Where shall I point my truck?
If you contrast the judgments of people who claim to be atheists versus people who claim to be religious, have religious background, whatever that background is, you find no differences in the patterns of judgments.I really don't even know where to begin with something like this. I'm amazed that people actually think—and many, many obviously do—that religious belief is some touchstone of morality, or that it is through religion that we learn morality. We are socialized from the youngest age in a million different ways that have nothing to do with religion, and demonstrating that (current, self-reported) religiosity doesn't affect patterns of moral judgment proves absolutely nothing about whether morality has a biological basis. The experiments required to determine whether human morality (ignoring the reductionist and question-begging nature of that term) has a biological basis would never be sanctioned. You would need experimental subjects uncontaminated by social influences, including parental influences, and the conditions for creating those subjects would constitute child abuse.
Also, it would fascinate me if some people's moral judgments were not closely tied to their particular religious beliefs and upbringing. You can't just disregard the sometime primacy of ideology. I really doubt that the professor would suggest that I could go into some different cultures of my choosing, ask people a question like "what should happen to adulterers?", and find "no differences in the patterns of judgments." In one place they will unlimber the stones and in another they will chuckle and mutter wryly in French.
Also, you have people's moral judgments and then you have what they say their moral judgments are. I doubt even a completely anonymous survey can eliminate the difference.
Also, if "we are born with an instinctive sense of what's right and wrong," you'd expect to see some evidence of it in very young children. Do you? I think not. We might just as well ask whether we are born with an instinctive ability to read.
I could go on. However, because of my lack of a sound religious upbringing, I have to go out now and do a couple of home invasions. More later, perhaps.
Labels: religion
posted at 12:05 AM
4 Comments:
(found a link to your blog on sexandtheivy.com, in case you're wondering how I found this)
I'm not really responding directly to your entry, just making some comments.
I think religion makes it easier for people to be moral, at least the true god-fearing people would be too afraid to cheat their system. Though, I don't mean that fear is what keeps religious people from doing bad things, I just think it probably helps.
Atheists, on the other hand, must be moral by having a strong belief what is right and wrong. Or, perhaps the atheist would have a fear for the law. I think the law takes religion's place for the nonbeliever.
I tend to agree with you, M, but I think I'd talk in terms of ethics (human-created) rather than morality (originating elsewhere).
I actually think a lot of religions (including most conservative ones) don't do a very good job of teaching ethics. They're really good at making rules, not so good at providing a true moral or ethical foundation. A friend of mine once said (according to her mother) that the problem with Mormonism is that it's all rules and no ethics. I agree, and I don't think it's only Mormonism that has this problem.
In the event, unsurprisingly, there was nothing particularly startling in the story. The professor (bio anthro) proposes that we have an innate capacity for learning/internalizing moral rules, a "morality organ" (I'm not using his terms) along the lines of whatever you want to say we have up there for learning language/grammar. This is not a particularly shocking idea, if you ask me.
The evidence shown is that in functional MRIs, a particular spot lights up when subjects are presented with questions of a certain sort (which the professor, quite possibly with reason, certainly beyond the scope of a "Nightline" puff piece, has identified as "moral questions"),a particular little region of the brain lights up. Again, not surprising . . . it has to happen somewhere.
There was a also a little demonstration with a class of preschoolers that was supposed to drive home the point that a sense of "fairness" is "instinctive" (ABC's term, I would guess). With their teacher and the professor present, and the cameras rolling, half the kids got envelopes with 10 Skittles candies and half got empty envelopes. Lo and behold, when asked what should be done to fairly rectify the situation, and coached that "fairness" should be involved in the solution, "the kids" (i.e., one kid, it seemed to me) proposed the haves each give five Skittles to one of the have-nots. Later, the professor commented that he didn't think anyone had taught the kids this specific solution to this specific problem, and "Nightline" jumped back in to suggest it was instinct. Again, where shall I point my truck? Do you suppose if they'd found the envelopes on the playground with no adults around, the result would have been the same? No . . . oh, my, no.
I don't distinguish between ethics and morality because I think it's all human-created. I will have to remember that when I apply the adjective "human-created" in this context that it is clear I am meaning to characterize all morality rather than to specify a particular category of morality.
I definitely agree on the "good at making rules, not so good at providing a true moral or ethical foundation." This reminds me of that wonderful joke with the punchline "It's all turtles from there on down, Sahib."
I appreciate the work of all people who share information with others.
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