Marc Hauser discusses "moral grammar"

Where does morality come from? C.S. Lewis asserted that the presence of a universal sense of morality in humanity is evidence that God granted it to us. People today from Al Sharpton to Francis Collins assert the same thing.

Marc Hauser (Prof. of Biology and Evolutionary Psychology at Harvard) disagrees. In this interview on Point of Inquiry, he talks about humanity's evolved moral grammar. He has concluded that the human brain has an innate moral module and a moral grammar that can be filled in by ethical systems the way that we have a language module that has a basic language grammar that gets filled in with any given language. The content of local culture can give us a lexicon, but our brains give us nouns, verbs, prepositions, conjunctions, adjectives, etc. The local culture can give us a specific version of morality (utilitarianism for example from Bentham or Singer) while there are basic categories of moral feelings and considerations based on harm, helping, giving, taking, protection, etc. that undergird these things.

He discusses some basic neurology, the evolution of a moral system, and what sort of environmental pressures could reinforce certain emotional reactions that help generate morality or simply reinforce an emotional reactions as something of a spandrel (he does this effectively by discussing brain damaged people and psychopaths), and much more.

For more on his thoughts about morality and its evolutionary vs. divine roots, read this article from Free Inquiry he penned with Peter Singer, "Morality Without Religion."