Richard Rorty reviews Marc D. Hauser’s new book, Moral Minds: How Nature Designed our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong, in yesterday’s NYT Book Review.   Rorty describes the book’s project thusly:

Nazi parents found it easy to turn their children into conscientious
little monsters. In some countries, young men are raised to believe
that they have a moral obligation to kill their unchaste sisters.
Gruesome examples like these suggest that morality is a matter of
nurture rather than nature — that there are no biological constraints
on what human beings can be persuaded to believe about right and wrong.
Marc Hauser disagrees. He holds that “we are born with abstract rules
or principles, with nurture entering the picture to set the parameters
and guide us toward the acquisition of particular moral systems.”
Empirical research will enable us to distinguish the principles from
the parameters and thus to discover “what limitations exist on the
range of possible or impossible moral systems.”

Hauser is professor of psychology, organismic and evolutionary biology, and biological anthropology at Harvard.
He believes that “policy wonks and politicians should listen more
closely to our intuitions and write policy that effectively takes into
account the moral voice of our species.” Biologists, he thinks, are in
a position to amplify this voice. For they have discovered evidence of
the existence of what Hauser sometimes calls “a moral organ” and
sometimes “a moral faculty.” This area of the brain is “a circuit,
specialized for recognizing certain problems as morally relevant.” It
incorporates “a universal moral grammar, a toolkit for building
specific moral systems.” Now that we have learned that such a grammar
exists, Hauser says, we can look forward to “a renaissance in our
understanding of the moral domain.”

    Rorty believes that Hauser ultimately fails to make the psycho- biological case for "a moral organ."  The experimental science just doesn’t seem to add up persuasively, for Rorty at least. 

    I have not read the book, but am just responding to the review here – I am not taking any position on whether Hauser has succeeded or not in his purpose.  What I do want to point our, however, are the resonances here with Mencius.

     Mencius famously believed that humans are innately good.  He did  not root this assertion in a sophisticated biological analysis – none then existed.  Rather, it was based on his observation and reason and, I believe, his hope and optimism about humanity.  His most well known example runs like this:

Mencius said: "Everyone has a heart that can’t bear to see others suffer.  The ancient emperors had hearts that couldn’t bear to see others suffer, and so had governments that couldn’t bear to see others suffer.  If you lead a government that can’t bear to see others suffer, ruling all beneath heaven is like turning it in the palm of your hand.

"Suddenly seeing a baby about to fall into a well, anyone would be heart-stricken with pity: heart-stricken not because they wanted to curry favor with the baby’s parents, not because they wanted the praise of neighbors and friends, and not because they hated the baby’s cries.  This is why I say everyone has a heart that can’t bear to see others suffer. (55)

     Of course, Mencius is well aware that some people will do bad things and act heartlessly toward others.  This, he believes, is learned behavior.  People have to learn how to be bad.  We all start out with the same good, moral innate capacities.  He makes this comparison:

"…Human nature is inherently good, just like water flows inherently downhill.  There’s no such thing as a person who isn’t good, just as there’s no water that doesn’t flow downhill.

"Think about water: if you slap it, you can make it jump over your head; and if you push it, you can make it stay on a mountain.  But what does this have to do with the nature of water?  It’s only responding to the forces around it.  It’s like that for people, too: you can make them evil, but that says nothing about human nature." (198)

     Do we need psycho-biological confirmation of this idea?  Not really.  It might be better to put our money scientific and efforts into understanding what makes people evil.