I’VE considered it and, yes, I think I could do it. I probably
could kill a man.
Provided, of course, that it happened as an accidental consequence of me doing something else, like pulling the lever to switch a runaway train on to a disused track, thus saving the lives of five teenagers who would otherwise have been mowed down. It wouldn’t really be my fault, would it, if a railwayman on the disused track was run over and killed? Isn’t it for the greater good that I sacrifice one life to save five? On the other hand, perhaps I should just let God play God and shut my eyes. No awkward decision to explain away to the railwayman’s family.
I’ve been mulling over the tricky question of morals ever since I picked up The Ethical Brain (Dana Press), a provocative and timely book by Michael Gazzaniga, a cognitive neuroscientist at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. Professor Gazzaniga is a fascinating character — a rare, secular voice among a choir of Christians who sit on the President’s Council on Bioethics. The non-elected council guides American government policy on frontier science and has acquired a shadowy reputation among researchers for pushing a conservative, Christian agenda on such controversial issues as therapeutic cloning, which involves work on early human embryos.
As a result, the US has cultivated one of the most restrictive federally funded scientific regimes in the world (while, by some ungodly logic, letting private biotech companies operate unhindered). Britain has benefited from this state-sponsored hostility to progress; talented American biologists have defected abroad to pursue their work.
Which is why Professor Gazzaniga, who was raised a Catholic, felt compelled to write his book. The more he looked at the human brain, the less he believed in a religious worldview. He ended up, as do many scientists, rejecting Catholicism and wondering why scientific research should be moulded according to Christian beliefs. “Understanding how strong beliefs about anything become established in our minds has been a goal in my scientific life,” he writes. “There is a brain mechanism underlying such phenomena which, when understood, leaves one with a less absolutist view about all belief systems.” It left him “none too thrilled to see the future treatment of debilitating diseases, never mind the future of our nation’s scientific research, being decided on the basis of such relativity”.
The problem for atheists and even agnostics is that religion has become entangled with morality. To the religiously minded, a person who discards the comfort blanket of faith is morally naked. The act is tantamount to embracing a bleak, lawless philosophy of progress in which helpless, nascent life is butchered to repair the old and withered, and deranged boffins dream of fusing humans with chimpanzees.
Science is now showing this apocalyptic view of unbelief to be a fallacy — and that religion does not have a monopoly on morals. The runaway train scenario is one of a series of tests being used by Harvard University to work out whether moral thought is acquired — and thus subject to cultural differences — or innate (the test is at http://moral.wjh.harvard.edu/). The Harvard academics started off with the commonly held premise that “moral psychology is a slowly developing capacity, founded entirely on experience and education, and subject to considerable variation across cultures”.
How different their views are now: “We believe this hyper rational, culturally-specific view is no longer tenable . . . When humans, from the hunter-gathers of the Rift Valley to the billionaire dot-com-ers of the Silicon Valley, generate moral intuitions they are like reflexes, something that happens to us without our being aware of how or even why.”
The discovery of a moral reflex, Professor Gazzaniga says, points to the existence of an instinctive “universal ethic” gifted to us by our ancestors. A society without morals would wipe itself out; evolution would inevitably have favoured the acquisition of a moral sense. And so, he argues, somewhere along the timeline of human history, the human brain became the ethical brain. It probably happened before the emergence of organised religion, and certainly well before 2005 years ago.
“For a person who has been secularised by modern science, (a universal ethic) provides a rationale of why they behave the way they do,” Professor Gazzaniga tells me. “Basically, you don’t kill because you don’t kill, not because God or Allah or Buddha tells you not to kill.”
But we don’t like the idea of behaving on instinct (why else has the term “kneejerk” become synonymous with stupid?). So we spin explanations of why we pulled or didn’t pull the lever; God can become part of the spin. When I raised the prospect of not pulling the lever — letting the railwayman live and the five teenagers perish — I said it was the equivalent of letting God play God. In reality, the decision would still be mine — God would just be an excuse for my cowardice.
Hard-wired for science?
I WAS due to interview, this month, the most cited theoretical physicist in the world, who is about to leave Harvard University for a UK lecture tour to promote a new book. We haven’t been able to get it together, the Prof and I, but I have started reading Warped Passages (Allen Lane), about the possibility of hidden extra dimensions in the Universe. The Prof’s papers are so famous that they are now known simply by the initials of the co-authors’ surnames, RS1 and RS2.
So, I hear you ask, who is he? It’s Lisa Randall, who has shaken up many of the leading theoretical physics groups across the pond. She sits on a Harvard task force set up to tackle sexism in science (yes, it was her boss, Lawrence Summers, who suggested that women were not hard-wired for science).
NOTHING shreds principles like the speedy approach of a child’s birthday party.
With my daughter’s third birthday imminent, I have been waking in the night worrying that my hardline approach to party bags (not provided) constitutes a breach of the social contract and, more to the point, makes me look like a stingy old bat.
I’ve always thought party bags unnecessary because they are usually stuffed with sugar and given to children already surfing a sugar high. But now I am haunted by the idea of toddlers and parents waiting by the front door once the festivities are over, and their faces contorting in horror as they realise that there is no party bag!
I dallied with the idea of a trip to Poundland for plastic tat — before realising that I would still be perpetuating the party bag tyranny, only badly. I have now swung back to no party bags but my conviction is less than courageous.
I’VE never smiled on Air Miles. I’ve never taken Advantage of the Boots card. I don’t sup from the Nectar cup. Etc etc.
So I was delighted to read this week that a whopping £2 billion of benefits earned through loyalty cards remains unclaimed. How pleasing that I am not surrounded by other consumers getting an annoyingly better deal than me.
I do earn Tesco Clubcard points, though. And, after years of presenting out-of-date coupons for 2p off a £5 box of washing powder, I think I’ve found something to spend my points on. I can get four times their value in restaurant vouchers, and it’s for a restaurant I actually go to! Just the coupons to find, the form to fill in, the stamp to find, a postbox to trek to . . . oh sod it, I’ll pay cash.
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