Whoopi Goldberg was Right. . . Sort Of!

If you believe in evolution, there is nothing wrong with rape. In fact, you can’t really call it rape. Whoopi Goldberg dismissed Roman Polanski’s rape conviction by declaring that it “wasn’t rape-rape” (see her comments on The View.) As a firm believer in evolution, she should have said, “There’s nothing wrong with rape or sexual aggression. That’s how we all got here!” Here’s the premise: Whatever animals do in nature is natural. What’s natural is normal. What’s normal is moral. So if penguins engage in homosexual behavior, then that behavior must be natural, normal, and moral. How can we mere mortals impose our rules of sexual behavior on what’s natural in the animal kingdom? Homosexuals extrapolate that what animals do naturally in nature applies to what higher “animals” can do naturally without any moral judgments attached.

Consider the case of Timothy Treadwell depicted in the movie Grizzly Man (2005). He lived among bears for 13 years and thought of them as his friends. In 2003, Treadwell and his companion, Amie Huguenard, were mauled and mostly eaten by one of the Alaskan grizzly bears. While he thought of the bears as his brothers and sisters, the bears thought of him as lunch. “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” as Alfred Lord Tennyson put it. Then there’s the case of Armin Meiwes who killed and ate 43-year-old Bernd-Jurgen Brandes.[1] What did Mr. Meiwes do that was wrong given the premise that animal behavior is a normative model for human behavior?[2] If the bears that ate Treadwell were only doing what came naturally, then how can the cannibal nature of Meiwes be judged as abnormal given evolutionary assumptions? Whoopi missed a great opportunity to extol the virtues of the evolutionary religion of the intelligentsia by pointing out these examples of evolution in action.

A few years ago, I saw an advertisement for a television special on Turner Network Television—“The Trials of Life.” The full-page advertisement showed a composite picture of six animals, one of which was the bald eagle, with the following caption: “Discover how similar the face of nature is to yours. The way you love, the way you fight, the way you grow, all have their roots in the kingdom we all live in: the animal kingdom.” The implication here is obvious: Humans are only an evolutionary step away from other animals.

While channel surfing, I came across the second installment of the six-part series. I soon learned what Benjamin Franklin meant when he described the eagle as a bird of “bad moral character.” With two eaglets in the nest and not enough food to go around, mamma allows the weakest eaglet to die. She then cannibalizes the dead eaglet and feeds it to the survivor. Was this natural or unnatural? Is this moral animal behavior that we should emulate? How do we know? Should we follow the example of the eagles or just the homosexual penguins?

If animal behavior is a template for human behavior, then why can’t a similar case be made for rape among human animals? As hard as it might be to imagine, the connection has been made. Randy Thornhill, a biologist who teaches at the University of New Mexico, and Craig T. Palmer, an anthropologist who teaches at the University of Missouri-Columbia, attempt to demonstrate in their book A Natural History of Rape [3] (MIT Press) that evolutionary principles explain rape as a “genetically developed strategy sustained over generations of human life because it is a kind of sexual selection—a successful reproductive strategy.” They go on to claim, however, that even though rape can be explained genetically in evolutionary terms, this does not make the behavior morally right. Of course, given Darwinian assumptions, there is no way to condemn rape on moral grounds. If we are truly the products of evolution, then there can be no moral judgments about anything. So then, if homosexuals want to use penguins as their moral model, then they need to take all animal behavior into consideration when they build their moral worldview. If we should follow the animal world regarding homosexual penguins and thereby regard human homosexual behavior as normal, then we must be consistent and follow the animal world regarding rape, eating our young, and eating our neighbors and decriminalize these behaviors as well. Whoopi just needed some help in framing the issue a little better.

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3286721.stm
[2] Theodore Dalrymple, “The Case for Cannibalism” (January 5, 2005): http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon_01_05_04td.html
[3] Randy Thornhill, and Craig T. Palmer, A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000)..

That will teach me to go back and put together two replies in one window to save time and then going back to edit and revise my comments. I wound up mangling and interweaving my reply to Hank and you. Here is the part directed at your comments.

What if there were a third element between the observer and the psychopath, that does not lend itself to rational inquiry, yet is causal to the behavior being observed.

Given that the differences in observations I'm talking about are observed in brain scans of which parts of the brain activate while answering moral decisions and physiological responses, any third element influence would exist outside of the difference.

It's also found practical applications in police-squad rooms. Soon after he delivered a keynote speech at a conference for homicide detectives and prosecuting attorneys in Seattle three years ago, Hare got a letter thanking him for helping solve a series of homicides. The police had a suspect nailed for a couple of murders, but believed he was responsible for others. They were using the usual strategy to get a confession, telling him, 'Think how much better you'll feel, think of the families left behind,' and so on. After they'd heard Hare speak they realized they were dealing with a psychopath, someone who could feel neither guilt nor sorrow. They changed their interrogation tactic to, "So you murdered a couple of prostitutes. That's minor-league compared to Bundy or Gacy." The appeal to the psychopath's grandiosity worked. He didn't just confess to his other crimes, he bragged about them.

