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morality
human nature is not just intrinsically moral, it’s also intrinsically moralistic, critical, and judgmental.
some modern definitions of righteous, such as “arising from an outraged sense of justice, morality, or fair play.”
an obsession with righteousness
the normal human condition. It is a feature of our evolutionary design, not a bug or error that crept into minds that would otherwise be objective and rational.
Our righteous minds made it possible for human beings—but no other animals—to produce large cooperative groups, tribes, and nations without the glue of kinship.
When I was a teenager I wished for world peace, but now I yearn for a world in which competing ideologies are kept in balance,
that human beings are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee.
I’ll show that our “higher nature” allows us to be profoundly altruistic, but that altruism is mostly aimed at members of our own groups.
People bind themselves into political teams that share moral narratives. Once they accept a particular narrative, they become blind to alternative moral worlds.
But if you believe that moral knowledge comes from nurture, then you are an empiricist.
rationalism, which says that kids figure out morality for themselves.
In other words, the understanding of the conservation of volume wasn’t innate, and it wasn’t learned from adults. Kids figure it out for themselves, but only when their minds are ready and they are given the right kinds of experiences.
But once they’ve reached the age of five or six, then playing games, having arguments, and working things out together will help them learn about fairness far more effectively than any sermon from adults.
Kids can’t talk like moral philosophers, but they are busy sorting social information in a sophisticated way. They seem to grasp early on that rules that prevent harm are special, important, unalterable, and universal.
Children construct their moral understanding on the bedrock of the absolute moral truth that harm is wrong.
but in all of the cultures Turiel examined, children still made a distinction between moral r...
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morality is about treating individuals well.
There must be more to moral development than kids constructing rules as they take the perspectives of other people and feel their pain. There must be something beyond rationalism.
(European nations with strong social safety nets are not sociocentric on this definition. They just do a very good job of protecting individuals from the vicissitudes of life.)
Shweder found almost no trace of social conventional thinking in the sociocentric culture of Orissa, where, as he put it, “the social order is a moral order.”
And if that was true, then Turiel’s theory became less plausible. Children were not figuring out morality for themselves, based on the bedrock certainty that harm is bad.
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.
I agreed with Turiel that Shweder’s study was missing an important experimental control: he didn’t ask his subjects about harm. If Shweder wanted to show that morality extended beyond harm in Orissa, he had to show that people were willing to morally condemn actions that they themselves stated were harmless.
thought that if somebody ran the right study—one that controlled for perceptions of harm—Shweder’s claims about cultural differences would survive the test. I spent the next semester figuring out how to become that somebody.
The results were as clear as could be in support of Shweder.
First, all four of my Philadelphia groups confirmed Turiel’s finding that Americans make a big distinction between moral and conventional violations.
In Recife in particular, the working-class kids judged the uniform rebel in exactly the same way they judged the swing-pusher. This pattern supported Shweder: the size of the moral-conventional distinction varied across cultural groups.
Unexpectedly, the effect of social class was much larger than the effect of city.
well-educated people in all three cities were more similar to each other than they were to their lower-class neighbors.
This was very strong support for Shweder’s claim that the moral domain goes far beyond harm.
Most of my subjects said that the harmless-taboo violations were universally wrong even though they harmed nobody.
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.
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.
had found that moral reasoning was often a servant of moral emotions, and this was a challenge to the rationalist approach that dominated moral psychology.
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 ro...
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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.
but Wilson had the audacity to suggest in his final chapter that natural selection also influenced human
behavior.
Wilson believed that there is such a thing as human nature, and that human nature constrains the range of what we can achieve when raising our child...
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Wilson sided with Hume. He charged that what moral philosophers were really doing was fabricating justifications after “consulting the emotive centers” of their own brains.16
He predicted that the study of ethics would soon be taken out of the hands of philosophers and “biologicized,” or made to fit with the emerging science of human nature. Such a linkage of philosophy, biology, and evolution would be an example of the “new synthesis” that Wilson dreamed of, and that he later referred to as consilience—the “jumping together” of ideas to create a unified body of knowledge.
Damasio’s interpretation was that gut feelings and bodily reactions were necessary to think rationally, and that one job of the vmPFC was to integrate those gut feelings into a person’s
conscious deliberations.
reasoning requires the passions.
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.
