[RADIOLAB INTRO]

ROBERT KRULWICH: Hi, I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD ABUMRAD: And I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: This is Radiolab. In this hour, we're gonna examine a sense of moral justice. Everybody knows that sometimes you feel something is right, sometimes you feel something is wrong. We want to know where does that feeling begin? Where does it come from? How old is it? We are going to take you from playgroups to prisons, some brain scans in between.

JAD: Can we get started, please?

ROBERT: [laughs] Okay, just going on a bit.

JAD: Since this is an hour on morality, why don't we start with two morality thought experiments? Are you with me?

ROBERT: Begrudgingly, yes.

JAD: This is a famous problem originally posed in 1967 by the philosopher Philippa Foot. There are two parts to this problem, and you're gonna have to make a choice at the end of each one.

ROBERT: Which one? What, you mean you're gonna tell me a story?

JAD: Yeah, I'm gonna tell you a story, and you're gonna make a choice.

ROBERT: All right.

JAD: Part one. You ready?

ROBERT: Yep.

JAD: All right. You're near some train tracks. Go there in your mind.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: There are five workers on the tracks working. They've got their backs turned to the trolley, which is coming in the distance.

ROBERT: You mean they're repairing the track.

JAD: They are repairing the track.

ROBERT: This is unbeknownst to them the trolley is approaching.

JAD: They don't see it. You can't shout to them.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: And if you do nothing, here's what will happen:

[screams]

JAD: Five workers will die.

ROBERT: Oh my God! That was a horrible experience. I don't want that to happen.

JAD: No, you don't. But you have a choice. You can do A) nothing; or B) it so happens next to you is a lever. Pull the lever, and the trolley will jump onto some side tracks where there is only one person working.

ROBERT: So if the—so if the trolley goes on the second track, it will kill the one guy.

JAD: Yeah. So there's your choice. Do you kill one man by pulling a lever, or do you kill five men by doing nothing?

ROBERT: Well, I'm gonna pull the lever.

JAD: Naturally. All right, here's part two. You're standing near some train tracks. Five guys are on the tracks. Just as before. And there is the trolley coming in.

ROBERT: The same five guys working on the track.

JAD: Same five guys.

ROBERT: Backs to the train. They can't see anything.

JAD: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. However, I'm gonna make a couple changes. Now you're standing on a footbridge that passes over the tracks. You're looking down onto the tracks. There's no lever anywhere to be seen. Except next to you there is a guy.

ROBERT: What do you mean, there's a guy?

JAD: A large guy, large individual, standing next to you on the bridge, looking down with you over the tracks, and you realize, wait, I can save those five workers. If I push this man, give him a little tap, he'll land on the tracks, and he stops the train.

ROBERT: Oh, yeah. I'm not gonna do that. I'm not gonna do that.

JAD: But surely you realize that the math is the same.

ROBERT: You mean I'll save four people this way?

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: Yeah, but this time I'm pushing the guy. Are you insane? No.

JAD: All right, here's the thing. If you ask people these questions—and we did—starting with the first: is it okay to kill one man to save five using a lever, nine out of ten people will say ...

[WOMAN: Yes.]

[WOMAN: Yes.]

[WOMAN: Yes.]

[WOMAN: Yes.]

[WOMAN: Yeah.]

JAD: But if you ask them: is it okay to kill one man to save five by pushing the guy, nine out of ten people will say ...

[WOMAN: No.]

[WOMAN: No.]

[WOMAN: Never.]

[WOMAN: No!]

[WOMAN: No.]

JAD: It is practically universal.

MARC HAUSER: Educational level, no effect. Male versus female, no effect.

JAD: That's Marc Hauser, a professor at Harvard. He actually posed the trolley scenarios to hundreds of thousands of people on the internet. Found the same thing. Everyone agrees. Then he took it a step further and asked them why? Why is murder—because that's what it is. Why is murder okay when you're pulling a lever, but not okay when you're pushing the guy? And what he found is that consistently, people have no clue.

MARC HAUSER: They don't understand what drove their judgments, which were completely spontaneous and automatic and immediate. And once they kind of appreciate the dilemma they're now in, of lack of consistency, the whole thing basically begins to unravel.

[WOMAN: Pulling the lever to save the five. No, that feels better than pushing the one to save the five, but I don't really know why. So that's a good—there's a good moral quandary for ya! [laughs]]

ROBERT: And if, as we said in the beginning, having a moral sense is a unique and special human quality, then maybe we, us two humans anyway, you and me, should at least inquire as to why this happens. And I happen to have met somebody who has a hunch. He's a young guy at Princeton University. Wild curly hair, bit of mischief in his eye. His name is Josh Greene.

