Robert Kurzban Author of Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite (For Hypocrite excerpts, please click Book Excerpts 1 above.) Robert Kurzban, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and the Evolutionary Psychology Specialty Chief Editor at Frontiersin.org, as well as an Associate Editor for the evolutionary psychology journal Epjournal.net. This interview originally appeared in American Atheist magazine. Can Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection help us understand the social behavior of humans? Robert Kurzban believes so. As an evolutionary psychologist, he is interested in the specific functions of the mechanisms of the human mind. He is the Director of the Penn Laboratory for Experimental Evolutionary Psychology, which he founded in 2003. His research is devoted to learning what the evolved mechanisms of the human mind do to enhance the survival of the species. His book, Why Everyone Else is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind, is a fascinating read about our how our minds are structured, and some of the inconsistent behaviors that arise due to this structure. I began our interview by asking him to explain what he means when he says the brain has a modular structure. “The idea is that the human brain consists of a lot of different mechanisms, each with their own job. Everyone knows that you’ve got a visual system that’s responsible for seeing, a language system for talking, and so on. The argument I make in the book is that there is specialization like this all through the human mind. We have specific modular systems designed for doing things like making friends, choosing our mates, presenting ourselves in a favorable way socially, and all the other separate things that we do as human beings.” Can you talk about your “iMind” analogy? “One of the things I think is interesting about modern technology is how cell phones have evolved into smart phones. It used to be that phones were just used to make calls. Now they’re capable of doing a large number of different things. We call them smart phones is because they bundle together lots of different applications—all these narrowly specialized, computer programs that perform specific functions. This gives us a good analogy of what’s going on in the human mind. The argument isn’t that the mind is exactly like a cell phone. The argument is that this gives us a way to think about how something becomes useful. Well, it gets that way by bundling together lots of different specialized applications. Our brains are like that, too. Evolution by natural selection has led to minds that bundle together lots of useful mechanisms with different functions. “Cell phones have a user who determines which application is going to be active at any given moment. The human mind is very different. It sort of has to make its own decisions. So various things going on in the environment will activate some modules and deactivate others. For example, say you’re walking down the street and suddenly you see a bear. Your fear modules, your anti-predator systems, come online in the brain, and those in turn will inhibit other modular systems from being in play. In this situation, you’re not as likely to notice potential mates, for instance. So the environment can have important effects on which modules are active and which ones are inactive. That’s not to say that there isn’t a lot of stuff the brain itself is doing to activate and deactivate modules.” You write about the four impatient modules, fight, flee, feed, and have sex. Obviously, a lot us have problems overriding those modules when they come online. Describe the brain’s ability or lack of ability to intervene when those modules kick in. “Over time, brains change in such a way that they become more or less likely to be able to inhibit the short-term sorts of things, the impatient modules. For example, different people become rewarded by different kinds of things. You see different sorts of addictions and so on. We can learn, to some extent, to be able to inhibit impulses, to resist temptation and so on. These things are quite complicated, but another way to put that is the environment can activate modules, but our own modules can also have an important role in activating and deactivating various modules in your head.” You say, “Indeed, I think there is some sense in which the part of you that feels like ‘you’ is, more or less, designed to serve this public relations function. You are the Machiavellian spin doctor, and, as such, only a small part of the sum total of what’s going on in your head.” You say the “self” may be a fiction of sorts that functions like a press secretary for the organism. “One of things found in psychological literature is that people often talk about a self. It’s easy to imagine when people are discussing this, that they have in mind a little person in their head that’s just as smart and intelligent as the whole person. That can’t be right. So I think that whatever the self is, if there is such a thing, it’s a subsection of all the different parts of the mind. Given that there are all these modules that are causing our behavior and we don’t always know why we do what we do, I think it’s probably the case that, because we’re social creatures, there has to be a system in place to explain our actions to other human beings.” To help us navigate the social matrix? “Yes. And in that sense, I talk about a module that functions as a press secretary. Other people have used this idea, too. Daniel Dennett has used this analogy.” So this press secretary is one of our “iMind” apps? “Yes. The idea is that you need some system that is designed to explain your behavior and make it look as positively plausible as possible, given all the constraints on the audience. And this plugs into some recent work that’s been in the news, called the argumentative theory of reasoning. Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber recently published a paper where they talk about the role of reason in human cognition, ways to persuade people about things that you want them to believe. And this is what I’m arguing as well, in part. Our minds have, in part, design features that cause us to put out favorable propaganda so that others think well of us. For example, when we endorse overly optimistic views about ourselves, the way we claim to have controlled past events that were positive, and disassociate ourselves from events that were negative, my claim is that this is part of a propaganda module.” That makes sense. So if I seek a certain mate and I know she likes a particular animal meat, I’m going to use reason during the tribal hunting meeting to argue that we hunt in area X because I know that particular animal is more likely to be there, thereby potentially augmenting my standing with a particular female. But don’t you think that reason has become more than just that over the course of evolution? “I certainly would endorse that. I think there’s something really nice about having mechanisms that allow you to make good inferences that are logical. If you have two facts, and you have logic on your side then you can often generate a third fact, and true things are useful for figuring stuff out, building tools, etc. It seems to me that there’s a lot we do for reasons that are useful, not only in the context of persuading other people. Tool use is one. Certainly making inferences about the natural world can be really valuable.” I want to switch subjects a bit to the survival function of morality. You write about people doing what they do,and then using morality to justify their actions. “People do use morality strategically. I do think that people pursue their interests and then, for the most part, make up explanations afterwards, often using a kind of moral discourse, the language of morality, but with no sense of consistency. And that’s why a television program like The Daily Show is so good at what it does because it’s easy to show people’s inconsistencies. Unless you point these things out, people are free to be just as inconsistent as they please. People are pursing their self-interests and doing what they want to do and then they’re justifying it post hoc with moral principles that are inconsistent with other moral principles. The example that I think is the most glaring in our modern environment is illegal drugs. People are falling all over themselves to say that we should have freedom. Republicans talk about freedom. Democrats talk about women’s freedom in the case of abortion. Then you look at drug laws and all of the sudden people are saying no, that’s something that we don’t want people to be free to do. We want the state to intervene. And then they make up reasons like if people do drugs maybe they’ll be less productive, and yet they don’t make that argument in the other ways we become less productive, like with alcohol, or the health effects of smoking. I think there’s tremendous hypocrisy, and I think that the question of why exactly that occurs is really interesting.” So if morality is, or can be, at least in part, a smokescreen for me getting eight pieces of candy and you get three, where might we go with that in regard to building a real morality? “People use morality as a smokescreen, but it doesn’t have to be. I think that we have these great moral principles in various places, the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, talking about freedom and liberty. These are statements about how we think we ought to live as a community. I think the real challenge is to change morality from this kind of façade to something that we actually care about. If our position is that people ought to be able to do what they want as long as they don’t hurt anyone else, whether intentionally or as an externality, then the federal government, state government, local government ought to not be able to abridge people’s ability to do that. Then morality isn’t a smokescreen; it becomes a way to ground our ideas about the laws we want to have. So I think the direction for the future is to ask what would happen if we actually took these moral principles seriously? What if we actually did want a world in which governments can’t impinge on people’s freedoms to do what they want in the bedroom, and in terms of what they eat and so on. And again, as long as there’s no externalities or side effects. The government, however, does have a role saying I can’t drive 120 miles an hour on the roads. That’s dangerous.” It does seem that we have made real moral advances over the course of cultural evolution, for example with regard to slavery, the continuing emancipation of women, race relations, Steven Pinker’s findings on the decline of violence over the course of history, etc. That’s not to say that we don’t have a long way to go, but it seems there has been genuine moral evolution. Would you agree? “I do agree with that. I think in many places people are way better off than they used to be. But I would want to distinguish two different things in terms of moral progress. One is progress in terms of people’s welfare, that is to say freedom from harm. The other is the amount of goods we have to share amongst ourselves because of things like markets and technology. I see moral progress as this gradual process whereby people are more and more allowed to do what they want. You don’t have to take the view that the expansion of freedom is what morality is. You can think about morality as people compiling a list of all those things that people can be punished for doing. And I think that list should include stuff like harming other people. I think it’s great that we have laws that penalize people who would intentionally harm other people. But we still have laws that prevent us from doing what we want to do where we’re not harming anyone else. I think that’s the kind of moral progress we still need to work on. “Let me just say for the record that I don’t think that I need to have any kind of religious justification to take a moral stand. I think it’s perfectly reasonable for me to say, look, it doesn’t matter if I think there’s a god or not, I happen not to. That doesn’t change the fact that I endorse a certain set of moral principles. People are always going to disagree about the details of morality, right? I think that as we get better at writing down on paper, or I guess now it’s electronic documents, what we think the bedrock moral principles are, there’s an opportunity for a lot more coordination around the world on what those principles might be. I think religion has some part to play in that, but I don’t think it’s a necessary role.” Do you think we can base a moral code on science, incorporating some of the principles of evolution and natural selection? “Well, I’m an evolutionary psychologist but I don’t look to evolution for my moral principles. I do think that those are the sorts of things that have to emerge, not so much out of what we think is true, but what we want in terms of how we want people to behave. So