact scientific estimates of the

consequences of the programs are as follows:

If Program A is adopted, 200 people will be saved.

If Program B is adopted, there is a one-third probability that 600 people will be

saved and a two-thirds probability that no people will be saved.

Which one of the two programs would you favor?

In this version of the problem, a significant majority of people favor Program A.

The problem, however, can be restated this way:

If Program A is adopted, 400 people will die.

If Program B is adopted, there is a one-third probability that nobody will die and a

two-thirds probability that 600 people will die.

Which one of the two programs would you favor?

Put this way, a majority of respondents will now favor Program B. And yet there

is no material or moral difference between these two scenarios, because their outcomes

are the same. What this shows is that people tend to be risk-averse when considering

potential gains and risk seeking when considering potential losses, so describing the same

event in terms of gains and losses evokes different responses. Another way of stating this

is that people tend to overvalue certainty: finding the certainty of saving life inordinately

attractive and the certainty of losing life inordinately painful. When presented with the

Asian Disease Problem in both forms, however, people agree that each scenario merits

the same response. Invariance of reasoning, both logical and moral, is a norm to which

we all aspire. And when we catch others departing from this norm, whatever the other

merits of their thinking, the incoherency of their position suddenly becomes its most

impressive characteristic.

Of course, there are many other ways in which we can be misled by context. Few

studies illustrate this more powerfully than one conducted by the psychologist David L.

Rosenhan,

in which he and seven confederates had themselves committed to psychiatric

hospitals in five different states in an effort to determine whether mental health

professionals could detect the presence of the sane among the mentally ill. In order to get

committed, each researcher complained of hearing a voice repeating the words “empty,”

“hollow,” and “thud.” Beyond that, each behaved perfectly normally. Upon winning

admission to the psychiatric ward, the pseudopatients stopped complaining of their

symptoms and immediately sought to convince the doctors, nurses, and staff that they felt

fine and were fit to be released. This proved surprisingly difficult. While these genuinely

sane patients wanted to leave the hospital, repeatedly declared that they experienced no

symptoms, and became “paragons of cooperation,” their average length of hospitalization

was nineteen days (ranging from seven to fifty-two days), during which they were

bombarded with an astounding range of powerful drugs (which they discreetly deposited

in the toilet). None were pronounced healthy. Each was ultimately discharged with a

diagnosis of schizophrenia “in remission” (with the exception of one who received a

diagnosis of bipolar disorder). Interestingly, while the doctors, nurses, and staff were

apparently blind to the presence of normal people on the ward, actual mental patients

frequently remarked on the obvious sanity of the researchers, saying things like “You’re

not crazy. You’re a journalist.”

In a brilliant response to the skeptics at one hospital who had heard of this

research before it was published, Rosenhan announced that he would send a few

confederates their way and challenged them to spot the coming pseudopatients. The

hospital kept vigil, while Rosenhan, in fact, sent no one. This did not stop the hospital

from “detecting” a steady stream of pseudopatients. Over a period of a few months fully

10 percent of their new patients were deemed to be shamming by both a psychiatrist and

a member of the staff. While we have all grown familiar with phenomena of this sort, it is

startling to see the principle so clearly demonstrated: expectation can be, if not

everything, almost everything. Rosenhan concluded his paper with this damning

summary: “It is clear that we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric

hospitals.”

There is no question that human beings regularly fail to achieve the norms of

rationality. But we do not merely fail—we fail reliably. We can, in other words, use

reason to understand, quantify, and predict our violations of its norms. This has moral

implications. We know, for instance, that the choice to undergo a risky medical procedure

will be heavily influenced by whether its possible outcomes are framed in terms of

survival rates or mortality rates. We know, in fact, that this framing effect is no less

pronounced among doctors than among patients.

Given this knowledge, physicians

have a moral obligation to handle medical statistics in ways that minimize unconscious

bias. Otherwise, they cannot help but inadvertently manipulate both their patients and one

another, guaranteeing that some of the most important decisions in life will be

unprincipled.

Admittedly, it is difficult to know how we should treat all of the variables that

influence our judgment about ethical norms. If I were asked, for instance, whether I

would sanction the murder of an innocent person if it would guarantee a cure for cancer, I

would find it very difficult to say “yes,” despite the obvious consequentialist argument in

favor of such an action. If I were asked to impose a one in a billion risk of death on

everyone for this purpose, however, I would not hesitate. The latter course would be

expected to kill six or seven people, and yet it still strikes me as obviously ethical. In fact,

such a diffusion of risk aptly describes how medical research is currently conducted. And

we routinely impose far greater risks than this on friends and strangers whenever we get

behind the wheel of our cars. If my next drive down the highway were guaranteed to

deliver a cure for cancer, I would consider it the most ethically important act of my life.

No doubt the role that probability is playing here could be experimentally calibrated. We

could ask subjects whether they would impose a 50 percent chance of death upon two

innocent people, a 10 percent chance on ten innocent people, etc. How we should view

the role that probability plays in our moral judgments is not clear, however. It seems

difficult to imagine ever fully escaping such framing effects.

Science has long been in the values business. Despite a widespread belief to the

contrary, scientific validity is not the result of scientists abstaining from making value

judgments; rather, scientific validity is the result of scientists making their best effort to

value principles of reasoning that link their beliefs to reality, through reliable chains of

evidence and argument. This is how norms of rational thought are made effective.

To say that judgments of truth and goodness both invoke specific norms seems

another way of saying that they are both matters of cognition, as opposed to mere

sentiment. That is why one cannot defend one’s factual or moral position by reference to

one’s preferences. One cannot say that water is H

or that lying is wrong simply because

one wants to think this way. To defend such propositions, one must invoke a deeper

principle. To believe that X is true or that Y is ethical is also to believe others should

share these beliefs under similar circumstances.

The answer to the question “What should I believe, and why should I believe it?”

is generally a scientific one. Believe a proposition because it is well supported by theory

and evidence; believe it because it has been experimentally verified; believe it because a

generation of smart people have tried their best to falsify it and failed; believe it because

it is true (or seems so). This is a norm of cognition as well as the core of any scientific

mission statement. As far as our understanding of the world is concerned— there are no

facts without values.

Chapter 4

RELIGION

Since the nineteenth century, it has been widely assumed that the spread of

industrialized society would spell the end of religion. Marx,

Freud,

and Weber

—

along with innumerable anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and psychologists

influenced by their work—expected religious belief to wither in the light of modernity. It

has not come to pass. Religion remains one of the most important aspects of human life

in the twenty-first century. While most developed societies have grown predominantly

secular,

with the curious exception of the United States, orthodox religion is in florid

bloom throughout the developing world. In fact, humanity seems to be growing

proportionally more religious, as prosperous, nonreligious people have the fewest babies.

When one considers the rise of Islamism throughout the Muslim world, the explosive

spread of Pentecostalism throughout Africa, and the anomalous piety of the United

States, it becomes clear that religion will have geopolitical consequences for a long time

to come.

Despite the explicit separation of church and state provided for by the U.S.

Constitution, the level of religious belief in the United States (and the concomitant

significance of religion in American life and political discourse) rivals that of many

theocracies. The reason for this is unclear. While it has been widely argued that religious

pluralism and competition have caused religion to flourish in the United States, with

state-church monopolies leading to its decline in Western Europe,

the support for this

“religious market theory” now appears weak. It seems, rather, that religiosity is strongly

coupled to perceptions of societal insecurity. Within a rich nation like the United States,

high levels of socioeconomic inequality may dictate levels of religiosity generally

associated with less developed (and less secure) societies. In addition to being the most

religious of developed nations, the United States also has the greatest economic

inequality.

The poor tend to be more religious than the rich, both within and between

nations.

Fifty-seven percent of Americans think that one must believe in God to have good

values and to be moral,

and 69 percent want a president who is guided by “strong

religious beliefs.”

Such views are unsurprising, given that even secular scientists

regularly acknowledge religion to be the most common source of meaning and morality.

It is true that most religions offer a prescribed response to specific moral questions—the

Catholic Church forbids abortion, for instance. But research on people’s responses to

unfamiliar moral dilemmas suggests that religion has no effect on moral judgments that

involve weighing harms against benefits (e.g., lives lost vs. lives saved).

And on almost every measure of societal health, the least religious countries are

better off than the most religious. Countries like Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and the

Netherlands—which are the most atheistic societies on earth—consistently rate better

than religious nations on measures like life expectancy, infant mortality, crime, literacy,

GDP, child welfare, economic equality, economic competitiveness, gender equality,

health care, investments in education, rates of university enrollment, internet access,

environmental protection, lack of corruption, political stability, and charity to poorer

nations, etc.

The independent researcher Gregory Paul has cast further light on this

terrain by creating two scales—the Successful Societies Scale and Popular Religiosity

Versus Secularism Scale—which offer greater support for a link between religious

conviction and societal insecurity.

And there is another finding which may be relevant

to this variable of societal insecurity: religious commitment in the United States is highly

correlated with racism.

While the mere correlation between societal dysfunction and religious belief does

not tell us what the connection is between them, these data should abolish the ever-

present claim that religion is the most important guarantor of societal health. They also

prove, conclusively, that a high level of unbelief need not lead to the fall of civilization.

Whether religion contributes to societal dysfunction, it seems clear that as

societies become more prosperous, stable, and democratic, they tend to become more

secular. Even in the United States, the trend toward secularism is visible. As Paul points

out, this suggests that, contrary to the opinions of many anthropologists and

psychologists, religious commitment “is superficial enough to be readily abandoned

when conditions improve to the required degree.”

Religion and Evolution

The evolutionary origins of religion remain obscure. The earliest signs of human

burial practices date to 95,000 years ago, and many take these as evidence of the

emergence of religious belief.

Some researchers consider the connection between

religion and evolution to be straightforward insofar as religious doctrines tend to view

sexual conduct as morally problematic and attempt to regulate it, both to encourage

fertility and to protect against sexual infidelity. Clearly, it is in the genetic interests of

every man that he not spend his life rearing another man’s children, and it is in the

genetic interests of every woman that her mate not squander his resources on other

women and their offspring. The fact that the world’s religions generally codify these

interests, often prescribing harsh penalties for their transgression, forms the basis for one

of their more persistent claims to social utility. It is, therefore, tempting to trace a line

between religious doctrines regarding marriage and sexuality to evolutionary fitness.

Even here, however, the link to evolution appears less than straightforward: as evolution

should actually favor indiscriminate heterosexual activity on the part of men, as long as

these scoundrels can avoid squandering their resources in ways that imperil the

reproductive success of their offspring.

Human beings may be genetically predisposed to superstition: for natural

selection should favor rampant belief formation as long as the benefits of the occasional,

correct belief are great enough.

The manufacture of new religious doctrines and

identities, resulting in group conformity and xenophobia, may have offered some

protection against infectious illness: for to the degree that religion divides people, it

would inhibit the spread of novel pathogens.

However, the question of whether religion

(or anything else) might have given groups of human beings an evolutionary advantage

(so-called “group selection”) has been widely debated.

And even if tribes have

occasionally been the vehicles of natural selection, and religion proved adaptive, it would

remain an open question whether religion increases human fitness today. As already

mentioned, there are a wide variety of genetically entrenched human traits (e.g., out-

group aggression, infidelity, superstition, etc.) that, while probably adaptive at some point

in our past, may have been less than optimal even in the Pleistocene. In a world that is

growing ever more crowded and complex, many of these biologically selected traits may

yet imperil us.

Clearly, religion cannot be reduced to a mere concatenation of religious beliefs.

Every religion consists of rites, rituals, prayers, social institutions, holidays, etc., and

these serve a wide variety of purposes, conscious and otherwise.

However, religious

belief—that is, the acceptance of specific historical and metaphysical propositions as

being true—is generally what renders these enterprises relevant, or even comprehensible.

I share with anthropologist Rodney Stark the view that belief precedes ritual and that a

practice like prayer is usually thought to be a genuine act of communication with a God

(or gods).

Religious adherents generally believe that they possess knowledge of sacred

truths, and every faith provides a framework for interpreting experience so as to lend

further credence to its doctrine.

There seems little question that most religious practices are the direct

consequence of what people believe to be true about both external and internal reality.

Indeed, most religious practices become intelligible only in light of these underlying

beliefs. The fact that many people have begun to doubt specific religious doctrines in the

meantime, while still mouthing the liturgy and aping the rituals, is beside the point. What

faith is best exemplified by those who are in the process of losing it? While there may be

many Catholics, for instance, who value the ritual of the Mass without believing that the

bread and wine are actually transformed into the body and blood of Jesus Christ, the

doctrine of Transubstantiation remains the most plausible origin of this ritual. And the

primacy of the Mass within the Church hinges on the fact that many Catholics still

consider the underlying doctrine to be true—which is a direct consequence of the fact that

the Church still promulgates and defends it. The following passage, taken from The

Profession of Faith of the Roman Catholic Church, represents the relevant case, and

illustrates the kind of assertions about reality that lie at the heart of most religions:

I likewise profess that in the Mass a true, proper, and propitiatory sacrifice is

offered to God on behalf of the living and the dead, and that the Body and the Blood,

together with the soul and the divinity, of our Lord Jesus Christ is truly, really, and

substantially present in the most holy sacrament of the Eucharist, and there is a change of

the whole substance of the bread into the Body, and of the whole substance of the wine

into Blood; and this change the Catholic Mass calls transubstantiation. I also profess that

the whole and entire Christ and a true sacrament is received under each separate species.

There is, of course, a distinction to be made between mere profession of such

beliefs and actual belief

—a distinction that, while important, makes sense only in a

world in which some people actually believe what they say they believe. There seems

little reason to doubt that a significant percentage of human beings, likely a majority, falls

into this latter category with respect to one or another religious creed.

What is surprising, from a scientific point of view, is that 42 percent of Americans

believe that life has existed in its present form since the beginning of the world, and

another 21 percent believe that while life may have evolved, its evolution has been

guided by the hand of God (only 26 percent believe in evolution through natural

selection).

Seventy-eight percent of Americans believe that the Bible is the word of God

(either literal or “inspired”); and 79 percent of Christians believe that Jesus Christ will

physically return to earth at some point in the future.

How is it possible that so many millions of people believe these things? Clearly,

the taboo around criticizing religious beliefs must contribute to their survival. But, as the

anthropologist Pascal Boyer points out, the failure of reality testing does not explain the

specific character of religious beliefs:

People have stories about vanishing islands and talking cats, but they usually do

not insert them in their religious beliefs. In contrast, people produce concepts of ghosts

and person-like gods and make use of these concepts when they think about a whole

variety of social questions (what is moral behavior, what to do with dead people, how

misfortune occurs, why perform rituals, etc.). This is much more precise than just

relaxing the usual principles of sound reasoning.

According to Boyer, religious concepts must arise from mental categories that

predate religion—and these underlying structures determine the stereotypical form that

religious beliefs and practices take. These categories of thought relate to things like living

beings, social exchange, moral infractions, natural hazards, and ways of understanding

human misfortune. On Boyer’s account, people do not accept incredible religious

doctrines because they have relaxed their standards of rationality; they relax their

standards of rationality because certain doctrines fit their “inference machinery” in such a

way as to seem credible. And what most religious propositions may lack in plausibility

they make up for by being memorable, emotionally salient, and socially consequential.

All of these properties are a product of the underlying structure of human cognition, and

most of this architecture is not consciously accessible. Boyer argues, therefore, that

explicit theologies and consciously held dogmas are not a reliable indicator of the real

contents or causes of a person’s religious beliefs.

Boyer may be correct in his assertion that we have cognitive templates for

religious ideas that run deeper than culture (in the same way that we appear to have deep,

abstract concepts like “animal” and “tool”). The psychologist Justin Barrett makes a

similar claim, likening religion to language acquisition: we come into this world

cognitively prepared for language; our culture and upbringing merely dictate which

languages we will be exposed to.

We may also be what the psychologist Paul Bloom

has called “common sense dualists”—that is, we may be naturally inclined to see the

mind as distinct from the body and, therefore, we tend to intuit the existence of

disembodied minds at work in the world.

This propensity could lead us to presume

ongoing relationships with dead friends and relatives, to anticipate our own survival of

death, and generally to conceive of people as having immaterial souls. Similarly, several

experiments suggest that children are predisposed to assume both design and intention

behind natural events—leaving many psychologists and anthropologists to believe that

children, left entirely to their own devices, would invent some conception of God.

The

psychologist Margaret Evans has found that children between the ages of eight and ten,

whatever their upbringing, are consistently more inclined to give a Creationist account of

the natural world than their parents are.

The psychologist Bruce Hood likens our susceptibility to religious ideas to the

fact that people tend to develop phobias for evolutionarily relevant threats (like snakes

and spiders) rather than for things that are far more likely to kill them (like automobiles

and electrical sockets).

And because our minds have evolved to detect patterns in the

world, we often detect patterns that aren’t actually there—ranging from faces in the

clouds to a divine hand in the workings of Nature. Hood posits an additional cognitive

schema that he calls “supersense”—a tendency to infer hidden forces in the world,

working for good or for ill. On his account, supersense generates beliefs in the

supernatural (religious and otherwise) all on its own, and such beliefs are thereafter

modulated, rather than instilled, by culture.

While religious affiliation is strictly a matter of cultural inheritance, religious

attitudes (e.g., social conservatism) and behaviors (e.g., church attendance) seem to be

moderately influenced by genetic factors.

The relevance of the brain’s dopaminergic

systems to religious experience, belief, and behavior is suggested by several lines of

evidence, including the fact that several clinical conditions involving the neurotransmitter

dopamine—mania, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and schizophrenia—are

regularly associated with hyperreligiosity.

Serotonin has also been implicated, as drugs

known to modulate it—like LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, N,N-dimethyltryptamine

(“DMT”), and 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (“ecstasy”)—seem to be especially

potent drivers of religious/spiritual experience.

Links have also been drawn between

religious experience and temporal lobe epilepsy.

However predisposed the human mind may be to harboring religious beliefs, it

remains a fact that each new generation receives a religious worldview, at least in part, in

the form of linguistic propositions—far more so in some societies than in others.

Whatever the evolutionary underpinnings of religion, it seems extraordinarily unlikely

that there is a genetic explanation for the fact that the French, Swedes, and Japanese tend

not to believe in God while Americans, Saudis, and Somalis do. Clearly, religion is

largely a matter of what people teach their children to believe about the nature of reality.

Is Religious Belief Special?

While religious faith remains one of the most significant features of human life,

little has been known about its relationship to ordinary belief at the level of the brain. Nor

has it been clear whether religious believers and nonbelievers differ in how they evaluate

statements of fact. Several neuroimaging and EEG studies have been done on religious

practice and experience—primarily focusing on meditation

and prayer.

But the

purpose of this research has been to evoke spiritual/contemplative experiences in

religious subjects and to compare these to more conventional states of consciousness.

None of these studies was designed to isolate belief itself.

Working in Mark Cohen’s cognitive neuroscience lab at UCLA, I published the

first neuroimaging study of belief as a general mode of cognition

(discussed in the

previous chapter). While another group at the National Institutes of Health later looked

specifically at religious belief,

no research had compared these two forms of belief

directly. In a subsequent study, Jonas T. Kaplan and I used fMRI to measure signal

changes in the brains of both Christians and nonbelievers as they evaluated the truth and

falsity of religious and nonreligious propositions.

For each trial, subjects were

presented with either a religious statement (e.g., “Jesus Christ really performed the

miracles attributed to him in the Bible”) or a nonreligious statement (e.g., “Alexander the

Great was a very famous military leader”), and they pressed a button to indicate whether

the statement was true or false.

For both groups, and in both categories of stimuli, our results were largely

consistent with our earlier findings. Believing a statement to be true was associated with

greater activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), a region important for self-

representation,

emotional associations,

reward,

and goal-driven behavior.

This

area showed greater activity whether subjects believed statements about God and the

Virgin Birth or statements about ordinary facts.

Our study was designed to elicit the same responses from the two groups on

nonreligious stimuli (e.g., “Eagles really exist”) and opposite responses on religious

stimuli (e.g., “Angels really exist”). The fact that we obtained essentially the same result

for belief in both devout Christians and nonbelievers, on both categories of content,

argues strongly that the difference between belief and disbelief is the same, regardless of

what is being thought about.

While the comparison between belief and disbelief produced similar activity for

both categories of questions, the comparison of all religious thinking to all nonreligious

thinking yielded a wide range of differences throughout the brain. Religious thinking was

associated with greater signal in the anterior insula and the ventral striatum. The anterior

insula has been linked to pain perception,

to the perception of pain in others,

and to

negative feelings like disgust.

The ventral striatum has been frequently linked to

reward.

It would not be surprising if religious statements provoked more positive and

negative emotion in both groups of subjects.

It also seems that both Christians and nonbelievers were probably less certain of

their religious beliefs. In our previous study of belief, in which a third of our stimuli were

designed to provoke uncertainty, we found greater signal in the anterior cingulate cortex

(ACC) when subjects could not assess the truth-value of a proposition. Here we found

that religious thinking (when compared with nonreligious thinking) elicited this same

pattern in both groups. Both groups also took considerably longer to respond to religious

stimuli, despite the fact that these statements were no more complex than those in the

other category. Perhaps both atheists and religious believers are generally less sure about

the truth and falsity of religious statements.

Despite vast differences in the underlying processing responsible for religious and

nonreligious modes of thought, the distinction between believing and disbelieving a

proposition appears to transcend content. Our research suggests that these opposing states

of mind can be detected by current techniques of neuroimaging and are intimately tied to

networks involved in self-representation and reward. These findings may have many

areas of application—ranging from the neuropsychology of religion, to the use of “belief

detection” as a surrogate for “lie detection,” to understanding how the practice of science

itself, and truth claims generally, emerge from the biology of the human brain. And

again, results of this kind further suggest that a sharp boundary between facts and values

does not exist as a matter of human cognition.

Does Religion Matter?

While religious belief may be nothing more than ordinary belief applied to

religious content, such beliefs are clearly special in so far as they are deemed special by

their adherents. They also appear especially resistant to change. This is often attributed to

the fact that such beliefs treat matters aloof from the five senses, and thus are not usually

susceptible to disproof. But this cannot be the whole story. Many religious groups,

ranging from Christian sects to flying saucer cults, have anchored their worldviews to

specific, testable predictions. For instance, such groups occasionally claim that a great

cataclysm will befall the earth on a specific date in the near future. Inevitably, enthusiasts

of these prophecies also believe that once the earth starts to shake or the floodwaters

begin to rise, they will be spirited away to safety by otherworldly powers. Such people

often sell their homes and other possessions, abandon their jobs, and renounce the

company of skeptical friends and family—all in apparent certainty that the end of the

world is at hand. When the date arrives, and with it the absolute refutation of a cherished

doctrine, many members of these groups rationalize the failure of prophecy with

remarkable agility.

In fact, such crises of faith are often attended by increased

proselytizing and the manufacture of fresh prophecy—which provides the next target for

zealotry and, alas, subsequent collisions with empirical reality. Phenomena of this sort

have led many people to conclude that religious faith must be distinct from ordinary

belief.

On the other hand, one often encounters bewildering denials of the power of

religious belief, especially from scientists who are not themselves religious. For instance,

the anthropologist Scott Atran alleges that “core religious beliefs are literally senseless

and lacking in truth conditions”

and, therefore, cannot actually influence a person’s

behavior. According to Atran, Muslim suicide bombing has absolutely nothing to do with

Islamic ideas about martyrdom and jihad; rather, it is the product of bonding among

“fictive kin.” Atran has publicly stated that the greatest predictor of whether a Muslim

will move from merely supporting jihad to actually perpetrating an act of suicidal

violence “has nothing to do with religion, it has to do with whether you belong to a

soccer club.”

Atran’s analysis of the causes of Muslim violence is relentlessly oblivious to what

jihadists themselves say about their own motives.

He even ignores the role of religious

belief in inspiring Muslim terrorism when it bursts into view in his own research. Here is

a passage from one of his papers in which he summarizes his interviews with jihadists:

All were asked questions of the sort, ‘So what if your family were to be killed in

retaliation for your action?’ or ‘What if your father were dying and your mother found

out your plans for a martyrdom attack and asked you to delay until the family could get

back on its feet?’ To a person they answered along lines that there is duty to family but

duty to God cannot be postponed. ‘And what if your action resulted in no one’s death but

your own?’ The typical response is, ‘God will love you just the same.’ For example,

when these questions were posed to the alleged Emir of Jemaah Islamiyah, Abu Bakr

Ba’asyir, in Jakarta’s Cipinang prison in August 2005, he responded that martyrdom for

the sake of jihad is the ultimate fardh ’ain, an inescapable individual obligation that

trumps all others, including four of the five pillars of Islam (only profession of faith

equals jihad). What matters for him as for most would-be martyrs and their sponsors I

have interviewed is the martyr’s intention and commitment to God, so that blowing up

only oneself has the same value and reward as killing however many of the enemy.

What may appear to the untutored eye as patent declarations of religious

conviction are, on Atran’s account, merely “sacred values” and “moral obligations”

shared among kin and confederates; they have no propositional content. Atran’s bizarre

interpretation of his own data ignores the widespread Muslim belief that martyrs go

straight to Paradise and secure a place for their nearest and dearest there. In light of such

religious ideas, solidarity within a community takes on another dimension. And phrases

like “God will love you just the same” have a meaning worth unpacking. First, it is pretty

clear that Atran’s subjects believe that God exists. What is God’s love good for? It is

good for escaping the fires of hell and reaping an eternity of happiness after death. To say

that the behavior of Muslim jihadists has nothing to do with their religious beliefs is like

saying that honor killings have nothing to do with what their perpetrators believe about

women, sexuality, and male honor.

Beliefs have consequences. In Tanzania, there is a growing criminal trade in the

body parts of albino human beings—as it is widely imagined that albino flesh has

magical properties. Fishermen even weave the hair of albinos into their nets with the

expectation of catching more fish.

I would not be in the least surprised if an

anthropologist like Atran refused to accept this macabre irrationality at face value and

sought a “deeper” explanation that had nothing to do with the belief in the magical power

of albino body parts. Many social scientists have a perverse inability to accept that people

often believe exactly what they say they believe. In fact, the belief in the curative powers

of human flesh is widespread in Africa, and it used to be common in the West. It is said

that “mummy paint” (a salve made from ground mummy parts) was applied to Lincoln’s

wounds as he lay dying outside Ford’s Theatre. As late as 1908 the Merck medical

catalog sold “genuine Egyptian mummy” to treat epilepsy, abscesses, fractures and the

like.

How can we explain this behavior apart from the content of people’s beliefs? We

need not try. Especially when, given the clarity with which they articulate their core

beliefs, there is no mystery whatsoever as to why certain people behave as they do.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), published

by the American Psychiatric Association, is the most widely used reference work for

clinicians in the field of mental health. It defines “delusion” as a “false belief based on

incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost

everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or

evidence to the contrary.” Lest we think that certain religious beliefs might fall under the

shadow of this definition, the authors exonerate religious doctrines, in principle, in the

next sentence: “The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the

person’s culture or subculture (e.g., it is not an article of religious faith)” (p. 765). As

others have observed, there are several problems with this definition.

As any clinician

can attest, delusional patients often suffer from religious delusions. And the criterion that

a belief be widely shared suggests that a belief can be delusional in one context and

normative in another, even if the reasons for believing it are held constant. Does a lone

psychotic become sane merely by attracting a crowd of devotees? If we are measuring

sanity in terms of sheer numbers of subscribers, then atheists and agnostics in the United

States must be delusional: a diagnosis which would impugn 93 percent of the members of

the National Academy of Sciences.