Now, being morally handicapped, alone, does not make one do evil. There are no doubt psychopaths who lead harmless and productive lives by virtue of rational morality and following the social conventions of moral people around them but the evidence suggests that those things alone, without a visceral and emotional conscience to back it up, is a weak and insufficient deterrent to doing evil and that a person relying only on the rational consideration of consequences and the deterrent effect of social conventions will do a very poor job of resisting doing evil things.

You said that you weren't a fundamentalist or a literalist, but you seem to be familiar with the Bible.

21From that time forth began Jesus to shew unto his disciples, how that he must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day. 22Then Peter took him, and began to rebuke him, saying, Be it far from thee, Lord: this shall not be unto thee. 23But he turned, and said unto Peter, Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men.

When Christ said "Get thee behind me, Satan," he was literally talking to Satan, yet, he was looking at Peter, and the words came from Peter's mouth. This is a very significant part of Scripture as far as I'm concerned, and I don't think most people understand the depth of the meaning here.

There are a variety of ways that I can interpret this scene, both in isolation and in the larger context of Jesus' story, including casting out demons, forgiving sins, and other cases where he disagreed with others. I'm not sure what particular point you are trying to make here but none of the interpretations I can imagine conflicts with my basic point. Please note that I have been acknowledging from the beginning that the innate human conscience, alone, is not sufficient to guarantee moral behavior and that the human conscience can be shaped and even erased through education and social conditioning.

There is more going on here than what we can understand and demonstrate rationally, no matter how smart we may think we are.

If your point is one about the role of Satan and demonic influences on human evil, I have not suggested anything that would stop those things from playing a role in human moral decisions. My point is about people being aware of right and wrong and as I'm sure you know, people choose to do things that they know are wrong all the time.

My apologies for mangling my reply to you. That's the result of putting together two replies in one window to try to save time and then going back to edit and revise my comments, intertwining the two together into a mess. Here is the part directed at your comments.

Thank you for taking the time to make such an extended response. I’m sorry I am much to busy to respond in kind. Still, I feel I owe you some response, which, by the way, is not meant to convince you, or change your mind about anything. I’m only expressing what I understand to be true.

At this point, I'm not sure I fully understand your point.

It would certainly be hubris if I ever said that, but never have said or thought it. I do think and say always, whatever men do understand, (which will never be everything), reasoning from the evidence is their only means to that knowledge. There is no such thing as “innate” knowledge, and human being do not have instinct, both of which concepts come from the pseudoscience, psychology.

I think the evidence strongly disagrees. I'm talking about research being done with brain scans and on people with damaged brains or irregular development, not interview and interpretation psychology. Humans are born with all sorts of instincts to suck, startle, and so on and the infants who don't have those instincts are badly handicapped. Similarly, there are people born without an innate sense of fear who must consciously evaluate, for example, that it's a bad idea to pick a knife up by the blade or walk out into a busy street in front of a car. Their lives are significantly more difficult than the lives of people who do those things innately. We can know that people are born with these abilities by observing what happens to those who aren't and by identifying what makes them different. None of that's pseudo-science or the product of subjective interpretations of observing behavior.

I also think it is a great mistake to attempt to understand the nature of human beings by studying those samples of them that are obviously defective.

I disagree. I think that it's often quite effective to to see what something fully does to see what happens when it's absent. And any theory of human nature and behavior that cannot handle or account for the defects as well as the perfect specimens would seem fairly weak to me. In other words, we can learn what a liver does by observing a patient with a failing liver. A stopped heart quickly illustrates the importance of a heart more clearly than a dissertation on the circulatory system. And figuring out why psychopaths are prone to be particularly bad and the role that innate morality plays in moral decisions helps address the chief objection of the atheist to the role that religion plays in morality, which is that many atheists and members of other religions can and do lead moral lives and share morality with those of faith.

I know you are not ever going to find my ideas agreeable, almost no one does which neither worries or surprises me. Most of your ideas are commonly accepted ones that those who bother to think about them at all would agree with. They are, to most people, “obviously true,” just as at one time, the fact the world was flat was “obviously true.”

It's not a matter of finding your ideas agreeable or disagreeable. It's a matter of looking at the evidence, even if I find where the evidence leads disagreeable. To be perfectly honest, I find everything I've read about psychopaths terribly troubling and disturbing and would prefer that they weren't real.

