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The Joker Was an Ethicist

Theories on the Evolution of Morality

By Grace Kim

Two ferries silently cross a river during the night. The two carry very different passengers: one holds civilians, who expect a simple cruise; the other solemn convicts, who have only a lifetime of prison ahead of them. But, the ferries have something in common: on board each vessel are stowaways—bombs left behind by a green-haired madman.

The deadline is fast approaching; it's almost midnight. The passengers have only fifteen minutes to make a moral decision.

To make things interesting, our benevolent madman has left an additional gift for each group of passengers: a detonator that will set off the bomb in the other ferry. If the passengers of one ferry set off the detonator, killing the passengers of the other ferry, then, the madman promises, he will leave the passengers on the remaining vessel alive. However, if neither bomb has been detonated by midnight, the madman will happily intervene and kill the passengers on both boats.

Have I mentioned that they have only fifteen minutes?

Stripped of its melodrama, this scenario from last summer's blockbuster movie, The Dark Knight, becomes a creative depiction of the Prisoner's Dilemma, a long-standing game theory model for studying human behavior. Should we hesitate to save our lives at the cost of others? Can we depend on the other passengers' willingness to bet on the same risk? How long before we explode into miniscule (yet righteous!) pieces, while we sit and ponder? As the Joker gleefully points out, the people in the other boat may not be "quite so noble."

O monkey! Hast thou morality?

The button of the detonator looks tempting. To push or not to push? The movie's characters struggle with this question, which reflects the tension and anxiety we feel when faced with the classic conflict between self-interest and what we call "morality." While saving ourselves may seem like the obvious choice, we also recognize that sometimes we have to deny our own instincts and do what is right by, for instance, empathizing with others. Recall the well-known Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Why might we believe that refusing to kill the other passengers is the correct moral decision?

One traditional approach is to credit our conscience. Often we view the conscience at odds with nature, and we assert that the moral principles guiding our conscience are a uniquely human characteristic. After all, in the dog-eat-dog world that nature is said to embody, self-sacrifice doesn't seem practical. That is, we can't reproduce if we're dead.

But in fact, recent studies suggest that morality may be, at least in part, a product of such a natural world. Evolutionary biologists present evidence of empathy in non-human animals, hinting that such features may have served as building blocks for the emergence of human morality. The idea that our moral judgments are driven by emotion can be traced back to the philosopher David Hume (Wade, 2007, para. 23).

In other words, people often intuitively believe that their sense of right and wrong has emerged solely out of their communities or cultures. However, novel evidence reveals that natural selection may have had a larger role as the designer of our morality.

For example, a recent experiment gave monkeys the option of helping another at no added benefit to themselves. In this study, brown capuchin monkeys were presented with two tokens: a "selfish" token and a "pro-social" token. Choosing and returning the "selfish" token to the experimenter resulted in a reward only to the subject monkey. However, returning the "pro-social" token resulted in the reward and the same reward to a neighboring monkey. There was no cost to selecting the "pro-social" token, but the monkeys were found to prefer the pro-social option (de Waal, Leimgruber, & Greenberg, 2008). These results add to the growing evidence supporting the existence of empathy in monkeys. So, what might explain this bizarre but familiar behavior? How can we make the jump from the empathy we see in monkeys to the altruistic cooperation that we attribute to human morality

Some Theories

Sociobiology offers two theories on the evolutionary development of empathy: genetic kinship theory and reciprocal altruism (Axelrod & Hamilton, 1981). Kinship theory looks beyond the sole interest of the individual and into the survival of the wider genetic pool. If the individuals affected by the altruistic action are sufficiently related to the actor, then the action might help the actor's genes survive, despite his or her personal sacrifice.

On the other hand, reciprocation theory is essentially the philosophy, "If you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours." In other words, despite adverse short-term consequences, an altruistic action could potentially rein in more valuable benefits in the future. Both theories thus explain altruism and social cooperation more generally as mechanisms that developed solely as means to pass along our genes.

In the experiment with the capuchin monkeys, there was a favorable bias towards familiar monkeys (de Waal et al., 2008). According to sociobiology, familiarity promoted empathy and increased the incidence of altruism in these monkeys because the neighboring monkeys were more likely to be related to the subject monkey and/or more likely to stick around to return the favor.