There are, in fact, more people in the United States

who cannot read than who doubt the existence of Yahweh.

In twenty-first-century

America, disbelief in the God of Abraham is about as fringe a phenomenon as can be

named. But so is a commitment to the basic principles of scientific thinking—not to

mention a detailed understanding of genetics, special relativity, or Bayesian statistics.

The boundary between mental illness and respectable religious belief can be

difficult to discern. This was made especially vivid in a recent court case involving a

small group of very committed Christians accused of murdering an eighteen-month-old

infant.

The trouble began when the boy ceased to say “Amen” before meals. Believing

that he had developed “a spirit of rebellion,” the group, which included the boy’s mother,

deprived him of food and water until he died. Upon being indicted, the mother accepted

an unusual plea agreement: she vowed to cooperate in the prosecution of her

codefendants under the condition that all charges be dropped if her son were resurrected.

The prosecutor accepted this plea provided that that resurrection was “Jesus-like” and did

not include reincarnation as another person or animal. Despite the fact that this band of

lunatics carried the boy’s corpse around in a green suitcase for over a year, awaiting his

reanimation, there is no reason to believe that any of them suffer from a mental illness. It

is obvious, however, that they suffer from religion.

The Clash Between Faith and Reason

Introspection offers no clue that our experience of the world around us, and of

ourselves within it, depends upon voltage changes and chemical interactions taking place

inside our heads. And yet a century and a half of brain science declares it to be so. What

will it mean to finally understand the most prized, lamented, and intimate features of our

subjectivity in terms of neural circuits and information processing?

With respect to our current scientific understanding of the mind, the major

religions remain wedded to doctrines that are growing less plausible by the day. While

the ultimate relationship between consciousness and matter has not been settled, any

naïve conception of a soul can now be jettisoned on account of the mind’s obvious

dependency upon the brain. The idea that there might be an immortal soul capable of

reasoning, feeling love, remembering life events, etc., all the while being metaphysically

independent of the brain, seems untenable given that damage to the relevant neural

circuits obliterates these capacities in a living person. Does the soul of a person suffering

from total aphasia (loss of language ability) still speak and think fluently? This is rather

like asking whether the soul of a diabetic produces abundant insulin. The specific

character of the mind’s dependency on the brain also suggests that there cannot be a

unified self at work in each of us. There are simply too many separable components to

the human mind—each susceptible to independent disruption—for there to be a single

entity to stand as rider to the horse.

The soul doctrine suffers further upheaval in light of the fatal resemblance of the

human brain to the brains of other animals. The obvious continuity of our mental powers

with those of ostensibly soulless primates raises special difficulties. If the joint ancestors

of chimpanzees and human beings did not have souls, when did we acquire ours?

Many

of the world’s major religions ignore these awkward facts and simply assert that human

beings possess a unique form of subjectivity that has no connection to the inner lives of

other animals. The soul is the preeminent keepsake here, but the claim of human

uniqueness generally extends to the moral sense as well: animals are thought to possess

nothing like it. Our moral intuitions must, therefore, be the work of God. Given the

pervasiveness of this claim, intellectually honest scientists cannot help but fall into overt

conflict with religion regarding the origins of morality.

Nevertheless, it is widely imagined that there is no conflict, in principle, between

science and religion because many scientists are themselves “religious,” and some even

believe in the God of Abraham and in the truth of ancient miracles. Even religious

extremists value some of the products of science—antibiotics, computers, bombs, etc.—

and these seeds of inquisitiveness, we are told, can be patiently nurtured in a way that

offers no insult to religious faith.

This prayer of reconciliation goes by many names and now has many advocates.

But it is based on a fallacy. The fact that some scientists do not detect any problem with

religious faith merely proves that a juxtaposition of good ideas and bad ones is possible.

Is there a conflict between marriage and infidelity? The two regularly coincide. The fact

that intellectual honesty can be confined to a ghetto—in a single brain, in an institution,

or in a culture—does not mean that there isn’t a perfect contradiction between reason and

faith, or between the worldview of science taken as a whole and those advanced by the

world’s “great,” and greatly discrepant, religions.

What can be shown by example is how poorly religious scientists manage to

reconcile reason and faith when they actually attempt to do so. Few such efforts have

received more public attention than the work of Francis Collins. Collins is currently the

director of the National Institutes of Health, having been appointed to the post by

President Obama. One must admit that his credentials were impeccable: he is a physical

chemist, a medical geneticist, and the former head of the Human Genome Project. He is

also, by his own account, living proof that there can be no conflict between science and

religion. I will discuss Collins’s views at some length, because he is widely considered

the most impressive example of “sophisticated” faith in action.

In 2006, Collins published a bestselling book, The Language of God,

in which

he claimed to demonstrate “a consistent and profoundly satisfying harmony” between

twenty-first-century science and Evangelical Christianity. The Language of God is a

genuinely astonishing book. To read it is to witness nothing less than an intellectual

suicide. It is, however, a suicide that has gone almost entirely unacknowledged: The body

yielded to the rope; the neck snapped; the breath subsided; and the corpse dangles in

ghastly discomposure even now—and yet polite people everywhere continue to celebrate

the great man’s health.

Collins is regularly praised by his fellow scientists for what he is not: he is not a

“young earth creationist,” nor is he a proponent of “intelligent design.” Given the state of

the evidence for evolution, these are both very good things for a scientist not to be. But as

director of the NIH, Collins now has more responsibility for biomedical and health-

related research than any person on earth, controlling an annual budget of more than $30

billion. He is also one of the foremost representatives of science in the United States. We

need not congratulate him for believing in evolution.

Here is how Collins, as a scientist and educator, summarizes his understanding of

the universe for the general public (what follows are a series of slides, presented in order,

from a lecture Collins gave at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2008):

Slide 1

Almighty God, who is not limited in space or time, created a universe 13.7 billion

years ago with its parameters precisely tuned to allow the development of complexity

over long periods of time.

Slide 2

God’s plan included the mechanism of evolution to create the marvelous diversity

of living things on our planet. Most especially, that creative plan included human beings.

Slide 3

After evolution had prepared a sufficiently advanced “house” (the human brain),

God gifted humanity with the knowledge of good and evil (the Moral Law), with free

will, and with an immortal soul.

Slide 4

We humans use our free will to break the moral law, leading to our estrangement

from God. For Christians, Jesus is the solution to that estrangement.

Slide 5

If the Moral Law is just a side effect of evolution, then there is no such thing as

good or evil. It’s all an illusion. We’ve been hoodwinked. Are any of us, especially the

strong atheists, really prepared to live our lives within that worldview?

Is it really so difficult to perceive a conflict between Collin’s science and his

religion? Just imagine how scientific it would seem to most Americans if Collins, as a

devout Hindu, informed his audience that Lord Brahma had created the universe and now

sleeps; Lord Vishnu sustains it and tinkers with our DNA (in a way that respects the law

of karma and rebirth); and Lord Shiva will eventually destroy it in a great conflagration.

Is there any chance that Collins would be running the NIH if he were an outspoken

polytheist?

Early in his career as a physician, Collins attempted to fill the God-shaped hole in

his life by studying the world’s major religions. He admits, however, that he did not get

very far with this research before seeking the tender mercies of “a Methodist minister

who lived down the street.” In fact, Collins’s ignorance of world religion appears

prodigious. For instance, he regularly repeats the Christian canard about Jesus being the

only person in human history who ever claimed to be God (as though this would render

the opinions of an uneducated carpenter of the first century especially credible). Collins

seems oblivious to the fact that saints, yogis, charlatans, and schizophrenics by the

thousands claim to be God at this very instant. And it has always been thus. Forty years

ago, a very unprepossessing Charles Manson convinced a band of misfits in the San

Fernando Valley that he was both God and Jesus. Should we, therefore, consult Manson

on questions of cosmology? He still walks among us—or at least sits—in Corcoran State

Prison. The fact that Collins, as both a scientist and as an influential apologist for

religion, repeatedly emphasizes the silly fiction of Jesus’ singular self-appraisal is one of

many embarrassing signs that he has lived too long in the echo chamber of Evangelical

Christianity.

But the pilgrim continues his progress: next, we learn that Collins’s uncertainty

about the identity of God could not survive a collision with C. S. Lewis. The following

passage from Lewis proved decisive:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often

say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His

claim to be God.” That is one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and

said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a

lunatic—on a level with the man who says He is a poached egg—or else He would be the

Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God:

or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at

Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call him Lord and God. But

let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He

has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

Collins provides this pabulum for our contemplation and then describes how it

irrevocably altered his view of the universe:

Lewis was right. I had to make a choice. A full year had passed since I decided to

believe in some sort of God, and now I was being called to account. On a beautiful fall

day, as I was hiking in the Cascade Mountains during my first trip west of the

Mississippi, the majesty and beauty of God’s creation overwhelmed my resistance. As I

rounded a corner and saw a beautiful and unexpected frozen waterfall, hundreds of feet

high, I knew the search was over. The next morning, I knelt in the dewy grass as the sun

rose and surrendered to Jesus Christ.

This is self-deception at full gallop. It is simply astounding that this passage was

written by a scientist with the intent of demonstrating the compatibility of faith and

reason. And if we thought Collins’s reasoning could grow no more labile, he has since

divulged that the waterfall was frozen into three streams, which put him in mind of the

Holy Trinity.

It should go without saying that if a frozen waterfall can confirm the specific

tenets of Christianity, anything can confirm anything. But this truth was not obvious to

Collins as he “knelt in the dewy grass,” and it is not obvious to him now. Nor was it

obvious to the editors of Nature, which is the most important scientific publication in any

language. The journal praised Collins for engaging “with people of faith to explore how

science—both in its mode of thought and its results—is consistent with their religious

beliefs.”

According to Nature, Collins was engaged in the “moving” and “laudable”

exercise of building “a bridge across the social and intellectual divide that exists between

most of U.S. academia and the so-called heartlands.” And here is Collins, hard at work on

that bridge:

As believers, you are right to hold fast to the concept of God as Creator; you are

right to hold fast to the truths of the Bible; you are right to hold fast to the conclusion that

science offers no answers to the most pressing questions of human existence; and you are

right to hold fast to the certainty that the claims of atheistic materialism must be

steadfastly resisted.

God, who is not limited to space and time, created the universe and established

natural laws that govern it. Seeking to populate this otherwise sterile universe with living

creatures, God chose the elegant mechanism of evolution to create microbes, plants, and

animals of all sorts. Most remarkably, God intentionally chose the same mechanism to

give rise to special creatures who would have intelligence, a knowledge of right and

wrong, free will, and a desire to seek fellowship with Him. He also knew these creatures

would ultimately choose to disobey the Moral Law.

Imagine: the year is 2006; half of the American population believes that the

universe is 6,000 years old; our president has just used his first veto to block federal

funding for the world’s most promising medical research on religious grounds; and one

of the foremost scientists in the land has this to say, straight from the heart (if not the

brain).

Of course, once the eyes of faith have opened, confirmation can be found

everywhere. Here Collins considers whether to accept the directorship of the Human

Genome Project:

I spent a long afternoon praying in a little chapel, seeking guidance about this

decision. I did not “hear” God speak—in fact, I’ve never had that experience. But during

those hours, ending in an evensong service that I had not expected, a peace settled over

me. A few days later, I accepted the offer.

One hopes to see, but does not find, the phrase “Dear Diary” framing these

solemn excursions from honest reasoning. Again we find a peculiar emphasis on the most

unremarkable violations of expectation: just as Collins had not expected to see a frozen

waterfall, he had not expected an evensong service. How unlikely would it be to

encounter an evensong service (generally celebrated just before sunset) while spending “a

long afternoon praying in a little chapel”? And what of Collins’s feeling of “peace”? We

are clearly meant to view it as some indication, however slight, of the veracity of his

religious beliefs. Elsewhere in his book Collins states, correctly, that “monotheism and

polytheism cannot both be right.” But doesn’t he think that at some point in the last

thousand years a Hindu or two has prayed in a temple, perhaps to the elephant-headed

god Ganesh, and experienced similar feelings of peace? What might he, as a scientist,

make of this fact?

I should say at this point that I see nothing irrational about seeking the states of

mind that lie at the core of many of the world’s religions. Compassion, awe, devotion,

and feelings of oneness are surely among the most valuable experiences a person can

have. What is irrational, and irresponsible in a scientist and educator, is to make

unjustified and unjustifiable claims about the structure of the universe, about the divine

origin of certain books, and about the future of humanity on the basis of such

experiences. And by the standards of even ordinary contemplative experience, the

phenomena that Collins puts forward in support of his religious beliefs scarcely merit

discussion. A beautiful waterfall? An unexpected church service? A feeling of peace?

The fact that these are the most salient landmarks on Collins’s journey out of bondage

may be the most troubling detail in this positive sea of troubles.

Collins argues that science makes belief in God “intensely plausible”—the Big

Bang, the fine-tuning of Nature’s constants, the emergence of complex life, the

effectiveness of mathematics,

all suggest to him that a “loving, logical, and consistent”

God exists. But when challenged with alternate (and far more plausible) accounts of these

phenomena—or with evidence that suggests that God might be unloving, illogical,

inconsistent, or, indeed, absent—Collins declares that God stands outside of Nature, and

thus science cannot address the question of His existence at all. Similarly, Collins insists

that our moral intuitions attest to God’s existence, to His perfectly moral character, and to

His desire to have fellowship with every member of our species; but when our moral

intuitions recoil at the casual destruction of innocent children by tidal wave or

earthquake, Collins assures us that our time-bound notions of good and evil cannot be

trusted and that God’s will is a perfect mystery.

As is often the case with religious

apology, it is a case of heads, faith wins; tails, reason loses.

Like most Christians, Collins believes in a suite of canonical miracles, including

the virgin birth and literal resurrection of Jesus Christ. He cites N. T. Wright

and John

Polkinghorne

as the best authorities on these matters, and when pressed on points of

theology, he recommends that people consult their books for further illumination. To give

readers a taste of this literature, here is Polkinghorne describing the physics of the

coming resurrection of the dead:

If we regard human beings as psychosomatic unities, as I believe both the Bible

and contemporary experience of the intimate connection between mind and brain

encourage us to do, then the soul will have to be understood in an Aristotelian sense as

the “form,” or information-bearing pattern, of the body. Though this pattern is dissolved

at death it seems perfectly rational to believe that it will be remembered by God and

reconstituted in a divine act of resurrection. The “matter” of the world to come, which

will be the carrier of the reembodiment, will be the transformed matter of the present

universe, itself redeemed by God beyond its cosmic death. The resurrected universe is not

a second attempt by the Creator to produce a world ex nihilo but it is the transmutation of

the present world in an act of new creation ex vetere. God will then truly be “all in all” (1

Cor. 15:28) in a totally sacramental universe whose divine infused “matter” will be

delivered from the transience and decay inherent in the present physical process. Such

mysterious and exciting beliefs depend for their motivation not only on the faithfulness of

God, but also on Christ’s resurrection, understood as the seminal event from which the

new creation grows, and indeed also on the detail of the empty tomb, with its implication

that the Lord’s risen and glorified body is the transmutation of his dead body, just as the

world to come will be the transformation of this present mortal world.

These beliefs are, indeed, “mysterious and exciting.” As it happens, Polkinghorne

is also a scientist. The problem, however, is that it is impossible to differentiate his

writing on religion—which now fills an entire shelf of books—from an extraordinarily

patient Sokal-style hoax.

If one intended to embarrass the religious establishment with

carefully constructed nonsense, this is exactly the sort of pseudoscience, pseudo-

scholarship, and pseudoreasoning one would employ. Unfortunately, I see no reason to

doubt Polkinghorne’s sincerity. Neither, it would seem, does Francis Collins.

Even for a scientist of Collins’s stature, who has struggled to reconcile his belief

in the divinity of Jesus with modern science, it all boils down to the “empty tomb.”

Collins freely admits that if all his scientific arguments for the plausibility of God were

proven to be in error, his faith would be undiminished, as it is founded upon the belief,

shared by all serious Christians, that the Gospel account of the miracles of Jesus is true.

The problem, however, is that miracle stories are as common as house dust, even in the

twenty-first century. For instance, all of Jesus’ otherworldly powers have been attributed

to the South Indian guru Sathya Sai Baba by vast numbers of living eyewitnesses. Sai

Baba even claims to have been born of a virgin. This is actually not an uncommon claim

in the history of religion, or in history generally. Even worldly men like Genghis Khan

and Alexander were once thought to have been born of virgins (parthenogenesis

apparently offers no guarantee that a man will turn the other cheek). Thus, Collins’s faith

is predicated on the claim that miracle stories of the sort that today surround a person like

Sathya Sai Baba—and do not even merit an hour on cable television—somehow become

especially credible when set in the prescientific religious context of the first-century

Roman Empire, decades after their supposed occurrence, as evidenced by discrepant and

fragmentary copies of copies of copies of ancient Greek manuscripts.

It is on this basis

that the current head of the NIH recommends that we believe the following propositions:

1. Jesus Christ, a carpenter by trade, was born of a virgin, ritually murdered as a

scapegoat for the collective sins of his species, and then resurrected from death after an

interval of three days.

2. He promptly ascended, bodily, to “heaven”—where, for two millennia, he has

eavesdropped upon (and, on occasion, even answered) the simultaneous prayers of

billions of beleaguered human beings.

3. Not content to maintain this numinous arrangement indefinitely, this invisible

carpenter will one day return to earth to judge humanity for its sexual indiscretions and

skeptical doubts, at which time he will grant immortality to anyone who has had the good

fortune to be convinced, on Mother’s knee, that this baffling litany of miracles is the most

important series of truths ever revealed about the cosmos.

4. Every other member of our species, past and present, from Cleopatra to

Einstein, no matter what his or her terrestrial accomplishments, will be consigned to a far

less desirable fate, best left unspecified.

5. In the meantime, God/Jesus may or may not intervene in our world, as He

pleases, curing the occasional end-stage cancer (or not), answering an especially earnest

prayer for guidance (or not), consoling the bereaved (or not), through His perfectly wise

and loving agency.

Just how many scientific laws would be violated by this scheme? One is tempted

to say “all of them.” And yet, judging from the way that journals like Nature have treated

Collins, one can only conclude that there is nothing in the scientific worldview, or in the

intellectual rigor and self-criticism that gave rise to it, that casts these convictions in an

unfavorable light.

Prior to his appointment as head of the NIH, Collins started an organization called

the BioLogos Foundation, whose purpose (in the words of its mission statement) is to

communicate “the compatibility of the Christian faith with scientific discoveries about

the origins of the universe and life.” BioLogos is funded by the Templeton Foundation,

an organization that claims to seek answers to “life’s biggest questions,” but appears

primarily dedicated to erasing the boundary between religion and science. Because of its

astonishing wealth, Templeton seems able to purchase the complicity of otherwise

secular academics as it seeks to rebrand religious faith as a legitimate arm of science.

True to form, Nature has adopted an embarrassingly supine posture with respect to

Templeton as well.

Would Collins have received the same treatment in Nature if he had argued for

the compatibility between science and witchcraft, astrology, or Tarot cards? On the

contrary, he would have been met by an inferno of criticism. As a point of comparison,

we should recall that the biochemist Rupert Sheldrake had his academic career neatly

decapitated by a single Nature editorial.

In his book A New Science of Life, Sheldrake

advanced a theory of “morphic resonance,” in an attempt to account for how living

systems and other patterns in nature develop.

Needless to say, the theory stands a very

good chance of being utterly wrong. But there is not a single sentence in Sheldrake’s

book to rival the intellectual dishonesty that Collins achieves on nearly every page of The

Language of God.

What accounts for the double standard? Clearly, it remains taboo to

criticize mainstream religion (which, in the West, means Christianity, Judaism, and

Islam).

According to Collins, the moral law applies exclusively to human beings:

Though other animals may at times appear to show glimmerings of a moral sense,

they are certainly not widespread, and in many instances other species’ behavior seems to

be in dramatic contrast to any sense of universal rightness.

One wonders if the author has ever read a newspaper. The behavior of humans

offers no such “dramatic contrast”? How badly must human beings behave to put this

“sense of universal rightness” in doubt? While no other species can match us for altruism,

none can match us for sadistic cruelty either. And just how widespread must

“glimmerings” of morality be among other animals before Collins—who, after all, knows

a thing or two about genes—begins to wonder whether our moral sense has evolutionary

precursors? What if mice show greater distress at the suffering of familiar mice than

unfamiliar ones? (They do.

) What if monkeys will starve themselves to prevent their

cage mates from receiving painful shocks? (They will.

) What if chimps have a

demonstrable sense of fairness when receiving food rewards? (They have.

) What if

dogs do too? (Ditto.

) Wouldn’t these be precisely the sorts of findings one would

expect if our morality were the product of evolution?

Collins’s case for the supernatural origin of morality rests on the further assertion

that there can be no evolutionary explanation for genuine altruism. Because self-sacrifice

cannot increase the likelihood that an individual creature will survive and reproduce,

truly self-sacrificing behavior stands as a primordial rejoinder to any biological account

of morality. In Collins’s view, therefore, the mere existence of altruism offers compelling

evidence of a personal God. A moment’s thought reveals, however, that if we were to

accept this neutered biology, almost everything about us would be bathed in the warm

glow of religious mystery. Smoking cigarettes isn’t a healthy habit and is unlikely to

offer an adaptive advantage—and there were no cigarettes in the Paleolithic—but this

habit is very widespread and compelling. Is God, by any chance, a tobacco farmer?

Collins can’t seem to see that human morality and selfless love may arise from more

basic biological and psychological traits, which were themselves products of evolution. It

is hard to interpret this oversight in light of his scientific training. If one didn’t know

better, one might be tempted to conclude that religious dogmatism presents an obstacle to

scientific reasoning.

There are, of course, ethical implications to believing that human beings are the

only species made in God’s image and vouchsafed with “immortal souls.” Concern about

souls is a very poor guide to ethical behavior—that is, to actually mitigating the suffering

of conscious creatures like ourselves. The belief that the soul enters the zygote at (or very

near) the moment of conception leads to spurious worries about the fate of

undifferentiated cells in Petri dishes and, therefore, to profound qualms over embryonic

stem cell research. Rather often, a belief in souls leaves people indifferent to the suffering

of creatures thought not to possess them. There are many species of animals that can

suffer in ways that three-day-old human embryos cannot. The use of apes in medical

research, the exposure of whales and dolphins to military sonar

—these are real ethical

dilemmas, with real suffering at issue. Concern over human embryos smaller than the

period at the end of this sentence—when, for years they have constituted one of the most

promising contexts for medical research—is one of the many delusional products of

religion that has led to an ethical blind alley, and to terrible failures of compassion. While

Collins appears to support embryonic stem-cell research, he does so after much (literal)

soul searching and under considerable theological duress. Everything he has said and

written about the subject needlessly complicates an ethical question that is—if one is

actually concerned about human and animal well-being—utterly straightforward.

The ethics of embryonic stem-cell research, which currently entails the

destruction of human embryos, can be judged only by considering what embryos at the

150-cell-stage actually are. We must contemplate their destruction in light of how we

treat organisms at similar and greater stages of complexity, as well as how we treat

human beings at later stages of development. For instance, there are a variety of

conditions that can occur during gestation, the remedy for which entails the destruction of

far more developed embryos—and yet these interventions offer far less potential benefit

to society. Curiously, no one objects to such procedures. A child can be born with his

underdeveloped yet living twin lodged inside him—a condition known as fetus in fetu.

Occasionally this condition isn’t discovered until years after birth, when the first child

complains about having something moving around inside his body. This second child is

then removed like a tumor and destroyed.

As God seems to love diversity, there are

countless permutations of this condition, and twins can fuse in almost any way

imaginable. The second twin can also be a disorganized mass called a teratoma. Needless

to say, any parasitic twin, however disorganized, will be a far more developed entity than

an embryo at the 150-cell stage. Even the intentional sacrifice of one conjoined

(“Siamese”) twin to save the other has occurred in the United States, with shared organs

being given to the survivor. In fact, there have been cases where unshared organs have

been transferred from the twin that is to be sacrificed.

Some have argued that the “viability” of an organism is the primary issue here:

for without some extraordinary intervention such twins cannot survive. But many fully

developed human beings answer to this condition of utter dependency at some point in

their lives (e.g., a kidney patient on dialysis). And embryos themselves are not viable

unless placed in the proper conditions. Indeed, embryos could be engineered to not be

viable past a certain age even if implanted in a womb. Would this obviate the ethical

concerns of those who oppose embryonic stem-cell research?

At the time of this writing, the Obama administration still has not removed the

most important impediments to embryonic stem-cell research. Currently, federal funding

is only allowed for work on stem cells that have been derived from surplus embryos at

fertility clinics. This delicacy is a clear concession to the religious convictions of the

American electorate. While Collins seems willing to go further and support research on

embryos created through somatic-cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), he is very far from being

a voice of ethical clarity in this debate. For instance, he considers embryos created

through SCNT to be distinct from those formed through the union of sperm and egg

because the former are “not part of God’s plan to create a human individual” while “the

latter is very much part of God’s plan, carried out through the millennia by our own

species and many others.”

What is to be gained in a serious discussion of bioethics by

talking about “God’s plan”? If such embryos were brought to term and became sentient

and suffering human beings, would it be ethical to kill these people and harvest their

organs because they had been conceived apart from “God’s plan”? While Collins’s

stewardship of the NIH seems unlikely to impede our mincing progress on embryonic

stem-cell research, his appointment is one of President Obama’s efforts to split the

difference between real science and real ethics on the one hand and religious superstition

and taboo on the other.

Collins has written that “science offers no answers to the most pressing questions

of human existence” and that “the claims of atheistic materialism must be steadfastly

resisted.” One can only hope that these convictions will not affect his judgment at the

NIH. As I have argued throughout this book, understanding human well-being at the level

of the brain might very well offer some answers to the most pressing questions of human

existence—questions like, Why do we suffer? How can we achieve the deepest forms of

happiness? Or, indeed, Is it possible to love one’s neighbor as oneself? And wouldn’t any

effort to explain human nature without reference to a soul, and to explain morality

without reference to God, constitute “atheistic materialism”? Is it really wise to entrust

the future of biomedical research in the United States to a man who believes that

understanding ourselves through science is impossible, while our resurrection from death

is inevitable?

When I criticized President Obama’s appointment of Collins in TheNew York

Times, many readers considered it an overt expression of “intolerance.”

For instance,

the biologist Kenneth Miller claimed in a letter to the editor that my view was purely the

product of my own “deeply held prejudices against religion” and that I opposed Collins

merely because “he is a Christian.”

Writing in TheGuardian, Andrew Brown called my

criticism of Collins a “fantastically illiberal and embryonically totalitarian position that

goes against every possible notion of human rights and even the American constitution.”

Miller and Brown clearly feel that unjustified beliefs and disordered thinking should not

be challenged as long as they are associated with a mainstream religion—and that to do

so is synonymous with bigotry. They are not alone.

There is now a large and growing literature—spanning dozens of books and

hundreds of articles—attacking Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens,

and me (the so-called New Atheists) for our alleged incivility, bias, and ignorance of how

“sophisticated” believers practice their faith. It is often said that we caricature religion,

taking its most extreme forms to represent the whole. We do no such thing. We simply do

what a paragon of sophisticated faith like Francis Collins does: we take the specific

claims of religion seriously.

