The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, and Follow the Golden Rule

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 368 pages
• Published by: Holt Paperbacks December 9, 2004
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0805077693
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0805077698
• Book Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 1.3 inches
• Weighs: 12 ounces

From Publishers Weekly
Drawing on evolutionary psychology, Skeptic publisher and Scientific American contributor Shermer (Why People Believe Weird Things) argues that the sources of moral behavior can be traced scientifically to humanity's evolutionary origins. He contends that human morality evolved as first an individual and then a species-wide mechanism for survival. As society evolved, humans needed rules governing behavior-e.g., altruism, sympathy, reciprocity and community concern-in order to ensure survival. Shermer says that some form of the Golden Rule-"Do unto others as you would have others do unto you"-provides the foundation of morality in human societies. Out of this, he develops the principles of what he calls a "provisional ethics" that "is neither absolute nor relative," that applies to most people most of the time, while allowing for "tolerance and diversity." According to the "ask-first" principle, for instance, the performer of an act simply asks its intended receiver whether the act is right or wrong. Other principles include the "happiness" principle ("always seek happiness with someone else's happiness in mind"), the liberty principle ("always seek liberty with someone else's liberty in mind") and the moderation principle ("when innocent people die, extremism in the defense of anything is no virtue, and moderation in the protection of everything is no vice"). Shermer's provisional ethics might reflect the messy ways that human moral behavior developed, but his simplistic principles establish a utilitarian calculus that not everyone will find acceptable. 35 b&w illus.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From The Washington Post


If God is dead, said Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov, then everything is permitted. Without religion, in other words, there can be no morality. This has been the position taken by religious conservatives as long as there have been religions, and it is Michael Shermer's principal target in The Science of Good and Evil. Shermer's new book is the final volume in a trilogy that began with Why People Believe Weird Things and continued with How We Believe, a critical survey of religious belief systems and their rationales.

It would not be unreasonable to conclude from Shermer's books and his past that he is obsessed with religion. Indeed, he makes no secret of it: He was, in college, a fundamentalist Christian, taking a degree in psychology and biology from Pepperdine University, a fundamentalist fortress in the hills above Malibu. Then at some point he turned on the beliefs of his youth and became the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and the director of the Skeptics Society, which he still runs. He calls himself an agnostic now, and an evolutionary psychologist. If he has a god, it is Charles Darwin. In 1999 Shermer co-hosted a 12-part series on the Fox Family Channel called "Exploring the Unknown" and devoted it to debunking everything from the Shroud of Turin to spontaneous human combustion. He has made himself into one of the leading spokespersons in the country for the rational scientific approach toward questions of belief and the unknown. That's quite a switch for a man who cut his intellectual teeth on the Bible.

But Shermer does, as a result, know his enemy, and it gives him a decided advantage in writing a book such as this, which aims to demonstrate that we don't need God at all to be moral human beings, that in fact human evolution has built a tendency toward moral behavior into our brains. We are moral by nature. He draws upon the work of anthropologists with so-called primitive peoples to make his case, showing that man in a state of nature does not, as Hobbes claimed, behave as if life were a matter of all against all. Rather, Shermer marshals research showing that altruism, cooperation, mutual aid, attachment and bonding, concern for the community and other moral behaviors appear not only among tribal humans but in great-ape societies and among dolphins, whales and other large-brained mammals as well, none of which, as far as we know, is monotheist. Since the doctrine of natural selection cannot account for this behavior -- there is no selective advantage to a creature in being altruistic, for example, sacrificing itself for the good of the group -- he turns to the controversial concept of group selection, which most strict Darwinists abjure, and quotes Darwin himself in support: "There can be no doubt that a tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection." "Better" tribes, then, tribes with a greater adherence to principles of justice and altruism and courage, would displace "worse" or more "evil" tribes, and therefore morality would evolve, and natural selection could indeed account for the universal appearance among human beings of moral goodness.

