Saturday, November 24, 2007

Time - What Makes Us Moral

Time has a feature story, What Makes Us Moral, on the current state of our understanding of how morality works in human beings. Interestingly, the article presents several studies on the morality of animals, which is one of the primary research areas for a biological source of morality. The research shows that morality is not unique to humans, nor is empathy and compassion.

Overall, the research seems to indicate that we are being pushed by our biology, our beliefs, and our cultural values in many different directions, which makes morality a very confusing structure for us humans. I would add that we are also at the mercy of social structures, such as laws, that dictate behavior. I know many people who would not do the "right" thing if it meant breaking a law.

Here is the beginning of the article:

If the entire human species were a single individual, that person would long ago have been declared mad. The insanity would not lie in the anger and darkness of the human mind—though it can be a black and raging place indeed. And it certainly wouldn't lie in the transcendent goodness of that mind—one so sublime, we fold it into a larger "soul." The madness would lie instead in the fact that both of those qualities, the savage and the splendid, can exist in one creature, one person, often in one instant.

We're a species that is capable of almost dumbfounding kindness. We nurse one another, romance one another, weep for one another. Ever since science taught us how, we willingly tear the very organs from our bodies and give them to one another. And at the same time, we slaughter one another. The past 15 years of human history are the temporal equivalent of those subatomic particles that are created in accelerators and vanish in a trillionth of a second, but in that fleeting instant, we've visited untold horrors on ourselves—in Mogadishu, Rwanda, Chechnya, Darfur, Beslan, Baghdad, Pakistan, London, Madrid, Lebanon, Israel, New York City, Abu Ghraib, Oklahoma City, an Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania—all of the crimes committed by the highest, wisest, most principled species the planet has produced. That we're also the lowest, cruelest, most blood-drenched species is our shame—and our paradox.


Read the whole article, and take a brief morality quiz.


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