Many of our secular critics worry that if we oblige people to choose between

reason and faith, they will choose faith and cease to support scientific research; if, on the

other hand, we ceaselessly reiterate that there is no conflict between religion and science,

we might cajole great multitudes into accepting the truth of evolution (as though this

were an end in itself). Here is a version of this charge that, I fear, most people would

accept, taken from journalist Chris Mooney and marine biologist Sheril Kirshenbaum’s

book Unscientific America:

If the goal is to create an America more friendly toward science and reason, the

combativeness of the New Atheists is strongly counterproductive. If anything, they work

in ironic combination with their dire enemies, the anti-science conservative Christians

who populate the creation science and intelligent design movements, to ensure we’ll

continue to be polarized over subjects like the teaching of evolution when we don’t have

to be. America is a very religious nation, and if forced to choose between faith and

science, vast numbers of Americans will select the former. The New Atheists err in

insisting that such a choice needs to be made. Atheism is not the logically inevitable

outcome of scientific reasoning, any more than intelligent design is a necessary corollary

of religious faith. A great many scientists believe in God with no sense of internal

contradiction, just as many religious believers accept evolution as the correct theory to

explain the development, diversity, and inter-relatedness of life on Earth. The New

Atheists, like the fundamentalists they so despise, are setting up a false dichotomy that

can only damage the cause of scientific literacy for generations to come. It threatens to

leave science itself caught in the middle between extremes, unable to find cover in a

destructive, seemingly unending, culture war.

The first thing to observe is that Mooney and Kirshenbaum are confused about the

nature of the problem. The goal is not to get more Americans to merely accept the truth

of evolution (or any other scientific theory); the goal is to get them to value the principles

of reasoning and educated discourse that now make a belief in evolution obligatory.

Doubt about evolution is merely a symptom of an underlying condition; the condition is

faith itself—conviction without sufficient reason, hope mistaken for knowledge, bad

ideas protected from good ones, good ideas obscured by bad ones, wishful thinking

elevated to a principle of salvation, etc. Mooney and Kirshenbaum seem to imagine that

we can get people to value intellectual honesty by lying to them.

While it is invariably advertised as an expression of “respect” for people of faith,

the accommodationism that Mooney and Kirshenbaum recommend is nothing more than

naked condescension, motivated by fear. They assure us that people will choose religion

over science, no matter how good a case is made against religion. In certain contexts,

this fear is probably warranted. I wouldn’t be eager to spell out the irrationality of Islam

while standing in the Great Mosque in Mecca. But let’s be honest about how Mooney and

Kirshenbaum view public discourse in the United States: Watch what you say, or the

Christian mob will burn down the Library of Alexandria all over again. By comparison,

the “combativeness” of the “New Atheists” seems quite collegial. We are merely guilty

of assuming that our fellow Homo sapiens possess the requisite intelligence and

emotional maturity to respond to rational argument, satire, and ridicule on the subject of

religion—just as they respond to these discursive pressures on all other subjects. Of

course, we could be wrong. But let’s admit which side in this debate currently views our

neighbors as dangerous children and which views them as adults who might prefer not to

be completely mistaken about the nature of reality.

Finally, we come to the kernel of confusion that has been the subject of this

section—the irrelevant claim that “a great many scientists believe in God with no sense

of internal contradiction.”

The fact that certain people can reason poorly with a clear

conscience—or can do so while saying that they have a clear conscience—proves

absolutely nothing about the compatibility of religious and scientific ideas, goals, or ways

of thinking. It is possible to be wrong and to not know it (we call this “ignorance”). It is

possible to be wrong and to know it, but to be reluctant to incur the social cost of

admitting this publicly (we call this “hypocrisy”). And it may also be possible to be

wrong, to dimly glimpse this fact, but to allow the fear of being wrong to increase one’s

commitment to one’s erroneous beliefs (we call this “self-deception”). It seems clear that

these frames of mind do an unusual amount of work in the service of religion.

There is an epidemic of scientific ignorance in the United States. This isn’t

surprising, as very few scientific truths are self-evident and many are deeply

counterintuitive. It is by no means obvious that empty space has structure or that we share

a common ancestor with both the housefly and the banana. It can be difficult to think like

a scientist (even, we have begun to see, when one is a scientist). But it would seem that

few things make thinking like a scientist more difficult than an attachment to religion.

Chapter 5

THE FUTURE OF HAPPINESS

No one has ever mistaken me for an optimist. And yet when I consider one of the

more pristine sources of pessimism—the moral development of our species—I find

reasons for hope. Despite our perennial bad behavior, our moral progress seems to me

unmistakable. Our powers of empathy are clearly growing. Today, we are surely more

likely to act for the benefit of humanity as a whole than at any point in the past.

Of course, the twentieth century delivered some unprecedented horrors. But those

of us who live in the developed world are becoming increasingly disturbed by our

capacity to do one another harm. We are less tolerant of “collateral damage” in times of

war—undoubtedly because we now see images of it—and we are less comfortable with

ideologies that demonize whole populations, justifying their abuse or outright destruction.

Consider the degree to which racism in the United States has diminished in the

last hundred years. Racism is still a problem, of course. But the evidence of change is

undeniable. Most readers will have seen photos of lynchings from the first half of the

twentieth century, in which whole towns turned out, as though for a carnival, simply to

enjoy the sight of some young man or woman being tortured to death and strung up on a

tree or lamppost for all to see. These pictures often reveal bankers, lawyers, doctors,

teachers, church elders, newspaper editors, policemen, even the occasional senator and

congressman, smiling in their Sunday best, having consciously posed for a postcard photo

under a dangling, lacerated, and often partially cremated person. Such images are

shocking enough. But realize that these genteel people often took souvenirs of the body—

teeth, ears, fingers, kneecaps, genitalia, and internal organs—home to show their friends

and family. Sometimes, they even displayed these ghoulish trophies in their places of

business.

Consider the following response to boxer Jack Johnson’s successful title defense

against Jim Jeffries, the so-called “Great White Hope”:

A Word to the Black Man:

Do not point your nose too high

Do not swell your chest too much

Do not boast too loudly

Do not be puffed up

Let not your ambition be inordinate

Or take a wrong direction

Remember you have done nothing at all

You are just the same member of society you were last week

You are on no higher plane

Deserve no new consideration

And will get none

No man will think a bit higher of you

Because your complexion is the same

Of that of the victor at Reno

A modern reader can only assume that this dollop of racist hatred appeared on a

leaflet printed by the Ku Klux Klan. On the contrary, this was the measured opinion of

the editors at the Los Angeles Times exactly a century ago. Is it conceivable that our

mainstream media will ever again give voice to such racism? I think it far more likely

that we will proceed along our current path: racism will continue to lose its subscribers;

the history of slavery in the United States will become even more flabbergasting to

contemplate; and future generations will marvel at the the ways that we, too, failed in our

commitment to the common good. We will embarrass our descendants, just as our

ancestors embarrass us. This is moral progress.

I am bolstered in this expectation by my view of the moral landscape: the belief

that morality is a genuine sphere of human inquiry, and not a mere product of culture,

suggests that progress is possible. If moral truths transcend the contingencies of culture,

human beings should eventually converge in their moral judgments. I am painfully aware,

however, that we are living at a time when Muslims riot by the hundreds of thousands

over cartoons, Catholics oppose condom use in villages decimated by AIDS, and one of

the few “moral” judgments guaranteed to unite the better part of humanity is that

homosexuality is an abomination. And yet I can detect moral progress even while

believing that most people are profoundly confused about good and evil. I may be a

greater optimist than I thought.

Science and Philosophy

Throughout this book, I have argued that the split between facts and values—and,

therefore, between science and morality—is an illusion. However, the discussion has

taken place on at least two levels: I have reviewed scientific data that, I believe, supports

my argument; but I have made a more basic, philosophical case, the validity of which

does not narrowly depend on current data. Readers may wonder how these levels are

related.

First, we should observe that a boundary between science and philosophy does

not always exist. Einstein famously doubted Bohr’s view of quantum mechanics, and yet

both physicists were armed with the same experimental findings and mathematical

techniques. Was their disagreement a matter of “philosophy” or “physics”? We cannot

always draw a line between scientific thinking and “mere” philosophy because all data

must be interpreted against a background theory, and different theories come bundled

with a fair amount of contextual reasoning. A dualist who believes in the existence of

immaterial souls might say that the entire field of neuroscience is beholden to the

philosophy of physicalism (the view that mental events should be understood as physical

events), and he would be right. The assumption that the mind is the product of the brain is

integral to almost everything neuroscientists do. Is physicalism a matter of “philosophy”

or “neuroscience”? The answer may depend upon where one happens to be standing on a

university campus. Even if we grant that only philosophers tend to think about

“physicalism” per se, it remains a fact that any argument or experiment that put this

philosophical assumption in doubt would be a landmark finding for neuroscience—likely

the most important in its history. So while there are surely some philosophical views that

make no contact with science, science is often a matter of philosophy in practice. It is

probably worth recalling that the original name for the physical sciences was, in fact,

“natural philosophy.”

Throughout the sections of this book that could be aptly described as

“philosophical,” I make many points that have scientific implications. Most scientists

treat facts and values as though they were distinct and irreconcilable in principle. I have

argued that they cannot be, as anything of value must be valuable to someone (whether

actually or potentially)—and, therefore, its value should be attributable to facts about the

well-being of conscious creatures. One could call this a “philosophical” position, but it is

one that directly relates to the boundaries of science. If I am correct, science has a far

wider purview than many of its practitioners suppose, and its findings may one day

impinge upon culture in ways that they do not expect. If I am wrong, the boundaries of

science are as narrow as most people assume. This difference of view might be ascribed

to “philosophy,” but it is a difference that will determine the practice of science in the

years to come.

Recall the work of Jonathan Haidt, discussed at some length in chapter 2: Haidt

has convinced many people, both inside and outside the scientific community, that there

are two types of morality: liberal morality focuses on two primary concerns (harm and

fairness), while conservative morality emphasizes five (harm, fairness, authority, purity,

and group loyalty). As a result, many people believe that liberals and conservatives are

bound to view human behavior in incompatible ways and that science will never be able

to say that one approach to morality is “better” or “truer” or more “moral” than the other.

I think that Haidt is wrong, for at least two reasons. First, I suspect that the extra

factors he attributes to conservatives can be understood as further concerns about harm.

That is, I believe that conservatives have the same morality as liberals do, they just have

different ideas about how harm accrues in this universe.

There is also some research to

suggest that conservatives are more prone to feelings of disgust, and this seems to

especially influence their moral judgments on the subject of sex.

More important,

whatever the differences between liberals and conservatives may or may not be, if my

argument about the moral landscape is correct, one approach to morality is likely more

conducive to human flourishing than the other. While my disagreement with Haidt may

be more a matter of argument than of experiment at present, whichever argument prevails

will affect the progress of science, as well as science’s impact on the rest of culture.

The Psychology of Happiness

I have said very little in this book about the current state of psychological science

as it relates to human well-being. This research—which occasionally goes by the name of

“positive psychology”—is in its infancy, especially when it comes to understanding the

relevant details at the level of the brain. And given the difficulty of defining human well-

being, coupled with the general reluctance of scientists to challenge anyone’s beliefs

about it, it is sometimes hard to know what is being studied in this research. What does it

mean, for instance, to compare self-reported ratings of “happiness” or “life satisfaction”

between individuals or across cultures? I’m not at all sure. Clearly, a person’s conception

of what is possible in human life will affect her judgment of whether she has made the

best use of her opportunities, met her goals, developed deep friendships, etc. Some

people will go to bed tonight proud to have merely reduced their daily consumption of

methamphetamine; others will be frustrated that their rank on the Forbes 400 list has

slipped into the triple digits. Where one is satisfied to be in life often has a lot to do with

where one has been.

I once knew a very smart and talented man who sent an email to dozens of friends

and acquaintances declaring his intention to kill himself. As you might expect, this

communication prompted a flurry of responses. While I did not know him well, I sent

several emails urging him to seek professional counseling, to try antidepressants, to

address his sleep issues, and to do a variety of other obvious things to combat depression.

In each of his replies, however, he insisted that he was not depressed. He believed

himself to be acting on a philosophical insight: everyone dies eventually; life, therefore,

is ultimately pointless; thus, there is no reason to keep on living if one doesn’t want to.

We went back and forth on these topics, as I sought to persuade him that his

“insight” was itself a symptom of depression or some other mood disorder. I argued that

if he simply felt better, he wouldn’t believe that his life was no longer worth living. No

doubt many other people had similar exchanges with him. These communications seemed

to nudge him away from the precipice for a while. Four years later, however, he

committed suicide.

Experiences of this kind reveal how difficult it can be to discuss the subject of

human well-being. Communication on any subject can be misleading, of course, because

people often use the same words quite differently. Talking about states of mind poses

special difficulties, however. Was my friend really “depressed” in my sense of the term?

Did he even know what I meant by “depression”? Did I know what I should have meant

by it? For instance, are there forms of depression that have yet to be differentiated which

admit of distinct remedies? And is it possible that my friend suffered from none of these?

Is it, in other words, possible for a person to see no point in living another day, and to be

motivated to kill himself, without experiencing any disorder of mood? Two things seem

quite clear to me at this point: such questions have answers, and yet we often do not

know enough about human experience to even properly discuss the questions themselves.

We can mean many things when using words like “happiness” and “well-being.”

This makes it difficult to study the most positive aspects of human experience

scientifically. In fact, it makes it difficult for many of us to even know what goals in life

are worth seeking. Just how happy and fulfilled should we expect to be in our careers or

intimate relationships? Much of the skepticism I encounter when speaking about these

issues comes from people who think “happiness” is a superficial state of mind and that

there are far more important things in life than “being happy.” Some readers may think

that concepts like “well-being” and “flourishing” are similarly effete. However, I don’t

know of any better terms with which to signify the most positive states of being to which

we can aspire. One of the virtues of thinking about a moral landscape, the heights of

which remain to be discovered, is that it frees us from these semantic difficulties.

Generally speaking, we need only worry about what it will mean to move “up” as

opposed to “down.”

Some of what psychologists have learned about human well-being confirms what

everyone already knows: people tend to be happier if they have good friends, basic

control over their lives, and enough money to meet their needs. Loneliness, helplessness,

and poverty are not recommended. We did not need science to tell us this.

But the best of this research also reveals that our intuitions about happiness are

often quite wrong. For instance, most of us feel that having more choices available to

us—when seeking a mate, choosing a career, shopping for a new stove, etc.—is always

desirable. But while having some choice is generally good, it seems that having too many

options tends to undermine our feelings of satisfaction, no matter which option we

choose.

Knowing this, it could be rational to strategically limit one’s choices. Anyone

who has ever remodeled a home will know the glassy-eyed anguish of having gone to one

too many stores in search of the perfect faucet.

One of the most interesting things to come out of the research on human

happiness is the discovery that we are very bad judges of how we will feel in the future—

an ability that the psychologist Daniel Gilbert has called “affective forecasting.” Gilbert

and others have shown that we systematically overestimate the degree to which good and

bad experiences will affect us.

Changes in wealth, health, age, marital status, etc., tend

not to matter as much as we think they will—and yet we make our most important

decisions in life based on these inaccurate assumptions. It is useful to know that what we

think will matter often matters much less than we think. Conversely, things we consider

trivial can actually impact our lives greatly. If you have ever been impressed by how

people often rise to the occasion while experiencing great hardship but can fall to pieces

over minor inconveniences, you have seen this principle at work. The general finding of

this research is now uncontroversial: we are poorly placed to accurately recall the past, to

perceive the present, or to anticipate the future with respect to our own happiness. It

seems little wonder, therefore, that we are so often unfulfilled.

Which Self Should We Satisfy?

If you ask people to report on their level of well-being moment-to-moment—by

giving them a beeper that sounds at random intervals, prompting them to record their

mental state—you get one measure of how happy they are. If, however, you simply ask

them how satisfied they are with their lives generally, you often get a very different

measure. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls the first source of information “the

experiencing self” and the second “the remembering self.” And his justification for

partitioning the human mind in this way is that these two “selves” often disagree. Indeed,

they can be experimentally shown to disagree, even across a relatively brief span of time.

We saw this earlier with respect to Kahneman’s data on colonoscopies: because “the

remembering self” evaluates any experience by reference to its peak intensity and its final

moments (the “peak/end rule”), it is possible to improve its lot, at the expense of “the

experiencing self,” by simply prolonging an unpleasant procedure at its lowest level of

intensity (and thereby reducing the negativity of future memories).

What applies to colonoscopies seems to apply elsewhere in life. Imagine, for

instance, that you want to go on vacation: You are deciding between a trip to Hawaii and

a trip to Rome. On Hawaii, you envision yourself swimming in the ocean, relaxing on the

beach, playing tennis, and drinking mai tais. Rome will find you sitting in cafés, visiting

museums and ancient ruins, and drinking an impressive amount of wine. Which vacation

should you choose? It is quite possible that your “experiencing self” would be much

happier on Hawaii, as indicated by an hourly tally of your emotional and sensory

pleasure, while your remembering self would give a much more positive account of

Rome one year hence. Which self would be right? Does the question even make sense?

Kahneman observes that while most of us think our “experiencing self” must be more

important, it has no voice in our decisions about what to do in life. After all, we can’t

choose from among experiences; we must choose from among remembered (or imagined)

experiences. And, according to Kahneman, we don’t tend to think about the future as a

set of experiences; we think of it as a set of “anticipated memories.”

The problem, with

regard to both doing science and living one’s life, is that the “remembering self” is the

only one who can think and speak about the past. It is, therefore, the only one who can

consciously make decisions in light of past experience.

According to Kahneman, the correlation in well-being between these two “selves”

is around 0.5.

This is essentially the same correlation observed between identical twins,

or between a person and himself a decade later.

It would seem, therefore, that about half

the information about a person’s happiness is still left on the table whichever “self” we

consult. What are we to make of a “remembering self” who claims to have a wonderful

life, while his “experiencing self” suffers continuous marital stress, health complaints,

and career anxiety? And what of a person whose “remembering self” claims to be deeply

dissatisfied—having failed to reach his most important goals—but whose moment-to-

moment state of happiness is quite high? Kahneman seems to think that there is no way to

reconcile disparities of this sort. If true, this would appear to present a problem for any

science of morality.

It seems clear, however, that the “remembering self” is simply the “experiencing

self” in one of its modes. Imagine, for instance, that you are going about your day quite

happily, experiencing one moment of contentment after the next, when you run into an

old rival from school. Looking like the very incarnation of success, he asks what you

have made of yourself in the intervening decades. At this point your “remembering self”

steps forward and, feeling great chagrin, admits “not so much.” Let us say that this

encounter pitches you into a crisis of self-doubt that causes you to make some drastic

decisions, affecting both your family and career. All of these moments are part of the

fabric of your experience, however, whether recollected or not. Conscious memories and

self-evaluations are themselves experiences that lay the foundation for future

experiences. Making a conscious assessment of your life, career, or marriage feels a

certain way in the present and leads to subsequent thoughts and behaviors. These changes

will also feel a certain way and have further implications for your future. But none of

these events occur outside the continuum of your experience in the present moment (i.e.,

the “experiencing self”).

If we could take the 2.5 billion seconds that make up the average human life and

assess a person’s well-being at each point in time, the distinction between the

“experiencing self” and the “remembering self” would disappear. Yes, the experience of

recalling the past often determines what we decide to do in the future—and this greatly

affects the character of one’s future experience. But it would still be true to say that in

each of the 2.5 billion seconds of an average life, certain moments were pleasant, and

others were painful; some were later recalled with greater or lesser fidelity, and these

memories had whatever effects they had later on. Consciousness and its ever-changing

contents remain the only subjective reality.

Thus, if your “remembering self” claims to have had a wonderful time in Rome,

while your “experiencing self” felt only boredom, fatigue, and despair, then your

“remembering self” (i.e., your recollection of the trip) is simply wrong about what it was

like to be you in Rome. This becomes increasingly obvious the more we narrow our

focus: Imagine a “remembering self” who thinks that you were especially happy while

sitting for fifteen minutes on the Spanish Steps; while your “experiencing self” was, in

fact, plunged deeper into misery for every one of those minutes than at any other point on

the trip. Do we need two selves to account for this disparity? No. The vagaries of

memory suffice.

As Kahneman admits, the vast majority of our experiences in life never get

recalled, and the time we spend actually remembering the past is comparatively brief.

Thus, the quality of most of our lives can be assessed only in terms of whatever fleeting

character it has as it occurs. But this includes the time we spend recalling the past. Amid

this flux, the moments in which we construct a larger story about our lives appear like

glints of sunlight on a dark river: they may seem special, but they are part of the current

all the same.

On Being Right or Wrong

It is clear that we face both practical and conceptual difficulties when seeking to

maximize human well-being. Consider, for instance, the tensions between freedom of

speech, the right to privacy, and the duty of every government to keep its citizens safe.

Each of these principles seems fundamental to a healthy society. The problem, however,

is that at their extremes, each is hostile to the other two. Certain forms of speech painfully

violate people’s privacy and can even put society itself in danger. Should I be able to film

my neighbor through his bedroom window and upload this footage onto YouTube as a

work of “journalism”? Should I be free to publish a detailed recipe for synthesizing

smallpox? Clearly, appropriate limits to free expression exist. Likewise, too much respect

for privacy would make it impossible to gather the news or to prosecute criminals and

terrorists. And too zealous a commitment to protecting innocent people can lead to

unbearable violations of both privacy and freedom of expression. How should we balance

our commitment to these various goods?

We may never be able to answer this question with absolute precision. It seems

quite clear, however, that questions like this have answers. Even if there are a thousand

different ways to optimally tune these three variables, given concomitant changes in the

rest of culture, there must be many more ways that are less than optimal—and people will

suffer as a result.

What would it mean for a couple to decide that they should have a child? It

probably means they think that their own well-being will tend to increase for having

brought another person into the world; it should also mean that they expect their child to

have a life that is, on balance, worth living. If they didn’t expect these things, it’s hard to

see why they would want to have a child in the first place.

However, most of the research done on happiness suggests that people actually

become less happy when they have children and do not begin to approach their prior level

of happiness until their children leave home.

Let us say that you are aware of this

research but imagine that you will be an exception. Of course, another body of research

shows that most people think that they are exceptions to rules of this sort: there is almost

nothing more common than the belief that one is above average in intelligence, wisdom,

honesty, etc. But you are aware of this research as well, and it does not faze you. Perhaps,

in your case, all relevant exceptions are true, and you will be precisely as happy a parent

as you hope to be. However, a famous study of human achievement suggests that one of

the most reliable ways to diminish a person’s contributions to society is for that person to

start a family.

How would you view your decision to have a child if you knew that all

the time you spent changing diapers and playing with Legos would prevent you from

developing the cure for Alzheimer’s disease that was actually within your reach?

These are not empty questions. But neither are they the sorts of questions that

anyone is likely to answer. The decision to have a child may always be made in the

context of reasonable (and not so reasonable) expectations about the future well-being of

all concerned. It seems to me that thinking in this way is, nevertheless, to contemplate the

moral landscape.

If we are not able to perfectly reconcile the tension between personal and

collective well-being, there is still no reason to think that they are generally in conflict.

Most boats will surely rise with the same tide. It is not at all difficult to envision the

global changes that would improve life for everyone: We would all be better off in a

world where we devoted fewer of our resources to preparing to kill one another. Finding

clean sources of energy, cures for disease, improvements in agriculture, and new ways to

facilitate human cooperation are general goals that are obviously worth striving for. What

does such a claim mean? It means that we have every reason to believe that the pursuit of

such goals will lead upward on the slopes of the moral landscape.

The claim that science could have something important to say about values

(because values relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures) is an

argument made on first principles. As such, it doesn’t rest on any specific empirical

results. That does not mean that this claim couldn’t be falsified, however. Clearly, if there

is a more important source of value that has nothing to do with the well-being of

conscious creatures (in this life or a life to come), my thesis would be disproved. As I

have said, however, I cannot conceive of what such a source of value could be: for if

someone claimed to have found it somewhere, it could be of no possible interest to

anyone, by definition.

There are other ways that my thesis could be falsified, however. There would be

no future science of morality, for instance, if human well-being were completely

haphazard and unrelated to states of the brain. If some people are made happiest by brain

state X, while others are made miserable by it, there would be no neural correlate of

human well-being. Alternately, a neural correlate of human well-being might exist, but it

could be invoked to the same degree by antithetical states of the world. In this case, there

would be no connection between a person’s inner life and his or her outer circumstances.

If either of these scenarios were true, we could not make any general claims about human

flourishing. However, if this is the way the world works, the brain would seem to be little

more than insulation for the skull, and the entire field of neuroscience would constitute an

elaborate and very costly method of misunderstanding the world. Again, this is an

intelligible claim, but that does not mean that intelligent people should take it seriously.

It is also conceivable that a science of human flourishing could be possible, and

yet people could be made equally happy by very different “moral” impulses. Perhaps

there is no connection between being good and feeling good—and, therefore, no

connection between moral behavior (as generally conceived) and subjective well-being.

In this case, rapists, liars, and thieves would experience the same depth of happiness as

the saints. This scenario stands the greatest chance of being true, while still seeming quite

far-fetched. Neuroimaging work already suggests what has long been obvious through

introspection: human cooperation is rewarding.

However, if evil turned out to be as

reliable a path to happiness as goodness is, my argument about the moral landscape

would still stand, as would the likely utility of neuroscience for investigating it. It would

no longer be an especially “moral” landscape; rather it would be a continuum of well-

being, upon which saints and sinners would occupy equivalent peaks.

Worries of this kind seem to ignore some very obvious facts about human beings:

we have all evolved from common ancestors and are, therefore, far more similar than we

are different; brains and primary human emotions clearly transcend culture, and they are

unquestionably influenced by states of the world (as anyone who has ever stubbed his toe

can attest). No one, to my knowledge, believes that there is so much variance in the

requisites of human well-being as to make the above concerns seem plausible.

Whether morality becomes a proper branch of science is not really the point. Is

economics a true science yet? Judging from recent events, it wouldn’t appear so. Perhaps

a deep understanding of economics will always elude us. But does anyone doubt that

there are better and worse ways to structure an economy? Would any educated person

consider it a form of bigotry to criticize another society’s response to a banking crisis?

Imagine how terrifying it would be if great numbers of smart people became convinced

that all efforts to prevent a global financial catastrophe must be either equally valid or

equally nonsensical in principle. And yet this is precisely where we stand on the most

important questions in human life.

Currently, most scientists believe that answers to questions of human value will

fall perpetually beyond our reach—not because human subjectivity is too difficult to

study, or the brain too complex, but because there is no intellectual justification for

speaking about right and wrong, or good and evil, across cultures. Many people also

believe that nothing much depends on whether we find a universal foundation for

morality. It seems to me, however, that in order to fulfill our deepest interests in this life,

both personally and collectively, we must first admit that some interests are more

defensible than others. Indeed, some interests are so compelling that they need no defense

at all.

This book was written in the hope that as science develops, we will recognize its

application to the most pressing questions of human existence. For nearly a century, the

moral relativism of science has given faith-based religion—that great engine of ignorance

and bigotry—a nearly uncontested claim to being the only universal framework for moral

wisdom. As a result, the most powerful societies on earth spend their time debating issues

like gay marriage when they should be focused on problems like nuclear proliferation,

genocide, energy security, climate change, poverty, and failing schools. Granted, the

practical effects of thinking in terms of a moral landscape cannot be our only reason for

doing so—we must form our beliefs about reality based on what we think is actually true.