It is an easy step from there to believe in a gradual improvement over time in the moral standards of humankind, and Shermer takes that step. He believes in moral progress and thinks things are getting better. All we need, he seems to believe, is more reason: more Enlightenment. He devotes much of the rest of his book to promoting his own secular system of morality -- "provisional morality" in his words -- that stands somewhere carefully unspecified between complete moral relativism and the absolute systems of dos and don'ts espoused by various religions. He thinks there are fundamental moral rights and wrongs that hold in almost all situations, but he is wary of absolutism in all its forms. He believes in uncertainty. Nothing is either simply good or bad. Pornography, for example: Yes, of course, anything that depicts the physical abuse of men or women or tries to make us believe that women really like being raped is a terrible thing. But not all pornography is like that. We can't simply condemn pornography. His arguments have a common sense feel to them. They seem perfectly reasonable, middle of the road. Let's take everything case by case, he says, and not get carried away. He is all for moderation.

It is, in a sense, unfortunate that this should be so, for it may explain why the book, despite its highly charged subject matter, lacks passion. Or it may just be that Shermer is not an eloquent writer. His prose is flat and has a tendency to shift tone and fall into the demotic at odd moments ("bass ackward" is the worst instance), as if he were unclear who his audience is or as if he were writing for television. The result is that he is not entirely convincing. He is a meliorist, but he never persuaded me that human beings had become "better" -- better behaved, less filled with hate, less murderous -- since the Greeks, say, or since World War II. He is always ready to attack his bête noir, religious absolutism, but there is little evidence in the book that he is well versed in the long, contentious history of moral philosophy or the subtleties of the current philosophical debates about abortion rights or most of the other issues he takes on. He's in the unhappy position of trying to establish a moral system that is itself rather unsystematic and ad hoc. His system, if that's the word for it, comes across as reasonable -- but perhaps too reasonable, and too relaxed to compel adherence. I finished the book well-disposed toward Shermer himself, clearly a seeker who has found the best answers he can find in skepticism and a purely rational approach to life, but who seems never to have encountered genuine evil face-to-face or seen tragedy up close and personal. The book lacks, in short, a certain emotional depth, and that is precisely what we want when dealing with intransigent moral issues.

Reviewed by Anthony Brandt




Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Reader Reviews
This review is from: The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, and Follow the Golden Rule (Hardcover) I'm torn between the naysayers and the wide-eyed on this one. First, I am a naturalist who believes, like Shermer, that ethics doesn't need god. Unlike Shermer, though, I don't think that this is anything close to a 'science'. Seeing people conflate 'it's a naturalistic explanation' with 'its a scientific explanation' forgets that science is a process, not an ideology. Yes, Shermer gives us a naturalistic explanation, but just like most evolutionary psych, it is simply naturalistic "puzzle filling" of what MIGHT have happened, not experimental and falsifiable conjecture that makes for science. For his part, Shermer does a decent job (so long as we see his as that of a philosopher, not a scientist; Shermer, I think, would protest this). He presents a case for a naturalistic ethic and goes into a fair amount of detail. Here's the problem: not only has everything here been proposed before by those more apt than Shermer (Mary Midgley, JL Mackie, Steven Pinker, William James) but the things he says here are quite common, and really in need of little defence. Shermer's point is that moral 'rules' are naturally endowed by evolution (or so it seems) and are provisoinal - they hold for most people, in most situations; they are more like guilelines for action. Okay, I believe it (just as I believed it when the said authors wrote it). But he really doesn't follow this up with what exactly that means. What are 'most people' and what are 'most situations'? Most troublingly, does merely saying 'evolution did it' and showing that homo erectus shared food (thus enforcing altruism by pasing along their genes) really mean that the theory is 'scientific' (even though it is non-emprical albeit good conjecture?) I am giving the book a three-star rating, though. Truth be told, I enjoyed it and think its judgments (although better defended, say, by Mackie) are sound (and easier to read than Mackie). Particularly if you are into biology and haven't really done much thinking in philosophy, this book is great! Shermer is an entertaining, and widely learned writer (even though I disagree with some details about, say, group selections power to explain). If a more detailed, less lay-like book is what you are looking for, I'd suggest: Mackie's "Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong", Midgley's "Beast and Man", and even Paul Ehrlich's "Human Natures". If you've read and liked this book, read Ridley's "Origins of Virtue" and Flanagan's "Problem of the Soul".