Topics Ethics

Question It is said that average IQ in prisons is well below the average among the whole population. The most selfish people I know are either very young children or mentally impaired adults. Do you think it probable that there is a positive correlation between intelligence and morally correct behavior?

Accepted:
March 9, 2012

Comments

It's credible that morally correct behavior is less common among very young children and the mentally impaired than among the rest. But your point about prisons does not seem to me to lend sufficient support to the larger positive correlation you suggest for at least three reasons.

First, a great deal of selfish, immoral and highly damaging behavior -- e.g. in politics or in the business world -- is actually not criminal; and more intelligent people are probably substantially overrepresented among those engaging in such behaviors. Second, many people commit crimes but nonetheless manage to avoid prison -- either by not getting caught or by creating enough reasonable doubt to sway a prosecutor or a jury; and in this group, too, the more intelligent are likely to be overrepresented. Third, a surprisingly high percentage of prison inmates (esp. in the US) are actually innocent of the crime they have been convicted for, and they languish in jail even though they have not acted immorally or have committed only minor wrongs; and in this group people with low levels of intelligence and education are likely to be overrepresented.

For these three reasons, we should not so easily make the inference from a positive correlation between low intelligence and jail time to a positive correlation between low intelligence and immorality. Rather than tending to be more moral and altruistic, intelligent people may simply be better at being immoral: better at rationalizations and self-deception and also better at avoiding the usual social penalities for selfishness and immorality.