But few people seem to recognize the dangers posed by thinking that there are no true

answers to moral questions.

If our well-being depends upon the interaction between events in our brains and

events in the world, and there are better and worse ways to secure it, then some cultures

will tend to produce lives that are more worth living than others; some political

persuasions will be more enlightened than others; and some world views will be mistaken

in ways that cause needless human misery. Whether or not we ever understand meaning,

morality, and values in practice, I have attempted to show that there must be something to

know about them in principle. And I am convinced that merely admitting this will

transform the way we think about human happiness and the public good.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Moral Landscape is based, in part, on the dissertation I wrote for my PhD in

neuroscience at the University of California, Los Angeles. Consequently, the book has

benefited greatly from the vetting that this first manuscript received from my thesis

committee. I am extremely grateful to Mark Cohen, Marco Iacoboni, Eran Zaidel, and

Jerome (“Pete”) Engel for their guidance and support—sustained, as it was, over many

years during which the progress of my scientific research was difficult to discern. Each

saved me from myself on several occasions—and, with unnerving frequency, from one

another.

I am especially indebted to Mark Cohen, my dissertation advisor. Mark is an

uncommonly gifted teacher and a model of caution in reporting scientific results. If our

academic interests did not always coincide, I was surely the poorer for it. I would also

like to thank Mark’s wife and colleague, Susan Bookheimer: I always profited from

Susan’s advice—delivered, in my case, with the compassionate urgency of a mother

rescuing a child from a busy intersection. I am also grateful to Suzie Vader, the smiling

face of the Interdepartmental PhD Program for Neuroscience at UCLA, for providing

generous encouragement and assistance over many years.

Sections of this book are based on two published papers: chapter 3 contains a

discussion of Harris, S., Sheth, S. A., and Cohen, M. S. (2008), Functional neuroimaging

of belief, disbelief, and uncertainty, Annals of Neurology, 63 (2), 141–147; part of

chapter 4 is drawn from Harris, S., Kaplan, J. T., Curiel, A., Bookheimer, S. Y., Iacoboni,

M., Cohen, M. S. (2009), The neural correlates of religious and nonreligious belief, PLoS

ONE4 (10). I gratefully acknowledge my coauthors on these works as well as their

original publishers. I would especially like to thank Jonas T. Kaplan, now at the Brain

and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, for partnering with me

on the second paper. This study was a joint effort at every stage, and Jonas’s involvement

was essential to its completion.

In addition to my dissertation committee at UCLA, several outside scholars and

scientists reviewed early drafts of this book. Paul Churchland, Daniel Dennett, Owen

Flanagan, and Steven Pinker read the text, in whole or in part, and offered extremely

helpful notes. A few sections contain cannibalized versions of essays that were first read

by a larger circle of scientists and writers: including Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins,

Daniel Dennett, Owen Flanagan, Anthony Grayling, Christopher Hitchens, and Steven

Pinker. I am pleased to notice that with friends like these, it has become increasingly

difficult to say something stupid. (Still, one does what one can.) It is an honor to be so

deeply in their debt.

My editor at the Free Press, Hilary Redmon, greatly improved The Moral

Landscape at every level, through several stages of revision. It was simply a joy to work

with her. My agents, John Brockman, Katinka Matson, and Max Brockman, were

extremely helpful in refining my initial conception of the book and in placing it with the

right publisher. Of course, JB, as his friends, colleagues, and clients well know, is much

more than an agent: he has become the world’s preeminent wrangler of scientific opinion.

We are all richer for his efforts to bring scientists and public intellectuals together

through his Edge Foundation to discuss the most interesting questions of our time.

I have been greatly supported in all things by my family and friends—especially

by my mother, who has always been a most extraordinary friend. She read the manuscript

of The Moral Landscape more than once and offered extremely valuable notes and

copyedits.

My wife, Annaka Harris, has continued to help me professionally on all fronts—

editing my books, essays, and public talks, and helping to run our nonprofit foundation. If

her abundant talent is not evident in every sentence I produce, it is because I remain a

hard case. Annaka has also raised our daughter, Emma, while I’ve worked, and herein

lies the largest debt of all: much of the time I spent researching and writing The Moral

Landscape belonged to “my girls.”

NOTES

Introduction: The Moral Landscape

1. Bilefsky, 2008; Mortimer & Toader, 2005.

2. For the purposes of this discussion, I do not intend to make a hard distinction

between “science” and other intellectual contexts in which we discuss “facts”—e.g.,

history. For instance, it is a fact that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Facts of this kind

fall within the context of “science,” broadly construed as our best effort to form a rational

account of empirical reality. Granted, one doesn’t generally think of events like

assassinations as “scientific” facts, but the murder of President Kennedy is as fully

corroborated a fact as can be found anywhere, and it would betray a profoundly

unscientific frame of mind to deny that it occurred. I think “science,” therefore, should be

considered a specialized branch of a larger effort to form true beliefs about events in our

world.

3. This is not to deny that cultural conceptions of health can play an important

role in determining a person’s experience of illness (more so with some illnesses than

others). There is evidence that American notions of mental health have begun to

negatively affect the way people in other cultures suffer (Waters, 2010). It has even been

argued that, with a condition like schizophrenia, notions of spirit possession are palliative

when compared to beliefs about organic brain disease. My point, however, is that

whatever contributions cultural differences make to our experience of the world can

themselves be understood, in principle, at the level of the brain.

4. Pollard Sacks, 2009.

5. In the interests of both simplicity and relevance, I tend to keep my references to

religion focused on Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Of course, most of what I say about

these faiths applies to Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and to other religions as well.

6. There are many reasons to be pessimistic about the future of Europe: Ye’or,

2005; Bawer, 2006; Caldwell, 2009.

7. Gould, 1997.

8. Nature 432, 657 (2004).

9. I am not the first person to argue that morality can and should be integrated

with our scientific understanding of the natural world. Of late, the philosophers William

Casebeer and Owen Flanagan have each built similar cases (Casebeer, 2003; Flanagan,

2007). Both Casebeer and Flanagan have resurrected Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia,

which is generally translated as “flourishing,” “fulfillment,” or “well-being.” While I rely

heavily on these English equivalents, I have elected not to pay any attention to Aristotle.

While much of what Aristotle wrote in his Nichomachean Ethics is of great interest and

convergent with the case I wish to make, some of it isn’t. And I’d rather not be beholden

to the quirks of the great man’s philosophy. Both Casebeer and Flanagan also seem to

place greater emphasis on morality as a skill and a form of practical knowledge, arguing

that living a good life is more a matter of “knowing how” than of “knowing that.” While I

think this distinction is often useful, I’m not eager to give up the fight for moral truth just

yet. For instance, I believe that the compulsory veiling of women in Afghanistan tends to

needlessly immiserate them and will breed a new generation of misogynistic, puritanical

men. This is an instance of “knowing that,” and it is a truth claim about which I am either

right or wrong. I am confident that both Casebeer and Flanagan would agree. The

difference in our approaches, therefore, seems to me to be more a matter of emphasis. In

any case, both Casebeer and Flanagan go into greater philosophical detail than I have on

many points, and both their books are well worth reading. Flanagan also offered very

helpful notes on an early draft of this book.

10. E. O. Wilson, 1998.

11. Keverne & Curley, 2004; Pedersen, Ascher, Monroe, & Prange, 1982;

Smeltzer, Curtis, Aragona, & Wang, 2006; Young & Wang, 2004.

12. Fries, Ziegler, Kurian, Jacoris, & Pollak, 2005.

13. Hume’s argument was actually directed against religious apologists who

sought to deduce morality from the existence of God. Ironically, his reasoning has since

become one of the primary impediments to linking morality to the rest of human

knowledge. However, Hume’s is/ought distinction has always had its detractors (e.g.,

Searle, 1964); here is Dennett:

If “ought” cannot be derived from “is,” just what can it be derived from?… ethics

must be somehow based on an appreciation of human nature—on a sense of what a

human being is or might be, and on what a human being might want to have or want to

be. If that is naturalism, then naturalism is no fallacy (Dennett, p. 468).

14. Moore [1903], 2004.

15. Popper, 2002, pp. 60–62.

16. The list of scientists who have followed Hume and Moore with perfect

obedience is very long and defies citation. For a recent example within neuroscience, see

Edelman (2006, pp. 84–91).

17. Fodor, 2007.

18. I recently had the pleasure of hearing the philosopher Patricia Churchland

draw this same analogy. (Patricia, I did not steal it!)

19. De Grey & Rae, 2007.

20. The problem with using a strictly hedonic measure of the “good” grows more

obvious once we consider some of the promises and perils of a maturing neuroscience. If,

for instance, we can one day manipulate the brain so as to render specific behaviors and

states of mind more pleasurable than they now are, it seems relevant to wonder whether

such refinements would be “good.” It might be good to make compassion more

rewarding than sexual lust, but would it be good to make hatred the most pleasurable

emotion of all? One can’t appeal to pleasure as the measure of goodness in such cases,

because pleasure is what we would be choosing to reassign.

21. Pinker, 2002, pp. 53–54.

22. It should be clear that the conventional distinction between “belief” and

“knowledge” does not apply here. As will be made clear in chapter 3, our propositional

knowledge about the world is entirely a matter of “belief” in the above sense. Whether

one chooses to say that one “believes” X or that one “knows” X is merely a difference of

emphasis, expressing one’s degree of confidence. As discussed in this book, propositional

knowledge is a form of belief. Understanding belief at the level of the brain has been the

focus of my recent scientific research, using functional magnetic resonance imaging

(fMRI) (S. Harris et al., 2009; S. Harris, Sheth, & Cohen, 2008).

23. Edgerton, 1992.

24. Cited in Edgerton, 1992, p. 26.

25. Though perhaps even this attributes too much common sense to the field of

anthropology, as Edgerton (1992, p. 105) tells us: “A prevailing assumption among

anthropologists who study the medical practices of small, traditional societies is that

these populations enjoy good health and nutrition … Indeed, we are often told that

seemingly irrational food taboos, once fully understood, will prove to be adaptive.”

26. Leher, 2010.

27. Filkins, 2010.

28. For an especially damning look at the Bush administration’s Council on

Bioethics, see Steven Pinker’s response to its 555-page report, Human Dignity and

Bioethics (Pinker, 2008a).

29. S. Harris, 2004, 2006a, 2006b; S. Harris, 2006c; S. Harris, 2007a, 2007b.

30. Judson, 2008; Chris Mooney, 2005.

Chapter 1: Moral Truth

1. In February of 2010, I spoke at the TED conference about how we might one

day understand morality in universal, scientific terms (

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hj9oB4zpHww). Normally, when one speaks at a

conference the resulting feedback amounts to a few conversations in the lobby during a

coffee break. As luck would have it, however, my TED talk was broadcast on the internet

as I was in the final stages of writing this book, and this produced a blizzard of useful

commentary.

Many of my critics fault me for not engaging more directly with the academic

literature on moral philosophy. There are two reasons why I haven’t done this: First,

while I have read a fair amount of this literature, I did not arrive at my position on the

relationship between human values and the rest of human knowledge by reading the work

of moral philosophers; I came to it by considering the logical implications of our making

continued progress in the sciences of mind. Second, I am convinced that every

appearance of terms like “metaethics,” “deontology,” “noncognitivism,” “antirealism,”

“emotivism,” etc., directly increases the amount of boredom in the universe. My goal,

both in speaking at conferences like TED and in writing this book, is to start a

conversation that a wider audience can engage with and find helpful. Few things would

make this goal harder to achieve than for me to speak and write like an academic

philosopher. Of course, some discussion of philosophy will be unavoidable, but my

approach is to generally make an end run around many of the views and conceptual

distinctions that make academic discussions of human values so inaccessible. While this

is guaranteed to annoy a few people, the professional philosophers I’ve consulted seem to

understand and support what I am doing.

2. Given my experience as a critic of religion, I must say that it has been quite

disconcerting to see the caricature of the overeducated, atheistic moral nihilist regularly

appearing in my inbox and on the blogs. I sincerely hope that people like Rick Warren

have not been paying attention.

3. Searle, 1995, p. 8.

4. There has been much confusion on this point, and most of it is still influential

in philosophical circles. Consider the following from J. L. Mackie:

If there were objective values, then they would be entities or qualities or relations

of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe.

Correspondingly, if we were aware of them, it would have to be by some special faculty

of moral perception or intuition, utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing

everything else (Mackie 1977, p. 38).

Clearly, Mackie has conflated the two senses of the term “objective.” We need

not discuss “entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from

anything else in the universe” in order to speak about moral truth. We need only admit

that the experiences of conscious creatures are lawfully dependent upon states of the

universe—and, therefore, that actions can cause more harm than good, more good than

harm, or be morally neutral. Good and evil need only consist in this, and it makes no

sense whatsoever to claim that an action that harms everyone affected by it (even its

perpetrator) might still be “good.” We do not require a metaphysical repository of right

and wrong, or actions that are mysteriously right or wrong in themselves, for there to be

right and wrong answers to moral questions; we simply need a landscape of possible

experiences that can be traversed in some orderly way in light of how the universe

actually is. The main criterion, therefore, is that misery and well-being not be completely

random. It seems to me that we already know that they are not—and, therefore, that it is

possible for a person to be right or wrong about how to move from one state to the other.

5. Is it always wrong to slice open a child’s belly with a knife? No. One might be

performing an emergency appendectomy.

6. One could respond by saying that scientists agree about science more than

ordinary people agree about morality (I’m not sure this is true). But this is an empty

claim, for at least two reasons: (1) it is circular, because anyone who insufficiently agrees

with the majority opinion in any domain of science won’t count as a “scientist” (so the

definition of scientist is question begging); (2) Scientists are an elite group, by definition.

“Moral experts” would also constitute an elite group, and the existence of such experts is

completely in line with my argument.

7. Obvious exceptions include “socially constructed” phenomena that require

some degree of consensus to be made real. The paper in my pocket really is “money”—

but it is only money because a sufficient number of people are willing to treat it as such

(see Searle, 1995).

8. Practically speaking, I think we have some very useful intuitions on this front.

We care more about creatures that can experience a greater range of suffering and

happiness—and we are right to, because suffering and happiness (defined in the widest

possible sense) are all that can be cared about. Are all animal lives equivalent? No. Do

monkeys suffer more than mice from medical experiments? If so, all other things being

equal, it is worse to run experiments on monkeys than on mice.

Are all human lives equivalent? No. I have no problem admitting that certain

people’s lives are more valuable than mine (I need only imagine a person whose death

would create much greater suffering and prevent much greater happiness). However, it

also seems quite rational for us to collectively act as though all human lives were equally

valuable. Hence, most of our laws and social institutions generally ignore differences

between people. I suspect that this is a very good thing. Of course, I could be wrong

about this—and that is precisely the point. If we didn’t behave this way, our world would

be different, and these differences would either affect the totality of human well-being, or

they wouldn’t. Once again, there are answers to such questions, whether we can ever

answer them in practice.

9. At bottom, this is purely a semantic point: I am claiming that whatever answer

a person gives to the question “Why is religion important?” can be framed in terms of a

concern about someone’s well-being (whether misplaced or not).

10. I do not think that the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant represents an

exception either. Kant’s categorical imperative only qualifies as a rational standard of

morality given the assumption that it will be generally beneficial (as J. S. Mill pointed out

at the beginning of Utilitarianism). One could argue, therefore, that what is serviceable in

Kant’s moral philosophy amounts to a covert form of consequentialism. I offer a few

more remarks about Kant’s categorical imperative below.

11. For instance, many people assume that an emphasis on human “well-being”

would lead us to do terrible things like reinstate slavery, harvest the organs of the poor,

periodically nuke the developing world, or nurture our children on a continuous drip of

heroin. Such expectations are the result of not thinking about these issues seriously.

There are rather clear reasons not to do these things—all of which relate to the immensity

of suffering that such actions would cause and the possibilities of deeper happiness that

they would foreclose. Does anyone really believe that the highest possible state of human

flourishing is compatible with slavery, organ theft, and genocide?

12. Are there trade-offs and exceptions? Of course. There may be circumstances

in which the very survival of a community requires that certain of these principles be

violated. But this doesn’t mean that they aren’t generally conducive to human well-being.

13. Stewart, 2008.

14. I confess that, as a critic of religion, I have paid too little attention to the

sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. Frankly, it felt somehow unsportsmanlike to

shoot so large and languorous a fish in so tiny a barrel. This scandal was one of the most

spectacular “own goals” in the history of religion, and there seemed to be no need to

deride faith at its most vulnerable and self-abased. Even in retrospect, it is easy to

understand the impulse to avert one’s eyes: Just imagine a pious mother and father

sending their beloved child to the Church of a Thousand Hands for spiritual instruction,

only to have him raped and terrified into silence by threats of hell. And then imagine this

occurring to tens of thousands of children in our own time—and to children beyond

reckoning for over a thousand years. The spectacle of faith so utterly misplaced, and so

fully betrayed, is simply too depressing to think about.

But there was always more to this phenomenon that should have compelled my

attention. Consider the ludicrous ideology that made it possible: the Catholic Church has

spent two millennia demonizing human sexuality to a degree unmatched by any other

institution, declaring the most basic, healthy, mature, and consensual behaviors taboo.

Indeed, this organization still opposes the use of contraception: preferring, instead, that

the poorest people on earth be blessed with the largest families and the shortest lives. As

a consequence of this hallowed and incorrigible stupidity, the Church has condemned

generations of decent people to shame and hypocrisy—or to Neolithic fecundity, poverty,

and death by AIDS. Add to this inhumanity the artifice of cloistered celibacy, and you

now have an institution—one of the wealthiest on earth—that preferentially attracts

pederasts, pedophiles, and sexual sadists into its ranks, promotes them to positions of

authority, and grants them privileged access to children. Finally, consider that vast

numbers of children will be born out of wedlock, and their unwed mothers vilified,

wherever Church teaching holds sway—leading boys and girls by the thousands to be

abandoned to Church-run orphanages only to be raped and terrorized by the clergy. Here,

in this ghoulish machinery set to whirling through the ages by the opposing winds of

shame and sadism, we mortals can finally glimpse how strangely perfect are the ways of

the Lord.

In 2009, the Irish Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (CICA) investigated

such of these events as occurred on Irish soil. Their report runs to 2,600 pages

(www.childabusecommission.com/rpt/). Having read only an oppressive fraction of this

document, I can say that when thinking about the ecclesiastical abuse of children, it is

best not to imagine shades of ancient Athens and the blandishments of a “love that dare

not speak its name.” Yes, there have surely been polite pederasts in the priesthood,

expressing anguished affection for boys who would turn eighteen the next morning. But

behind these indiscretions there is a continuum of abuse that terminates in absolute evil.

The scandal in the Catholic Church—one might now safely say the scandal that is the

Catholic Church—includes the systematic rape and torture of orphaned and disabled

children. Its victims attest to being whipped with belts and sodomized until bloody—

sometimes by multiple attackers—and then whipped again and threatened with death and

hellfire if they breathed a word about their abuse. And yes, many of the children who

were desperate or courageous enough to report these crimes were accused of lying and

returned to their tormentors to be raped and tortured again.

The evidence suggests that the misery of these children was facilitated and

concealed by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church at every level, up to and including the

prefrontal cortex of the current pope. In his former capacity as Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope

Benedict personally oversaw the Vatican’s response to reports of sexual abuse in the

Church. What did this wise and compassionate man do upon learning that his employees

were raping children by the thousands? Did he immediately alert the police and ensure

that the victims would be protected from further torments? One still dares to imagine

such an effulgence of basic human sanity might have been possible, even within the

Church. On the contrary, repeated and increasingly desperate complaints of abuse were

set aside, witnesses were pressured into silence, bishops were praised for their defiance of

secular authority, and offending priests were relocated only to destroy fresh lives in

unsuspecting parishes. It is no exaggeration to say that for decades (if not centuries) the

Vatican has met the formal definition of a criminal organization devoted—not to

gambling, prostitution, drugs, or any other venial sin—but to the sexual enslavement of

children. Consider the following passages from the CICA report:

7.129 In relation to one School, four witnesses gave detailed accounts of sexual

abuse, including rape in all instances, by two or more Brothers and on one occasion along

with an older resident. A witness from the second School, from which there were several

reports, described being raped by three Brothers: “I was brought to the infirmary … they

held me over the bed, they were animals. … They penetrated me, I was bleeding.”

Another witness reported he was abused twice weekly on particular days by two Brothers

in the toilets off the dormitory:

One Brother kept watch while the other abused me … [sexually]… then they

changed over. Every time it ended with a severe beating. When I told the priest in

Confession, he called me a liar. I never spoke about it again.

I would have to go into his … [Br X’s] … room every time he wanted. You’d get a

hiding if you didn’t, and he’d make me do it … [masturbate] … to him. One night I didn’t

… [masturbate him] … and there was another Brother there who held me down and they

hit me with a hurley and they burst my fingers … [displayed scar] .…

7.232 Witnesses reported being particularly fearful at night as they listened to

residents screaming in cloakrooms, dormitories or in a staff member’s bedroom while

they were being abused. Witnesses were conscious that co-residents whom they described

as orphans had a particularly difficult time:

The orphan children, they had it bad. I knew … [who they were] … by the size of

them, I’d ask them and they’d say they come from … named institution. … They were

there from an early age. You’d hear the screams from the room where Br … X … would

be abusing them.

There was one night, I wasn’t long there and I seen one of the Brothers on the bed

with one of the young boys … and I heard the young lad screaming crying and Br … X …

said to me “if you don’t mind your own business you’ll get the same.”… I heard kids

screaming and you know they are getting abused and that’s a nightmare in anybody’s

mind. You are going to try and break out. … So there was no way I was going to let that

happen to me … I remember one boy and he was bleeding from the back passage and I

made up my mind, there was no way it … [anal rape] … was going to happen to me. …

That used to play on my mind.

This is the kind of abuse that the Church has practiced and concealed since time

out of memory. Even the CICA report declined to name the offending priests.

I have been awakened from my unconscionable slumber on this issue by recent

press reports (Goodstein and Callender, 2010; Goodstein, 2010a, 2010b; Donadio, 2010a,

2010b; Wakin and McKinley Jr., 2010), and especially by the eloquence of my

colleagues Christopher Hitchens (2010a, 2010b, 2010c, and 2010d), and Richard

Dawkins (2010a, 2010b).

15. The Church even excommunicated the girl’s mother (

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7930380.stm).

16. The philosopher Hilary Putnam (2007) has argued that facts and values are

“entangled.” Scientific judgments presuppose “epistemic values”—coherence, simplicity,

beauty, parsimony, etc. Putnam has pointed out, as I do here, that all the arguments

against the existence of moral truth could be applied to scientific truth without any

change.

17. Many people find the idea of “moral experts” abhorrent. Indeed, this

ramification of my argument has been called “positively Orwellian” and a “recipe for

fascism.” Again, these concerns seem to arise from an uncanny reluctance to think about

what the concept of “well-being” actually entails or how science might shed light on its

causes and conditions. The analogy with health seems important to keep in view: Is there

anything “Orwellian” about the scientific consensus on the link between smoking and

lung cancer? Has the medical community’s insistence that people should not smoke led to

“fascism”? Many people’s reflexive response to the notion of moral expertise is to say, “I

don’t want anyone telling me how to live my life.” To which I can only respond, “If there

were a way for you and those you care about to be much happier than you now are,

would you want to know about it?”

18. This is the subject of that now infamous quotation from Albert Einstein,

endlessly recycled by religious apologists, claiming that “science without religion is

lame, religion without science is blind.” Far from indicating his belief in God, or his

respect for unjustified belief, Einstein was speaking about the primitive urge to

understand the universe, along with the “faith” that such understanding is possible:

Though religion may be that which determines the goal, it has, nevertheless,

learned from science, in the broadest sense, what means will contribute to the attainment

of the goals it has set up. But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly

imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling,

however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the

possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is,

comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound

faith. This situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame,

religion without science is blind (Einstein, 1954, p. 49).

19. These impasses are seldom as insurmountable as skeptics imagine. For

instance, Creationist “scientists” can be led to see that the very standards of reasoning

they use to vindicate scripture in light of empirical data also reveal hundreds of

inconsistencies within scripture—thereby undermining their entire project. The same is

true for moral impasses: those who claim to get their morality from God, without

reference to any terrestrial concerns, are often susceptible to such concerns in the end. In

an extreme case, the New York Times correspondent Thomas Friedman once reported

meeting a Sunni militant who had begun fighting alongside the American military against

al-Qaeda in Iraq, having been persuaded that the infidel troops were the lesser of two

evils. What convinced him? He witnessed a member of al-Qaeda decapitate an eight-

year-old girl (Friedman, 2007). It would seem, therefore, that the boundary between the

crazy values of Islam and the utterly crazy can be discerned when drawn in the spilled

blood of little girls. This is a basis for hope, of sorts.

In fact, I think that morality will be on firmer ground than any other branch of

science in the end, since scientific knowledge is only valuable because it contributes to

our well-being. Of course, we must include among these contributions the claims of

people who say that they value knowledge “for its own sake”—for they are merely

describing the mental pleasure that comes with understanding the world, solving

problems, etc. It is clear that well-being must take precedence over knowledge, because

we can easily imagine situations in which it would be better not to know the truth, or

when false knowledge would be desirable. No doubt, there are circumstances in which

religious delusion functions in this way: where, for instance, soldiers are vastly

outnumbered on the battlefield but, being ignorant of the odds against them and

convinced that God is on their side, they manage to draw on emotional resources that

would be unavailable to people with complete information and fully justified beliefs.

However, the fact that a combination of ignorance and false knowledge can occasionally

be helpful is no argument for the general utility of religious faith (much less for its truth).

Indeed, the great weakness of religion, apart from the obvious implausibility of its

doctrines, is that the cost of holding irrational and divisive beliefs on a global scale is

extraordinarily high.

20. The physicist Sean Carroll finds Hume’s analysis of facts and values so

compelling that he elevates it to the status of mathematical truth:

Attempts to derive ought from is are like attempts to reach an odd number by

adding together even numbers. If someone claims that they’ve done it, you don’t have to

check their math; you know that they’ve made a mistake (Carroll, 2010a).

21. This spurious notion of “ought” can be introduced into any enterprise and

seem to plant a fatal seed of doubt. Asking why we “ought” to value well-being makes

even less sense than asking why we “ought” to be rational or scientific. And while it is

possible to say that one can’t move from “is” to “ought,” we should be honest about how

we get to “is” in the first place. Scientific “is” statements rest on implicit “oughts” all the

way down. When I say, “Water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen,” I have

uttered a quintessential statement of scientific fact. But what if someone doubts this

statement? I can appeal to data from chemistry, describing the outcome of simple

experiments. But in so doing, I implicitly appeal to the values of empiricism and logic.

What if my interlocutor doesn’t share these values? What can I say then? As it turns out,

this is the wrong question. The right question is, why should we care what such a person

thinks about chemistry?

