Altruism is just another way to be selfish

A recent article about research supporting a neurological (= biological) basis for altruism panders to the alarmist view that behavior with an identifiable biological basis precludes personal responsibility, and could throw our criminal justice system into an uproar.

The first statement that shows an ignorance of sociobiology and evolution:

The results — many of them published just in recent months — are showing, unexpectedly, that many aspects of morality appear to be hard-wired in the brain, most likely the result of evolutionary processes that began in other species.

Why is this unexpected? In social animals, such a biological basis for morality would absolutely be expected. This is because morality governs social interactions, so animals who have evolved in the context of sociality have a biological need for it. Altruism is related to empathy, without which we cannot interact socially because we need a mechanism for assessing what another person is thinking or feeling. Those without empathy, such as autistics, are lost in the maze of unspoken rules that govern interpersonal interactions. Altruism is a way of acting on empathic information.

…some wonder whether the very idea of morality is somehow degraded if it turns out to be just another evolutionary tool that nature uses to help species survive and propagate.

The idea that “morality is somehow degraded” because it has a biological basis really has no logic to it, but it is typical of those who confuse morality with religion. Perhaps the idea is analogous to someone we like doing something nice versus someone we do not like doing it. In the latter case we assume insidious motives because we do not believe the person is truly being altruistic. But the mistake there is that there is no such thing as pure altruism, as research shows. Either altruistic acts cause us to receive tangible benefits, such as increased standing in a community, or if anonymous, provide us with pleasure (Moll et al., 2006).

Of course morality and altruism are complex neurologically because human social interactions are complex. But a biological explanation for moral behavior does not indicate a lack of need of philosophers or even religious thinkers who study moral behavior such as altruism. Humans are faced with ethical decisions nearly every day, and it is not always clear what is the altruistic way to respond, even if that is our goal. That is why religious advisors, analysts, and advice columnists are not automatically out of a job just because automatic brain function reveals our options. Our brains often do not make obvious the decisive course of action, that is, the course of action having the most positive or least negative social consequences, in the balance. Social consequences are a real biological phenomenon, because decisions affecting an individual’s social standing often affect that of an entire family, which shares genes.

For example, there is the potential problem of revealing or not revealing a friend’s indiscretions, such as an extramarital affair. In the short term, revealing the truth might be bad for the social group, as bonds are broken. But in the long term, the earlier such a truth is revealed, the quicker wounds may heal and the social group rebuilt. Such a decision is necessarily affected by social norms of the community, which are of course extremely variable among societies.

The article points out that “a number of experiments such as the one by Grafman have shown that emotions are central to moral thinking.” Of course this is true. Grafman and his colleagues (Moll et al., 2005) make it clear that moral reasoning is a complex process that uses both reasoning and emotional centers of the brain – there is no one specific brain structure that dictates morality, but rather a series of structures that must interact in a complex way to produce a moral decision. The role of emotion is understandable because a major purpose of emotion is social navigation; for example, laughter is a way of making a social connection with another person. Solitary-living animals have no need for emotions such as love, anger, envy, pride, etc., because feeling these or acting on these invariably involves the establishment, maintenance, or alteration of a social relationship.

While several brain structures interact to produce moral reasoning, those involved can be identified specifically because specific brain damage has predictive effects on moral behavior (Moll et al., 2005). For example, damage to the prefrontal cortex at an early age prevents normal development of moral reasoning. Such people often have short-term, self-centered responses to moral dilemmas, because they have no sense of the social consequences of their actions. A different region of the cortex, the superior temporal sulcus, is required as well because it is a center of social perception, i.e. empathy, which is also required for normal moral reasoning. The limbic system, a center of basic emotional drives, also affects morality because behavior such as aggression is controlled by this area, and can become uninhibited when parts of the limbic system become damaged. Functional MRI studies also have indicated activity in the orbitofrontal cortex (behind the eyes), the anterior temporal lobes, the insula, and the anterior cingulate cortex in people processing moral dilemmas posed to them.

