BELIEFS AND MORALSMarc Hauser’s increasingly influential account, we humans have a kind
of universal moral grammar, akin to the universal grammar that under-
lies our linguistic capabilities (see p.158). Like its language equivalent, the
universal moral grammar provides a series of default principles set in
stone, with various parameters that can be tweaked one way or the other
according to local cultural variation.
Hauser has provided some preliminary
evidence for the idea of a universal moral
grammar by using a website (moral.wjh.
harvard.edu/) to collect the moral judge-
ments of thousands of people across the
world. In a 2009 paper, Hauser and his
colleague Ilkka Pyysiäinen at the Helsinki
Collegium for Advanced Studies, observed
that “in dozens of dilemmas, and with
thousands of subjects, the pattern of moral
judgements delivered by subjects with a
religious background do not differ from
those who are atheists”.
What emerges from these thought experi-
ments conducted on the Internet is that
three moral codes appear to be near-universal across cultures: the action
principle; the intention principle; and the contact principle (see box
on p.231). The action principle refers to the idea that harm caused by
deliberate action is morally worse than harm caused by inaction. The
intention principle refers to whether a person is deliberately harmed for
the greater good, or if instead a person is harmed as an unfortunate side-
effect of an action that leads to the greater good. Although outcomes are
the same in each case, the former, deliberate-harm condition is usually
judged as morally worse. Finally, the contact principle refers to whether
or not physical contact is involved in an action that leads to harm.
Harmful actions involving physical contact are usually judged more
harshly than actions that don’t involve such contact.
A shortcoming of much of the existing research in this area is that
the participants have nearly always been from urban, technologically
advanced cultures. However, in 2010, Hauser took translations of the
usual hypothetical scenarios to the highlands of Chiapas in Mexico to
study a rural Mayan community. Like most other surveyed participants,
the Mayans regarded deliberate harm caused for the greater good as
worse than harm caused as a side-effect for the greater good. However,
“Two things fill
the mind with ever
new and increasing
admiration and awe,
the oftener and more
steadily we reflect
upon them: the starry
heavens above me and
the moral law within
me.”
Immanuel Kant,
Critique of Practical
Reason (1788)