So it is with the linkage between morality and well-being: To say that morality is

arbitrary (or culturally constructed, or merely personal) because we must first assume that

the well-being of conscious creatures is good, is like saying that science is arbitrary (or

culturally constructed, or merely personal) because we must first assume that a rational

understanding of the universe is good. Yes, both endeavors rest on assumptions (and, as I

have said, I think the former will prove to be more firmly grounded), but this is not a

problem. No framework of knowledge can withstand utter skepticism, for none is

perfectly self-justifying. Without being able to stand entirely outside of a framework, one

is always open to the charge that the framework rests on nothing, that its axioms are

wrong, or that there are foundational questions it cannot answer. Occasionally some of

our basic assumptions do turn out to be wrong or limited in scope—e.g., the parallel

postulate of Euclidean geometry does not apply to geometry as a whole—but these errors

can be detected only by the light of other assumptions that stand firm.

Science and rationality generally are based on intuitions and concepts that cannot

be reduced or justified. Just try defining “causation” in noncircular terms. Or try

justifying transitivity in logic: if A = B and B = C, then A = C. A skeptic could say, “This

is nothing more than an assumption that we’ve built into the definition of ‘equality.’

Others will be free to define ‘equality’ differently.” Yes, they will. And we will be free to

call them “imbeciles.” Seen in this light, moral relativism—the view that the difference

between right and wrong has only local validity within a specific culture—should be no

more tempting than physical, biological, mathematical, or logical relativism. There are

better and worse ways to define our terms; there are more and less coherent ways to think

about reality; and there are—is there any doubt about this?—many ways to seek

fulfillment in this life and to not find it.

22. We can, therefore, let this metaphysical notion of “ought” fall away, and we

will be left with a scientific picture of cause and effect. To the degree that it is in our

power to produce the worst possible misery for everyone in this universe, we can say that

if we don’t want everyone to experience the worst possible misery, we shouldn’t do X.

Can we readily conceive of someone who might hold altogether different values and want

all conscious beings, himself included, reduced to the state of worst possible misery? I

don’t think so. And I don’t think we can intelligibly ask questions like, “What if the worst

possible misery for everyone is actually good?” Such questions seem analytically

confused. We can also pose questions like “What if the most perfect circle is really a

square?” or “What if all true statements are actually false?” But if someone persists in

speaking this way, I see no obligation to take his views seriously.

23. And even if minds were independent of the physical universe, we could still

speak about facts relative to their well-being. But we would be speaking about some

other basis for these facts (souls, disembodied consciousness, ectoplasm, etc.).

24. On a related point, the philosopher Russell Blackford wrote in response to my

TED talk, “I’ve never yet seen an argument that shows that psychopaths are necessarily

mistaken about some fact about the world. Moreover, I don’t see how the argument could

run.” While I discuss psychopathy in greater detail in the next chapter, here is such an

argument in brief: We already know that psychopaths have brain damage that prevents

them from having certain deeply satisfying experiences (like empathy) that seem good for

people both personally and collectively (in that they tend to increase well-being on both

counts). Psychopaths, therefore, don’t know what they are missing (but we do). The

position of a psychopath also cannot be generalized; it is not, therefore, an alternative

view of how human beings should live (this is one point Kant got right: even a

psychopath couldn’t want to live in a world filled with psychopaths). We should also

realize that the psychopath we are envisioning is a straw man: watch interviews with real

psychopaths, and you will find that they do not tend to claim to be in possession of an

alternative morality or to be living deeply fulfilling lives. These people are generally

ruled by compulsions that they don’t understand and cannot resist. It is absolutely clear

that, whatever they might believe about what they are doing, psychopaths are seeking

some form of well-being (excitement, ecstasy, feelings of power, etc.), but because of

their neurological and social deficits, they are doing a very bad job of it. We can say that

a psychopath like Ted Bundy takes satisfaction in the wrong things, because living a life

purposed toward raping and killing women does not allow for deeper and more

generalizable forms of human flourishing. Compare Bundy’s deficits to those of a

delusional physicist who finds meaningful patterns and mathematical significance in the

wrong places. The mathematician John Nash, while suffering the symptoms of his

schizophrenia, seems a good example: his “Eureka!” detectors were poorly calibrated; he

saw meaningful patterns where his peers would not—and these patterns were a very poor

guide to the proper goals of science (i.e., understanding the physical world). Is there any

doubt that Ted Bundy’s “Yes! I love this!” detectors were poorly coupled to the

possibilities of finding deep fulfillment in this life, or that his obsession with raping and

killing young women was a poor guide to the proper goals of morality (i.e., living a

fulfilling life with others)?

While people like Bundy may want some very weird things out of life, no one

wants utter, interminable misery. People with apparently different moral codes are still

seeking forms of well-being that we recognize—like freedom from pain, doubt, fear,

etc.—and their moral codes, however vigorously they might want to defend them, are

undermining their well-being in obvious ways. And if someone claims to want to be truly

miserable, we are free to treat them like someone who claims to believe that 2 + 2 = 5 or

that all events are self-caused. On the subject of morality, as on every other subject, some

people are not worth listening to.

25. From the White House press release: www.bioethics.gov/about/creation.html.

26. Oxytocin is a neuroactive hormone that appears to govern social recognition

in animals and the experience of trust (and its reciprocation) in humans (Zak, Kurzban, &

Matzner, 2005; Zak, Stanton, & Ahmadi, 2007).

27. Appiah, 2008, p. 41.

28. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has this to say on the subject of

moral relativism:

In 1947, on the occasion of the United Nations debate about universal human

rights, the American Anthropological Association issued a statement declaring that moral

values are relative to cultures and that there is no way of showing that the values of one

culture are better than those of another. Anthropologists have never been unanimous in

asserting this, and in recent years human rights advocacy on the part of some

anthropologists has mitigated the relativist orientation of the discipline. Nonetheless,

prominent contemporary anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz and Richard A. Shweder

continue to defend relativist positions. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-relativism/.

1947? Please note that this was the best the social scientists in the United States

could do with the crematoria of Auschwitz still smoking. My spoken and written

collisions with Richard Shweder, Scott Atran, Mel Konner, and other anthropologists

have convinced me that awareness of moral diversity does not entail, and is a poor

surrogate for, clear thinking about human well-being.

29. Pinker, 2002, p. 273.

30. Harding, 2001.

31. For a more complete demolition of feminist and multicultural critiques of

Western science, see P. R. Gross, 1991; P. R. Gross & Levitt, 1994.

32. Weinberg, 2001, p. 105.

33. Dennett, 1995.

34. Ibid., p. 487.

35. See, for instance, M. D. Hauser, 2006. Experiments show that even eight-

month-old infants want to see aggressors punished (Bloom, 2010).

36. www.gallup.com/poll/118378/Majority-Americans-Continue-Oppose-Gay-

Marriage.aspx.

37. There is now a separate field called “neuroethics,” formed by a confluence of

neuroscience and philosophy, which loosely focuses on matters of this sort. Neuroethics

is more than bioethics with respect to the brain (that is, it is more than an ethical

framework for the conduct of neuroscience): it encompasses our efforts to understand

ethics itself as a biological phenomenon. There is a quickly growing literature on

neuroethics (recent, book-length introductions can be found in Gazzaniga, 2005, and

Levy, 2007), and there are other neuroethical issues that are relevant to this discussion:

concerns about mental privacy, lie detection, and the other implications of an advancing

science of neuroimaging; personal responsibility in light of deterministic and random

processes in the brain (neither of which lend any credence to common notions of “free

will”); the ethics of emotional and cognitive enhancement; the implications of

understanding “spiritual” experience in physical terms; etc.

Chapter 2: Good and Evil

1. Consider, for instance, how much time and money we spend to secure our

homes, places of business, and cars against unwanted entry (and to have doors

professionally unlocked when keys are lost). Consider the cost of internet and credit card

security, and the time dissipated in the use and retrieval of passwords. When phone

service is interrupted for five minutes in a modern society the cost is measured in billions

of dollars. I think it safe to say that the costs of preventing theft are far higher. Add to the

expense of locking doors, the pains we take to prepare formal contracts—locks of another

sort—and the costs soar beyond all reckoning. Imagine a world that had no need for such

prophylactics against theft (admittedly, it is difficult). It would be a world of far greater

disposable wealth (measured in both time and money).

2. There are other ways of thinking about human cooperation, including politics

and law, but I take the normative claims of ethics to be foundational.

3. Hamilton, 1964a, 1964b.

4. McElreath & Boyd, 2007, p. 82.

5. Trivers, 1971.

6. G. F. Miller, 2007.

7. For a recent review that also looks at the phenomenon of indirect

reciprocity(i.e., A gives to B; and then B gives to C, or C gives to A, or both), see Nowak,

2005. For doubts about the sufficiency of kin selection and reciprocal altruism to account

for cooperation—especially among eusocial insects—see D. S. Wilson & Wilson, 2007;

E. O. Wilson, 2005.

8. Tomasello, 2007.

9. Smith, [1759] 1853, p. 3.

10. Ibid. pp. 192–193.

11. Benedict, 1934, p. 172.

12. Consequentialism has undergone many refinements since the original

utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. My discussion will ignore most

of these developments, as they are generally of interest only to academic philosophers.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides a good summary article (Sinnott-

Armstrong, 2006).

13. J. D. Greene, 2007; J. D. Greene, Nystrom, Engell, Darley, & Cohen, 2004; J.

D. Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen, 2001.

14. J. D. Greene, 2002, pp. 59–60.

15. Ibid., pp. 204–205.

16. Ibid., p. 264.

17. Let us briefly cover a few more philosophical bases: What would have to be

true for a practice like the forced veiling of women to be objectively wrong? Would this

practice have to cause unnecessary suffering in all possible worlds? No. It only need

cause unnecessary suffering in this world. Must it be analytically true that compulsory

veiling is immoral—that is, must the wrongness of the act be built into the meaning of the

word “veil”? No. Must it be true a priori—that is, must this practice be wrong

independent of human experience? No. The wrongness of the act very much depends on

human experience. It is wrong to force women and girls to wear burqas because it is

unpleasant and impractical to live fully veiled, because this practice perpetuates a view of

women as being the property of men, and because it keeps the men who enforce it

brutally obtuse to the possibility of real equality and communication between the sexes.

Hobbling half of the population also directly subtracts from the economic, social, and

intellectual wealth of a society. Given the challenges that face every society, this is a bad

practice in almost every case. Must compulsory veiling be ethically unacceptable without

exception in our world? No. We can easily imagine situations in which forcing one’s

daughter to wear a burqa could be perfectly moral—perhaps to escape the attention of

thuggish men while traveling in rural Afghanistan. Does this slide from brute, analytic, a

priori, and necessary truth to synthetic, a posteriori, contingent, exception-ridden truth

pose a problem for moral realism? Recall the analogy I drew between morality and chess.

Is it always wrong to surrender your Queen in a game of chess? No. But generally

speaking, it is a terrible idea. Even granting the existence of an uncountable number of

exceptions to this rule, there are still objectively good and objectively bad moves in every

game of chess. Are we in a position to say that the treatment of women in traditional

Muslim societies is generally bad? Absolutely we are. Should there be any doubt, I

recommend that readers consult Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s several fine books on the subject (A.

Hirsi Ali, 2006, 2007, 2010).

18. J. D. Greene, 2002, pp. 287–288.

19. The philosopher Richard Joyce (2006) has argued that the evolutionary origins

of moral beliefs undermine them in ways that the evolutionary origins of mathematical

and scientific beliefs do not. I do not find his reasoning convincing, however. For

instance, Joyce asserts that our mathematical and scientific intuitions could have been

selected for only by virtue of their accuracy, whereas our moral intuitions were selected

for based on an entirely different standard. In the case of arithmetic (which he takes as his

model), this may seem plausible. But science has progressed by violating many (if not

most) of our innate, proto-scientific intuitions about the nature of reality. By Joyce’s

reasoning, we should view these violations as a likely step away from the Truth.

20. Greene’s argument actually seems somewhat peculiar. Consequentialism is

not true, because there is simply too much diversity of opinion about morality; but he

seems to believe that most people will converge on consequentialist principles if given

enough time to reflect.

21. Faison, 1996.

22. Dennett, 1995, p. 498.

23. Churchland, 2008a.

24. Slovic, 2007.

25. This seems related to a more general finding in the reasoning literature, in

which people are often found to put more weight on a salient anecdote than on large-

sample statistics (Fong, Krantz, & Nisbett, 1986/07; Stanovich & West, 2000). It also

appears to be an especially perverse version of what Kahneman and Frederick call

“extension neglect” (Kahneman & Frederick, 2005): where our valuations reliably fail to

increase with the size of a problem. For instance, the value most people will place on

saving 2,000 lives will be less than twice as large as the value they will place on 1,000

lives. Slovic’s result, however, suggests that it could be less valuable (even if the larger

group contained the smaller). If ever there were a nonnormative result in moral

psychology, this is it.

26. There may be some exceptions to this principle: for instance, if you thought

that either child would suffer intolerably if the other died, you might believe that both

dying would be preferable than one dying. Whether such cases actually exist, they are

clearly exceptions to the general rule that negative consequences should be additive.

27. Does this sound crazy? Jane McGonigal designs games with such real-world

outcomes in mind: www.iftf.org/user/46.

28. Parfit, 1984.

29. While Parfit’s argument is rightfully celebrated, and Reasons and Persons is a

philosophical masterpiece, a very similar observation first appears in Rawls, [1971] 1999,

pp. 140–141.

30. For instance:

How Only France Survives. In one possible future, the worst-off people in the

world soon start to have lives that are well worth living. The quality of life in different

nations then continues to rise. Though each nation has its fair share of the world’s

resources, such things as climate and cultural traditions give to some nations a higher

quality of life. The best-off people, for many centuries, are the French.

In another possible future, a new infectious disease makes nearly everyone sterile.

French scientists produce just enough of an antidote for all of France’s population. All

other nations cease to exist. This has some bad effects on the quality of life for the

surviving French. Thus there is no new foreign art, literature, or technology that the

French can import. These and other bad effects outweigh any good effects. Throughout

this second possible future the French therefore have a quality of life that is slightly lower

than it would be in the first possible future (Parfit, ibid., p. 421).

31. P. Singer, 2009, p. 139.

32. Graham Holm, 2010.

33. Kahneman, 2003.

34. LaBoeuf & Shafir, 2005.

35. Tom, Fox, Trepel, & Poldrack, 2007. But as the authors note, this protocol

examined the brain’s appraisal of potential loss (i.e., decision utility) rather than

experienced losses, where other studies suggest that negative affect and associated

amygdala activity can be expected.

36. Pizarro and Uhlmann make a similar observation (D. A. Pizarro & Uhlmann,

2008).

37. Redelmeier, Katz, & Kahneman, 2003.

38. Schreiber & Kahneman, 2000.

39. Kahneman, 2003.

40. Rawls, [1971] 1999; Rawls & Kelly, 2001.

41. S. Harris, 2004, 2006a, 2006d.

42. He later refined his view, arguing that justice as fairness must be understood

as “a political conception of justice rather than as part of a comprehensive moral

doctrine” (Rawls & Kelly, 2001, p. xvi).

43. Rawls, [1971] 1999, p. 27.

44. Tabibnia, Satpute, & Lieberman, 2008.

45. It is not unreasonable, therefore, to expect people who are seeking to

maximize their well-being to also value fairness. Valuing fairness, they will tend to view

its breach as less than ethical—that is, as not being conducive to their collective well-

being. But what if they don’t? What if the laws of nature allow for different and

seemingly antithetical peaks on the moral landscape? What if there is a possible world in

which the Golden Rule has become an unshakable instinct, while there is another world

of equivalent happiness where the inhabitants reflexively violate it? Perhaps this is a

world of perfectly matched sadists and masochists. Let’s assume that in this world every

person can be paired, one-for-one, with the saints in the first world, and while they are

different in every other way, these pairs are identical in every way relevant to their well-

being. Stipulating all these things, the consequentialist would be forced to say that these

worlds are morally equivalent. Is this a problem? I don’t think so. The problem lies in

how many details we have been forced to ignore in the process of getting to this point.

What possible reason do we have to worry that the principles of human well-being are

this elastic? This is like worrying that there is a possible world in which the laws of

physics, while as consistent as they are in our world, are completely antithetical to

physics as we know it. Okay, what if? Exactly how much should this possibility concern

us as we try to predict the behavior of matter in our world?

And the Kantian commitment to viewing people as ends in themselves, while a

very useful moral principle, is difficult to map onto the world with precision. Not only

are the boundaries between self and world hard to define, one’s individuality with respect

to one’s own past and future is somewhat mysterious. For instance, we are each heirs to

our actions and to our failures of action. Does this have any moral implications? If I am

currently disinclined to do some necessary and profitable work, to eat well, to make

regular visits to doctor and dentist, to avoid dangerous sports, to wear my seat belt, to

save money, etc.—have I committed a series of crimes against the future self who will

suffer the consequences of my negligence? Why not? And if I do live prudently, despite

the pain it causes me, out of concern for the interests of my future self, is this an instance

of my being used as a means to someone else’s end? Am I merely a resource for the

person I will be in the future?

46. Rawls’s notion of “primary goods,” access to which must be fairly allocated

in any just society, seems parasitic upon a general notion of human well-being. Why are

“basic rights and liberties,” “freedom of movement and free choice of occupation,” “the

powers and prerogatives of offices and positions of authority,” “income and wealth,” and

“the social bases of self-respect” of any interest to us at all if not as constituents of happy

human lives? Of course, Rawls is at pains to say that his conception of the “good” is

partial and merely political—but to the degree that it is good at all, it seems beholden to a

larger conception of human well-being. See Rawls, 2001, pp. 58–60.

47. Cf. Pinker, 2008b.

48. Kant, [1785] 1995, p. 30.

49. As Patricia Churchland notes:

Kant’s conviction that detachment from emotions is essential in characterizing

moral obligation is strikingly at odds with what we know about our biological nature.

From a biological point of view, basic emotions are Mother Nature’s way of getting us to

do what we prudentially ought. The social emotions are a way of getting us to do what we

socially ought, and the reward system is a way of learning to use past experiences to

improve one’s performance in both domains (Churchland, 2008b).

50. However, one problem that people often have with consequentialism is that it

entails moral hierarchy: certain spheres of well-being (i.e., minds) will be more important

than others. The philosopher Robert Nozick famously observed that this opens the door to

“utility monsters”: hypothetical creatures who could get enormously greater life

satisfaction from devouring us than we would lose (Nozick 1974, p. 41). But, as Nozick

observes, we are just such utility monsters. Leaving aside the fact that economic

inequality allows many of us to profit from the drudgery of others, most of us pay others

to raise and kill animals so that we can eat them. This arrangement works out rather

badly for the animals. How much do these creatures actually suffer? How different is the

happiest cow, pig, or chicken from those who languish on our factory farms? We seem to

have decided, all things considered, that it is proper that the well-being of certain species

be entirely sacrificed to our own. We might be right about this. Or we might not. For

many people, eating meat is simply an unhealthy source of fleeting pleasure. It is very

difficult to believe, therefore, that all of the suffering and death we impose on our fellow

creatures is ethically defensible. For the sake of argument, however, let’s assume that

allowing some people to eat some animals yields a net increase in well-being on planet

earth.

In this context, would it be ethical for cows being led to slaughter to defend

themselves if they saw an opportunity—perhaps by stampeding their captors and

breaking free? Would it be ethical for a fish to fight against the hook in light of the

fisherman’s justified desire to eat it? Having judged some consumption of animals to be

ethically desirable (or at least ethically acceptable), we appear to rule out the possibility

of warranted resistance on their parts. We are their utility monsters.

Nozick draws the obvious analogy and asks if it would be ethical for our species

to be sacrificed for the unimaginably vast happiness of some superbeings. Provided that

we take the time to really imagine the details (which is not easy), I think the answer is

clearly “yes.” There seems no reason to suppose that we must occupy the highest peak on

the moral landscape. If there are beings who stand in relation to us as we do to bacteria, it

should be easy to admit that their interests must trump our own, and to a degree that we

cannot possibly conceive. I do not think that the existence of such a moral hierarchy

poses any problems for our ethics. And there is no compelling reason to believe that such

superbeings exist, much less ones that want to eat us.

51. Traditional utility theory has been unable to explain why people so often

behave in ways that they know they will later regret. If human beings were simply

inclined to choose the path leading to their most satisfying option, then willpower would

be unnecessary, and self-defeating behavior would be unheard of. In his fascinating book,

Breakdown of Will, the psychiatrist George Ainslie examines the dynamics of human

decision making in the face of competing preferences. To account for both the necessity

of human will, along with its predictable failures, Ainslie presents a model of decision

making in which each person is viewed as a community of present and future “selves” in

competition, and each “self” discounts future rewards more steeply than seems strictly

rational.

The multiplicity of competing interests in the human mind causes us each to

function as a loose coalition of interests that may be unified only by resource

limitations—like the fact that we have only one body with which to express our desires,

moment to moment. This obvious constraint upon our fulfilling mutually incompatible

ends keeps us bargaining with our “self” across time: “Ulysses planning for the Sirens

must treat Ulysses hearing them as a separate person, to be influenced if possible and

forestalled if not” (Ainslie, 2001, p. 40).

Hyperbolic discounting of future rewards leads to curiosities like “preference

reversal”: for example, most people prefer $10,000 today to $15,000 three years from

now, but prefer $15,000 in thirteen years to $10,000 in ten years. Given that the latter

scenario is simply the first seen at a distance of ten years, it seems clear that people’s

preferences reverse depending on the length of the delay. The deferral of a reward is less

acceptable the closer one gets to the possibility of enjoying it.

52. I am also not as healthy or as well educated as I could be. I believe that such

statements are objectively true (even where they relate to subjective facts about me).

53. Haidt, 2001, p. 821.

54. The wisdom of switching doors is seen more easily if you imagine having

made your initial selection among a thousand doors, rather than three. Imagine you

picked Door #17, and Monty Hall then opens every door except for #562, revealing goats

as far as the eye can see. What should you do next? Stick with Door #17 or switch to

Door #562? It should be obvious that your initial choice was made in a condition of great

uncertainty, with a 1-in-1,000 chance of success and a 999-in-1,000 chance of failure.

The opening of 998 doors has given you an extraordinary amount of information—

collapsing the remaining odds of 999-in-1,000 on door #562.

55. Haidt, 2008.

56. Haidt, 2001, p. 823.

57. http://newspolls.org/question.php?question_id=716. Incidentally, the same

research found that 16 percent of Americans also believe that it is “very likely” that the

“federal government is withholding proof of the existence of intelligent life from other

planets” ( http://newspolls.org/question.php? question_id=715).

58. This is especially obvious in split-brain research, when language areas in the

left hemisphere routinely confabulate explanations for right-hemisphere behavior

(Gazzaniga, 1998; M. S. Gazzaniga, 2005; Gazzaniga, 2008; Gazzaniga, Bogen, &

Sperry, 1962).

59. Blow, 2009.

60. “Multiculturalism ‘drives young Muslims to shun British values.’” The Daily

Mail (January 29, 2007).

61. Moll, de Oliveira-Souza, & Zahn, 2008; 2005.

62. Moll et al., 2008, p. 162.

63. Including the nucleus accumbens, the caudate nucleus, the ventromedial and

orbitofrontal cortex, and the rostral anterior cingulate (Rilling et al., 2002).

64. Though, as is often the case with neuroimaging work, the results do not divide

as neatly as all that. In fact, one of Moll’s earlier studies on disgust and moral indignation

found medial regions also involved in these negative states (Moll, de Oliveira-Souza et

al., 2005).

65. Koenigs et al., 2007.

66. J. D. Greene et al., 2001.

67. This thought experiment was first introduced by Foot (1967) and later

elaborated by Thompson (1976).

68. J. D. Greene et al., 2001.

69. Valdesolo & DeSteno, 2006.

70. J. D. Greene, 2007.

71. Moll et al., 2008, p. 168. There is the additional concern, which bedevils

much neuroimaging research: the regions that Greene et al. label as “emotional” have

been implicated in other types of processing—memory and language, for instance (G.

Miller, 2008b). This is an instance of the “reverse inference” problem raised by Poldrack

(2006), discussed below in the context of my own research on belief.

72. While some researchers have sought to differentiate these terms, most use

them interchangeably.

73. Salter, 2003, pp. 98–99. See also Stone, 2009.

74. www.missingkids.com.

75. Twenty percent of male and female prison inmates are psychopaths, and they

are responsible for more than 50 percent of serious crimes (Hare, 1999, p. 87). The

recidivism rate of psychopaths is three times higher than that of other offenders (and the

violent recidivism rate is three to five times higher) (Blair, Mitchell, & Blair, 2005, p.

16).

76. Nunez, Casey, Egner, Hare, & Hirsch, 2005. For reasons that may have

something to do with the sensationalism just mentioned, psychopathy does not exist as a

diagnostic category, or even as an index entry, in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual

of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV). The two DSM-IV diagnoses that seek to address the

behavioral correlates of psychopathy—antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) and

conduct disorder—do not capture its interpersonal and emotional components at all.

Antisocial behavior is common to several disorders, and people with ASPD may not

score high on the PCL-R (de Oliveira-Souza et al., 2008; Narayan et al., 2007). The

inadequacies of the DSM-IV’s treatment of the syndrome are very well brought out in

Blair et al., 2005. There are many motives for antisocial behavior and many routes to

becoming a violent felon. The hallmark of psychopathy isn’t bad behavior per se, but an

underlying spectrum of emotional and interpersonal impairments. And psychopathy, as a

construct, is far more predictive of specific behaviors (e.g., recidivism) than the DSM-IV

criteria are.

77. It would appear, however, that the same could be said of the great Erwin

Schrödinger (Teresi, 2010).

78. Frontal lobe injury can result in a condition known as “acquired sociopathy,”

which shares some of the features of developmental psychopathy. While they are often

mentioned in the same context, acquired sociopathy and psychopathy differ, especially

with regard to the type of aggression they produce. Reactive aggression is triggered by an

annoying or threatening stimuli and is often associated with anger. Instrumental

aggression is purposed toward a goal. The man who lashes out after being jostled on the

street has expressed reactive aggression; the man who attacks another man to steal his

wallet or to impress his fellow gang members has displayed instrumental aggression.

Subjects suffering from acquired sociopathy, who have generally sustained injuries to

their orbitofrontal lobes, display poor impulse control and tend to exhibit increased levels

of reactive aggression. However, they do not show a heightened tendency toward

instrumental aggression. Psychopaths are prone to aggression of both types. Most

important, instrumental aggression seems most closely linked to the

callousness/unemotional (CU) trait that is the hallmark of the disorder. Studies of same-

sex twins suggest that the CU trait is also most associated with heritable causes of

antisocial behavior (Viding, Jones, Frick, Moffitt, & Plomin, 2008).

Moll, de Oliveira-Souza, and colleagues found that the correlation between gray

matter reductions and psychopathy extends beyond the frontal cortex, and this would

explain why acquired sociopathy and psychopathy are distinct disorders. Psychopathy

was correlated with gray matter reductions in a wide network of structures: including the

bilateral insula, the superior temporal sulci, the supra-marginal/angular gyri, the caudate

(head), the fusiform cortex, the middle frontal gyri, among others. It would be

exceedingly unlikely to injure such a wide network selectively.

79. Kiehl et al., 2001; Glenn, Raine, & Schug, 2009. However, when given

personal vs. impersonal moral dilemmas to solve, unlike MPFC patients, psychopaths

tend to produce the same answers as normal controls, albeit without the same emotional

response (Glenn, Raine, Schug, Young, & Hauser, 2009).