JOSH GREENE: Alrighty.

ROBERT: And he spent the last few years trying to figure out where this inconsistency comes from.

JOSH GREENE: How do people make this judgment? Forget whether or not these judgments are right or wrong, just what's going on in the brain that makes people distinguish so naturally and intuitively between these two cases, which from an actuarial point of view, are very, very, very similar if not identical?

ROBERT: Josh is, by the way, a philosopher and a neuroscientist, so this gives him special powers. He doesn't sort of sit back in a chair, smoke a pipe and think, "Now why do you have these differences?" He says, "No, I would like to look inside people's heads, because in our heads we may find clues as to where these feelings of revulsion or acceptance come from." In our brains.

JOSH GREENE: So we're here in the control room. Where you basically just see ...

ROBERT: And it just so happens that in the basement of Princeton, there was this, well ...

ROBERT: A big circular thing.

JOSH GREENE: Yeah, it looks kind of like an airplane engine.

ROBERT: 180,000-pound brain scanner.

JOSH GREENE: I'll tell you a funny story. You can't have any metal in there because of the magnet, so we have this long list of questions that we ask people to make sure they can go in. "Do you have a pacemaker? Have you ever worked with metal?" Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah ...

ROBERT: Have you ever worked with metal?

JOSH GREENE: Yeah, because you could have little flecks of metal in your eyes that you would never even know are there from having done metalworking. And one of the questions is whether or not you wear a wig or anything like that, because they often have metal wires in with that. And there's this very nice woman who does brain research here who's Italian, and she's asking her subjects over the phone all these screening questions.

JOSH GREENE: And so I have this person over to dinner. She says, "Yeah, you know, I ended up doing this study, but it asks you the weirdest questions. This woman's like, 'Do you have a hairpiece?' And—and I'm like, 'What does it have to do if I have herpes or not?'" [laughs] Anyway, and she said—you know, she asked, "Do you have a hairpiece?" But she—so now she asks people if you wear a wig or whatever.

ROBERT: Anyhow, what Josh does is he invites people into this room, has them lie down on what is essentially a cot on rollers, and he rolls them into the machine. Their heads are braced, so they're sort of stuck in there.

ROBERT: Have you ever done this?

JOSH GREENE: Oh yeah. Yep, several times.

ROBERT: And then he tells them stories. He tells them the same two, you know, trolley tales that you told before.

JAD: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: And then at the very instant that they're deciding whether I should push the lever or whether I should push the man, at that instant, the scanner snaps pictures of their brains. And what he found in those pictures was frankly, a little startling. He showed us some.

JOSH GREENE: All right, I'll show you some—some stuff. Okay, let me think.

ROBERT: The picture that I'm looking at is a sort of a—it's a brain looked at, I guess, from the top down?

JOSH GREENE: Yep, it's top-down. It's sort of sliced, you know, like—like a deli slicer.

ROBERT: And the first slide that he showed me was a human brain being asked the question, "Would you pull the lever?" And the answer in most cases was, "Yes."

MAN: Yeah, I'd pull the lever.

ROBERT: When the brain's saying, "Yes," you'd see little kind of peanut-shaped spots of yellow.

JOSH GREENE: This little guy right here and these two guys right there.

ROBERT: The brain was being active in these places. And oddly enough, whenever people said yes ...

WOMAN: Yes. Yes.

ROBERT: ... to the lever question, the very same pattern lit up. Then he showed me another slide. This is a slide of a brain saying, "No."

WOMAN: No, I would not push the man.

ROBERT: "I will not push the large man." And in this picture ...

JOSH GREENE: This one we're looking at here, this ...

ROBERT: ... it was a totally different constellation of regions that lit up.

ROBERT: This is the "No, no, no" crowd.

JOSH GREENE: I think this is part of the "No, no, no" crowd.

JAD: So when people answer yes to the lever question, there are—there are places in their brain which glow?

ROBERT: Right. But when they answer, "No, I will not push the man," then you get a completely different part of the brain lighting up.

JAD: Even though the questions are basically the same?

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: Well, what does that mean? What does Josh make of this?

ROBERT: Well he has a theory about this.

JOSH GREENE: A theory—not proven, but I think—this is what I think the evidence suggests.