The claim that these discoveries mean that “society has to rethink how it judges immoral people” (according to Adrian Raine, a USC neuroscientist) is absurd. There is a minimum standard of behavior that is acceptable in a society, and this minimum exists whether or not you are psychopathic (= brain damaged in a way that impairs interpersonal interactions due to lack of empathy). If some people are physically unable to make correct social decisions, it does not mean we must treat them as equals. Serial killers are psychopaths, and whether their brain damage is physical or developmental, they cannot be allowed to move freely in society because they have no internal constraints against killing. We lock them up so that they cannot damage society further. Most people would agree that a similar situation holds for pedophiles – there seems to be increasing evidence that most are incapable of being “rehabilitated,” which is not surprising; their psychopathy is likely due to brain damage – which again can be physical or developmental – that cannot be repaired. Damaged people must be isolated from society because the structure of society must be protected for the sake of the non-damaged majority.

J. Grafman says, “Some of the questions that are important are not just of intellectual interest, but challenging and frightening to the ways we ground our lives. We need to step very carefully.” Not at all. This information is simple and reasonable when understood in terms of maintaining a functional society.

An interesting moral phenomenon in humans involves the altruism of helping someone near and dear to you versus helping people in distant countries that you will never visit. The neuroscientist/philosopher Joshua Greene, interviewed in the article, gets the implications of this wrong:

“We evolved in a world where people in trouble right in front of you existed, so our emotions were tuned to them, whereas we didn’t face the other kind of situation,” Greene said. “It is comforting to think your moral intuitions are reliable and you can trust them. But if my analysis is right, your intuitions are not trustworthy. Once you realize why you have the intuitions you have, it puts a burden on you” to think about morality differently.

Yes, we evolved in a non-global world, and our knowledge of the plights of people around the world sets humans apart from other social animals. But that is not the point. What matters is that any type of altruism affects one’s standing either in society, or to oneself. Our higher reasoning ability convinces us that faraway starving children are as important as the starving children next door – even as our emotions tell us otherwise – but this does not make our intuitions untrustworthy, it just adds potential complexity to the moral decisions we make. If one is a member of a church, for example, where such generous behavior is valued, it increases or maintains one’s social standing to give to the needy in faraway places, it makes sense to do it. For many people, “charity begins at home” is an acceptable societal standard, and thus there is no burden to think about morality differently. Undamaged brains can still rely on their moral intuitions, and navigate their social world successfully.

Of course the different details of morality across cultures require us to be flexible in their moral reasoning. The social brain must adapt to local social conditions to successfully reproduce. This creates difficulties in a globalized world in which we not only are aware of the different moral values in different societies, but people from those different societies interact daily, not only in person, but probably more important these days, over the internet. To use an extreme example, people from societies that support individual rights for women have worked hard to stop what to us are sickening cultural practices such as female genital mutilation. Any Western woman is horrified by the practice with good reason – it not only is such an extreme example of oppression of women by men, which goes against our stated values (values that were hard won and still being fought for even in our “enlightened” society), but the long term health consequences are often dire. Yet efforts to eliminate the practice are often derailed by the women of those cultures themselves, because if they do not accept the ritual mutilation, they will be rejected by their society (and will not reproduce successfully there). It is nearly impossible to end such traditions by force. The values rejecting them must be inculcated in enough of the local population to the point where it becomes socially acceptable not to undergo the mutilation.

A similar example closer to home is the explanation of why most battered wives return to their husbands over and over again, contrary, it seems, to all reason. But in the cultures (and subcultures) in which wife-beating is common, breaking the cycle is so difficult because if a woman leaves her husband she often must give up her entire social group as well (and she often cannot fathom that it would be possible to become part of another social group, simple as that may seem in the abstract). Going it alone under such circumstances is contrary to our very nature as social beings.

It is completely natural for everyone to believe that their society’s cultural norms are superior to everyone else’s, because they know from experience that following those cultural norms make them successful. Of course though, if the same behavior is transferred to a society with different cultural norms, the result can be disaster. It is this naive sense of superiority (also held by most religious groups) that creates solutionless predicaments such as the current one in Iraq.

References

Moll, J., Krueger, F., Zahn, R., Pardini, M., de Oliveira-Souzat, R. & Grafman, J. (2006) Human fronto-mesolimbic networks guide decisions about charitable donation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 103, 15623-15628.

Moll, J., Zahn, R., de Oliveira-Souza, R., Krueger, F. & Grafman, J. (2005) The neural basis of human moral cognition. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 6, 799-809.

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