80. Hare, 1999, p. 76.

81. Ibid., p. 132.

82. Blair et al., 2005.

83. Buckholtz et al., 2010.

84. Richell et al., 2003.

85. Dolan & Fullam, 2004.

86. Dolan & Fullam, 2006; Blair et al., 2005.

87. Blair et al., 2005. The first book-length treatment of psychopathy appears to

be Cleckley’s The Mask of Sanity. While it is currently out of print, this book is still

widely referenced and much revered. It is worth reading, if only for the author’s highly

(and often inadvertently) amusing prose. Hare, 1999, Blair et al., 2005, and Babiak &

Hare, 2006, provide more recent book-length discussions of the disorder.

88. Blair et al., 2005. The developmental literature suggests that, because

punishment (the unconditioned stimulus) rarely follows a specific transgression (the

conditioned stimulus) closely in time, the aversive conditioning brought on by corporal

punishment tends to get associated with the person who metes it out, rather than with the

behavior in need of correction. Blair also observes that if punishment were the primary

source of moral instruction, children would be unable to observe the difference between

conventional transgressions (e.g., talking in class) and moral ones (e.g., hitting another

student), as breaches of either sort tend to elicit punishment. And yet healthy children can

readily distinguish between these forms of misbehavior. Thus, it would seem that they

receive their correction directly from the distress that others exhibit when true moral

boundaries have been crossed. Other mammals also find the suffering of their

conspecifics highly aversive. We know this from work in monkeys (Masserman,

Wechkin, & Terris, 1964) and rats (Church, 1959) that would seem scarcely ethical to

perform today. For instance, the conclusion of the former study reads: “A majority of

rhesus monkeys will consistently suffer hunger rather than secure food at the expense of

electroshock to a conspecific.”

89. Subsequent reviews of the neuroimaging literature have produced a somewhat

muddled view of the underlying neurology of psychopathy (Raine & Yaling, 2006).

While individual studies have found anatomical and functional abnormalities in a wide

variety of brain regions—including the amygdala, hippocampus, corpus callosum, and

putamen—the only result common to all studies is that psychopaths tend to show reduced

gray matter in the prefrontal cortex (PFC). Reductions in gray matter in three regions of

the PFC—the medial and lateral orbital areas and the frontal poles—correlate with

psychopathy scores, and these regions have been shown in other work to be directly

involved in the regulation of social conduct (de Oliveira-Souza et al., 2008). Recent

findings suggest that the correlation between cortical thinning and psychopathy may be

significant only for the right hemisphere (Yang, Raine, Colletti, Toga, & Narr, 2009).

The brains of psychopaths also show reduced white matter connections between orbital

frontal regions and the amygdala (M. C. Craig et al., 2009). In fact, the difference in the

average volume of gray matter in orbitofrontal regions seems to account for half of the

variation in antisocial behavior between the sexes: men and women don’t seem to differ

in their experience of anger, but women tend to be both more fearful and more

empathetic—and are thus better able to control their antisocial impulses (Jones, 2008).

90. Blair et al. hypothesize that the orbitofrontal deficits of psychopathy underlie

the propensity for reactive aggression, while the amygdala dysfunction leads to

“impairments in aversive conditioning, instrumental learning, and the processing of

fearful and sad expressions” that allow for learned, instrumental aggression and make

normal socialization impossible. Kent Kiehl, author of the first fMRI study on

psychopathy, now believes that the functional neuroanatomy of the disorder includes a

network of structures including the orbital frontal cortex, insula, anterior and posterior

cingulate, amygdala, parahippocampal gyrus, and anterior superior temporal gyrus (Kiehl

et al., 2001). He refers to this network as the “the paralimbic system” (Kiehl, 2006).

Kiehl is currently engaged in a massive and ongoing fMRI study of incarcerated

psychopaths, using a 1.5 Tesla scanner housed in a tractor-trailer that can be moved from

prison to prison. He hopes to build a neuroimaging database of 10,000 subjects (G.

Miller, 2008a; Seabrook, 2008).

91. Trivers, 2002, p. 53. For an extensive discussion of the details here, see

Dawkins, [1976] 2006, pp. 202–233.

92. Jones, 2008.

93. Diamond, 2008. Pinker, 2007, makes the same point: “If the wars of the

twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the wars of

a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths, not 100 million.”

It is easy to conclude that life is cheap in an honor culture, ruled by vengeance

and the law of talion (“eye for an eye”), but, as William Ian Miller observes, by at least

one measure these societies value life even more than we do. Our modern economies

thrive because we tend to limit personal liability. If I sell you a defective ladder, and you

fall and break your neck, I may have to pay you some compensation. But I will not have

to pay you nearly as much as I would be willing to pay to avoid having my own neck

broken. In our society we are constrained by the value a court places on the other guy’s

neck; in a culture ruled by talion law, we are constrained by the value we place on our

own (W. I. Miller, 2006).

94. Bowles, 2006, 2008, 2009.

95. Churchland, 2008a.

96. Libet, Gleason, Wright, & Pearl, 1983.

97. Soon, Brass, Heinze, & Haynes, 2008. Libet later argued that while we don’t

have free will with respect to initiating behavior, we might have free will to veto an

intention before it becomes effective (Libet, 1999, 2003). I think his reasoning was

clearly flawed, as there is every reason to think that a conscious veto must also arise on

the basis of unconscious neural events.

98. Fisher, 2001; Wegner, 2002; Wegner, 2004.

99. Heisenberg, 2009; Kandel, 2008; Karczmar, 2001; Libet, 1999; McCrone,

2003; Planck & Murphy, 1932; Searle, 2001; Sperry, 1976.

100. Heisenberg, 2009.

101. One problem with this approach is that quantum mechanical effects are

probably not, as a general rule, biologically salient. Quantum effects do drive evolution,

as high-energy particles like cosmic rays cause point mutations in DNA, and the behavior

of such particles passing through the nucleus of a cell is governed by the laws of quantum

mechanics. Evolution, therefore, seems unpredictable in principle (Silver, 2006).

102. The laws of nature do not strike most of us as incompatible with free will

because we have not imagined how human action would appear if all cause-and-effect

relationships were understood. But imagine that a mad scientist has developed a means of

controlling the human brain at a distance: What would it be like to watch him send a

person to and fro on the wings of her “will”? Would there be even the slightest

temptation to impute freedom to her? No. But this mad scientist is nothing more than

causal determinism personified. What makes his existence so inimical to our notion of

free will is that when we imagine him lurking behind a person’s thoughts and actions—

tweaking electrical potentials, manufacturing neurotransmitters, regulating genes, etc.—

we cannot help but let our notions of freedom and responsibility travel up the puppet’s

strings to the hand that controls them. To see that the addition of randomness does

nothing to change this situation, we need only imagine the scientist basing the inputs to

his machine on a shrewd arrangement of roulette wheels. How would such unpredictable

changes in the states of a person’s brain constitute freedom?

Swapping any combination of randomness and natural law for a mad scientist, we

can see that all the relevant features of a person’s inner life would be conserved—

thoughts, moods, and intentions would still arise and beget actions—and yet we are left

with the undeniable fact that the conscious mind cannot be the source of its own thoughts

and intentions. This discloses the real mystery of free will: if our experience is

compatible with its utter absence, how can we say that we see any evidence for it in the

first place?

103. Dennett, 2003.

104. The phrase “alien hand syndrome” describes a variety of neurological

disorders in which a person no longer recognizes ownership of one of his hands. Actions

of the nondominant hand in the split-brain patient can have this character, and in the

acute phase after surgery this can lead to overt, intermanual conflict. Zaidel et al. (2003)

prefer the phrase “autonomous hand,” as patients typically experience their hand to be out

of control but do not ascribe ownership of it to someone else. Similar anomalies can be

attributed to other neurological causes: for instance, in sensory alien hand syndrome

(following a stroke in the right posterior cerebral artery) the right arm will sometimes

choke or otherwise attack the left side of the body (Pryse-Philips, 2003).

105. See S. Harris, 2004, pp. 272–274.

106. Burns & Bechara, 2007, p. 264.

107. Others have made a similar argument. See Burns & Bechara, 2007, p. 264; J.

Greene & Cohen, 2004, p. 1776.

108. Cf. Levy, 2007.

109. The neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga writes:

Neuroscience will never find the brain correlate of responsibility, because that is

something we ascribe to humans—to people—not to brains. It is a moral value we

demand of our fellow, rule-following human beings. Just as optometrists can tell us how

much vision a person has (20/20 or 20/200) but cannot tell us when someone is legally

blind or has too little vision to drive a school bus, so psychiatrists and brain scientists

might be able to tell us what someone’s mental state or brain condition is but cannot tell

us (without being arbitrary) when someone has too little control to be held responsible.

The issue of responsibility (like the issue of who can drive school buses) is a social

choice. In neuroscientific terms, no person is more or less responsible than any other for

actions. We are all part of a deterministic system that someday, in theory, we will

completely understand. Yet the idea of responsibility, a social construct that exists in the

rules of a society, does not exist in the neuronal structures of the brain (Gazzaniga, 2005,

pp. 101–102).

While it is true that responsibility is a social construct attributed to people and not

to brains, it is a social construct that can make more or less sense given certain facts

about a person’s brain. I think we can easily imagine discoveries in neuroscience, as well

as brain imaging technology, that would allow us to attribute responsibility to persons in

a far more precise way than we do at present. A “Twinkie defense” would be entirely

uncontroversial if we learned that there was something in the creamy center of every

Twinkie that obliterated the frontal lobe’s inhibitory control over the limbic system.

But perhaps “responsibility” is simply the wrong construct: for Gazzaniga is

surely correct to say that “in neuroscientific terms, no person is more or less responsible

than any other for actions.” Conscious actions arise on the basis of neural events of which

we are not conscious. Whether they are predictable or not, we do not cause our causes.

110. Diamond, 2008.

111. In the philosophical literature, one finds three approaches to the problem:

determinism, libertarianism, and compatibilism. Both determinism and libertarianism are

often referred to as “incompatibilist” views, in that both maintain that if our behavior is

fully determined by background causes, free will is an illusion. Determinists believe that

we live in precisely such a world; libertarians (no relation to the political view that goes

by this name) believe that our agency rises above the field of prior causes—and they

inevitably invoke some metaphysical entity, like a soul, as the vehicle for our freely

acting wills. Compatibilists, like Daniel Dennett, maintain that free will is compatible

with causal determinism (see Dennett, 2003; for other compatibilist arguments see Ayer,

Chisholm, Strawson, Frankfurt, Dennett, and Watson—all in Watson, 1982). The

problem with compatibilism, as I see it, is that it tends to ignore that people’s moral

intuitions are driven by deeper, metaphysical notions of free will. That is, the free will

that people presume for themselves and readily attribute to others (whether or not this

freedom is, in Dennett’s sense, “worth wanting”) is a freedom that slips the influence of

impersonal, background causes. The moment you show that such causes are effective—as

any detailed account of the neurophysiology of human thought and behavior would—

proponents of free will can no longer locate a plausible hook upon which to hang their

notions of moral responsibility. The neuroscientists Joshua Greene and Jonathan Cohen

make the same point:

Most people’s view of the mind is implicitly dualist and libertarian and not

materialist and compatibilist … [I]ntuitive free will is libertarian, not compatibilist. That

is, it requires the rejection of determinism and an implicit commitment to some kind of

magical mental causation … contrary to legal and philosophical orthodoxy, determinism

really does threaten free will and responsibility as we intuitively understand them (J.

Greene & Cohen, 2004, pp. 1779–1780).

Chapter 3: Belief

1. Brains do not fossilize, so we cannot examine the brains of our ancient

ancestors. But comparing the neuroanatomy of living primates offers some indication of

the types of physical adaptations that might have led to the emergence of language. For

instance, diffusion-tensor imaging of macaque, chimpanzee, and human brains reveals a

gradual increase in the connectivity of the arcuate fasciculus—the fiber tract linking the

temporal and frontal lobes. This suggests that the relevant adaptations were incremental,

rather than saltatory (Ghazanfar, 2008).

2. N. Patterson, Richter, Gnerre, Lander, & Reich, 2006, 2008.

3. Wade, 2006.

4. Sarmiento, Sawyer, Milner, Deak, & Tattersall, 2007; Wade, 2006.

5. It seems, however, that the Neanderthal copy of the FOXP2 gene carried the

same two crucial mutations that distinguish modern humans from other primates (Enard

et al., 2002; Krause et al., 2007). FOXP2 is now known to play a central role in spoken

language, and its disruption leads to severe linguistic impairments in otherwise healthy

people (Lai, Fisher, Hurst, Vargha-Khadem, & Monaco, 2001). The introduction of a

human FOXP2 gene into mice changes their ultrasonic vocalizations, decreases

exploratory behavior, and alters cortico-basal ganglia circuits (Enard et al., 2009). The

centrality of FOXP2 for language development in humans has led some researchers to

conclude that Neanderthals could speak (Yong, 2008). In fact, one could argue that the

faculty of speech must precede Homo sapiens, as “it is difficult to imagine the emergence

of complex subsistence behaviors and selection for a brain size increase of approximately

75 percent, both since about 800,000 years ago, without complex social communication”

(Trinkaus, 2007).

Whether or not they could speak, the Neanderthals were impressive creatures.

Their average cranial capacity was 1,520 cc, slightly larger than that of their Homo

sapien contemporaries. In fact, human cranial capacity has decreased by about 150 cc

over the millennia to its current average of 1,340 cc (Gazzaniga, 2008). Generally

speaking, the correlation between brain size and cognitive ability is less than

straightforward, as there are several species that have larger brains than we do (e.g.,

elephants, whales, dolphins) without exhibiting signs of greater intelligence. There have

been many efforts to find some neuroanatomical measure that reliably tracks cognitive

ability, including allometric brain size (brain size proportional to body mass),

“encephalization quotient” (brain size proportional to the expected brain size for similar

animals, corrected for body mass; for primates EQ = [brain weight] / [0.12 × body weight

0.67

]), the size of the neocortex relative to the rest of the brain, etc. None of these metrics

has proved especially useful. In fact, among primates, there is no better predictor of

cognitive ability than absolute brain size, irrespective of body mass (Deaner, Isler,

Burkart, & van Schaik, 2007). By this measure, our competition with Neanderthals looks

especially daunting.

There are several genes involved in brain development that have been found to be

differentially regulated in human beings compared to other primates; two of special

interest are microcephalin and ASPM (the abnormal spindlelike microcephaly-associated

gene). The modern variant of microcephalin, which regulates brain size, appeared

approximately 37,000 years ago (more or less coincident with the ascendance of modern

humans) and has increased in frequency under positive selection pressure ever since (P.

D. Evans et al., 2005). One modern variant of ASPM, which also regulates brain size, has

spread with great frequency in the last 5,800 years (Mekel-Bobrov et al., 2005). As these

authors note, this can be loosely correlated with the spread of cities and the development

of written language. The possible significance of these findings is also discussed in

Gazzaniga (2008).

6. Fitch, Hauser, & Chomsky, 2005; Hauser, Chomsky, & Fitch, 2002; Pinker &

Jackendoff, 2005.

7. Regrettably, language is also the basis of our ability to wage war effectively, to

perpetrate genocide, and to render our planet uninhabitable.

8. While general information sharing has been undeniably useful, there is good

reason to think that the communication of specifically social information has driven the

evolution of language (Dunbar, 1998, 2003). Humans also transmit social information

(i.e., gossip) in greater quantity and with higher fidelity than nonsocial information

(Mesoudi, Whiten, & Dunbar, 2006).

9. Cf. S. Harris, 2004, pp. 243–244.

10. A. R. Damasio, 1999.

11. Westbury & Dennett, 1999.

12. Bransford & McCarrell, 1977.

13. Rumelhart, 1980.

14. Damasio draws a similar distinction (A. R. Damasio, 1999).

15. For the purposes of studying belief in the lab, therefore, there seems to be

little problem in defining the phenomenon of interest: believing a proposition is the act of

accepting it as “true” (e.g., marking it as “true” on a questionnaire); disbelieving a

proposition is the act of rejecting it as “false”; and being uncertain about the truth value

of a proposition is the disposition to do neither of these things, but to judge it, rather, as

“undecidable.”

In our search for the neural correlates of subjective states like belief and disbelief,

we are bound to rely on behavioral reports. Therefore, having presented an experimental

subject with a written statement—e.g., the United States is larger than Guatemala—and

watched him mark it as “true,” it may occur to us to wonder whether we can take him at

his word. Does he really believe that the United States is larger than Guatemala? Does

this statement, in other words, really seem true to him? This is rather like worrying, with

reference to a subject who has just performed a lexical decision task, whether a given

stimulus really seems like a word to him. While it may seem reasonable to worry that

experimental subjects might be poor judges of what they believe, or that they might

attempt to deceive experimenters, such concerns seem misplaced—or if appropriate here,

they should haunt all studies of human perception and cognition. As long as we are

content to rely on subjects to report their perceptual judgments (about when, or whether,

a given stimulus appeared), or their cognitive ones (about what sort of stimulus it was),

there seems to be no special problem taking reports of belief, disbelief, and uncertainty at

face value. This does not ignore the possibility of deception (or self-deception), implicit

cognitive conflict, motivated reasoning, and other sources of confusion.

16. Blakeslee, 2007.

17. These considerations run somewhat against David Marr’s influential thesis

that any complex information-processing system should be understood first at the level of

“computational theory” (i.e., the level of highest abstraction) in terms of its “goals”

(Marr, 1982). Thinking in terms of goals can be extremely useful, of course, in that it

unifies (and ignores) a tremendous amount of bottom-up detail: the goal of “seeing,” for

instance, is complicated at the level of its neural realization and, what is more, it has been

achieved by at least forty separate evolutionary routes (Dawkins, 1996, p. 139).

Consequently, thinking about “seeing” in terms of abstract computational goals can make

a lot of sense. In a structure like the brain, however, the “goals” of the system can never

be fully specified in advance. We currently have no inkling what else a region like the

insula might be “for.”

18. There has been a long debate in neuroscience over whether the brain is best

thought of as a collection of discrete modules or as a distributed, dynamical system. It

seems clear, however, that both views are correct, depending on one’s level of focus (J.

D. Cohen & Tong, 2001). Some degree of modularity is now an undeniable property of

brain organization, as damage to one brain region can destroy a specific ability (e.g., the

recognition of faces) while sparing most others. There are also distinct differences in cell

types and patterns of connectivity that articulate sharp borders between regions. And

some degree of modularity is ensured by limitations on information transfer over large

distances in the brain.

While regional specialization is a general fact of brain organization, strict

partitioning generally isn’t: as has already been said, most regions of the brain serve

multiple functions. And even within functionally specific regions, the boundaries

between their current function and their possible functions are provisional, fuzzy, and in

the case of any individual brain, guaranteed to be idiosyncratic. For instance, the brain

shows a general capacity to recover from focal injuries, and this entails the recruitment

and repurposing of other (generally adjacent) brain areas. Such considerations suggest

that we cannot expect true isomorphism between brains—or even between a brain and

itself across time.

There is legitimate concern, however, that current methods of neuroimaging tend

to beg the question in favor of the modularity thesis—leading, among uncritical

consumers of this research, to a naïve picture of functional segregation in the brain.

Consider functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which is the most popular

method of neuroimaging at present. This technique does not give us an absolute measure

of neural activity. Rather, it allows us to compare changes in blood flow throughout the

brain between two experimental conditions. We can, for example, compare instances in

which subjects believe statements to be true to instances in which they believe statements

to be false. The resulting image reveals which regions of the brain are more active in one

condition or the other. Because fMRI allows us to detect signal changes throughout the

brain, it is not, in principle, blind to widely distributed or combinatorial processing. But

its dependence on blood flow as a marker for neural activity reduces spatial and temporal

resolution, and the statistical techniques we use to analyze our data require that we focus

on relatively large clusters of activity. It is, therefore, in the very nature of the tool to

deliver images that appear to confirm the modular organization of brain function (cf.

Henson, 2005). The problem, as far as critics are concerned, is that this method of

studying the brain ignores the fact that the whole brain is active in both experimental

conditions (e.g., during belief and disbelief), and regions that don’t survive this

subtractive procedure may well be involved in the relevant information processing.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) also rests on the assumption that

there is a more or less linear relationship between changes in blood flow, as measured by

blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) changes in the MR signal, and changes in

neuronal activity. While the validity of fMRI seems generally well supported (Logothetis,

Pauls, Augath, Trinath, & Oeltermann, 2001), there is some uncertainty about whether

the assumed linear relationship between blood flow and neuronal activity holds for all

mental processes (Sirotin & Das, 2009). There are also potential problems with

comparing one brain state to another on the assumption that changes in brain function are

additive in the way that the components of an experimental task may be (this is often

referred to as the problem of “pure insertion”) (Friston et al., 1996). There are also

questions about what “activity” is indicated by changes in the BOLD signal. The

principal correlate of blood-flow changes in the brain appears to be

presynaptic/neuromodulatory activity (as measured by local field potentials), not axonal

spikes. This fact poses a few concerns related to the interpretation of fMRI data: fMRI

cannot readily differentiate activity that is specific to a given task and neuromodulation;

nor can it differentiate bottom-up from top-down processing. In fact, fMRI may be blind

to the difference between excitatory and inhibitory signals, as metabolism also increases

with inhibition. It seems quite possible, for instance, that increases in recurrent inhibition

in a given region might be associated with greater BOLD signal but decreased neuronal

firing. For a discussion of these and other limitations of the technology, see Logothetis,

2008; M. S. Cohen, 1996, 2001. Such concerns notwithstanding, fMRI remains the most

important tool for studying brain function in human beings noninvasively.

A more sophisticated, neural network analysis of fMRI data has shown that

representational content—which can appear, under standard methods of data analysis, to

be strictly segregated (e.g., face-vs.-object perception in the ventral temporal lobe)—is

actually intermingled and dispersed across a wider region of the cortex. Information

encoding appears to depend not on strict localization, but on a combinatorial pattern of

variations in the intensity of the neural response across regions once thought to be

functionally distinct (Hanson, Matsuka, & Haxby, 2004).

There are also epistemological questions about what it means to correlate any

mental state with physiological changes in the brain. And yet, while I consider the so-

called “hard problem” of consciousness (Chalmers, 1996) a real barrier to scientific

explanation, I do not think it will hinder the progress of cognitive neuroscience generally.

The distinction between consciousness and its contents seems paramount. It is true that

we do not understand how consciousness emerges from the unconscious activity of neural

networks—or even how it could emerge. But we do not need such knowledge to compare

states of mind through neuroimaging. To consider one among countless examples from

the current literature: neuroscientists have begun to investigate how envy and

schadenfreude are related in neuroanatomical terms. One group found activity in the

ACC (anterior cingulate cortex) to be correlated with envy, and the magnitude of signal

change was predictive of activity in the striatum (a region often associated with reward)

when subjects witnessed those they envied experiencing misfortune (signifying the

pleasure of schadenfreude) (Takahashi et al., 2009). This reveals something about the

relationship between these mental states that may not be obvious by introspection. The

finding that right-sided lesions in the MPFC impair the perception of envy (a negative

emotion), while analogous left-sided lesions impair the perception of schadenfreude (a

positive emotion) fills in a few more details (Shamay-Tsoory, Tibi-Elhanany, & Aharon-

Peretz, 2007)—as there is a wider literature on the lateralization of positive and negative

mental states. Granted, the relationship between envy and schadenfreude was somewhat

obvious without our learning their neural correlates. But improvements in neuroimaging

may one day allow us to understand the relationship between such mental states with

great precision. This may deliver conceptual surprises and even personal epiphanies. And

if the mental states and capacities most conducive to human well-being are ever

understood in terms of their underlying neurophysiology, neuroimaging may become an

integral part of any enlightened approach to ethics.

It seems to me that progress on this front does not require that we solve the “hard

problem” of consciousness (or that it even admit of a solution). When comparing mental

states, the reality of human consciousness is a given. We need not understand how

consciousness relates to the behavior of atoms to investigate how emotions like love,

compassion, trust, greed, fear, and anger differ (and interact) in neurophysiological terms.

19. Most inputs to cortical dendrites come from neurons in the same region of

cortex: very few arrive from other cortical regions or from ascending pathways. For

instance, only 5 percent to 10 percent of inputs to layer 4 of visual cortex arrive from the

thalamus (R. J. Douglas & Martin, 2007).

20. The apparent (qualified) existence of “grandmother cells” notwithstanding

(Quiroga, Reddy, Kreiman, Koch, & Fried, 2005). For a discussion of the limits of

traditional “connectionist” accounts of mental representation, see Doumas & Hummel,

2005.

21. These data were subsequently published as Harris, S., Sheth, & Cohen 2008.

22. The post-hoc analysis of neuroimaging data is a limitation of many studies,

and in our original paper we acknowledged the importance of distinguishing between

results predicted by a specific model of brain function and those that arise in the absence

of a prior hypothesis. This caveat notwithstanding, I believe that too much has been made

of the distinction between descriptive and hypothesis-driven research in science generally

and in neuroscience in particular. There must always be a first experimental observation,

and one gets no closer to physical reality by running a follow-up study. To have been the

first person to observe blood-flow changes in the right fusiform gyrus in response to

visual stimuli depicting faces (Sergent, Ohta, & MacDonald, 1992)—and to have

concluded, on the basis of these data, that this region of cortex plays a role in facial

recognition—was a perfectly legitimate instance of scientific induction. Subsequent

corroboration of these results increased our collective confidence in this first set of data

(Kanwisher, McDermott, & Chun, 1997) but did not constitute an epistemological

advance over the first study. All subsequent hypothesis-driven research that has taken the

fusiform gyrus as a region of interest derives its increased legitimacy from the descriptive

study upon which it is based (or, as has often been the case in neuroscience, from the

purely descriptive, clinical literature). If the initial descriptive study was in error, then

any hypothesis based on it would be empty (or only accidentally correct); if the initial

work was valid, then follow-up work would merely corroborate it and, perhaps, build

upon it. The injuries suffered by Phineas Gage and H.M. were inadvertent, descriptive

experiments, and the wealth of information learned from these cases—arguably more

than was learned from any two experiments in the history of neuroscience—did not suffer

for lack of prior hypothesis. Indeed, these clinical observations became the basis of all

subsequent hypotheses about the function of the frontal and medial temporal lobes.

23. E. K. Miller & Cohen, 2001; Desimone & Duncan, 1995. While damage to the

PFC can result in a range of deficits, the most common is haphazard, inappropriate, and

impulsive behavior, along with the inability to acquire new behavioral rules (Bechara,

Damasio, & Damasio, 2000). As many parents can attest, the human capacity for self-

regulation does not fully develop until after adolescence; this is when the white-matter

connections in the PFC finally mature (Sowell, Thompson, Holmes, Jernigan, & Toga,

1999).

24. Spinoza, [1677] 1982.

25. D. T. K. Gilbert, 1991; D. T. K. Gilbert, Douglas, & Malone, 1990; J. P.

Mitchell, Dodson, & Schacter, 2005.

26. This truth bias may interact with (or underlie) what has come to be known as

the “confirmation bias” or “positive test strategy” heuristic in reasoning (Klayman & Ha,

1987): people tend to seek evidence that confirms an hypothesis rather than evidence that

refutes it. This strategy is known to produce frequent reasoning errors. Our bias toward

belief may also explain the “illusory-truth effect,” where mere exposure to a proposition,

even when it was revealed to be false or attributed to an unreliable source, increases the

likelihood that it will later be remembered as being true (Begg, Robertson, Gruppuso,

Anas, & Needham, 1996; J. P. Mitchell et al., 2005).

