Epstein’s Fascination with Moral Psychology

And what he failed to understand about my field

Jeffrey Epstein was an immoral monster with a curious interest in the science of morality. As the world discovered this week in the recently released Epstein files, he hung out with (dis)honesty researcher Dan Ariely, gave 6.5 million to Martin Nowak to support his work on the evolution of cooperation, and tried to connect with many others studying moral psychology and adjacent topics. In his emails, he expressed a specific interest in (and included lists of) scientists studying morality—many names that are familiar to anyone in my field. Why was Epstein, someone with such a dark mind, so keen to learn about how our moral minds work?

This was one of the question asked of me by Lisa Miller, a thoughtful reporter for The New York Times, who is researching Epstein’s connection to scientists. It’s a great question—one that demands an answer here, where we discuss so much moral psychology.

One obvious reason for Epstein’s draw to the field was status. Many moral psychologists are at elite institutions, they are famous and do exciting work. All humans are drawn to unique achievers: royalty, billionaires, and sport stars, so it makes sense that Epstein wanted to hang with the scientific elite.

But why would he try to befriend moral psychologists? Perhaps he thought it served as a kind of internal penance—a form of “reputation-washing” similar to Coca-Cola funding microplastic research while using three million tons of plastic in their packaging each year. There’s no doubt that science—including moral psychology—strives to help others. Moral psychologists test how altruism can be most effective, how to make sense of miscarriages of justice in the legal system, and—as readers here know—how to best bridge political divides among everyday people.

Epstein clearly didn’t to have any real desire to do good—but he may not have wanted to see himself as entirely evil, at least in the confines of his own conscience. Morality psychology may have offered him absolution. He could believe the idea that there was no objective “right and wrong” and that evil didn’t even exist.

Explaining away morality

Moral psychology is rooted in philosophy, which excels at questioning cherished truths. Descartes wondered if our entire reality was a fiction, and Berkeley wondered if we can never know anything except from our perceptions. But perhaps the most cynical about humanity was Nietzsche, who thought that morality was for the weak, and that the strong—the Übermensch (Overman)—can rise above pesky questions of rules and compassion.

It’s no wonder that those preaching “might makes right,“ those who take but never give, often quote Nietzsche. If you are powerful and ruthless, there seems little need to be kind. Why earn someone’s loyalty with compassion when you can simply buy it?

Moral psychology was inspired by philosophy but is grounded less in normative questions (what is right or wrong?) and more in descriptive questions (what do people believe is right or wrong?). Psychological studies show that people’s moral judgments are far from objective. In a classic example, people’s judgments on the trolley problem vastly change if you tweak the scenario. People respond much faster when deciding to flip a switch to reroute and save five workers from a runaway train than when debating whether they would push one man in front of the train to stop it. Even though the moral calculus seems identical (1 dead, 5 survive).

Moral hypocrisy is another example of subjective moral judgments: people are quick to condemn others for cheating at a game but then they do the exact same thing themselves (and justify that it’s permissible). Related to Epstein: one study found that while the “powerful” condemned others cheating, they actually tended to cheat more than the “powerless”.

My own work also highlights the subjectivity of moral psychology. My lab studies how we perceive other minds, like pets or fetuses. There’s surely an objective truth about how much a Labradoodle or an 8-week fetus can suffer, but learning that truth may be impossible. So we are left to merely perceive how much we think they can feel and suffer when making our moral judgments.

Even if morality is ultimately objective, moral psychology shows us the many ways that our moral minds are subjective, and it makes sense that Epstein is drawn to this work. It makes it easier to shrug off the people condemning him: they are just biased perceivers. And the legal system? Just the flawed reflection of psychological intuitions.

Epstein may have funded Martin Novak’s work because it does more than highlight subjectivity. It argues that all our moral psychological tendencies are simply to support beneficial coordination in repeated interactions. When people are forced to repeatedly interact in situations like the “public good’s game” or the “prisoner’s dilemma,” they are better off if they cooperate with each other. (Of course, if you only meet someone once, evolutionary logic supports betraying them). In this evolutionary understanding of morality, there is no real goodness, but rather our minds are intuitively following rules that generally lead to better outcomes for society (and therefore yourself).

That kind of reductionist, functionalist account of morality is well supported by studies involving agent-based modeling. Simple simulations where tiny mindless bots interact repeatedly based on clear rules show the benefits of selective cooperation and betrayal. Viewing morality through this method (which I’ve used in my own studies) would naturally be appealing to someone like Epstein, who is trying to argue that his own odious behavior is not evil but instead merely maximizing his own outcomes among other “agents”.

In fact, there are many examples of Epstein engaging in cooperation with other “agents” to maximize their joint outcomes—just look at all his collaborators who helped him so they could benefit. But terribly, this cooperation was at the expense of other “agents” who suffered and were betrayed, and who—let’s not forget—are not mindless bots but other human beings.

Epstein missed the most important part of moral psychology

Moral psychologists are far from the only ones who reduce human phenomena to functional accounts. Evolutionary biologists have long been arguing for the inherent selfishness of our genes and economists view it as rational for people to act like “Homo economicus“, caring solely about their own utility. Moral psychology is perhaps unique among these disciplines in that it tries to keep the baby and the bathwater. Even if it treats morality as something that can be explained with scientific models, it still accepts its reality and substance.

The deep humanness of morality is clearly the part that Epstein misses—but is something emphasized by almost all moral psychologists, including me. Yes, our deepest beliefs are socially constructed, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. Our moral beliefs are what structure society, our self-image, and parenthood. Our moral beliefs are especially essential for protecting the most vulnerable people (my work suggests that all our moral beliefs revolve around protecting the vulnerable).

Epstein clearly didn’t worry about the vulnerable. He saw children not as people needing protection, but instead as things to be exploited. He missed one of the most important concepts in human morality: We owe each other something, not because it benefits ourselves, but because we are all members of humanity.

The very worst monsters in our world forget—or willfully neglect—that other people are human beings. We may be one agent among others, but those other agents have minds too—their own morals and deep beliefs—and one of the (many) reasons Epstein is evil is because he failed to appreciate that.