ROBERT: He suggests that the human brain doesn't hum along like one big, unified system. Instead, he says, maybe in your brain, every brain, you'll find little warring tribes, little subgroups. One that is sort of doing the logical sort of accounting kind of thing.

JOSH GREENE: You've got one part of the brain that says, "Huh, five lives versus one life? Wouldn't it be better to save five versus one?"

ROBERT: And that's the part that would glow when you answer, "Yes, I'd pull the lever."

MAN: Yeah, I'd pull the lever.

ROBERT: But there's this other part of the brain which really, really doesn't like personally killing another human being, and gets very upset at the fat man case, and shouts, in effect ...

MAN #1: No!

MAN #2: No!

JOSH GREENE: It understands it on that level, and says ...

MAN #1: No!

MAN #2: No!

JOSH GREENE: No. Bad! Don't do.

WOMAN #1: No, I don't think I could push ...

WOMAN #2: No.

WOMAN #3: Never.

WOMAN #1: ... a person.

JOSH GREENE: Instead of having sort of one system that just sort of churns out the answer and bing, we have multiple systems that give different answers, and they duke it out. And hopefully out of that competition comes morality.

ROBERT: This is not a trivial discovery, that you struggle to find right and wrong depending upon what part of your brain is shouting the loudest. This is—it's like bleachers morality.

JAD: Do you buy this?

ROBERT: Hmm. You know, I just don't know.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: I've always kind of suspected that a sense of right and wrong is mostly stuff that you get from your mom and your dad and from experience, that it's culturally learned for the most part. Josh is kind of a radical in this respect. He thinks it's biological. I mean, deeply biological. That somehow we inherit from the deep past a sense of right and wrong that's already in our brains from the get-go, before Mom and Dad.

JOSH GREENE: Our—our primate ancestors, before we were full-blown humans, had intensely social lives. They have social mechanisms that prevent them from doing all the nasty things that they might otherwise be interested in doing. And so deep in our brain, we have what you might call basic primate morality. And basic primate morality doesn't understand things like tax evasion, but it does understand things like pushing your buddy off of a cliff.

ROBERT: Oh, so you're thinking then that the man on the bridge, that I'm on the bridge next to the large man, and I have hundreds of thousands of years of training in my brain that says, "Don't murder the large man."

JOSH GREENE: Right. Whereas ...

ROBERT: And even if I'm thinking, "If I murder the large man, I'm gonna save five lives and only kill the one man," but there's something deeper down that says, "Don't murder the large man."

JOSH GREENE: Right. Now that case, I think it's a pretty easy case. Even though it's five versus one, in that case, people just go with what we might call the "inner chimp." But there are other, but there ...

ROBERT: The "inner chimp" is your unfortunate way of describing an act of deep goodness.

JOSH GREENE: Right. Well, that's what's interesting.

ROBERT: It's the 10 Commandments, for God's sake! Inner chimp!

JOSH GREENE: Right. Well, what's interesting is that we think of basic human morality as being handed down from on high, and it's probably better to say that it was handed up from below, that our most basic core moral values are not the things that we humans have invented, but the things that we've actually inherited from other people. The stuff that we humans have invented are the things that seem more peripheral and variable.

ROBERT: But something as basic as, "Thou shalt not kill," which many people think was handed down in tablet form from a mountaintop from God directly to humans, no chimps involved ...

JOSH GREENE: Right.

ROBERT: ... you're suggesting that hundreds of thousands of years of on-the-ground training have gotten our brains to think, "Don't kill your kin. Don't kill your ..."

JOSH GREENE: Right. Or at least, you know, that should be your default response. I mean, certainly chimpanzees are extremely violent and they do kill each other, but they don't do it as a matter of course. They, so to speak, have to have some context-sensitive reason for doing so.

ROBERT: So now we're getting to the rub of it. You think that profound moral positions may be somehow embedded in brain chemistry.

JOSH GREENE: Yeah.

JAD: That's a cool idea, though, that when—when you have these gut feelings, when we talk about our gut, I know in my gut this is right or this is wrong. Really, in that moment, that's evolution talking.

ROBERT: Yeah. He calls it our inner chimp.

JAD: And that phrase bothers you?

FRANS DE WAAL: Well, yeah, inner chimp. That's an interesting way.

JAD: Well, you'll be glad to know that it was a phrase that was not too familiar to a guy who specializes in chimps.

FRANS DE WAAL: My name is Frans de Waal, and I'm a professor at Emory University. I also work at the Yerkes Primate Center in Atlanta, Georgia. But we'll see. Maybe they make some noise without food.

