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Kevin Weeks--ex-boxer, loan-shark, extortionist, and thug--kept his day job as a bouncer at the Triple-O bar in South Boston. But Weeks was also a member of the inner circle of the Irish Mob from the 1970s to the late 1990s, and a hard-knuckled enforcer for the infamous James "Whitey" Bulger and Steven "the Rifleman" Flemmi. During his criminal career, James Bulger murdered around forty people. Steven Flemmi was involved in around thirty murders. Kevin Weeks himself participated in several of those crimes--but life in the mob was not always an exciting series of plots, fistfights, shakedowns, and killings. In his chilling confessional memoir, Brutal (2006), Weeks claims that much of the time his existence was every bit as boring as yours and mine. "On a typical day, Jimmy and I would spend an hour a day with Stevie, doing business. I mean, we weren't doing crimes every day. We weren't animals, and except for the business aspect of our lives, we had boring, regular lives."
We weren't animals?
Human murderers may be criminals of the worst kind, and when we want to emphasize their apparent lack of ordinary moral values or restraint, we sometimes call them "animals"--but that comparison even the basest professional criminal will reject. Criminals are people, too. Criminals have values, too. And ordinary criminals share the ordinary idea that morality is a remarkable thing possessed or potentially possessed by every single person on this planet simply by virtue of his or her membership in the human species.
Where does this impressive, humans-only thing come from? How did we manage to be so blessed? The more traditional idea about the origin of human morality regards it as a code or a system of positive behaviors imposed from the outside. This is what I call morality's external narrative, and it is typically based upon one of two very firmly-held theories: the sacred gift and the social contract.
We all recognize the theory of the sacred gift, which suggests that morality was handed down by an all-powerful deity. In some versions of the theory, the deity looked down upon an inherently sinful, badly-behaving humanity, was profoundly dissatisfied by the sight, and put in writing a moral code for people to live by and thus change the tenor of their behavior.
Although people who spend their lives as professional interpreters of the sacred gift--ministers, pastors, priests, imams, rabbis, gurus, and the like--are unable to agree with one another on its precise details, the general outlines are clear and amazingly consistent between religions and across cultures. Everyone knows that murder, theft, and deceit are bad, that submission to proper authority and following certain tenets of sexual propriety are good, that we should treat others as well as we would like to be treated, and so on. And, of course, the cross-cultural consistency of the sacred gift might well suggest an ecumenical interpretation: that the deity who supplied morality is in fact universally known and worshipped but given different names in different parts of the world by a confused humanity.
The second theory supporting an external narrative for morality's origin is a secular one: the idea that a positive moral code has historically been imposed upon neutral or naturally anti-social individual people by the community. This we can call the theory of a social contract, in deference to a concept promoted by European philosophers John Locke, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Hobbes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and named in Rousseau's influential book The Social Contract (1762). If we dress up this pre-modern theory in contemporary clothes, it might be called the theory of contractarianism or, more broadly, of cultural construction or cultural evolution. Both the social contract theory and its more contemporary variants often imagine positive morality as a language-based code. They imply that the origin of positive morality was a historical event, albeit a gradually-developing one. And they tend to avoid the question of universality. How do we explain the universality of human moral behavior?
These two theories might seem to be radically different: one sacred, the other secular. But they have in common the presupposition that humans emerge from the womb unendowed (or decidedly underendowed) with morality. Infants emerge into the buzzing chaos of the world either behaviorally negative (a condition of sinfulness as an inherited consequence of the Original Sin or some equivalent) or behaviorally neutral (as a result of being born with a mental Blank Slate). In either case, since human infants come to us without morality, they need to acquire it or, less actively, be placed in circumstances conducive to receiving it. So morality is an external thing that must be somehow imposed or received, and without that imposition or reception, so the thinking goes, we would all be left minus the mark of human civilization or the milk of human kindness. We would be left in our original state of darkness: as base, anarchic, self-involved, ignoble, bloody, and irrationally-violent as mere animals. In short, both of these theories show us a vision of morality as an external code that only humans can hope to possess.
There is, however, another narrative for the origins of morality--an internal one. This internal narrative suggests a third and less traditional theory: that morality is something you already have because you're born with it, at least partially or roughly or rudimentarily. Earlier versions of this idea might have said that morality comes from the heart, not the head. In speaking of "the heart," of course, one is really referring to feelings or emotions. It's a psychological theory of morality, and the version I promote in my book The Moral Lives of Animals is based on the idea that our psychological nature is very significantly shaped by past events--not so much by events from the recent and brief past of childhood but more events from the ancient and extended past of our evolutionary beginnings as social animals. This internal narrative, then, offers a theory of morality as an evolutionary development.
It is a common if naïve complaint that ascribing an evolutionary aspect to behavior implies the development of "hardwired" mechanisms. The term hardwired, recently borrowed from the vocabulary of computer science, produces a mental image of electronic circuitry inside a machine; and the routine use of the term can create a crude caricature of how evolution shapes behavior. It's important to recognize that evolution can have exquisitely subtle, intricately complex, and yet very powerful effects on behavior, producing not a few simple on-off events so much as an immense array of predilections and potentialities that will often still be fully responsive to reality, reason, and learning.