I think that understanding humans beings from an evolutionary point of view is really important for bringing about what it is that we want to bring about, for understanding how to organize cultural institutions, how people are going to respond to incentives, and how people are going to produce and consume public goods. I don’t think that that’s where I want to look for my morality. I think morality has to come sui generis. I, as an individual, think that the deepest moral principle is freedom, is liberty. I don’t think that there’s anything in evolution that can tell me the right way to structure political institutions and incentives, and that we want people to have the freedom to do as they please. That has to come from somewhere else. And people can and do disagree about that. What I’m saying is that I don’t need to understand the process of natural selection to have the view that that’s something for which I want to work.” What about the argument that we are now beginning to look to science for some of our legal standards, for example, say from neuroscience with regard to the functionality of teenage brains as it relates to responsibility? Why wouldn’t we look to science for a moral code? “My claim isn’t that we shouldn’t look to science. My claim is that we should decide what we want and then use science to tell us how to get it. I think that’s as true for the space program as it is for morality. So if it turns out that we want a world where people are free, we have to look to our understanding of human nature and economics and political science to understand how to bring about those goals. Then our understanding of people, societies, cultures, and so on becomes really important. It’s just that looking to science comes after we’ve introspected about our own moral goals.” What are you currently researching? “One of the things that I’m continuing to work on now is this idea of strategic morality. How is it that people are using morality to bring about their own strategic goals? Last year I published a paper called “Sex, Drugs, and Moral Goals.” Essentially, it examines the idea that people are using the morality surrounding drugs as a way to curb other people’s sexual nature. It might sound a bit odd, but we have some data that are consistent with that premise. If I’m pursuing a long-term monogamous strategy, and illegal drugs are going to lead to promiscuity in the world around me, then I want to ban illegal drugs, mostly because I seek to reduce other people’s ability to implement promiscuous sexual strategies that may jeopardize my standing with my mate. So—and this maybe sounds a little cynical—the idea is to link up these moral commitments to people’s goals, to trying to coerce other people. We’re looking at some other data in collaboration with people in other countries.” Fascinating stuff. “Yeah, it’s fun. We think it’s interesting to try to think about morality from a strategic context, as a way to constrain other people’s behaviors. So that’s been on the top of my agenda.” Obviously you’re not running for office with this idea, telling people their moral codes are tools of sexual coercion to benefit their own goals. What has been the reaction to this line of thinking? “We’ve gotten pretty minimal reaction to it so far. I’ve been a little surprised. When I present this material, I find that psychologists are not particularly fond of it. People in other fields seem to be a little more interested. As you say, it’s not going to get me elected to say that your moral views are basically a stick you’re holding over other people’s heads to get them to do what you want. People don’t want to hear that. Part of the reason that we’re continuing to do this research is to try to illustrate this point and make it more plausible. “The other thing I’ve indicated in my written work is that we often don’t know where morality comes from. John Haidt is a key name in this area. He’s shown that people have these intuitions that they can’t explain. Our own morality is so opaque to us that people’s initial reaction is, Could that be why I care about drugs? Morality is difficult to be introspective about. My view is that morality has a much more sinister function than a whole lot of other people seem to think it has. “Another issue that we’ve started to look at is prostitution. There are all these strange features and really funny inconsistencies with prostitution. You can’t pay someone to have sex, unless somebody films it and then sells the film. Porn is legal, but prostitution is illegal. Having sex for money is okay if other people watch it on film. We’re interested in why it is that people care about who’s having sex with whom for what kind of implicit or explicit exchange of resources. We hope that by looking at these victimless crime cases that we get more insight into what’s going on with people’s moral intuition.” I see you battling sometimes with people who want to write off evolutionary psychology. Do you want to comment on that? “I spend a decent amount of time fielding the arguments that people make about evolutionary psychology, which are the same ones that people have made for 20 years, and they’re inaccurate in the same way they’ve been for 20 years. Why do people make these phantom arguments about the discipline, get red in the face spending nickels on these arguments that aren’t reasonable? It’s a good question. People think we’re trying to draw moral lessons from the science. They seem to live in some kind of existential fear that science will undermine their moral fabric and they get really upset about that. They bring to bear a lot of misconceptions and haven’t taken the time to really understand the field. There’s a famous quote that’s variously attributed: ‘The debates are so violent because the stakes are so small.’ I don’t think the stakes are so small here because we’re battling for our vision of human nature. Sometimes the stakes are big. People get really angry about this stuff. I don’t think I have a lot of insight into why that’s the case.” They’re trying to control your breeding opps. “Maybe (laughs).” Maybe your memetic breeding in a sense. “Right, they’re trying to control the marketplace of ideas. There’s this sort of Kuhnian aspect to it. In his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn says that as science changes, the people in power lose their grip on resources. One can understand why they would be emotional. I mean if someone was threatening my bread and butter I might get angry, too.”