JAD: Frans de Waal, well, he knows chimps. He's observed chimps, in some cases the same chimps, for the last three decades. And though he doesn't use the phrase "inner chimps," he would agree that human morality is not special. All you have to do is watch chimps do their thing for five minutes to see that—which we did. He took us on a little walk around his office.

FRANS DE WAAL: 115 acres of land here in the middle of Atlanta, with 2,000 primates.

JAD: Some bonobos, gorillas.

FRANS DE WAAL: Mostly monkeys.

JAD: He keeps his chimps in big stadium-type enclosures. They're like gladiator rings with high walls and no roof. And off to one side, there's an observation tower. On the way to one of these big things, we had to pass through some woods, and we crossed a blackberry bush, at which point Frans stopped.

FRANS DE WAAL: I'm gonna cut a few branches of blackberry. They like blackberry a lot.

JAD: This is him cutting the branches.

FRANS DE WAAL: They love the young shoots. You will see. Pull this one out. Not bad at all.

JAD: Anyhow, a few minutes later, we climbed the ladder to the observation tower so we could see the chimps down below, 15 chimps were milling around in the heat. And then ...

FRANS DE WAAL: All right, guys.

JAD: ... this is the cool part. With a big smile on his face, Frans drops the branch into the enclosure.

FRANS DE WAAL: Oops!

JAD: There it goes.

JAD: And lands. Thud. 20 feet below, right in front of a female.

FRANS DE WAAL: That's a young female, Katie, who takes it. She has the enormous branches of blackberry. There's one female coming over. They're not gonna be happy to share. See? There's a fight.

[chimps screaming]

JAD: So there was a fight, but you hear how it stops like that on a dime?

ROBERT: Didn't you edit the tape?

JAD: No, I didn't edit that tape. Raw tape.

ROBERT: Well, what happened? What happened?

JAD: What happened was that the alpha male, number one chimp, comes out and then everyone shuts up.

FRANS DE WAAL: The alpha male is coming over. He's here.

JAD: And then after him comes number two.

FRANS DE WAAL: Now the second male has taken the food.

JAD: And then the two of them stand together for a while. Who knows what they're doing? But eventually, number two takes the branch and walks toward the back of the enclosure.

FRANS DE WAAL: You see, he's being followed by females.

JAD: At the back of the enclosure is a hut, a little building. And one by one, all 15 chimps file in after him.

FRANS DE WAAL: Now they're going in the building with the branch, which is bad for us, because we may not hear a lot.

ROBERT: Can we see what they're doing?

JAD: Mm-mm. Unfortunately not. But there's no need to wonder, because Frans told us what they're doing. He's seen it a million times. This is how they share.

FRANS DE WAAL: They will probably divide the thing, and then some individuals will have a large branch, and then they will start sharing.

ROBERT: Wow!

JAD: See, they have the system. Anytime some food lands in the enclosure and the juveniles get it and they can't decide who gets what, the adults will take it, lead everyone into the hut, where they will divide the branch into pieces.

FRANS DE WAAL: Usually, in the end, everybody gets something. We have this wonderful word. We do something nice, we call it 'humane' behavior, meaning that we borrow from our species name to describe it. But it's actually a very ancient tendency.

JAD: Ancient, Frans says, because the only way our primate ancestors made it this far was through cooperation.

FRANS DE WAAL: And that's the key. So of course, if you fall and stumble and bleed and are in trouble, I should respond to that because my survival also depends on how you are doing. That doesn't mean that there's no nastiness.

JAD: Chimps do fight, they do kill each other, but on the whole, they get along. And they've gotten along for so long that evolution, he says, has etched some really basic instincts into our brains: sharing, reciprocity. And the most basic one of all ...

FRANS DE WAAL: If you were to remove the capacity for empathy ...

JAD: ... empathy.

FRANS DE WAAL: ... from morality, the whole thing falls apart. Then it just becomes a bunch of rules.

JAD: You know, people disagree about this. What's the real essence of morality? Is it thoughts? Is it feelings? Frans says it's empathy.

FRANS DE WAAL: And you can see very striking instances of empathy in the apes.

JAD: He literally has a hundred different examples. But here's a really good one that you may remember.

FRANS DE WAAL: There's this famous case in the Brookfield Zoo where a gorilla rescued a boy who had fallen into the enclosure. This happened, like, 10 years ago.

[NEWS CLIP: It was a parent's nightmare.]

