Where Do Morals Come From?

A religious person could offer an argument on morality along the lines of:

'If you don't believe in the absolutism of scripture, you don't believe there are any absolute standards of morality. With the best will in the world you may intend to be a good person, but how do you decide what is good and what is bad?  Only religion can ultimately provide your standards of good and evil.  Without religion you have to make it up as you go along.  That would be morality without a rule book: morality flying by the seat of its pants.  If morality is merely a matter of choice, Hitler could claim to be moral by his own eugenically inspired standards, and all the others can do is make a personal choice to live by different lights.  The Christian, the Jew or the Muslim, by contrast, can claim that evil has an absolute meaning, true for all time and in all places, according to which Hitler was absolutely evil.'

The religious apologist’s claim is that, wherever the motive to be good comes from, without scripture there would be no standard for deciding what is good. We could each make up our own definition of good, and behave accordingly.  The religious apologist would claim that only religion can provide a basis for deciding what is good.  It is tempting to agree with the hypothetical apologist that absolutist morals are usually driven by religion.  Their preferred source of absolute morality is usually a holy book of some kind of authority.  People who claim to derive their morals from scripture do not really do so in practice as the following thought experiments will demonstrate.

The Harvard biologist Marc Hauser has a line of thought experiments derived from other philosophers.  A hypothetical moral dilemma is posed, and the difficulty we experience in answering it tells us something about our sense of right and wrong.  The interesting thing is that most people (both atheists and religionists) come to the same decisions when faced with these dilemmas, even if they lack the ability to articulate their reasons. This is what we should expect if we have a moral sense which is built into our brains rather than deriving morals from instructed religion.  The way people respond to these moral tests, and their inability to articulate their reasons, seems largely independent of their religious beliefs or lack of them.  

Typical of Hauser's moral dilemmas are variations on the theme of a runaway trolley on a railway line which threatens to kill a number of people. The simplest story imagines a person, Denise, standing by a set of points and in a position to divert the trolley onto a siding, thereby saving the lives of five people trapped on the main line ahead. Unfortunately there is a man trapped on the siding.  But since he is only one, outnumbered by the five people trapped on the main track, most people agree that it is morally permissible, if not obligatory, for Denise to throw the switch and save the five by killing the one.  (We ignore hypothetical possibilities such as that the one man on the siding might be Beethoven, or a close friend.)  

Elaborations of the thought experiment present a series of increasingly teasing moral conundrums. What if the trolley can be stopped by dropping a large weight in its path from a bridge overhead?  That's easy: obviously we must drop the weight.   But what if the only large weight available is a very fat man sitting on the bridge, admiring the sunset? Almost everybody agrees that it is immoral to push the fat man off the bridge, even though, from one point of view, the dilemma might seem parallel to Denise's, where throwing the switch kills one to save five.  Most of us have a strong intuition that there is a crucial difference between the two cases, though we may not be able to articulate what it is.

Pushing the fat man off the bridge is reminiscent of another dilemma considered by Hauser.  Five patients in a hospital are dying, each with a different organ failing.  Each would be saved if a donor could be found for their particular faulty organ, but none is available. Then the surgeon notices that there is a healthy man in the waiting-room, all five of whose organs are in good working order and suitable for transplanting.  In this case, almost nobody can be found who is prepared to say that the moral act is to kill the one to save the five.  As with the fat man on the bridge, the intuition that most of us share is that an innocent bystander should not suddenly be dragged into a bad situation and used for the sake of others without his consent.

Immanuel Kant famously articulated the principle that a rational being should never be used as merely an unconsenting means to an end, even the end of benefiting others. This seems to provide the crucial difference between the case of the fat man on the bridge (or the man in the hospital waiting-room) and the man on Denise's siding.  The fat man on the bridge is being positively used as the means to stop the runaway trolley.  This clearly violates the Kantian principle.  The person on the siding is not being used to save the lives of the five people on the line.  It is the siding that is being used, and he just has the bad luck to be standing on it.

The hypothetical situations involving the runaway trolley become increasingly ingenious, and the moral dilemmas correspondingly tortuous.  Hauser contrasts the dilemmas faced by hypothetical individuals called Ned and Oscar.

Ned is standing by the railway track. Unlike Denise, who could divert the trolley onto a siding, Ned's switch diverts it onto a side loop which joins the main track again just before the five people.  Simply switching the points doesn't help: the trolley will plough into the five anyway when the diversion rejoins the main track.  However, as it happens, there is an extremely fat man on the diversionary track who is heavy enough to stop the trolley.  Should Ned change the points and divert the train?  Most people's intuition is that he should not.  But what is the difference between Ned's dilemma, and Denise's?  Denise diverts the trolley from ploughing into the five people, and the unfortunate casualty on the siding is 'collateral damage', to use the charmingly Rumsfeldian phrase.  He is not being used by Denise to save the others.  Ned is actually using the fat man to stop the trolley, and most people (perhaps unthinkingly), see this as a crucial difference.

The difference is brought out again by the dilemma of Oscar. Oscar's situation is identical to Ned's, except that there is a large iron weight on the diversionary loop of track, heavy enough to stop the trolley.  Clearly Oscar should have no problem deciding to pull the points and divert the trolley. Except that there happens to be a hiker walking in front of the iron weight.  He will certainly be killed if Oscar pulls the switch, just as surely as Ned's fat man.  The difference is that Oscar's hiker is not being used to stop the trolley: he is collateral damage, as in Denise's dilemma.  Most of us feel that Oscar is permitted to throw the switch but Ned is not. But do we find it quite hard to justify our intuition?  Hauser's point is that such moral intuitions are often not well thought out but that we feel them strongly anyway, because of our innate morals.

In an intriguing venture into anthropology, Hauser and his colleagues adapted their moral experiments to the Kuna, a small Central American tribe with little contact with Westerners and no formal religion. The researchers changed the 'trolley on a line' thought experiment to locally suitable equivalents, such as crocodiles swimming towards canoes.  With corresponding minor differences, the Kuna show the same moral judgments as the rest of us.  

Of particular interest, Hauser also wondered whether religious people differ from atheists in their moral intuitions. Surely, if we get our morality from religion, they should differ.  But it seems that they don't. Hauser, working with the moral philosopher Peter Singer, focused on three hypothetical dilemmas and compared the verdicts of atheists with those of religious people.  In each case, the subjects were asked to choose whether a hypothetical action is morally 'obligatory', 'permissible' or 'forbidden'. The three dilemmas were:

1. Denise's dilemma. Ninety per cent of people said it was permissible to divert the trolley, killing the one to save the five.

 2. You see a child drowning in a pond and there is no other help in sight. You can save the child, but your trousers will be ruined in the process. Ninety-seven per cent agreed that you should save the child (amazingly, 3 per cent apparently would prefer to save their trousers).

3. The organ transplant dilemma described above. Ninety-seven per cent of subjects agreed that it is morally forbidden to seize the healthy person in the waiting-room and kill him for his organs, thereby saving five other people.  

The main conclusion of Hauser and Singer's study was that there is no statistically significant difference between atheists and religious believers in making these judgments.  Quite a lot of religious people do think religion is what motivates them to be good, especially if they belong to one of those faiths that evokes personal guilt.