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Even in the United States the social order is a moral order, but it’s an individualistic order built up around the protection of individuals and their freedom.
When you put individuals first, before society, then any rule or social practice that limits personal freedom can be questioned. If it doesn’t protect somebody from harm, then it can’t be morally justified. It’s just a social convention.
If you want to give people a quick flash of revulsion but deprive them of any victim they can use to justify moral condemnation, ask them about people who do disgusting or disrespectful things, but make sure the actions are done in private so that nobody else is offended.
“A woman is cleaning out her closet, and she finds her old American flag. She doesn’t want the flag anymore, so she cuts it up into pieces and uses the rags to clean her bathroom.”
Turiel’s rationalism predicted that reasoning about harm is the basis of moral judgment, so even though people might say it’s wrong to eat your dog, they would have to treat
the act as a violation of a social convention.
Shweder’s theory, on the other hand, said that Turiel’s predictions should hold among members of individualistic secular societies but not elsewhere. I now had a study designed.
Southern Brazil is the most European part of the country, settled largely by Portuguese, German, and Italian immigrants in the nineteenth century.
First, she suggested we run the study across social class. The divide between rich and poor is so vast in Brazil that it’s as though people live in different countries.
I predicted that Philadelphia would be the most individualistic of the three cities (and therefore the most Turiel-like) and Recife would be the most sociocentric (and therefore more like Orissa in its judgments).
First, all four of my Philadelphia groups confirmed Turiel’s finding that Americans make a big distinction between moral and conventional violations.
The upper-class Brazilians looked just like the Americans on these stories.
But the working-class Brazilian kids usually thought that it was wrong, and universally wrong, to break the social convention and not wear the uniform.
This pattern supported Shweder: the size of the moral-conventional distinction varied across cultural groups.
The second thing I found was that people responded to the harmless taboo stories just as Shweder had predicted: the upper-class Philadelphians judged them to be violations of social conventions, and the lower-class Recifeans judged them to be moral violations.
well-educated people in all three cities were more similar to each other than they were to their lower-class neighbors.
My third finding was that all the differences I found held up when I controlled for perceptions of harm.
This was very strong support for Shweder’s claim that the moral domain goes far beyond harm.
The moral domain varied across nations and social classes. For most of the people in my study, the moral domain extended well beyond issues of harm and fairness.
even when everyone cooperates in the rule violation so that nobody can play the role of punisher, the subject still clings to a notion of cosmic justice in which, somehow, the whole family would “get in trouble.”
The biggest surprise was that so many subjects tried to invent victims.
People usually condemned the actions very quickly—they didn’t seem to need much time to decide what they thought. But it often took them a while to come up with a victim, and they usually offered those victims up halfheartedly and almost apologetically.
Yet even when subjects recognized that their victim claims were bogus, they still refused to say that the act was OK. Instead, they kept searching for another victim.
These subjects were reasoning. They were working quite hard at reasoning. But it was not reasoning in search of truth; it was reasoning in support of their emotional reactions.
I had found that moral reasoning was often a servant of moral emotions,
My dissertation landed with a silent thud in part because I published it in a social psychology journal.
Where does morality come from? The two most common answers have long been that it is innate (the nativist answer) or that it comes from childhood learning (the empiricist answer).
In this chapter I considered a third possibility, the rationalist answer, which dominated moral psychology when I entered the field: that morality is self-constructed by children on the basis of their experiences with harm.
The moral domain varies by culture. It is unusually narrow in Western, educated, and individualistic cultures. Sociocentric cultures broaden the moral domain to encompass and regulate more aspects of life. • People sometimes have gut feelings—particularly about disgust and disrespect—that can drive their reasoning. Moral reasoning is sometimes a post hoc fabrication. • Morality can’t be entirely self-constructed by children based on their growing understanding of harm. Cultural learning or guidance must play a larger role than rationalist theories had given it.
In the rest of this book I’ll try to explain how morality can be innate (as a set of evolved intuitions) and learned (as children learn to apply those intuitions within a particular culture). We’re born to be righteous, but we have to learn what, exactly, people like us should be righteous about.
“I am dragged along by a strange new force. Desire and reason are pulling in different directions. I see the right way and approve it, but follow the wrong.”2
And just in case there was any
doubt about Plato’s contempt for the passions, Timaeus adds that a man who masters his emotions will live a life of reason and justice, and will be reborn into a celestial heaven of eternal happiness. A man who is mastered by his passions, however, will be reincarnated as a woman.
I’ll refer to this worshipful attitude throughout this book as the rationalist delusion. I call it a delusion because when a group of people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it. Morality binds and blinds.
Jefferson wrote the letter as a dialogue between his head and his heart debating the wisdom of having pursued a “friendship” even while he knew it would have to end. Jefferson’s head is the Platonic ideal of reason, scolding the heart for having dragged them both into yet another fine mess.
Morals were too essential to the happiness of man to be risked on the incertain combinations of the head.
Plato said that reason ought to be the master,
Hume said that reason is and ought to be the servant of the passions.
Jefferson gives us a third option, in which reason and sentiment are (and ought to be) independent co-rulers,
Darwin was a nativist about morality: he thought that natural selection gave us minds that were preloaded with moral emotions.
The first was the horror among anthropologists and others at “social Darwinism”—the idea (raised but not endorsed by Darwin) that the richest and most successful nations, races, and individuals are the fittest. Therefore, giving charity to the poor interferes with the natural progress of evolution: it allows the poor to breed.
The second wave of moralism was the radical politics that washed over universities in America, Europe, and Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s. Radical reformers usually want to believe that human nature is a blank slate on which any utopian vision can be sketched.
Do people believe in human rights because such rights actually exist,
Or do people feel revulsion and sympathy when they read accounts of torture, and then invent a story about universal rights to help justify their feelings?
He charged that what moral philosophers were really doing was fabricating justifications after “consulting the emotive centers” of their own brains.
emotions, it was about the development of reasoning and information processing.
Yet the result of the separation was not the liberation of reason from the thrall of the passions. It was the shocking revelation that reasoning requires the passions. Jefferson’s model fits better: when one co-emperor is knocked out and the other tries to rule the empire by himself, he’s not up to the task.
The head can’t even do head stuff without the heart. So Hume’s model fit these cases best: when the master (passions) drops dead, the servant (reasoning) has neither the ability nor the desire to keep the estate running. Everything goes to ruin.
If performance suffers while people are carrying the heavy load, then we can conclude that “controlled” thinking (such as conscious reasoning) is necessary for that particular task. But if people do fine on the task regardless of the load, then we can conclude that “automatic” processes (such as intuition and emotion) are sufficient for performing that task.
Can people make moral judgments just as well when carrying a heavy cognitive load as when carrying a light one? The answer turned out to be yes. I found no difference between conditions, no effect of cognitive load.
