First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans
Sunday, March 9, 2008
In thinking about the age-old subject of the moral instinct, two examples from popular culture immediately jump to my mind. One is the smarmy character of Eddie Haskell in the old TV show “Leave It to Beaver.” Eddie Haskell is unfailingly polite and respectful and flattering to Mr. and Mrs. Cleaver – but only to their faces. Behind their backs he is derisive and manipulative, and is often the instigator of whatever trouble Wally and the Beave get into. The other is the familiar Christmas song “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” which warns, “he knows if you’ve been bad or good – so be good for goodness’ sake!” This song reminds me of the old concept of God from my Catholic childhood – that God was watching you all the time, so you better be good!
There’s the rub – and our Universalist ancestors caught it right away. If you are only good as long as you’re being watched – by Ward and June Cleaver, by your own parents or teachers or other authority figures, by Santa Claus, or by God – then are you really being good? If goodness is only done for show, or to please an authority figure, or to avoid punishment, or get a reward, then can it really be said to be “goodness”? Can you be coerced into right behavior?
The answer that conservative religions (and a lot of conservative parents) give to those questions is “yes,” and that answer stems from a particular view of human nature. To this way of thinking, human beings are born depraved and fallen (to use the old religious terms), or born without moral instincts (to use the psychological term). In this view moral behavior must first be enforced or even coerced – or to use less fraught language, encouraged through a system of rewards and punishments and the approval of authority figures, otherwise, there would be chaos. This was indeed the brief that religions of the day had against the preaching of Universalism – that without threat of eternal punishment, human beings would revert to their true, evil natures.
Our Universalist forebears, on the other hand, taught that each and every person was loved by God, and had as part of their innate make-up a seed of God’s nature; our responsibility in life is to nurture and grow that seed. In other words, we are to take the moral instinct we are born with, and use it, in the words of A. Powell Davies, “to grow a soul.” Right behavior was thought to be the only possible response to experiencing the universal love of God. It turns out that unbeknownst to them, those old Universalists had science on their side. Many scientists today believe that some form of moral instinct is inborn in our neurobiology, part of our evolutionary heritage.
In a recent article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker says that moral decision-making operates differently from other kinds of thinking. He calls it the “moralization switch.” He says that there are two ways you can tell if someone’s moralization switch has been tripped: first, when people call an act “immoral,” they believe it is both an objective and universal judgment. Second, when people decide an act is immoral, they not only want the perpetrator punished, they feel that NOT doing so would be “letting them get away with it.”
The second of these 2 points hints at why some individuals would behave in ways that they themselves would judge to be wrong in other circumstances, or why supposedly upright military officers or prison guards would commit atrocities. If the people being hurt or tortured or killed are evildoers who have themselves committed immoral acts, then they deserve what happens to them. It would even be wrong to treat them better. Well-known behavioral science experiments let us know a second reason: ordinary human beings will go against their own conscience and harm others if they respect or fear – or both – the authority figure directing them.
Interestingly, some things that used to be considered moral issues are now thought by most people to be simple life-style choices or inherent traits. At one time, divorce was thought so immoral that no divorced person could serve as clergy or be elected to public office; at one time, being pregnant outside of marriage was cause to be sent away from your family and being thought a “fallen woman.” Neither of those things is true today anywhere but in the most conservative of circles. Polls now show that a slim majority of Americans, even young evangelicals, now believe that being gay or lesbian is also not a moral issue. Thus, what is considered moral can migrate and evolve.
Another interesting thing about morality is that there seems to be an unconscious “set point” about the quantity of things that we consider to be moral issues. Just as we decide that some things, like divorce, single motherhood, homosexuality, alcoholism, and drug use are no longer immoral but are personal choices, inherited traits, or problems to be coped with, other things have became issues of morality or ethics that used to be simple practical matters or value-free available options, such as eating meat, smoking, using disposable diapers, or recycling. A person who is perfectly free and easy about one topic once considered immoral usually substitutes something else to go into the vacancy in the morality column. My favorite example of this is the Mardi Gras Day that Eric and I spent years ago with dear friends. After a long afternoon spent in the Quarter, seeing all kinds of body parts exposed by every possible gender, and watching people imbibing every possible mind-altering substance, we emerged onto Canal Street that evening just as traffic was being allowed back. One of our friends exclaimed with disgust, “Oh, that’s obscene – that’s positively immoral!” And when we turned to see what extreme of human behavior we hadn’t already seen had prompted this outburst, our friend pointed to a giant stretch Hummer driving by.
