There was an interesting article in the NY Times about a book by Marc D. Hauser, a Harvard biologist, proposing that moral grammar is wired into people's neural circuits by evolution (interestingly, we've been discussing evolution in another thread.) The title of the book is "Moral Minds," and I intend to read it.

What is interesting about this hypothesis is that Hauser argues "that the moral grammar operates in much the same way as the universal grammar proposed by the linguist Noam Chomsky as the innate neural machinery for language. The universal grammar is a system of rules for generating syntax and vocabulary but does not specify any particular language. That is supplied by the culture in which a child grows up." He asserts that most people, no matter what their religious beliefs, make the same moral judgments. For example, many rules are similar across societies, such as " do as you would be done by; care for children and the weak; don’t kill; avoid adultery and incest; don’t cheat, steal or lie. "

Thoughts?

I think the idea of a universal grammar is hard to argue against - humans must have some innate facility that lets them speak any human language. In the same way, it might make sense to say that humans have an innate facility that lets them understand morality.

The question is, how much does the grammar encompass. The problem that some critics have with Chomsky's Universal Grammar is that it encompasses too much. For instance, Chomsky doesn't think that children get enough stimulus to acquire language, so he concludes that most of what we "acquire" is innate, and it's only certain parameters that are set during language acquisition, for instance whether the verb goes before or after the object.

The analogy between Universal Grammar and moral grammar doesn't really work though, because Hauser seems to be arguing that we have a counterpart to moral grammar in the social structure of primates. At least that's what the article implies. But the language facility has no counterpart in primates; it is unique to humans.