Robert Kurzban

Author of

Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite

(For Hypocrite excerpts, please click Book Excerpts 1 above.)

Robert Kurzban, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and the Evolutionary Psychology Specialty Chief Editor at Frontiersin.org, as well as an Associate Editor for the evolutionary psychology journal Epjournal.net.

This interview originally appeared in American Atheist magazine.

Can Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection help us understand the social behavior of humans? Robert Kurzban believes so. As an evolutionary psychologist, he is interested in the specific functions of the mechanisms of the human mind. He is the Director of the Penn Laboratory for Experimental Evolutionary Psychology, which he founded in 2003. His research is devoted to learning what the evolved mechanisms of the human mind do to enhance the survival of the species.

His book, Why Everyone Else is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind, is a fascinating read about our how our minds are structured, and some of the inconsistent behaviors that arise due to this structure. I began our interview by asking him to explain what he means when he says the brain has a modular structure.

“The idea is that the human brain consists of a lot of different mechanisms, each with their own job. Everyone knows that you’ve got a visual system that’s responsible for seeing, a language system for talking, and so on. The argument I make in the book is that there is specialization like this all through the human mind. We have specific modular systems designed for doing things like making friends, choosing our mates, presenting ourselves in a favorable way socially, and all the other separate things that we do as human beings.”

Can you talk about your “iMind” analogy?

“One of the things I think is interesting about modern technology is how cell phones have evolved into smart phones. It used to be that phones were just used to make calls. Now they’re capable of doing a large number of different things. We call them smart phones is because they bundle together lots of different applications—all these narrowly specialized, computer programs that perform specific functions. This gives us a good analogy of what’s going on in the human mind. The argument isn’t that the mind is exactly like a cell phone. The argument is that this gives us a way to think about how something becomes useful. Well, it gets that way by bundling together lots of different specialized applications. Our brains are like that, too. Evolution by natural selection has led to minds that bundle together lots of useful mechanisms with different functions.

