The Behavioral Code: The Hidden Ways the Law Makes Us Better . or Worse

by Benjamin van Rooij

All of this shows that people do not engage in clear reasoning before they come to a moral judgment. Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at New York University who was the lead author of those studies, concluded that Kohlberg and others who focused on moral reasoning suffered from a fundamental oversight. Kohlberg had looked at how children develop morality through asking them to explain what they thought about moral dilemmas. As Haidt explains: “Kohlberg thought of children as budding moral philosophers.” Yet what Kohlberg was studying was the post hoc rationalization of a moral judgment, not the moral intuition that shapes people’s moral judgments. Critically, moral reasoning does not cause moral judgment. Rather, Haidt believes, moral reasoning comes after people have made a moral judgment based on their intuition about right and wrong. Thus, there is doubt that moral reasoning can predict moral behavior.