You can tell when your own or someone else’s moral toggle has been thrown by the glowing inner heat of righteousness, coupled with the burning desire to recruit more people to your side. My friend’s face that Carnival, earlier so relaxed and happy, had contorted and reddened; her pointing finger was the very picture of moral indignation. If you catch yourself or someone else in that pose, either literally or figuratively, then you can be sure you are dealing with a moralization switch, and it might be a good idea to reason through it. Not everything that you consider to be bad is immoral. Some things are just natural occurrences, like hurricanes; some things are simply nasty accidents, like my fall on Canal Street last night. Other things are culturally determined, such as whether women can show their hair, or their knees. Some things are matters of personal preference.
The trouble is, most of us do not think rationally about moral issues, but instead rely on rationalization – beginning with a foregone conclusion arising from our emotions, and then going back to devise reasons to justify our ready-made decision. As Ben Franklin put it so wonderfully, “So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable Creature, since it enables one to find or make a Reason for everything one has a mind to do.” Or not do, as the case may be. For many people, confronted with a complex or emotional moral question, the only possible response is a somewhat befuddled, “I don’t know, I can’t explain it, I just know it’s wrong.”
As we learned in this morning’s Reading, many of us can be swayed by the appearance of goodness, and just as prejudiced by the appearance of badness. See Bill Gates as a moral figure, whose work in international public health has saved the lives of thousands of people all over the world? Some folks would rather dig their eyes with a spoon. Devoting your life to caring for the poor, even doing a bad job of it, while voluntarily living in relative poverty yourself? Many people would be insulted and angry to think that anyone might impugn the life and work of Mother Teresa.
Consider this test given to American university students and, through the Internet, to people in Europe, Asia, North and South America, whose educational level, race, and religion ran the gamut; see what you think:
You see a trolley car hurtling down the track, the driver slumped unconscious at the controls. Down the track, oblivious to the danger, are a group of five workmen. You are near a fork in the track and can pull a lever that will divert the trolley, saving the five workers. Unfortunately, there is a lone worker on the spur that the trolley would run down. Is it right to pull the lever, to kill one person to save five?
Almost everyone says “yes” – but then consider this variation:
You are on a bridge overlooking the tracks and see a runaway trolley bearing down on five workmen. The only thing you can do to save the workers is throw a heavy object onto the tracks, but the only heavy object within reach is a large person standing nearby. Is it right to throw a person from the bridge, to kill one person to save five?
While in one sense you could say the two scenarios are roughly equivalent, almost no one taking the Trolley Problem test sees it that way. While nearly everyone would throw the switch in the first instance, almost no body would heave the big person off the bridge in the second. And when asked to explain, most folks can’t come up with anything more coherent than “just knowing” it would be wrong.
Philosopher and cognitive neuroscientist Joshua Green thinks we may be hard-wired with an inner revulsion to committing violence on an innocent, even with a rational calculus about saving a number of other lives. When tested using an MRI of the brain of subjects pondering the Trolley Problem, scientists discovered that the second situation, which required a hands-on killing, lit up three different areas of the brain: one associated with emotion, another with mental computation, and one that registers conflicts between different areas. The first scenario, which involved merely throwing a switch, lit up only the area associated with rational calculation. Together, the findings show that our non-utilitarian moral intuitions come from the victory of an emotional impulse over a rational cost-benefit analysis.
Making decisions about what is the right thing to do, especially decisions that go beyond the knee-jerk, requires that careful balance among rational thought, judgments about consequences, our deepest emotions, and an ineffable something-something from our evolutionary hard-wiring.
Being good for goodness’ sake is the challenge we religious liberals have set for ourselves. Not to be good out of fear of punishment or to get reward or approval from an authority figure, but to be good for the sake of goodness alone, figuring out for ourselves what is the right thing, and then trying to conform our lives to that self-chosen standard. It can be a lonely path, if attempted without the help and support, and yes, the challenge of a religious community, but we have always believed that it is the path with heart, the only spiritual journey worth making. May we make this journey together, struggling together to discern the right, and then striving together to live in the best ways we can. So might this be! AMEN – ASHE – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTE – BLESSED BE!
“The Moral Instinct – Evolution has endowed us with ethical impulses. Do we know what to do with them?” by Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University; author of “The Language Instinct” and “The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature.” New York Times Magazine, January 13, 2008.