“Cell phones have a user who determines which application is going to be active at any given moment. The human mind is very different. It sort of has to make its own decisions. So various things going on in the environment will activate some modules and deactivate others. For example, say you’re walking down the street and suddenly you see a bear. Your fear modules, your anti-predator systems, come online in the brain, and those in turn will inhibit other modular systems from being in play. In this situation, you’re not as likely to notice potential mates, for instance. So the environment can have important effects on which modules are active and which ones are inactive. That’s not to say that there isn’t a lot of stuff the brain itself is doing to activate and deactivate modules.”

You write about the four impatient modules, fight, flee, feed, and have sex. Obviously, a lot us have problems overriding those modules when they come online. Describe the brain’s ability or lack of ability to intervene when those modules kick in.

“Over time, brains change in such a way that they become more or less likely to be able to inhibit the short-term sorts of things, the impatient modules. For example, different people become rewarded by different kinds of things. You see different sorts of addictions and so on. We can learn, to some extent, to be able to inhibit impulses, to resist temptation and so on. These things are quite complicated, but another way to put that is the environment can activate modules, but our own modules can also have an important role in activating and deactivating various modules in your head.”

You say, “Indeed, I think there is some sense in which the part of you that feels like ‘you’ is, more or less, designed to serve this public relations function. You are the Machiavellian spin doctor, and, as such, only a small part of the sum total of what’s going on in your head.” You say the “self” may be a fiction of sorts that functions like a press secretary for the organism.

“One of things found in psychological literature is that people often talk about a self. It’s easy to imagine when people are discussing this, that they have in mind a little person in their head that’s just as smart and intelligent as the whole person. That can’t be right. So I think that whatever the self is, if there is such a thing, it’s a subsection of all the different parts of the mind. Given that there are all these modules that are causing our behavior and we don’t always know why we do what we do, I think it’s probably the case that, because we’re social creatures, there has to be a system in place to explain our actions to other human beings.”

To help us navigate the social matrix?

“Yes. And in that sense, I talk about a module that functions as a press secretary. Other people have used this idea, too. Daniel Dennett has used this analogy.”

So this press secretary is one of our “iMind” apps?

“Yes. The idea is that you need some system that is designed to explain your behavior and make it look as positively plausible as possible, given all the constraints on the audience. And this plugs into some recent work that’s been in the news, called the argumentative theory of reasoning. Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber recently published a paper where they talk about the role of reason in human cognition, ways to persuade people about things that you want them to believe. And this is what I’m arguing as well, in part. Our minds have, in part, design features that cause us to put out favorable propaganda so that others think well of us. For example, when we endorse overly optimistic views about ourselves, the way we claim to have controlled past events that were positive, and disassociate ourselves from events that were negative, my claim is that this is part of a propaganda module.”

That makes sense. So if I seek a certain mate and I know she likes a particular animal meat, I’m going to use reason during the tribal hunting meeting to argue that we hunt in area X because I know that particular animal is more likely to be there, thereby potentially augmenting my standing with a particular female. But don’t you think that reason has become more than just that over the course of evolution?

“I certainly would endorse that. I think there’s something really nice about having mechanisms that allow you to make good inferences that are logical. If you have two facts, and you have logic on your side then you can often generate a third fact, and true things are useful for figuring stuff out, building tools, etc. It seems to me that there’s a lot we do for reasons that are useful, not only in the context of persuading other people. Tool use is one. Certainly making inferences about the natural world can be really valuable.”

I want to switch subjects a bit to the survival function of morality. You write about people doing what they do,and then using morality to justify their actions.

“People do use morality strategically. I do think that people pursue their interests and then, for the most part, make up explanations afterwards, often using a kind of moral discourse, the language of morality, but with no sense of consistency. And that’s why a television program like The Daily Show is so good at what it does because it’s easy to show people’s inconsistencies. Unless you point these things out, people are free to be just as inconsistent as they please. People are pursing their self-interests and doing what they want to do and then they’re justifying it post hoc with moral principles that are inconsistent with other moral principles. The example that I think is the most glaring in our modern environment is illegal drugs. People are falling all over themselves to say that we should have freedom. Republicans talk about freedom. Democrats talk about women’s freedom in the case of abortion. Then you look at drug laws and all of the sudden people are saying no, that’s something that we don’t want people to be free to do. We want the state to intervene. And then they make up reasons like if people do drugs maybe they’ll be less productive, and yet they don’t make that argument in the other ways we become less productive, like with alcohol, or the health effects of smoking. I think there’s tremendous hypocrisy, and I think that the question of why exactly that occurs is really interesting.”

