Blumner takes a stab at morality

I've been sifting through some more of Robyn Blumner's editorials in the St. Petersburg Times. She's frequently good for a laugh when she's not trying to be funny.

In a recent editorial Blumner wrote about evolutionary scientists who think that morality is inherited.

Such a backward judgment makes me feel entirely divorced from the Iranian court's understanding of right and wrong. Does their moral compass and our own really share the same essential human instincts for discerning ethical conduct?

Yes, say modern evolutionary biologists, who claim that human moral intuition is largely inherited, as opposed to a cultural acquisition. And the evidence seems to suggest they are right.

(St. Petersburg Times)

We receive no indication that "evolutionary biologists" other than Marc Hauser make the claim (let's just say I suspect Blumner fudged on that one), and no good evidence of the supposed genetic link.
I located an interview with Hauser. Here's what he said:

... we have only begun to flesh out the theory and run the relevant experiments.

(...)

In our recent studies, collaborating with a patient population that has been carefully studied by the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio and his colleagues, we have found an exciting and highly selective deficit. Whereas these patients show normal patterns of responses to a relatively large class of moral dilemmas, they show highly abnormal responses on one specific type of dilemma. In particular, where the action involves personal contact with another individual, and where the choice is between harming one versus many, and there are no clear social norms available to decide, these patients consistently take the utilitarian route, selecting the option that yields the greatest good regardless of the means required to achieve such ends. Thus, damage to this particular area of the brain, one that connects emotional processing with high-level decision making, yields a highly selective deficit in moral judgment. Of course, if you are a utilitarian, your interpretation will be different! You will think that it is because of irrational emotions that we don't all think like utilitarians, seeing the overall good as the only relevant moral yardstick.
(American Scientist Online)

The obvious question should be: How does this data differentiate between inherited and learned morality?

Here's Hauser from earlier in the interview.

The core idea is derived from the work in generative grammar that [MIT linguist Noam] Chomsky initiated in the 1950s and that the political philosopher John Rawls brought to life in a short section of his major treatise A Theory of Justice in 1971. In brief, I argue that we are endowed with a moral faculty that delivers judgments of right and wrong based on unconsciously operative and inaccessible principles of action.

Blumner grasps at this like a foundering sailor reaching for a life-preserver.

As an atheist, I find this research intriguing because some religious people think that the only source of morality is faith.

Yet, given the same objective tests, researchers have found that people come to the same moral conclusions regardless of religious background or lack of one. According to Hauser, "the system that unconsciously generates moral judgments is immune to religious doctrine." The primary principles of morality are coded in our DNA.

I'll pick up later on Blumner's claim about people claiming "faith" being the only source of morality.
Pay attention instead to the way she seems to think that Hauser's work provides some type of basis for true morality. Hauser plainly doesn't see it that way. Back to the interview.

To be explicit, the theory that I have developed in Moral Minds is a descriptive theory of morality. It describes the unconscious and inaccessible principles that are operative in our moral judgments. It does not provide an account of what people ought to do. It is not, therefore, a prescriptive theory of morality. That said, I am certain that a better understanding of the descriptive principles will ultimately shape how we develop our prescriptive theories, be they legal or religious.

Either Blumner missed it or she doesn't have the neurons to process the implications.

Hauser is saying that his theory only provides a justification for descriptive morality. What's descriptive morality? It's nothing more than what people do in real life. So, supposing all we had was a culture where every child is branded with a white-hot iron on his birthday up through the age of 25, considered as what "ought" to be done, that is the descriptive morality of that culture. By itself, it says nothing about what is, prescriptively, what ought to be done. Morality is the province of prescriptive morality, not that other kind.

A contributer at the Panda's Thumb site made an observation considerably better than Blumner's.

To me, the concept of a Moral Grammar has significant overlap with the Natural Law arguments by Aquinas. In fact, some interesting observations can be made when combining the concept of Natural Law, the Bible and these scientific findings.

In Romans 2:15, it is stated that the law is written on the hearts of believers and non-believers alike. If this is the case then we can make the following observations

1. Christians who argue that atheists have no principled foundations for their morality and ethics need to take another look at their Bible which contradicts their claims.
2. Of course both Christians and atheists can take these new scientific findings, one accepting that these rules were Created by God, while the other can avoid such conclusions by observing how these rules would have arisen via evolutionary processes.

(--PvM, the Panda's Thumb)

What PvM seems to miss is that the atheist only gets his principled foundation for morality if the god who made morality known in man's nature actually exists--unless, of course, the atheist comes up with an alternative source.

The atheist looks a bit ridiculous claiming that he has a principled morality because god gave him one. I grant, however, that PvM makes a good point in terms of the atheist's ability to behave in society according to godly morality if god exists. But I wouldn't have argued otherwise in any case.

Lacking the creator, the sense of morality cannot be epistemically distinguished from an entirely random set of prescriptives (as descriptives they are not entirely random; as prescriptives they are effectively random).

Descriptive morality doesn't really qualify as a principled source (or else dressing like Brittney Spears because everybody else is doing it immediately ascends to principled status).

***

Faith the source of morality?
As noted above, the view in the Bible is that God is the source of morality regardless of the amount of faith placed in his existence.

In theology, the person of God is the metaphysical source of morality, and modern theologians escape the Eutyphro dilemma (divine command vs. god bound to higher authority) by positing morality as intrinsic to God. Right is right not because God commands it, nor because God is bound to a higher authority, but simply because morality flows from God being God (the commands just happen to flow from the nature of God).