'How much do they pay you at Harvard?' Moderator Jon Meecham asked evolutionary biologist and psychologist Marc Hauser that last night at the 92nd St. Y during a roundtable discussion of the 'Science of morality.' Hauser had just asked the audience if it was morally wrong to have - well - 'relations' with a chicken if you do it in the privacy of your own home. Needless to say, the crowd leaned toward Meecham on the wrongs of feathered intimacy.
Hauser, neuroethicist Patricia Churchland, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, and philosopher of the mind Daniel Dennett had a wide-ranging and complex discussion about what science teaches us about morality. They touched on definitions of morality (they said: an emotional process of learning from punishments and rewards for what is right and wrong), if we are the only moral species on the planet, whether morality can exist without God or religion, what neuroscience can teach us about how we make moral choices, how we can know something is wrong without being able to explain why, and if there's a chemical basis for the moral differences between men and women. None of these questions had simple answers. Rarely was a statement from one panelist not challenged or enhanced by another speaker.
The audience seemed most fascinated by the experiments the panelists cited to support their ideas. Hauser's example was how eating cookies predicts your marriage's stability.
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Listening to each of the speakers, it became clear that morality isn't only a religious question. That would make it complex enough. Now we must contend with how the self-knowledge we can gain through science about how our brains 'make' morality can enhance our society -- or be manipulated by those with power. As Damasio said, we must continue to think critically about what we do with what we know. We must aim higher in our understanding and interactions. In the end, we may find that a scientific understanding of morality is one more step forward in our evolution as a species. The hope is that such knowledge will make us better social beings, individually and together.
USA Today
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