So if morality is, or can be, at least in part, a smokescreen for me getting eight pieces of candy and you get three, where might we go with that in regard to building a real morality?

“People use morality as a smokescreen, but it doesn’t have to be. I think that we have these great moral principles in various places, the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, talking about freedom and liberty. These are statements about how we think we ought to live as a community. I think the real challenge is to change morality from this kind of façade to something that we actually care about. If our position is that people ought to be able to do what they want as long as they don’t hurt anyone else, whether intentionally or as an externality, then the federal government, state government, local government ought to not be able to abridge people’s ability to do that. Then morality isn’t a smokescreen; it becomes a way to ground our ideas about the laws we want to have. So I think the direction for the future is to ask what would happen if we actually took these moral principles seriously? What if we actually did want a world in which governments can’t impinge on people’s freedoms to do what they want in the bedroom, and in terms of what they eat and so on. And again, as long as there’s no externalities or side effects. The government, however, does have a role saying I can’t drive 120 miles an hour on the roads. That’s dangerous.”

It does seem that we have made real moral advances over the course of cultural evolution, for example with regard to slavery, the continuing emancipation of women, race relations, Steven Pinker’s findings on the decline of violence over the course of history, etc. That’s not to say that we don’t have a long way to go, but it seems there has been genuine moral evolution. Would you agree?

“I do agree with that. I think in many places people are way better off than they used to be. But I would want to distinguish two different things in terms of moral progress. One is progress in terms of people’s welfare, that is to say freedom from harm. The other is the amount of goods we have to share amongst ourselves because of things like markets and technology. I see moral progress as this gradual process whereby people are more and more allowed to do what they want. You don’t have to take the view that the expansion of freedom is what morality is. You can think about morality as people compiling a list of all those things that people can be punished for doing. And I think that list should include stuff like harming other people. I think it’s great that we have laws that penalize people who would intentionally harm other people. But we still have laws that prevent us from doing what we want to do where we’re not harming anyone else. I think that’s the kind of moral progress we still need to work on.

“Let me just say for the record that I don’t think that I need to have any kind of religious justification to take a moral stand. I think it’s perfectly reasonable for me to say, look, it doesn’t matter if I think there’s a god or not, I happen not to. That doesn’t change the fact that I endorse a certain set of moral principles. People are always going to disagree about the details of morality, right? I think that as we get better at writing down on paper, or I guess now it’s electronic documents, what we think the bedrock moral principles are, there’s an opportunity for a lot more coordination around the world on what those principles might be. I think religion has some part to play in that, but I don’t think it’s a necessary role.”

Do you think we can base a moral code on science, incorporating some of the principles of evolution and natural selection?

“Well, I’m an evolutionary psychologist but I don’t look to evolution for my moral principles. I do think that those are the sorts of things that have to emerge, not so much out of what we think is true, but what we want in terms of how we want people to behave. So I think that understanding humans beings from an evolutionary point of view is really important for bringing about what it is that we want to bring about, for understanding how to organize cultural institutions, how people are going to respond to incentives, and how people are going to produce and consume public goods. I don’t think that that’s where I want to look for my morality. I think morality has to come sui generis. I, as an individual, think that the deepest moral principle is freedom, is liberty. I don’t think that there’s anything in evolution that can tell me the right way to structure political institutions and incentives, and that we want people to have the freedom to do as they please. That has to come from somewhere else. And people can and do disagree about that. What I’m saying is that I don’t need to understand the process of natural selection to have the view that that’s something for which I want to work.”

What about the argument that we are now beginning to look to science for some of our legal standards, for example, say from neuroscience with regard to the functionality of teenage brains as it relates to responsibility? Why wouldn’t we look to science for a moral code?

