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Should parents and teachers be allowed to spank children for disobedience? On the left side of the political spectrum, spanking typically triggers judgments of cruelty and oppression. On the right, it is sometimes linked to judgments about proper enforcement of rules, particularly rules about respect for parents and teachers.
Five adaptive challenges stood out most clearly: caring for vulnerable children, forming partnerships with non-kin to reap the benefits of reciprocity, forming coalitions to compete with other coalitions, negotiating status hierarchies, and keeping oneself and one’s kin free from parasites and pathogens, which spread quickly when people live in close proximity to each other. (I’ll present the sixth foundation—Liberty/oppression—in
If our ancestors faced these challenges for hundreds of thousands of years, then natural selection would favor those whose cognitive modules helped them to get things right—rapidly and intuitively—compared to those who had to rely upon their general intelligence (the rider) to solve recurrent problems.
The second row gives the original triggers—that is, the sorts of social patterns that such a module should detect.
The third row lists examples of the current triggers—the sorts of
things that do in fact trigger the relevant modules (sometimes by mistake) for people in a modern Western society.
The fourth row lists some emotions that are part of the output of each foundation, at least when the foundat...
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The fifth row lists some of the virtue words that we use to talk about people who trigger a particula...
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Imagine that your four-year-old son is taken to the hospital to have his appendix removed.
If your “dolors” (pains) outweigh your “hedons” (pleasures), then your reaction is irrational, from a utilitarian point of view, but it makes perfect sense as the output of a module.
the older nurse occasionally strokes your son’s head, as though trying to comfort him. The younger nurse is all business.
If you are a utilitarian, you should have no preference.
If you are a Kantian, you’d also give the older nurse no extra credit. She seems to have acted absentmindedly, or (even worse, for Kant) she acted on her feelings. She did not act out of commitment to a universalizable principle.
for you to like and praise the older nurse. She has so fully acquired the virtue of caring that she does it automatically and effortlessly, even when it has no effect. She is a virtuoso of caring, which is a fine and beautiful thing in a nurse.
The second principle of moral psychology is: There’s more to morality than harm and fairness.
Morality is like taste in many ways—an analogy made long ago by Hume and Mencius. • Deontology and utilitarianism are “one-receptor” moralities that are likely to appeal most strongly to people who are high on systemizing
and low on empathizing. • Hume’s pluralist, sentimentalist, and naturalist approach to ethics is more promising than utilitarianism or deontology for modern moral psychology. As a first step in resuming Hume’s project, we should try to identify the taste receptors of the righteous mind. • Modularity can help us think about innate receptors, and how they produce a variety of initial perceptions that get developed in culturally variable ways. • Five good candidates for being taste receptors of the righteous mind are care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. In psychology, theories are
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Behind every act of altruism, heroism, and human decency you’ll find either selfishness or stupidity.
If you found any of the actions in column B worse than their counterparts in column A, then congratulations, you are a human being, not an economist’s fantasy. You have concerns beyond narrow self-interest. You have a working set of moral foundations.
now we know that traits can be innate without being either hardwired or universal.
“Nature bestows upon the newborn a considerably complex brain, but one that is best seen as prewired—flexible and subject to change—rather than hardwired, fixed, and immutable.”
The brain is like a book, the first draft of which is written by the genes during fetal development.
Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises.… “Built-in” does not mean unmalleable; it means “organized in advance of experience.”
Mammals make fewer bets and invest a lot more in each one, so mammals face the challenge of caring for and nurturing their children for a long time.
Given this big wager, there is an enormous adaptive challenge: to care for the vulnerable and expensive child, keep it safe, keep it alive, keep it from harm.
This is not a just-so story. It is my retelling of the beginning of attachment theory,
First, you might find it cute.
Cuteness primes us to care, nurture, protect, and interact.
Second, although this is not your child, you might still have an instant emotional response because the Care foundation can be triggered by any child.
Third, you might find my son’s companions (Gogo and Baby Gogo) cute, even though they are not real children, because they were designed by a toy company to trigger your Care foundation.
Fourth, Max loves Gogo; he screams when I accidentally sit on Gogo, and he often says, “I am Gogo’s mommy,” because his attachment system and ...
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It makes no evolutionary sense for you to care about what happens to my son Max, or a hungry child in a faraway country, or a baby seal.
We care about violence toward many more classes of victims today than our grandparents did in their time.
Bumper stickers are often tribal badges; they advertise the teams we support, including sports teams, universities, and rock bands.
The moral matrix of liberals, in America and elsewhere, rests more heavily on the Care foundation than do the matrices of conservatives,
It was harder to find bumper stickers related to compassion for conservatives, but the “wounded warrior” car is an example.
it is aimed not at animals or at people in other countries but at those who’ve sacrificed for the group.12 It is not universalist; it is more local, and blended with loyalty.
Altruism toward non-kin, on the other hand, has presented one of the longest-running puzzles in the history of evolutionary thinking.
Trivers noted that evolution could create altruists in a species where individuals could remember their prior interactions with other individuals and then limit their current niceness to those who were likely to repay the favor.
Human life is a series of opportunities for mutually beneficial cooperation.
The original triggers of the Fairness modules are acts of cooperation or selfishness that people show toward us. We feel pleasure, liking, and friendship when people show signs that they can be trusted to reciprocate. We feel anger, contempt, and even sometimes disgust when people try to cheat us or take advantage of us.
On the left, concerns about equality and social justice are based in part on the Fairness foundation—wealthy and powerful groups are accused of gaining by exploiting those at the bottom while not paying their “fair share” of the tax burden.
On the right, the Tea Party movement is also very concerned about fairness. They see Democrats as “socialists” who take money from hardworking Americans and give it to lazy people (including those who receive welfare or unemployment benefits) and to illegal immigrants (in the form of free health
care and education).
Everyone cares about fairness, but there are two major kinds. On the left, fairness often implies equality, but on the right it means proportionality—people should be rewarded in proportion to what they contribute, even if that guarantees unequal outcomes.
When the boys were deciding what to do, they all suggested ideas. But when it came time to choose one of those ideas, the leader usually made the choice.
The Rattlers begged the camp counselors to let them challenge the Eagles to a baseball game.
Tribal behavior increased dramatically. Both sides created flags and hung them in contested territory. They destroyed each other’s flags, raided and vandalized each other’s bunks, called each other nasty names, made weapons (socks filled with rocks), and would often have come to blows had the counselors not intervened.
