There is a scandal at Harvard. The Harvard Crimson reports that psychologist and professor in the Department of Biological Anthropology Marc D. Hauser has been sanctioned for scientific misconduct. A popular teacher whose Evolution of Human Behavior (aka the sex course) is the second most popular course at Harvard (after Econ 10), Hauser used web-generated survey data to investigate the moral sense in humans, and ran a research lab for animal study.

An article in the Chronicle for Higher Education quotes a former teaching assistant (who remained anonymous) that Hauser failed to report his laboratory findings accurately. Hauser who is a specialist in cognition in primates is said to have falsified responses which did not accord with his hypothesis about how monkeys learn language. Following a three-year investigation, the Harvard Dean of Arts and Sciences released a letter on August 20 confirming Hauser was solely responsible for eight cases of misconduct. Three of his published articles have been withdrawn or amended. In the other five instances work was amended before publication or did not result in publication. Hauser, who is on leave, issued a statement admitting to making mistakes, but denying any scientific misconduct.

Ironically, Hauser is best known for his book Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Sense of Right and Wrong. In other words, according to his own theory he must have known he was doing something wrong if he jimmied the lab results as was suggested.

Plato held that human beings had an innate sense of right and wrong. The idea that humans are moral beings, making judgements on the conduct of others, and creating codes for society through reference to right and wrong (justice) and good and bad (values), is integral to philosophy. Indeed moral philosophy merits its own place within the wider study of knowledge.

What Hauser did in Moral Minds was to propose that humans were born with moral sensitivity. Much as Chomsky proposed that language skills were innate, that people did not learn to speak grammatically just by imitating sounds expressed by those around them, in his book Hauser suggested humans have an inborn sense of right and wrong that translates into moral awareness.

In reviewing the book for the New York Sunday Times, the eminent philosopher Richard Rorty set out his doubts. Grammar establishes and settles questions of usage. Moral questions remain difficult to agree upon, and generate controversy. Moral awareness takes more time to acquire than language. A moral sensibility is something that deepens through study, as people read novels, or academic works. Nature needs nurture.

In a prescient review of Moral Minds published by the New England Journal of Medicine Neil Levy of the University of Melbourne commented: “There is little doubt that this book, written for a general audience, is the most important attempt to date to explain the psychological mechanisms of moral judgments. However, Hauser has made the unusual decision to publish it well before all the experimental data are in.” This rebuke turns out to have had an unfortunate sequel. Hauser may be right about the innate moral sense of humans, his own efforts to demonstrate his knowledge have run afoul of a serious misconduct charge.

The Hauser case is one instance which suggests that is doubtful that doing good comes naturally from having a sense of right and wrong. More happily, it allows us to reflect with philosophers such as Richard Rorty that moral awareness can be improved. Humans have the capacity not just to understand what constitutes good and evil, but to acquire a taste for doing better.