Crimes, misdemeanors, and Gyges' ring

I recently led an informal discussion of Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors, one of Allen's best movies, which provides a good deal of food for philosophical thought. There are several sub-plots to follow, of course, but the main story concerns a successful doctor, played by Martin Landau, who is being blackmailed by his mistress. Forced into a corner, and facing losing everything he has, he arranges for her to be killed. While Landau's character struggles with his conscience for a little bit, in one of the final scenes (the only one where he appears on screen at the same time as Allen), he has clearly moved on, and -- quite literally -- gotten away with murder.

The story presents the same conundrum as the famous tale of Gyges, as told by Plato in the Republic. In that dialog, Socrates and friends are discussing the nature of justice, and one of his interlocutors, Glaucon, claims that the only basis for justice is the obvious (to him) observation that might makes right. Glaucon tells the story of Gyges, a shepherd who finds a ring that can make him invisible at will. Given this great power, Gyges uses it to kill the king, marry the queen, and generally acting above any moral law. Glaucon's point is that morality is simply an excuse, something we claim to abide to only because there are repercussions if we don't. But given the opportunity to get away with it, we would use power to our own advantage and with no regard for any moral values.

Allen's movie struggles with the source of morality, featuring a fascinating number of characters ranging from the atheist philosopher (who in the end commits suicide) to the blind rabbi who cannot conceive of a universe without a moral structure imposed by God, to Judah (Martin Landau)'s father, who goes so far as claiming that "if it's a choice between God and Truth, I will always choose God" (apparently a position not infrequently taken by some guests of this blog).

What is Socrates response to all this? He claims that just behavior has its own reward because it is what helps keeping our soul in balance. Even if we can get away with immoral acts, not having to face external punishment, we still have to live with our own feelings about our actions. Indeed, most of us -- unless we have pathological brain damage -- do have an instinctive sense of right and wrong, which constitutes the biological basis of what we call "conscience." (Yes, of course, the specific contents of our conscience are to some extent the result of the culture we grow up in, but not entirely: to consider pork meat unclean is idiosyncratic to specific places and times of human history, but all cultures consider unjustified killing of others something to be reckoned with.)

Socrates' position, in turn, leads one to ask the obvious follow-up question: where does the ability of our soul to be thrown off balance, our innate sense of morality, come from? You guessed it: evolution. There is mounting evidence (for example from studies of social behavior in other primates) that a sense of right and wrong, as well as of punishment, is in fact common among social animals with complex brains. While human beings most certainly have developed such sense to a high degree of sophistication, and can even reflect upon it at least since Socrates, we can trace morality to our biological ancestry, just like we can trace our basic emotions (fear, joy), and our anatomy. Rather ironic, if one is a creationist.