[NEWS CLIP: A three-year-old boy had climbed over a railing and fallen 18 feet into the gorilla pit.]

ROBERT: What did the gorilla in that case do?

FRANS DE WAAL: She went over to pick up the boy.

[NEWS CLIP: As he lay injured and unconscious on the concrete, Binty gently scooped him up.]

FRANS DE WAAL: She sat down with the boy, she patted him on the back and she seemed to calm him down.

[NEWS CLIP: Then she did something amazing.]

[NEWS CLIP: She carried him probably about 50 or 60 feet.]

FRANS DE WAAL: And then she brought him to a place where people could get him.

[NEWS CLIP: Paramedics quickly removed the boy from the pit.]

FRANS DE WAAL: All of this was videotaped because there were people there videotaping it.

[NEWS CLIP: I never thought a gorilla would do that.]

FRANS DE WAAL: And a big deal was made of it in the media. But actually, the response of that gorilla to the boy who had fallen in was a very common, typical ape response.

JAD: So there you go.

ROBERT: Look, I'll concede the point that, you know, when Mount Sinai happened, that wasn't the beginning of creatures learning to do good or knowing the difference between good and bad. But I will say that I still think there's a difference between human beings and apes and monkeys. It's a tangible difference. And I'd like—let me do one more story. This is a Josh Greene story.

JAD: Okay.

ROBERT: I don't think you could handle this one if you were a monkey. It's even hard to handle if you're a human.

JOSH GREENE: The situation is somewhat similar to the last episode of M*A*S*H, for people who are familiar with that. But the way we tell the story, it goes like this: it's wartime ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, M*A*S*H: There's an enemy patrol coming down the road.]

JOSH GREENE: You're hiding in the basement with some of your fellow villagers.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, M*A*S*H: Let's kill those lights.]

JOSH GREENE: And the enemy soldiers are outside. They have orders to kill anyone that they find.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, M*A*S*H: Be quiet! Nobody make a sound until they've passed us.]

ROBERT: So there you are, you're huddled in the basement. All around you are enemy troops, and you're holding your baby in your arms, your baby with a cold, a bit of a sniffle. And you know that your baby could cough at any moment.

JOSH GREENE: If they hear your baby, they're gonna find you and the baby and everyone else, and they're gonna kill everybody. And the only way you can stop this from happening is cover the baby's mouth. But if you do that, the baby's going to smother and die. If you don't cover the baby's mouth, the soldiers are gonna find everybody and everybody's gonna be killed, including you, including your baby.

ROBERT: And you have the choice. Would you smother your own baby to save the village, or would you let your baby cough, knowing the consequences?

JOSH GREENE: And this is a very tough question. People take a long time to think about it, and some people say yes, and some people say no.

WOMAN #1: Children are a blessing and a gift from God, and we do not do that to children.

WOMAN #2: Yes, I think I would kill my baby to save everyone else and myself.

MAN #1: No, I would not kill the baby.

WOMAN #2: I feel because it's my baby, I have the right to terminate the life.

MAN #2: I'd like to say that I would kill the baby, but I don't know if I'd have the inner strength.

MAN #3: No. If it comes down to killing my own child, my own daughter or my own son, then I choose death.

MAN #4: Yeah. If you have to, because it was done in World War II. When the Germans were coming around, there was a mother that had a baby that was crying, and rather than be found, she actually suffocated the baby, but the other people lived.

WOMAN #3: Sounds like an old M*A*S*H thing. No, you do not kill your baby.

ROBERT: In the final M*A*S*H episode, the Korean woman who's a character in this piece, she murders her baby.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, M*A*S*H: She killed it. She killed it! Oh my God, oh my God! I didn't mean for her to kill it. [crying] I did not. I—I just wanted it to be quiet. It was, it was a baby. She—she smothered her own baby!]

ROBERT: What Josh did is he asked people the question, "Would you murder your own child?" while they were in the brain scanner. And at just the moment when they were trying to decide what they would do, he took pictures of their brains. And what he saw, the contest we described before, was global in the brain. It was like a world war. That gang of accountants, that part of the brain was busy calculating, calculating. "A whole village could die. A whole village could die."

ROBERT: But the older and deeper reflex also was lit up, shouting, "Don't kill the baby! No, no! Don't kill the baby!"

MAN: No!

ROBERT: Inside, the brain was literally divided: do the calculations, don't kill the baby. Do the calculations, don't kill the baby. Two different tribes in the brain literally trying to shout each other out. And Jad, this was a different kind of contest than the ones we talked about before. Remember before, when people were pushing a man off a bridge, overwhelmingly their brains yelled, "No, no! Don't push the man!" And when people were pulling the lever, overwhelmingly, "Yeah, yeah, pull the lever!"