27. This was due to a greater decrease in signal during disbelief trials than during

belief trials. This region of the brain is known to have a high level of resting-state activity

and to show reduced activity compared to baseline for a wide variety of cognitive tasks

(Raichle et al., 2001).

28. Bechara et al., 2000. The MPFC is also activated by reasoning tasks that

incorporate high emotional salience (Goel & Dolan, 2003b; Northoff et al., 2004).

Individuals with MPFC lesions test normally on a variety of executive function tasks but

often fail to integrate appropriate emotional responses into their reasoning about the

world. They also fail to habituate normally to unpleasant somatosensory stimuli (Rule,

Shimamura, & Knight, 2002). The circuitry in this region that links decision making to

emotions seems rather specific, as MPFC lesions do not disrupt fear conditioning or the

normal modulation of memory by emotionally charged stimuli (Bechara et al., 2000).

While reasoning appropriately about the likely consequences of their actions, these

persons seem unable to feel the difference between good and bad choices.

29. Hornak et al., 2004; O’Doherty, Kringelbach, Rolls, Hornak, & Andrews,

2001.

30. Matsumoto & Tanaka, 2004.

31. Schnider, 2001.

32. Northoff et al., 2006.

33. Kelley et al., 2002.

34. When compared with both belief and uncertainty, disbelief was associated in

our study with bilateral activation of the anterior insula, a primary region for the

sensation of taste (Faurion, Cerf, Le Bihan, & Pillias, 1998; O’Doherty, Rolls, Francis,

Bowtell, & McGlone, 2001). This area is widely thought to be involved with negatively

valenced feelings like disgust (Royet, Plailly, Delon-Martin, Kareken, & Segebarth,

2003; Wicker et al., 2003), harm avoidance (Paulus, Rogalsky, Simmons, Feinstein, &

Stein, 2003), and the expectation of loss in decision tasks (Kuhnen & Knutson, 2005).

The anterior insula has also been linked to pain perception (Wager et al., 2004) and even

to the perception of pain in others (T. Singer et al., 2004). The frequent association

between activity in the anterior insula and negative affect appears to make at least

provisional sense of the emotional tone of disbelief.

While disgust is regularly classed as a primary human emotion, infants and

toddlers do not appear to feel it (Bloom, 2004, p. 155). This would account for some of

their more arresting displays of incivility. Interestingly, people suffering from

Huntington’s disease, as well as presymptomatic carriers of the HD allele, exhibit

reduced feelings of disgust and are generally unable to recognize the emotion in others

(Calder, Keane, Manes, Antoun, & Young, 2000; Gray, Young, Barker, Curtis, &

Gibson, 1997; Halligan, 1998; Hayes, Stevenson, & Coltheart, 2007; I. J. Mitchell,

Heims, Neville, & Rickards, 2005; Sprengelmeyer, Schroeder, Young, & Epplen, 2006).

The recognition deficit has been correlated with reduced activity in the anterior insula

(Hennenlotter et al., 2004; Kipps, Duggins, McCusker, & Calder, 2007)—though other

work has found that HD patients and carriers are impaired in processing a range of

(predominantly negative) emotions: including disgust, anger, fear, sadness, and surprise

(Henley et al., 2008; Johnson et al., 2007; Snowden et al., 2008).

We must be careful not to draw too strong a connection between disbelief and

disgust (or any other mental state) on the basis of these data. While a connection between

these states of mind seems intuitively plausible, equating disbelief with disgust represents

a “reverse inference” of a sort known to be problematic in the field of neuroimaging

(Poldrack, 2006). One cannot reliably infer the presence of a mental state on the basis of

brain data alone, unless the brain regions in question are known to be truly selective for a

single mental state. If it were known, for instance, that the anterior insulae were active if

and only if subjects experienced disgust, then we could draw quite a strong inference

about the role of disgust in disbelief. But there are very few regions of the brain whose

function is so selective as to justify inferences of this kind. The anterior insula, for

instance, appears to be involved in a wide range of neutral/positive states—including

time perception, music appreciation, self-recognition, and smiling (A. D. Craig, 2009).

And there may also be many forms of disgust: While subjects tend to rate a wide

range of stimuli as equivalently “disgusting,” one group found that disgust associated

with pathogen-related acts, social-sexual acts (e.g., incest), and nonsexual moral

violations activated different (but overlapping) brain networks (J. S. Borg, Lieberman, &

Kiehl, 2008). To further complicate matters, they did not find the insula implicated in any

of this disgust processing, with the exception of the subjects’ response to incest. This

group is not alone in suggesting that the insula may not be selective for disgust and may

be more generally sensitive to other factors, including self-monitoring and emotional

salience. As the authors note, the difficulty in interpreting these results is compounded by

the fact that their subjects were engaged in a memory task and not required to explicitly

evaluate how disgusting a stimulus was until after the scanning session. This may have

selected against insular activity; at least one other study suggests that the insula may only

be preferentially active in response to attended stimuli (Anderson, Christoff, Panitz, De

Rosa, & Gabrieli, 2003).

35. These results seem to pull the rug out from under one widely subscribed view

in moral philosophy, generally described as “non-cognitivism.” Non-cognitivists hold

that moral claims lack propositional content and, therefore, do not express genuine beliefs

about the world. Unfortunately for this view, our brains appear to be unaware of this

breakthrough in metaethics: we seem to accept the truth of moral assertions in the same

way as we accept any other statements of fact.

In this first experiment on belief, we also analyzed the brain’s response to

uncertainty: the mental state in which the truth value of a proposition cannot be judged.

Not knowing what one believes to be true—Is the hotel north of Main Street, or south of

Main Street? Was he talking to me, or to the man behind me?—has obvious

behavioral/emotional consequences. Uncertainty prevents the link between thought and

subsequent behavior/emotion from forming. It can be distinguished readily from belief

and disbelief in this regard, because in the latter states, the mind has settled upon a

specific, actionable representation of the world. The results of our study suggest two

mechanisms that might account for this difference.

The contrasts—uncertainty minus belief and uncertainty minus disbelief—yielded

signal in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). This region of the brain has been widely

implicated in error detection (Schall, Stuphorn, & Brown, 2002) and response conflict

(Gehring & Fencsik, 2001), and it regularly responds to increases in cognitive load and

interference (Bunge, Ochsner, Desmond, Glover, & Gabrieli, 2001). It has also been

shown to play a role in the perception of pain (Coghill, McHaffie, & Yen, 2003).

The opposite contrasts, belief minus uncertainty and disbelief minus uncertainty,

showed increased signal in the caudate nucleus, which is part of the basal ganglia. One of

the primary functions of the basal ganglia is to provide a route by which cortical

association areas can influence motor action. The caudate has displayed context-specific,

anticipatory, and reward-related activity in a variety of animal studies (Mink, 1996) and

has been associated with cognitive planning in humans (Monchi, Petrides, Strafella,

Worsley, & Doyon, 2006). It has also been shown to respond to feedback in both

reasoning and guessing tasks when compared to the same tasks without feedback (Elliott,

Frith, & Dolan, 1997).

In cognitive terms, one of the principal features of feedback is that it

systematically removes uncertainty. The fact that both belief and disbelief showed highly

localized signal changes in the caudate, when compared to uncertainty, appears to

implicate basal ganglia circuits in the acceptance or rejection of linguistic representations

of the world. Delgado et al. showed that the caudate response to feedback can be

modulated by prior expectations (Delgado, Frank, & Phelps, 2005). In a trust game

played with three hypothetical partners (neutral, bad, and good), they found that the

caudate responded strongly to violations of trust by a neutral partner, to a lesser degree

with a bad partner, but not at all when the partner was assumed to be morally good. On

their account, it seems that the assumption of moral goodness in a partner led subjects to

ignore or discount feedback. This result seems convergent with our own: one might say

that subjects in their study were uncertain of what to conclude when a trusted collaborator

failed to cooperate.

The ACC and the caudate display an unusual degree of connectivity, as the

surgical lesioning of the ACC (a procedure known as a cingulotomy) causes atrophy of

the caudate, and the disruption of this pathway is thought to be the basis of the

procedure’s effect in treating conditions like obsessive-compulsive disorder (Rauch et al.,

2000; Rauch et al., 2001).

There are, however, different types of uncertainty. For instance, there is a

difference between expected uncertainty—where one knows that one’s observations are

unreliable—and unexpected uncertainty, where something in the environment indicates

that things are not as they seem. The difference between these two modes of cognition

has been analyzed within a Bayesian statistical framework in terms of their underlying

neurophysiology. It appears that expected uncertainty is largely mediated by

acetylcholine and unexpected uncertainty by norepinephrine (Yu & Dayan, 2005).

Behavioral economists sometimes distinguish between “risk” and “ambiguity”: the

former being a condition where probability can be assessed, as in a game of roulette, the

latter being the uncertainty borne of missing information. People are generally more

willing to take even very low-probability bets in a condition of risk than they are to act in

a condition of missing information. One group found that ambiguity was negatively

correlated with activity in the dorsal striatum (caudate/putamen) (Hsu, Bhatt, Adolphs,

Tranel, & Camerer, 2005). This result fits very well with our own, as the uncertainty

provoked by our stimuli would have taken the form of “ambiguity” rather than “risk.”

36. There are many factors that bias our judgment, including: arbitrary anchors on

estimates of quantity, availability biases on estimates of frequency, insensitivity to the

prior probability of outcomes, misconceptions of randomness, nonregressive predictions,

insensitivity to sample size, illusory correlations, overconfidence, valuing of worthless

evidence, hindsight bias, confirmation bias, biases based on ease of imaginability, as well

as other nonnormative modes of thinking. See Baron, 2008; J. S. B. T. Evans, 2005;

Kahneman, 2003; Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, & Stone, 2006; Kahneman,

Slovic, & Tversky, 1982; Kahneman & Tversky, 1996; Stanovich & West, 2000; Tversky

& Kahneman, 1974.

37. Stanovich & West, 2000.

38. Fong et al., 1986/07. Once again, asking whether something is rationally or

morally normative is distinct from asking whether it has been evolutionarily adaptive.

Some psychologists have sought to minimize the significance of the research on cognitive

bias by suggesting that subjects make decisions using heuristics that conferred adaptive

fitness on our ancestors. As Stanovich and West (2000) observe, what serves the genes

does not necessarily advance the interests of the individual. We could also add that what

serves the individual in one context may not serve him in another. The cognitive and

emotional mechanisms that may (or may not) have optimized us for face-to-face conflict

(and its resolution) have clearly not prepared us to negotiate conflicts waged from afar—

whether with email or other long-range weaponry.

39. Ehrlinger, Johnson, Banner, Dunning, & Kruger, 2008; Kruger & Dunning,

1999.

40. Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003. Amodio et al. (2007) used EEG

to look for differences in neurocognitive function between liberals and conservatives on a

Go/No-Go task. They found that liberalism correlated with increased event-related

potentials in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Given the ACC’s well-established role

in mediating cognitive conflict, they concluded that this difference might, in part, explain

why liberals are less set in their ways than conservatives, and more aware of nuance,

ambiguity, etc. Inzlicht (2009) found a nearly identical result for religious nonbelievers

versus believers.

41. Rosenblatt, Greenberg, Solomon, Pyszczynski, & Lyon, 1989.

42. Jost et al., 2003, p. 369.

43. D. A. Pizarro & Uhlmann, 2008.

44. Kruglanski, 1999. The psychologist Drew Westen describes motivated

reasoning as “a form of implicit affect regulation in which the brain converges on

solutions that minimize negative and maximize positive affect states” (Westen, Blagov,

Harenski, Kilts, & Hamann, 2006). This seems apt.

45. The fact that this principle often breaks down, spectacularly and

unselfconsciously, in the domain of religion is precisely why one can reasonably question

whether the world’s religions are in touch with reality at all.

46. Bechara et al., 2000; Bechara, Damasio, Tranel, & Damasio, 1997; A.

Damasio, 1999.

47. S. Harris et al., 2008.

48. Burton, 2008.

49. Frith, 2008, p. 45.

50. Silver, 2006, pp. 77–78.

51. But this allele has also been linked to a variety of psychological traits, like

novelty seeking and extraversion, which might also account for its persistence in the

genome (Benjamin et al., 1996).

52. Burton, 2008, pp. 188–195.

53. Joseph, 2009.

54. Houreld, 2009; LaFraniere, 2007; Harris, 2009.

55. Mlodinow, 2008.

56. Wittgenstein, 1969, p. 206.

57. Analogical reasoning is generally considered a form of induction (Holyoak,

2005).

58. Sloman & Lagnado, 2005; Tenenbaum, Kemp, & Shafto, 2007.

59. For a review of the literature on deductive reasoning see Evans, 2005.

60. Cf. J. S. B. T. Evans, 2005, pp. 178–179.

61. For example, Canessa et al., 2005; Goel, Gold, Kapur, & Houle, 1997;

Osherson et al., 1998; Prabhakaran, Rypma, & Gabrieli, 2001; Prado, Noveck, & Van

Der Henst, 2009; Rodriguez-Moreno & Hirsch, 2009; Strange, Henson, Friston, & Dolan,

2001. Goel and Dolan (2003a) found that when syllogistic reasoning was modulated by a

strong belief bias, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex was preferentially engaged, while

such reasoning without an effective belief bias appeared to be driven by a greater

activation of the (right) lateral prefrontal cortex. Elliot et al. (1997) found that guessing

appears to be mediated by the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Bechara et al. (1997) report

that patients suffering ventromedial prefrontal damage fail to act according to their

correct conceptual beliefs while engaged in a gambling task. Prior to our 2008 study, it

was unclear how these findings would relate to belief and disbelief per se. They

suggested, however, that the medial prefrontal cortex would be among our regions of

interest.

While decision making is surely related to belief processing, the “decisions” that

neuroscientists have tended to study are those that precede voluntary movements in tests

of sensory discrimination (Glimcher, 2002). The initiation of such movements requires

the judgment that a target stimulus has appeared—we might even say that this entails the

“belief” that an event has occurred—but such studies are not designed to examine belief

as a propositional attitude. Decision making in the face of potential reward is obviously

of great interest to anyone who would understand the roots of human and animal

behavior, but the link to belief per se appears tenuous. For instance, in a visual-decision

task (in which monkeys were trained to detect the coherent motion of random dots and

signal their direction with eye movements), Gold and Shadlen found that the brain

regions responsible for this sensory judgment were the very regions that subsequently

initiated the behavioral response (Gold & Shadlen, 2000, 2002; Shadlen & Newsome,

2001). Neurons in these regions appear to act as integrators of sensory information,

initiating the trained behavior whenever a threshold of activation has been reached. We

might be tempted to say, therefore, that the “belief” that a stimulus is moving to the left is

located in the lateral intraparietal area, the frontal eye fields, and the superior colliculus—

as these are the brain regions responsible for initiating eye movements. But here we are

talking about the “beliefs” of a monkey—a monkey that has been trained to reproduce a

stereotyped response to a specific stimulus in expectation of an immediate reward. This is

not the kind of “belief” that has been the subject of my research.

The literature on decision making has generally sought to address the link

between voluntary action, error detection, and reward. Insofar as the brain’s reward

system involves a prediction that a specific behavior will lead to future reward, we might

say that this is a matter of belief formation—but there is nothing to indicate that such

beliefs are explicit, linguistically mediated, or propositional. We know that they cannot

be, as most studies of reward processing have been done in rodents, monkeys, titmice,

and pigeons. This literature has investigated the link between sensory judgments and

motor responses, not the difference between belief and disbelief in matters of

propositional truth. This is not to minimize the fascinating progress that has occurred in

this field. In fact, the same economic modeling that allows behavioral ecologists to

account for the foraging behavior of animal groups also allows neurophysiologists to

describe the activity of the neuronal assemblies that govern an individual animal’s

response to differential rewards (Glimcher, 2002). There is also a growing literature on

neuroeconomics, which examines human decision making (as well as trust and

reciprocity) using neuroimaging. Some of these findings are discussed here.

62. This becomes especially feasible using more sophisticated techniques of data

analysis, like multivariate pattern classification (Cox & Savoy, 2003; P. K. Douglas,

Harris, & Cohen, 2009). Most analyses of fMRI data are univariate and merely look for

correlations between the activity at each point in the brain and the task paradigm. This

approach ignores the interrelationships that surely exist between regions. Cox and Savoy

demonstrated that a multivariate approach, in which statistical pattern recognition

methods are used to look for correlations across all regions, allows for a very subtle

analysis of fMRI data in a way that is far more sensitive to distributed patterns of activity

(Cox & Savoy, 2003). With this approach, they were able to determine which visual

stimulus a subject was viewing (out of ten possible types) by examining a mere 20

seconds of his experimental run.

Pamela Douglas, a graduate student in Mark Cohen’s cognitive neuroscience lab

at UCLA, recently took a similar approach to analyzing my original belief data (P. K.

Douglas, Harris, & Cohen, 2009). She created an unsupervised machine-learning

classifier by first performing an independent component (IC) analysis on each of our

subjects’ three scanning sessions. She then selected the IC time-course values that

corresponded to the maximum value of the hemodynamic response function (HRF)

following either “belief” or “disbelief” events. These values were fed into a selection

process, whereby ICs that were “good predictors” were promoted as features in a

classification network for training a Naïve Bayes classifier. To test the accuracy of her

classification, Douglas performed a leave-one-out cross-validation. Using this criterion,

her Naïve Bayes classifier correctly labeled the “left out” trial 90 percent of the time.

Given such results, it does not seem far-fetched that, with further refinements in both

hardware and techniques of data analysis, fMRI could become a means for accurate lie

detection.

63. Holden, 2001.

64. Broad, 2002.

65. Pavlidis, Eberhardt, & Levine, 2002.

66. Allen & Iacono, 1997; Farwell & Donchin, 1991. Spence et al. (2001) appear

to have published the first neuroimaging study on deception. Their research suggests that

“deception” is associated with bilateral increases in activity in the ventrolateral prefrontal

cortex (BA 47), a region often associated with response inhibition and the suppression of

inappropriate behavior (Goldberg, 2001).

The results of the Spence study were susceptible to some obvious limitations,

however—perhaps most glaring was the fact that the subjects were told precisely when to

lie by being given a visual cue. Needless to say, this did much to rob the experiment of

verisimilitude. The natural ecology of deception is one in which a potential liar must

notice when questions draw near to factual terrain that he is committed to keeping

hidden, and he must lie as the situation warrants, while respecting the criteria for logical

coherence and consistency that he and his interlocutor share. (It is worth noting that

unless one respects the norms of reasoning and belief formation, it is impossible to lie

successfully. This is not an accident.) To be asked to lie automatically in response to a

visual cue simply does not simulate ordinary acts of deception. Spence et al. did much to

remedy this problem in a subsequent study, where subjects could lie at their own

discretion and on subjects related to their personal histories (Spence, Kaylor-Hughes,

Farrow, & Wilkinson, 2008). This study largely replicated their findings with respect to

the primary involvement of the ventrolateral PFC (though now almost entirely in the left

hemisphere). There have been other neuroimaging studies of deception—as “guilty

knowledge” (Langleben et al., 2002), “feigned memory impairment” (Lee et al., 2005),

etc.—but the challenge, apart from reliably finding the neural correlates of any of these

states, is to find a result that generalizes to all forms of deception.

It is not entirely obvious that these studies have given us a sound basis for

detecting deception through neuroimaging. Focusing on the neural correlates of belief

and disbelief might obviate whatever differences exist between types of deception, the

mode of stimulus presentation, etc. Is there a difference, for instance, between denying

what is true and asserting what is false? Recasting the question in terms of a proposition

to be believed or disbelieved might circumvent any problem posed by the “directionality”

of a lie. Another group (Abe et al., 2006) took steps to address the directionality issue by

asking subjects to alternately deny true knowledge and assert false knowledge. However,

this study suffered from the usual limitations, in that subjects were directed when to lie,

and their lies were limited to whether they had previously viewed an experimental

stimulus.

A functional neuroanatomy of belief might also add to our understanding of the

placebo response—which can be both profound and profoundly unhelpful to the process

of vetting pharmaceuticals. For instance, 65 percent to 80 percent of the effect of

antidepressant medication seems attributable to positive expectation (Kirsch, 2000).

There are even forms of surgery that, while effective, are no more effective than sham

procedures (Ariely, 2008). While some neuroimaging work has been done in this area,

the placebo response is currently operationalized in terms of symptom relief, without

reference to a subject’s underlying state of mind (Lieberman et al., 2004; Wager et al.,

2004). Finding the neural correlates of belief might allow us to eventually control for this

effect during the process of drug design.

67. Stoller & Wolpe, 2007.

68. Grann, 2009.

69. There are, however, reasons to doubt that our current methods of

neuroimaging, like fMRI, will yield a practical mind-reading technology. Functional MRI

studies as a group have several important limitations. Perhaps first and most important

are those of statistical power and sensitivity. If one chooses to analyze one’s data at

extremely conservative thresholds to exclude the possibility of type I (false positive)

detection errors, this necessarily increases one’s type II (false negative) error. Further,

most studies implicitly assume uniform detection sensitivity throughout the brain, a

condition known to be violated for the low-bandwidth, fast-imaging scans used for fMRI.

Field inhomogeneity also tends to increase the magnitude of motion artifacts. When

motion is correlated to the stimuli, this can produce false positive activations, especially

in the cortex.

We may also discover that the underlying physics of neuroimaging grants only so

much scope for human ingenuity. If so, an era of cheap, covert lie detection might never

dawn, and we will be forced to rely upon some relentlessly costly, cumbersome

technology. Even so, I think it safe to say that the time is not far off when lying, on the

weightiest matters—in court, before a grand jury, during important business negotiations,

etc.—will become a practical impossibility. This fact will be widely publicized, of

course, and the relevant technology will be expected to be in place, or accessible,

whenever the stakes are high. This very assurance, rather than the incessant use of these

machines, will change us.

70. Ball, 2009.

71. Pizarro & Uhlmann, 2008.

72. Kahneman, 2003.

73. Rosenhan, 1973.

74. McNeil, Pauker, Sox, & Tversky, 1982.

75. There are other reasoning biases that can affect medical decisions. It is well

known, for instance, that the presence of two similar options can create “decisional

conflict,” biasing a choice in favor of a third alternative. In one experiment, neurologists

and neurosurgeons were asked to determine which patients to admit to surgery first. Half

the subjects were given a choice between a woman in her early fifties and a man in his

seventies. The other half were given the same two patients, plus another woman in her

fifties who was difficult to distinguish from the first: 38 percent of doctors chose to

operate on the older man in the first scenario; 58 percent chose him in the second

(LaBoeuf & Shafir, 2005). This is a bigger change in outcomes than might be apparent at

first glance: in the first case, the woman’s chance of getting the surgery is 62 percent; in

the second it is 21 percent.

Chapter 4: Religion

1. Marx, [1843] 1971.

2. Freud, [1930] 1994; Freud & Strachey, [1927] 1975.

3. Weber, [1922] 1993.

4. Zuckerman, 2008.

5. Norris & Inglehart, 2004.

6. Finke & Stark, 1998.

7. Norris & Inglehart, 2004, p. 108.

8. It does not seem, however, that socioeconomic inequality explains religious

extremism in the Muslim world, where radicals are, on average, wealthier and more

educated than moderates (Atran, 2003; Esposito, 2008).

9. http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=258.

10. http://pewforum.org/surveys/campaign08/.

11. Pyysiäinen & Hauser, 2010.

12. Zuckerman, 2008.

13. Paul, 2009.

14. Hall, Matz, & Wood, 2010.

15. Decades of cross-cultural research on “subjective well-being” (SWB) by the

World Values Survey ( www.worldvaluessurvey.org) indicate that religion may make an

important contribution to human happiness and life satisfaction at low levels of societal

development, security, and freedom. The happiest and most secure societies, however,

tend to be the most secular. The greatest predictors of a society’s mean SWB are social

tolerance (of homosexuals, gender equality, other religions, etc.) and personal freedom

(Inglehart, Foa, Peterson, & Welzel, 2008). Of course, tolerance and personal freedom

are directly linked, and neither seems to flourish under the shadow of orthodox religion.

16. Paul, 2009.

17. Culotta, 2009.

18. Buss, 2002.

19. I am indebted to the biologist Jerry Coyne for pointing this out (personal

communication). The neuroscientist Mark Cohen has further observed (personal

communication), however, that many traditional societies are far more tolerant of male

promiscuity than female—for instance, the sanction for being raped has often been as

bad, or worse, than for initiating a rape. Cohen speculates that in such cases religion may

offer a post-hoc justification for a biological imperative. This may be so. I would only

add that here, as elsewhere, the task of maximizing human well-being is clearly separable

from Pleistocene biological imperatives.

20. Foster & Kokko, 2008.

21. Fincher, Thornhill, Murray, & Schaller, 2008.

22. Dawkins, 1994; D. Dennett, 1994; D. C. Dennett, 2006; D. S. Wilson &

Wilson, 2007; E. O. Wilson, 2005; E. O. Wilson & Holldobler, 2005, pp. 169–172;

Dawkins, 2006.

23. Boyer, 2001; Durkheim & Cosman, [1912] 2001.

24. Stark, 2001, pp. 180–181.

25. Livingston, 2005.

26. Dennett, 2006.

27. http://pewforum.org/docs/?DocID=215.

28. http://pewforum.org/docs/?DocID=153.

29. Boyer, 2001, p. 302.

30. Barrett, 2000.

31. Bloom, 2004.

32. Brooks, 2009.

33. E. M. Evans, 2001.

34. Hood, 2009.

35. D’Onofrio, Eaves, Murrelle, Maes, & Spilka, 1999.

36. Previc, 2006.

37. In addition, the densities of a specific type of serotonin receptor have been

inversely correlated with high scores on the “spiritual acceptance” subscale of the

Temperament and Character Inventory (J. Borg, Andree, Soderstrom, & Farde, 2003).

38. Asheim, Hansen & Brodtkorb, 2003; Blumer, 1999; Persinger & Fisher, 1990.

39. Brefczynski-Lewis, Lutz, Schaefer, Levinson, & Davidson, 2007; Lutz,

Brefczynski-Lewis, Johnstone, & Davidson, 2008; Lutz, Greischar, Rawlings, Ricard, &

Davidson, 2004; Lutz, Slagter, Dunne, & Davidson, 2008; A. Newberg et al., 2001.

40. Anastasi & Newberg, 2008; Azari et al., 2001; A. Newberg, Pourdehnad,

Alavi, & d’Aquili, 2003; A. B. Newberg, Wintering, Morgan, & Waldman, 2006;

Schjoedt, Stodkilde-Jorgensen, Geertz, & Roepstorff, 2008, 2009.

41. S. Harris et al., 2008.

42. Kapogiannis et al., 2009.

43. S. Harris et al., 2009.

44. D’Argembeau et al., 2008; Moran, Macrae, Heatherton, Wyland, & Kelley,

2006; Northoff et al., 2006; Schneider et al., 2008.

45. Bechara et al., 2000.

46. Hornak et al., 2004; O’Doherty et al., 2003; Rolls, Grabenhorst, & Parris,

2008.

47. Matsumoto & Tanaka, 2004.

48. A direct comparison of belief minus disbelief in Christians and nonbelievers

did not show any significant group differences for nonreligious stimuli. For religious

stimuli, there were additional regions of the brain that did differ by group; however, these

results seem best explained by a common reaction in both groups to statements that

violate religious doctrines (i.e., “blasphemous” statements).