For example, it is “obviously true” to most people that “conscience” is innate in those who have conscience. The fact is, that what will make someone feel guilty or ashamed is not innate but learned. Most people think that one’s conscience will make them ashamed of lying, and certainly would make them feel guilty if they killed and ate someone. But it is not innate, it is learned.

That's not how the innate conscience works, and I've said as much. It provides a foundation that can be shaped by various forces and also ignored or overriden by other concerns. As the Discover article points out, a moral decision is the product of a net emotional response and a rational utilitarian response. The strength of the emotional response varies with emotional proximity and emotional proximity can be controlled by culture. There has been some research into how children draw distinctions between moral transgressions and transgressions against social convention such that if you ask children who have been taught that chewing food with their mouth open is rude and wrong, "If you want to another country where chewing with your mouth open was considered polite, would it be OK to chew with your mouth open there?" most children will tell you that it would be OK in that other culture. But if you ask them, "If you went to another country and they told you it was OK to hit your friends until they cry," most children will answer that it still wouldn't be OK. In fact, you exhibited the same sort of response on one of your own replies, "What you are implying is that rape, murder, stealing, and lying are only wrong because God said so. If He said they were OK, would they be?" you were essentially saying that rape, murder, stealing, and lying are moral transgressions that would be wrong even if God Himself told you they were good, yet I doubt you'd have the same strong reaction to, say, whether someone picks Saturday or Sunday as their Sabbath.

So how does this all work?

I may be born with an innate sense of right and wrong that works at a very rudimentary level. Killing other people is wrong. Cheating other people is wrong. Being cheated is wrong. Purposely causing us harm is different than accidentally causing us harm. Cruelty is bad. These moral rules apply to people we care about. As people become emotionally distanced from us or become our enemies, whether those rules or not will depend on how human we consider them and how much empathy we have for them, and that's where culture comes in. It tells us who our friends and enemies are, whether men should treat women like people or property, and so it. It can insist that we ignore the moral voice telling us something is wrong by emphasizing utilitarian or social convention reasons to ignore that moral voice, by forcing the decision into a purely abstract rational process, or by adjusting the empathic status of the target. I'll illustrate with your Borneo example.

Quite a few years ago some missionaries were working with cannibalistic tribes in Borneo. In those tribes it was believed telling the truth to an enemy was very wrong, and that not eating an enemy, if you managed to catch one, was also wrong. Those primitive people suffered a bad conscience if they inadvertently told the truth to an enemy, and also suffered a bad conscience if they failed to eat their enemy.

First, people morally treat strangers different than friends, enemies different than friends. That people are willing to kill their enemies when they are not willing to kill their friends makes their lack of moral anguish over lying to their enemies rather trivial in comparison. Basically, people are willing to accept that it's permissible to do bad things to their enemies that they wouldn't do to friends, including killing them, lying to them, and strapping them to a board and pouring water over their faces to make them feel like they are drowning. Why is such lying mandatory in their culture? Without knowing more, I can only speculate, but I can think of any number of reasons where they would argue that such lying serves a greater good or frame the lying in such a way that it seems to be, itself, a moral good. For example, it could come from an obligation to not help one's enemy and not betray one's own group, at which point truthfulness would be equivalent of betrayal.

As for eating one's enemy, the moral status of a corpse is an interesting thing and is largely a matter of social convention. For example, we would never think of putting our dead out to be eaten by scavengers but that's exactly what Zoroastrians did. And when one hears why the Zoroastrians did that, the moral context becomes fairly clear and most people don't seem to interpret it as an evil act. Similarly, if the Borneo cannibals felt that eating one's enemy was necessary to release their soul, as misguided as we may believe such behavior to be, it makes a certain amount of moral sense and has enough of a moral imperative to explain how it could overcome an innate reluctance to do so. The bigger question there is whether they hunt other human enemies as food as they might hunt an animal for food. I strongly doubt you would find an example of them doing that.

Conscience in not some kind of innate barometer of moral behavior, its the automatic emotional reaction to ones behavior in relation to their values, whatever those values are; and whatever they are, they must be learned. But that’s not obvious, just as the fact the world is round is not obvious.

The emotional reaction, itself, is innate and people either have it or they don't have it and if they don't have it, an important element of moral consideration is missing to them. That said, how they understand, interpret, and process individual moral acts will depend greatly on how a culture interprets those acts, but the the types of things that exist in the moral realm, truth and falsehood, cruelty and kindness, murder and help, fairness and unfairness, and so on are a constant and a person who lacks the innate conscience will never feel guilty, for example, even though people who feel guilty may feel guilty about different things and to different degrees. And it's because of that common conscience that we can have productive moral discussions with atheists and those of different cultures and religions and how we can convince an entire culture to treat women humanely or to outlaw slavery.

Please note that I am not arguing that humans are all nature an no nurture. My argument is that human behavior is a product of both nature and nurture and there is certainly room for religion in there, as well.

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