Review - Moral Minds

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Review - Moral Minds - Marc D. Hauser

This is a magnificent example of the curate's egg style of popular science book. When you are reading the good bits - and there are plenty of them - it is a delight. These good bits are the moral dilemmas and the descriptions of real human reactions. But then... I'm getting ahead of myself (which probably isn't the most moral of things to do in a review).

Moral Minds tries to be to morality what previous popular science books have been to language or happiness or behaviour - a re-examination of an old topic in the light of what we now know about the way the brain functions. So far, so good. Along the way, Marc D. Hauser brings in some totally wonderful theoretical moral dilemmas, the moral equivalent of one the thought experiments that Einstein used to try to shake up quantum theory. I challenge anyone not to be fascinated by thinking through the trolley car dilemmas (apparently standards of the field), for instance. His thesis that we have a similar combination of an in-built grammar for morality overlaid with cultural normals (using the parallel of our language "instinct") is well drawn and clear.

So far we are only dealing with good. We haven't strayed into the dark side. But unfortunately this book has deep dark side. It suffers from the typical faults of an attempt at a popular science book by a scientist rather than a science writer. It is too long. Much too long. Several times along the way I was tempted to give up. There's simply too much detail, and a tendency to, well, drone. There are too many assumptions made about what the reader knows, while at the same time piling in far too much supporting material. There are tags used that rapidly become obscure to the ordinary reader. We are told of the Kantean, Humean and Rawlsian creatures, but very soon the reader forgets which is which. There are even neat little cartoon figures to illustrate them, which we are told will crop up through the book - but unfortunately the figures don't illustrate these concepts well enough to make them memorable, and after a chapter or two they disappear altogether as if everyone got fed up of them. A popular science book isn't an academic paper or a text book. It needs to have a something in it that drives the reader on - this just sags.

Perhaps the worst feeling for the general reader is that there are too many obvious questions which never get answered, while the obscure questions that really don't bother anyone but an academic do at great length. For example there is quite a lot of detail on experiments where individuals were offered a small amount of money, monitoring how they reacted - but nothing about experiments involving large sums, where I suspect behaviour would be totally different. For example, imagine someone is given £10 and they can offer part of it to you. If you accept the share offered, you each keep the money. If you refuse, you both lose the money. If I was given £10 and only offered you £1, chances are you'd say "forget it, that's miserly, so we'll both lose out." And lots of deductions are made from this response. But if it were £10 million, only a very stupid person would turn down a 10% share in spite - yet this wasn't brought out at all.

In other experiments people were asked whether, for instance, they would throw a switch that would divert a trolley car from hitting five people so it would hit one person - or whether they would push a very big person in front of the trolley and stop it from hitting the five. What isn't explored at all, the real loophole in these thought experiments, is the uncertainty. In the real world, you wouldn't know for certain if any action would work. You might push the big person in front, kill him and still the five would die. Throwing the switch might not work - life is much more complicated than these simple models. This is a bit like a physicist trying to model a race horse and saying "we'll assume it's a sphere." It's not that this is a bad thing to do, but there should be an exploration of the assumptions and their implications, and this just doesn't come through in the book.

Despite these concerns, there is no doubt at all that some of the content is excellent, or that Hauser knows his stuff, but the right thing to do would have been to have found a collaborator or a bold editor to mercilessly (but morally) trim out the dead would and ask the idiot questions. Without it, this is a struggle to read for all but the most enthusiastic.

Only in hardback.

Reviewed by Jo Reed

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