“My claim isn’t that we shouldn’t look to science. My claim is that we should decide what we want and then use science to tell us how to get it. I think that’s as true for the space program as it is for morality. So if it turns out that we want a world where people are free, we have to look to our understanding of human nature and economics and political science to understand how to bring about those goals. Then our understanding of people, societies, cultures, and so on becomes really important. It’s just that looking to science comes after we’ve introspected about our own moral goals.”

What are you currently researching?

“One of the things that I’m continuing to work on now is this idea of strategic morality. How is it that people are using morality to bring about their own strategic goals? Last year I published a paper called “Sex, Drugs, and Moral Goals.” Essentially, it examines the idea that people are using the morality surrounding drugs as a way to curb other people’s sexual nature. It might sound a bit odd, but we have some data that are consistent with that premise. If I’m pursuing a long-term monogamous strategy, and illegal drugs are going to lead to promiscuity in the world around me, then I want to ban illegal drugs, mostly because I seek to reduce other people’s ability to implement promiscuous sexual strategies that may jeopardize my standing with my mate. So—and this maybe sounds a little cynical—the idea is to link up these moral commitments to people’s goals, to trying to coerce other people. We’re looking at some other data in collaboration with people in other countries.”

Fascinating stuff.

“Yeah, it’s fun. We think it’s interesting to try to think about morality from a strategic context, as a way to constrain other people’s behaviors. So that’s been on the top of my agenda.”

Obviously you’re not running for office with this idea, telling people their moral codes are tools of sexual coercion to benefit their own goals. What has been the reaction to this line of thinking?

“We’ve gotten pretty minimal reaction to it so far. I’ve been a little surprised. When I present this material, I find that psychologists are not particularly fond of it. People in other fields seem to be a little more interested. As you say, it’s not going to get me elected to say that your moral views are basically a stick you’re holding over other people’s heads to get them to do what you want. People don’t want to hear that. Part of the reason that we’re continuing to do this research is to try to illustrate this point and make it more plausible.

“The other thing I’ve indicated in my written work is that we often don’t know where morality comes from. John Haidt is a key name in this area. He’s shown that people have these intuitions that they can’t explain. Our own morality is so opaque to us that people’s initial reaction is, Could that be why I care about drugs? Morality is difficult to be introspective about. My view is that morality has a much more sinister function than a whole lot of other people seem to think it has.

“Another issue that we’ve started to look at is prostitution. There are all these strange features and really funny inconsistencies with prostitution. You can’t pay someone to have sex, unless somebody films it and then sells the film. Porn is legal, but prostitution is illegal. Having sex for money is okay if other people watch it on film. We’re interested in why it is that people care about who’s having sex with whom for what kind of implicit or explicit exchange of resources. We hope that by looking at these victimless crime cases that we get more insight into what’s going on with people’s moral intuition.”

I see you battling sometimes with people who want to write off evolutionary psychology. Do you want to comment on that?

“I spend a decent amount of time fielding the arguments that people make about evolutionary psychology, which are the same ones that people have made for 20 years, and they’re inaccurate in the same way they’ve been for 20 years. Why do people make these phantom arguments about the discipline, get red in the face spending nickels on these arguments that aren’t reasonable? It’s a good question. People think we’re trying to draw moral lessons from the science. They seem to live in some kind of existential fear that science will undermine their moral fabric and they get really upset about that. They bring to bear a lot of misconceptions and haven’t taken the time to really understand the field. There’s a famous quote that’s variously attributed: ‘The debates are so violent because the stakes are so small.’ I don’t think the stakes are so small here because we’re battling for our vision of human nature. Sometimes the stakes are big. People get really angry about this stuff. I don’t think I have a lot of insight into why that’s the case.”

They’re trying to control your breeding opps.

“Maybe (laughs).”

Maybe your memetic breeding in a sense.

“Right, they’re trying to control the marketplace of ideas. There’s this sort of Kuhnian aspect to it. In his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn says that as science changes, the people in power lose their grip on resources. One can understand why they would be emotional. I mean if someone was threatening my bread and butter I might get angry, too.”