Leading ethnologist Frans B. M. de Waal says no. He asserts that theories of sociobiology tend to be "gross simplifications of genetic effects" (1996, p.13). He claims, "Human morality shares with language that it is far too complex…and far too variable to be genetically programmed" (de Waal, 1996, p.36). Instead, he believes that in addition to an inborn programming that has its basis in evolution, like the capacity to empathize and invest emotionally in others' situations, human morality needs to be further fine-tuned by the environment. This allows us to "internalize the moral fabric of our native society" (de Waal, 1996, p.36). In other words, although the building blocks of morality may be coded in our genes, de Waal believes that there is plenty of wiggle room for our environment to structure our moral compasses. This, he writes, explains why conflicting ideas of moral behavior may exist.

A critic of Hume and de Waal may posit that instead of the emotions stirred by our empathy, our moral decisions are driven by our reason—this may strike a particular Kantian chord. The Kantian model proposes that moral judgments are made after rational deliberation (Hauser, Young, & Cushman, 2007). However, de Waal responds by claiming that reasoning came "afterwards as a post hoc justification" (Wade, 2007, para. 24). Significant moral decisions come into play in life-and-death situations, biologists like de Waal claim, when emotions run high and conscientious reasoning take a back seat. As Hume claimed in A Treatise of Human Nature, "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them" (1740, p.295).

Marc Hauser, Harvard Professor of Psychology, Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and Biological Anthropology, defends a third possibility—the Rawlsian model—to explain the evolutionary development of a uniquely human morality. Here, judgment is believed to precede both emotion and reasoning. According to Hauser, we often form moral judgments "reflexively" and thus, our moral behaviors might be explained by an underlying mechanism or mediating principles distinct from those of emotion and reason—just as our capacity to learn language is mediated by linguistic principles. This "universal moral grammar," he explains, "operates over the causes and intentions of an agent vis-à-vis the actions that he or she pursues toward some consequence or outcome" (M. Hauser, personal communication, February 22, 2009).

These moral principles "operate like a knee-jerk reflex in that they are automatic [and] unconscious," and some examples of such principles are the beliefs that "means-based harms are worse than side effects, actions are worse than omission, [and] using someone as a means to a greater good is permissible when you don't make them worse off" (M. Hauser, personal communication, February 22, 2009). Our "moral instinct," as he describes it in his book, Moral Minds, evolved just like any other organ in our bodies, refined by years of environmental pressures to become what it is today.

Why So Serious?

So back to the life-and-death situation we first considered. As it turns out, you can breathe a sigh of relief—no one dies in this particular scene. In the end, the passengers in each ferry choose to risk their own lives instead of killing the passengers in the other, and Batman saves the day as usual so that the Joker can't detonate the bombs. However, the point of this article, if you remember, was to explore the reasons for why you breathed that sigh of relief.

Why do the scenes depicting the final decisions of the passengers evoke feelings of triumph—such as when the convict grabs the detonator from the ferry captain's hands and dramatically throws it out the window? Why do we cheer the willingness of our fellow humans—whether average citizen or alleged criminal—to sacrifice themselves for the sake of others, for a greater good?

A reasonable Kantian may argue that setting off the other bomb would be wrongly treating those on the other ferry merely as a means to one's own survival. Our universal rationality, he would say, prohibits us from giving in to the crude instinct of self-preservation. On the other hand, an emotional Humean may counter that our ability to put ourselves in the shoes of those in the other boat makes us consider self-sacrifice. Empathy may have evolved as anything from the sole motivator for increasing genetic fitness or as more of a basic building block for human morality. Or finally, a third party might chime in, defending a Rawlsian point of view, and claim that moral actions are "cold" reactions to an evolved set of moral principles (M. Hauser, personal communication, February 22, 2009).

Despite the undeniable ambiguity of morality, evolutionary theory has come a long way in attempting to explain its origins and development. However, it is also just getting started. Hauser points out that the evolutionary approach to morality is being taken more seriously and has become a hot topic as "over the last few years…several different disciplines have cross-fertilized" to find themselves debating over converging issues in the moral domain. "Interesting theories and novel methods," among those the ones discussed above, have kept the subject at the forefront of modern scientific discourse.

So when you re-watch The Dark Knight for the umpteenth time, pay more attention to the ferry scene. Tally the number of silent arm pumps and triumphant smiles rallying for the good of humanity. But, if you find yourself actually sympathizing with the psychotic Joker… Well, there's another evolutionary theory for you…

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