JAD: Right.

ROBERT: There it was distinct. Here, I don't think really anybody wins.

JAD: Well, who breaks the tie? I mean, they had to answer something, right?

ROBERT: [laughs] Well, that's a good question!

ROBERT: And now, is there a—what happens? Is it just two cries that fight each other out, or is there a judge?

JOSH GREENE: Well, that's an interesting question. And that's one of the things that we're looking at.

ROBERT: When you are in this moment, with parts of your brain contesting, there are two brain regions ...

JOSH GREENE: These two areas here, towards the front ...

ROBERT: ... right behind your eyebrows—left and right—that light up. And this is particular to us. He showed me a slide.

JOSH GREENE: It's those sort of areas that are very highly developed in humans as compared to other species.

ROBERT: So when we have a problem that we need to deliberate over, the light—the front of the brain, this is above my eyebrow, sort of?

JOSH GREENE: Yeah, right about there.

ROBERT: And there's two of them, one on the left and one on the right.

JOSH GREENE: Bilateral.

ROBERT: And they are the things that monkeys don't have as much of that we have?

JOSH GREENE: Certainly these parts of the brain are more highly developed in humans.

ROBERT: So looking at these two flashes of light at the front of a human brain, you could say we are looking at what makes us special.

JOSH GREENE: That's a fair statement.

ROBERT: A human being wrestling with a problem, that's what that is.

JOSH GREENE: Yeah, where it's both emotional, but there's also a sort of a rational attempt to sort of sort through those emotions. Those are the cases that are showing more activity in that area.

JAD: So in those cases when these dots above our eyebrows become active, what are they doing?

ROBERT: Well, he doesn't know for sure, but what he found is in these close contests, whenever those nodes are very, very active, it appears that the calculating section of the brain gets a bit of a boost, and the visceral "inner chimp" section of the brain is kind of muffled.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Man: No! No. No ...]

ROBERT: The people who chose to kill their children, who made what is essentially a logical decision, over and over, those subjects had brighter glows in these two areas and longer glows in these two areas. So there is a definite association between these two dots above the eyebrow and the power of the logical brain over the "inner chimp" or the visceral brain.

JOSH GREENE: Well, you know, that's the hypothesis. But it's gonna take a lot of more research to sort of tease apart what these different parts of the brain are doing, or if some of these are just sort of activating in an incidental kind of way. I mean, we really don't know. This is all—all very new.

JAD: And how many people chose to kill their baby?

ROBERT: About half.

JAD: Wow! That's not bad.

ROBERT: What do you mean, it's not bad? You're in favor of killing the baby? [laughs]

JAD: Well, what would you do?

ROBERT: Me? I must have a very noisy chimp.

JAD: Yeah?

ROBERT: Because I wouldn't even consider.

JAD: I would kill the baby.

ROBERT: You would?

JAD: The village will go on to have a hundred babies. Your baby is just one.

ROBERT: [laughs] My baby is my world. My baby is my universe. So I don't ...

JAD: You're gonna erase all those people based on your one child?

ROBERT: Well first of all, the audience should know that Jad Abumrad does not have a child of his own yet, so what you can't know is you can't know what it would be like to look into your own daughter's face, your own son's face, and end that life.

JAD: Yeah, you're right.

ROBERT: I know you. You couldn't do that.

JAD: Agreed. I don't know what I would do, really. But if you're just asking me right now in the abstract, which is more right, well, I couldn't live with myself if I didn't act on behalf of the greater good.

ROBERT: Look, you know what I think? I think the real essence of a moral sense, if you want to bring this discussion to its real end, you say what is it about human beings that the animals still don't have and may never have and I hope we'll never have?

JAD: Mm-hmm?

ROBERT: Guilt.

JAD: Guilt?

ROBERT: Yeah, guilt. The ability to blush.

FRANS DE WAAL: That's the one expression that the apes don't have, as far as I know. Shame and guilt, I'm not sure that they are particularly well developed in the chimpanzee.

JAD: Wow! So shame. We should embrace our shame.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: Which is good, because I actually spend most of my life feeling ashamed.

ROBERT: [laughs] In that we're exactly the same.

JAD: For more information on neuroscientist and philosopher Josh Greene and primatologist Frans de Waal, who you just heard, visit our website, Radiolab.org.

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