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Video Q+A: Before Misconduct Allegations, Scientist Marc Hauser Described How We Judge People

Marc Hauser's "scientific crimes":http://www.boston.com/news/health/blog/2010/08/hauser_found_re.html are not on the level of, say, a Bernie Madoff. But, in a twist befitting of a Russian novel, thinking about how we might judge him was exactly the...

Marc Hauser’s alleged scientific crimes are not on the level of, say, a Bernie Madoff. But, in a twist befitting of a Russian novel, thinking about how we might judge him was exactly the focus of his research. I interviewed him about that research in June.

Prompted in part by Noam Chomsky’s search for a universal language, Hauser and others had been on a quest for a moral grammar that underlies our cognition and understanding of the world. That work directly addressed some of questions that in his case may now be moot in the hard-and-fast context of science, but which are relevant to our social idea of Hauser’s behavior, and to our own propensity to do bad things.

Is someone like Hauser responsible for their bad behavior? Was he himself a psychopath, able to tell the difference between right and wrong, but unable to care? And when the law attempts to apply justice within the realm of science, how well might it consider fickle notions of intention alongside the sanctity of the scientific method?

Because, ironically and amazingly, Hauser was conducting research into the very mechanisms by which a community would judge him, it is deliciously tempting to imagine that he knew exactly what he was doing, misconduct-wise, and was, at the same time and somewhat naturally, not considering it a problem. Or perhaps his work – and his excitement over it in this interview, done just two months ago, (and years after he hired a lawyer to defend himself against internal allegations of misconduct) – is all an indication that his own notions of right and wrong were so papered over by a desire for success and acceptance, and a kind of denial, that he didn’t know that he was doing something wrong.

Even after university and federal investigators finish their own research into Hauser’s case, we probably won’t know exactly what happened. As good as science is at pushing deeper into the mysteries of the human brain, it’s aberrations like this that remind us, thankfully, just how little we know too.

Read my longer take on Hauser, and take his lab’s online Moral Sense Test to test your own intuitions about morality.