The opposite contrast, disbelief minus belief, yielded increased signal in the

superior frontal sulcus and the precentral gyrus. The engagement of these areas is not

readily explained on the basis of prior work. However, a region-of-interest analysis

revealed increased signal in the insula for this contrast. This partially replicates our

previous finding for this contrast and supports the work of Kapogiannis et al., who also

found signal in the insula to be correlated with the rejection of religious statements

deemed false. The significance of the anterior insula for negative affect/appraisal has

been discussed above. Because Kapogiannis et al. did not include a nonreligious control

condition in their experiment, they interpreted the insula’s recruitment as a sign that

violations of religious doctrine might provoke “aversion, guilt, or fear of loss” in people

of faith. Whereas, our prior work suggests that the insula is active for disbelief generally.

In our study, Christians appeared to make the largest contribution to the insula

signal bilaterally, while the pooled data from both groups produced signal in the left

hemisphere exclusively. Kapogiannis et al. also found that religious subjects produced

bilateral insula signal on disbelief trials, while data from both believers and nonbelievers

yielded signal only on the left. Taken together, these findings suggest that there may be a

group difference between religious believers and nonbelievers with respect to insular

activity. In fact, Inbar et al. found that heightened feelings of disgust are predictive of

social conservatism (as measured by self-reported disgust in response to homosexuality)

(Inbar, Pizarro, Knobe, & Bloom, 2009). Our finding of bilateral insula signal for this

contrast in our first study might be explained by the fact that we did not control for

religious belief (or political orientation) during recruitment. Given the rarity of

nonbelievers in the United States, even on college campuses, one would expect that most

of the subjects in our first study possessed some degree of religious faith.

49. We obtained these results, despite the fact that our two groups accepted and

rejected diametrically opposite statements in half of our experimental trials. This would

seem to rule out the possibility that our data could be explained by any property of the

stimuli apart from their being deemed “true” or “false” by the participants in our study.

50. Wager et al., 2004.

51. T. Singer et al., 2004.

52. Royet et al., 2003; Wicker et al., 2003.

53. Izuma, Saito, & Sadato, 2008.

54. Another key region that appears to be preferentially engaged by religious

thinking is the posterior medial cortex. This area is part of the “resting state” network that

shows greater activity during both rest and self-referential tasks (Northoff et al., 2006). It

is possible that one difference between responding to religious and nonreligious stimuli is

that, for both groups, a person’s answers serve to affirm his or her identity: i.e., for every

religious trial, Christians were explicitly affirming their religious worldview, while

nonbelievers were explicitly denying the truth claims of religion.

The opposite contrast, nonreligious minus religious statements, produced greater

signal in left hemisphere memory networks, including the hippocampus, the

parahippocampal gyrus, middle temporal gyrus, temporal pole, and retrosplenial cortex. It

is well known that the hippocampus and the parahippocampal gyrus are involved in

memory retrieval (Diana, Yonelinas, & Ranganath, 2007). The anterior temporal lobe is

also engaged by semantic memory tasks (K. Patterson, Nestor, & Rogers, 2007), and the

retrosplenial cortex displays especially strong reciprocal connectivity with structures in

the medial temporal lobe (Buckner, Andrews-Hanna, & Schacter, 2008). Thus, judgments

about the nonreligious stimuli presented in our study seemed more dependent upon those

brain systems involved in accessing stored knowledge.

Among our religious stimuli, the subset of statements that ran counter to Christian

doctrine yielded greater signal for both groups in several brain regions, including the

ventral striatum, paracingulate cortex, middle frontal gyrus, the frontal poles, and inferior

parietal cortex. These regions showed greater signal both when Christians rejected stimuli

contrary to their doctrine (e.g., The Biblical god is a myth) and when nonbelievers

affirmed the truth of those same statements. In other words, these brain areas responded

preferentially to “blasphemous” statements in both subject groups. The ventral striatum

signal in this contrast suggests that decisions about these stimuli may have been more

rewarding for both groups: Nonbelievers may take special pleasure in making assertions

that explicitly negate religious doctrine, while Christians may enjoy rejecting such

statements as false.

55. Festinger, Riecken, & Schachter, [1956] 2008.

56. Atran, 2006a.

57. Atran, 2007.

58. Bostom, 2005; Butt, 2007; Ibrahim, 2007; Oliver & Steinberg, 2005; Rubin,

2009; Shoebat, 2007.

59. Atran, 2006b.

60. Gettleman, 2008.

61. Ariely, 2008, p. 177.

62. Pierre, 2001.

63. Larson & Witham, 1998.

64. Twenty-one percent of American adults (and 14 percent of those born on

American soil) are functionally illiterate ( www.nifl.gov/nifl/facts/reading_facts.html),

while only 3 percent of Americans agree with the statement “I don’t believe in God.”

Despite their near invisibility, atheists are the most stigmatized minority in the United

States—beyond homosexuals, African Americans, Jews, Muslims, Asians, or any other

group. Even after September 11, 2001, more Americans would vote for a Muslim for

president than would vote for an atheist (Edgell, Geteis, & Hartmann, 2006).

65. Morse, 2009.

66. And if there were a rider to this horse, he would be entirely without structure

and oblivious to the details of perception, cognition, emotion, and intention that owe their

existence to electrochemical activity in specific regions of the brain. If there is a “pure

consciousness” that might occupy such a role, it will bear little resemblance to what most

religious people mean by a “soul.” A soul this diaphanous would be just as at home in the

brain of a hyena (and seems just as likely to be there) as it would in the brain of a human

being.

67. Levy (2007) poses the same question.

68. Collins, 2006.

69. It is worth recalling in this context that it is, in fact, possible for an established

scientist to destroy his career by saying something stupid. James Watson, the

codiscoverer of the structure of DNA, a Nobel laureate, and the original head of the

Human Genome Project, recently accomplished this feat by asserting in an interview that

people of African descent appear to be innately less intelligent than white Europeans

(Hunte-Grubbe, 2007). A few sentences, spoken off the cuff, resulted in academic

defenestration: lecture invitations were revoked, award ceremonies canceled, and Watson

was forced to immediately resign his post as chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor

Laboratory.

Watson’s opinions on race are disturbing, but his underlying point was not, in

principle, unscientific. There may very well be detectable differences in intelligence

between races. Given the genetic consequences of a population living in isolation for tens

of thousands of years, it would be very surprising if there were no differences between

racial or ethnic groups waiting to be discovered. I say this not to defend Watson’s

fascination with race, or to suggest that such race-focused research might be worth doing.

I am merely observing that there is, at least, a possible scientific basis for his views.

While Watson’s statement was obnoxious, one cannot say that his views are utterly

irrational or that, by merely giving voice to them, he has repudiated the scientific

worldview and declared himself immune to its further discoveries. Such a distinction

would have to be reserved for Watson’s successor at the Human Genome Project, Dr.

Francis Collins.

70. Collins, 2006, p. 225.

71. Van Biema, 2006; Paulson, 2006.

72. Editorial, 2006.

73. Collins, 2006, p. 178.

74. Ibid., pp. 200–201.

75. Ibid., p. 119.

76. It is true that the mysterious effectiveness of mathematics for describing the

physical world has lured many scientists to mysticism, philosophical Platonism, and

religion. The physicist Eugene Wigner famously posed the problem in a paper entitled

“The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences” (Wigner,

1960). While I’m not at all sure that it exhausts this mystery, I think there is something to

be said for Craik’s idea (Craik, 1943) that an isomorphism between brain processes and

the processes in the world that they represent might account for the utility of numbers and

certain mathematical operations. Is it really so surprising that certain patterns of brain

activity (i.e., numbers) can map reliably onto the world?

77. Collins also has a terrible tendency of cherry-picking and misrepresenting the

views of famous scientists like Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein. For instance he

writes:

Even Albert Einstein saw the poverty of a purely naturalistic worldview.

Choosing his words carefully, he wrote, “science without religion is lame, religion

without science is blind.”

The one choosing words carefully here is Collins. As we saw above, when read in

context (Einstein, 1954, pp. 41–49), this quote reveals that Einstein did not in the least

endorse theism and that his use of the word “God” was a poetical way of referring to the

laws of nature. Einstein had occasion to complain about such deliberate distortions of his

work:

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which

is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never

denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called

religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our

science can reveal it (cited in R. Dawkins, 2006, p. 36).

78. Wright, 2003, 2008.

79. Polkinghorne, 2003; Polkinghorne & Beale, 2009.

80. Polkinghorne, 2003, pp. 22–23.

81. In 1996, the physicist Alan Sokal submitted the nonsense paper

“Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum

Gravity” to the journal Social Text. While the paper was patently insane, this journal,

which still stands “at the forefront of cultural theory,” avidly published it. The text is

filled with gems like following:

[T]he discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot

assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives

emanating from dissident or marginalized communities … In quantum gravity, as we

shall see, the space-time manifold ceases to exist as an objective physical reality;

geometry becomes relational and contextual; and the foundational conceptual categories

of prior science—among them, existence itself—become problematized and relativized.

This conceptual revolution, I will argue, has profound implications for the content of a

future postmodern and liberatory science (Sokal, 1996, p. 218).

82. Ehrman, 2005. Bible scholars agree that the earliest Gospels were written

decades after the life of Jesus. We don’t have the original texts of any of the Gospels.

What we have are copies of copies of copies of ancient Greek manuscripts that differ

from one another in literally thousands of places. Many show signs of later

interpolation—which is to say that people have added passages to these texts over the

centuries, and these passages have found their way into the canon. In fact, there are whole

sections of the New Testament, like the Book of Revelation, that were long considered

spurious, that were included in the Bible only after many centuries of neglect; and there

are other books, like the Shepherd of Hermas, that were venerated as part of the Bible for

hundreds of years only to be rejected finally as false scripture. Consequently, it is true to

say that generations of Christians lived and died having been guided by scripture that is

now deemed to be both mistaken and incomplete by the faithful. In fact, to this day,

Roman Catholics and Protestants cannot agree on the full contents of the Bible. Needless

to say, such a haphazard and all-too-human process of cobbling together the authoritative

word of the Creator of the Universe seems a poor basis for believing that the miracles of

Jesus actually occurred.

The philosopher David Hume made a very nice point about believing in miracles

on the basis of testimony: “No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the

testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact,

which it endeavours to establish …” (Hume, 1996, vol. IV, p. 131). This is a good rule of

thumb. Which is more likely, that Mary, the mother of Jesus, would have sex outside of

wedlock and then feel the need to lie about it, or that she would conceive a child through

parthenogenesis the way aphids and Komodo dragons do? On the one hand, we have the

phenomenon of lying about adultery—in a context where the penalty for adultery is

death—and on the other, we have a woman spontaneously mimicking the biology of

certain insects and reptiles. Hmm …

83. Editorial, 2008.

84. Maddox, 1981.

85. Sheldrake, 1981.

86. I have publicly lamented this double standard on a number of occasions (S.

Harris, 2007a; S. Harris & Ball, 2009)

87. Collins, 2006, p. 23.

88. Langford et al., 2006.

89. Masserman et al., 1964.

90. Our picture of chimp notions of fairness is somewhat muddled. There is no

question that they notice inequity, but they do not seem to care if they profit from it

(Brosnan, 2008; Brosnan, Schiff, & de Waal, 2005; Jensen, Call, & Tomasello, 2007;

Jensen, Hare, Call, & Tomasello, 2006; Silk et al., 2005).

91. Range et al., 2009.

92. Siebert, 2009.

93. Silver, 2006, p. 157.

94. Ibid., p. 162.

95. Collins, 2006.

96. Of course, I also received much support, especially from scientists, and even

from scientists at the NIH.

97. Miller, it should be noted, is also a believing Christian and the author of

Finding Darwin’s God (K. R. Miller, 1999). For all its flaws, this book contains an

extremely useful demolition of “intelligent design.”

98. C. Mooney & S. Kirshenbaum, 2009, pp. 97–98.

99. The claim is ubiquitous, even at the highest levels of scientific discourse.

From a recent editorial in Nature, insisting on the reality of human evolution:

The vast majority of scientists, and the majority of religious people, see little

potential for pleasure or progress in the conflicts between religion and science that are

regularly fanned into flame by a relatively small number on both sides of the debate.

Many scientists are religious, and perceive no conflict between the values of their

science—values that insist on disinterested, objective inquiry into the nature of the

Universe—and those of their faith (Editorial, 2007).

From the National Academy of Sciences:

Science can neither prove nor disprove religion … Many scientists have written

eloquently about how their scientific studies have increased their awe and understanding

of a creator … The study of science need not lessen or compromise faith (National

Academy of Sciences [U.S.] & Institute of Medicine [U.S.], 2008, p. 54).

Chapter 5: The Future of Happiness

1. Allen, 2000.

2. Los Angeles Times, July 5, 1910.

3. As indicated above, I think it is reasonably clear that concerns about angering

God and/or suffering an eternity in hell are based on specific notions of harm. Not

believing in God or hell leaves one blissfully unconcerned about such liabilities. Under

Haidt’s analysis, concerns about God and the afterlife would seem to fall under the

categories of “authority” and/or “purity.” I think such assignments needlessly parcel what

is, at bottom, a more general concern about harm.

4. Inbar et al., 2009.

5. Schwartz, 2004.

6. D. T. Gilbert, 2006.

www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_memory.html.

8. Ibid.

9. Lykken & Tellegen, 1996.

10. D. T. Gilbert, 2006, pp. 220–222.

11. Simonton, 1994.

12. Rilling et al., 2002.

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INDEX

The letter n after a page number means “note”; the number following an n is the

note’s number; a double nn precedes a range of note numbers.

abortion, 5, 35, 146

acetylcholine, 226n35

Adam and Eve, 40–41

adultery, 74, 91, 97

affective forecasting, 183–84

Afghanistan, 122, 196n9 , 207n17

Africa, 129, 145, 156–57

aggression, 100–101, 213n78 , 215n90 . See also violence

AIDS, 179, 200n14

Ainslie, George, 211n51

Albania, 1

albinos, 156–57

alien hand syndrome, 105, 216n104

altruism, 56, 57, 92, 101–2, 170

altruistic punishment, 92

ambiguity, 226n35

American Anthropological Association, 205n28

American Psychiatric Association, 157

Amodio, D. M., 227n40

animals:

aggression in chimps, 100

brain size of primates, 218–19n5

caudate in, 225n35

common ancestor of chimps and humans, 114, 159

communicative behavior of, 114, 218n1 , 218n5

differential rewards for, 229n61

fairness and chimps, 170, 237n90

as food source, 210–11n50

foraging behavior of, 229n61

head movements of chimps, 57

monkeys’ aversion from producing suffering in other monkeys, 170, 214n88

moral sense and, 169–70

reward system in, 9

suffering of, 171, 199n8 , 210–11n50 , 214n88

visual-decision task with monkeys, 228n61

well-being of, 41–42, 198–99n8 , 210–11n50

answers in practice versus answers in principle, 3, 30–31, 60, 191

anthropology, 19–20, 45, 145, 147, 151, 197n25 , 205–6n28 . See also specific

anthropologists

anticipated memories, 185

antidepressants, 110, 182, 230n66

antisocial behavior, 99, 213n76 , 214–15n89 . See also psychopathy

antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), 213n76

anxiety, 97–98

aphasia, 159

Aristotle, 195n9

Asian Disease Problem, 140–41

ASPD. See antisocial personality disorder (ASPD)

atheism, 234–35n64 . See also New Atheists; secular liberals

Atran, Scott, 155–56, 205n28

“autonomous hand,” 216n104

aversive sounds, 77

Babiak, P., 214n87

Bad Life versus Good Life, 15–21, 38–42

Ball, Philip, 137–39

Barrett, Justin, 151

Bechara, A., 228n61

beehive approach to morality, 89

belief:

adoption of, for feeling better, 137–39

bias and, 122–26, 137, 226n36

brain science on, 11, 14, 116–22, 197n22

definitions of, 117

different categories of, 139–40

ethical beliefs, 14

extraneous information and/or context as influence on, 140–42

factual beliefs, 14

freedom of, 136–44

inseparability of reasoning and emotion, 126–31

internet’s influence on, 123

as intrinsically epistemic, 138

knowledge as, 115, 196–97n22

lie detection and, 133–36

meaning of, 115–18, 219–20n15

memory and, 116

mental properties of, 136–40

motivation for, 126

reasoning and, 122, 131–33

religious belief, 137–38, 148–54

science and, 144

wrong beliefs, 21

Benedict, Pope, 200n14

Benedict, Ruth, 20, 60–62

Bentham, Jeremy, 207n12

bias:

adaptive fitness versus, 226–27n38

belief and, 122–26, 137, 226n36

decisional conflict, 231n75

definition of, 132

endowment effect and, 75

factors causing, 226n36

internet’s influence on, 123

knowledge and, 123–24

of liberals, 125–26

loss aversion, 75–77, 209n35

medical decisions and, 143, 231n75

of parents, 73

of political conservatives, 124–25

in reasoning, 132, 142–43

of science, 47

sins of commission versus sins of omission, 77

truth bias, 120, 223n26

unconscious and, 122–23

Bible, 3, 34, 38, 150, 166, 236–37n82

Biblical Creationism, 34, 37, 151, 202n19

Bin Laden, Osama, 5

Bingham, Roger, 5–6, 23

BioLogos Foundation, 169

birth control. See contraception

birthday wishes, 30–31

Blackford, Russell, 204n24

Blair, James, 99, 214n87 , 214n88

Bloom, Paul, 151

Boas, Franz, 20

Bohr, Niels, 179

Bowles, Samuel, 101

Boyer, Pascal, 150–51

brain science:

Bad Life versus Good Life, 17–18

on belief, 11, 14, 116–22, 197n22

on change, 8

on cooperation, 55–56, 59, 61–62

on cultural norms, 9–10

on depression, 30

on disgust, 153, 212n64 , 224–25n34 , 233n48

early childhood experience and, 9–10

emotional circuitry of, and moral intuitions, 89, 212n71

on envy, 222n18

evolution of, 13

on facial recognition, 223n22

fears about progress in, 110

feedback and, 225–26n35

fundamental processes of, as self-generated, 103–4

illusion of free will and, 102–5, 110

and influences on well-being, 64

information processing and, 102–3, 117–18

interconnectivity and, 119–20, 222n19

on loss aversion, 75, 209n35

maximization of well-being of self and others, 83–85

on memory and language processing, 212n58 , 212n71

mind as product of physical brain, 110

modularity in brain organization, 220–22n18

on moral cognition, 91–95

on moral responsibility, 216–17n109

on motivated reasoning, 227n44

multiple functions of brain regions, 119–20, 212n64 , 212n71 , 220–22n18 , 224–

26nn34–35

on neuroethics, 206n37

on psychopaths, 97–98, 204n24 , 213n78 , 214–15 nn 89–90

on reasoning, 228n61

religion and, 152–54, 233nn48–49, 234n54

reward system, 92–93, 98, 153, 212n63

on schadenfreude, 222n18

split-brain research, 212n58 See also brain structures; neuroimaging research

brain structures:

amygdala, 128

anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), 154, 222n18 , 225–26n35 , 227n40

anterior insula, 153, 224–25n34 , 233n48

anterior temporal lobe, 234n54

basal ganglia, 225–26n35

caudate nucleus in, 225–26n35

dorsal striatum, 226

frontal lobes of, 93, 118–19, 213n78 , 223n22

fusiform gyrus in, 222–23n22

“grandmother cells,” 222n20

gray matter, 214–15n89

hippocampus, 234n54

insula, 119, 233n48

lateral prefrontal cortex, 228n61

limbic system, 103, 217n109

medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), 93–94, 107, 108, 120–22, 153, 222n18 , 223–

24nn27–28

medial temporal lobes, 223n22 , 234n54

motor regions, 103

nucleus accumbens, 98, 212n63

parahippocampal gyrus, 234n54

paralimbic system, 215n90

posterior medial cortex, 234n54

prefrontal cortex (PFC), 91–93, 103, 107, 120, 214–15n89 , 223n23 , 228n61 ,

230n66

retrosplenial cortex, 234n54

temporal lobes, 91–92, 223n22 , 234n54

ventral striatum, 153

ventromedial prefrontal cortex, 228n61

white matter, 214n89 , 223n23 See also brain

Brown, Andrew, 173

Bundy, Ted, 205n24

Burton, Robert, 127–29

Bush, George W., 88, 197n28

cancer, 87, 101, 143, 202n17

capital punishment, 128, 136

Carroll, Sean, 203n20

Casebeer, William, 195–96n9

categorical imperative, 81–82, 199n10

Catholic Church, 34–35, 146, 149, 179, 199–202nn14–15, 237n82 . See also

religion

children:

callousness/unemotional trait in, 99, 213n78

care about other people’s children, 40

corporal punishment of, 3, 214n88

decision to have children, 187–88

disgust felt by, 224n34

early experience of, 9–10

hospital care of, 76–77

infants’ ability to follow a person’s gaze, 57

infants’ perception of aggressors, 206n35

in Israeli kibbutzim, 73

kindness for, 38

murder of infant by religious conservatives, 158

neglect and abuse of, 9, 35, 95–96, 107–8, 199–201n14

in orphanages, 9, 200n14

parents’ attachment to, 73

religion and, 151

self-regulation of, 223n23

sexual abuse scandal in Catholic Church, 35, 199–201n14

China, 67

Christianity. See religion

Churchland, Patricia, 68, 101–2, 196n18 , 210n49

cingulotomy, 226n35

Cleckley, H. M., 214n87

Clinton, Bill, 133

cognitive bias. See bias

Cohen, Jonathan, 217–18n111

Cohen, Mark, 152, 229n62 , 232n19

Collins, Francis, 160–74, 235n69 , 236n77

colonoscopies, 77, 184

common sense dualists, 151

communication. See language

compatibilism, 217n111

computational theory, 220n17

conduct disorder, 213n76

confirmation bias, 223n26

consciousness, 32–33, 41–42, 62, 108–9, 158–59, 221–22n18 , 235n66

consensus, 31–32, 34, 198, 198n6

consequentialism, 62, 67–73, 207n12 , 208n20 , 210–11n50

conservatives. See political conservatives; religious conservatives

“consilience” in science, 8

conspiracy theories, 88–89, 212n57

contraception, 35, 48, 63, 179

contractual approach to morality, 89

contractualism, 78–79

cooperation, 55–62, 92, 99–100, 189, 207n7

corporal punishment, 3, 214n88

Cotard’s delusion, 127

Cox, D. D., 229n62

Coyne, Jerry, 232n19

Creationist “science,” 34, 37, 151, 202n19 , 237n97

Crick, Francis, 47

criminal justice system, 106, 109, 110–11, 135–36. See also murder; prisons

cultural norms, 9–10

cultural relativism, 20–21, 45–46

“culture wars.” See religious conservatives; secular liberals

Dahmer, Jeffrey, 18–19, 34

Damasio, Antonio, 126

Danish cartoon controversy, 74–75, 179

Darwin, Charles, 13, 56

Dawkins, Richard, 23, 174

De Grey, Aubrey, 12

De Oliveira-Souza, Ricardo, 91–92, 213n78

death, 35, 125, 143. See also murder

deception, 133–36, 229n62 , 229–30n66

decision making, 228–29n61

decisional conflict, 231n75

deduction, 131–32

Delgado, M. R., 226n35

delusions, 157

Dennett, Daniel, 48, 68, 105, 174, 217n111

depression, 22, 30, 182

determinism, 105, 217–18n111

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), 157

Diamond, Jared, 100–101, 110–11

disbelief, 120–22, 225–26n35 , 229n62 , 233n48 . See also belief; uncertainty

disgust, 153, 181, 212n64 , 224–25n34 , 233n48

diversity, bewildered by, 85–91

Dobu islanders, 60–62

dogmatism, 22–23, 53, 124–25. See also religion

dopamine, 128, 152, 227n51

Douglas, Pamela, 229n62

DSM-IV, 157

Edelman, G. M., 196n16

Edgerton, Robert, 20, 197n25

Einstein, Albert, 179, 202n18 , 236n77

Elliot, R., 228n61

embryonic stem-cell research, 5, 23, 171–73

emotions, 89, 126–31, 210n49 . See also specific emotions, such as happiness

empathy, 99, 177

endowment effect, 75

envy, 222n18

ethics. See morality; values; and headings beginning with moral

Europe, 5, 145–46

Evans, Margaret, 151

evil, 27, 64–66, 100–102, 108, 109, 189–90. See also psychopathy

evolution, 11, 13–14, 36, 48–53, 56–57, 147–52, 161, 175, 207–8n19 , 216n101 ,

237–38n99

experiencing self, 184–87

extension neglect, 208n25

facts, 4, 5–6, 10–14, 24–25, 122, 143–44. See also knowledge; science

fairness, 77–82, 89–90, 170, 209n42 , 209n45 , 237n90

faith. See belief; religion

fatalism versus determinism, 105

feedback, 225–26n35

feminist epistemology, 47–48

fetus in fetu, 171–72

Fifth Amendment, 135

Flanagan, Owen, 195–96n9

fMRI. See neuroimaging research

Fodor, Jerry, 11

food, 7–8, 82–83, 113–14, 197n25 , 210–11n50

Foot, P., 212n67

Fox, C. R., 209n35

Franklin, Rosalind, 47

Frederick, S., 208n25

free will, 102–6, 110–12, 206n37 , 215n97 , 216n102 , 217–18n111

freedom of belief, 136–44

Freud, Sigmund, 145

Friedman, Thomas, 202n19

Frith, Chris, 127, 128

functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). See neuroimaging research

gay marriage, 5, 53, 86, 191

Gazzaniga, Michael, 216–17n109

Geertz, Clifford, 205n28

genital mutilation of females, 27, 42, 46

genocide, 133, 191, 219n7

genocide neglect, 69

Gilbert, Daniel, 183

God. See religion

Gold, J. I., 228n61

good/goodness:

Bad Life versus Good Life, 15–21, 38–42, 195–96n9

bewildered by diversity and, 85–91

cooperation and, 55–62, 92, 99–100, 189, 207n7

definition of, 12

difficulty of being good, 82–85

fairness and hierarchy, 77–82, 209n42

Greene on, 64–66, 208n20

Kahneman on, 75

Moore on open question argument, 10, 12

moral brain and, 91–95

moral paradox and, 67–77

moral responsibility and, 106–12, 216–17n109

Plato on, 30

pleasure and, 196n20

Rawls on, 210n46

of suffering, 21–22 See also happiness; well-being; and headings beginning with

moral

Gould, Stephen J., 6

Greene, Joshua, 64–66, 86, 94, 208n20 , 212n71 , 217–18n111

Haidt, Jonathan, 50, 85–91, 180–81, 238n3

Haiti earthquake, 68

Haldane, J. B. S., 56

Hamilton, William, 56

happiness:

Bad Life versus Good Life, 15–21, 38–42

care about others’ happiness, 57–59

difficulties in study of, 182–83

future of, 177–91

inaccurate intuitions about, 183

kindness versus cruelty for, 8, 80

maximization of, for self and others, 83–85

of parents, 73, 187–88

positive psychology on, 181–84

religion’s contribution to, 231–32n15

in secular societies, 231–32n15 See also good/goodness; well-being

Harding, Sandra, 47

Hare, Robert, 97, 214n87

harm, 89–90, 181, 238n3 . See also evil; psychopathy

Hawking, Stephen, 236n77

health, 7–8, 11–12, 21, 22, 35–37, 47, 143, 195n3 , 197n25 , 202n17 , 231n75 .