Revealing The Origins Of Morality -- Good And
Evil, Liberal And Conservative
May 24, 2007
How much money would it take to get you to stick a pin into your palm? How much
to stick a pin into the palm of a child you don't know? How much to slap a
friend in the face (with his or her permission) as part of a comedy skit? Well,
what about slapping your father (with his permission) as part of a skit? How you
answer questions such as these may reveal something about your morality, and
even your politics - conservatives, for example, tend to care more about issues
of hierarchy and respect, while liberals concentrate on caring and fairness.
(You can take a short test of your moral intuitions by visiting http://www.yourmorals.org/).
In a review to be published in the journal Science, Jonathan Haidt,
associate professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, discusses a new
consensus scientists are reaching on the origins and mechanisms of morality.
Haidt shows how evolutionary, neurological and social-psychological insights are
being synthesized in support of three principles: 1) Intuitive primacy, which
says that human emotions and gut feelings generally drive our moral judgments;
2) Moral thinking if for social doing, which says that we engage in moral
reasoning not to figure out the truth, but to persuade other people of our
virtue or to influence them to support us; and 3) Morality binds and builds,
which says that morality and gossip were crucial for the evolution of human
ultrasociality, which allows humans - but no other primates - to live in large
and highly cooperative groups.
"Putting these three principles together forces us to re-evaluate many of
our most cherished notions about ourselves," says Haidt, whose own research
demonstrates that people generally follow their gut feelings and make up moral
reasons afterwards. "Since the time of the Enlightenment," Haidt says,
"many philosophers have celebrated the power and virtue of cool,
dispassionate reasoning. Unfortunately, few people other than philosophers can
engage in such cool, honest reasoning when moral issues are at stake. The rest
of us behave more like lawyers, using any arguments we can find to make our
case, rather than like judges or scientists searching for the truth. This
doesn't mean we are doomed to be immoral; it just means that we should look for
the roots of our considerable virtue elsewhere - in the emotions and intuitions
that make us so generally decent and cooperative, yet also sometimes willing to
hurt or kill in defense of a principle, a person or a place."
Haidt argues that human morality is a cultural construction built on top of -
and constrained by - a small set of evolved psychological systems. He presents
evidence that political liberals rely primarily on two of these systems,
involving emotional sensitivities to harm and fairness. Conservatives, however,
construct their moral understandings on those two systems plus three others,
which involve emotional sensitivities to in-group boundaries, authority and
spiritual purity. "We all start off with the same evolved moral
capacities," says Haidt, "but then we each learn only a subset of the
available human virtues and values. We often end up demonizing people with
different political ideologies because of our inability to appreciate the moral
motives operating on the other side of a conflict. We are surrounded by moral
conflicts, on the personal level, the national level and the international
level. The recent scientific advances in moral psychology can help explain why
these conflicts are so passionate and so intractable. An understanding of moral
psychology can also point to some new ways to bridge these divides, to appeal to
hearts and minds on both sides of a conflict."
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Contact: Jonathan Haidt
University of Virginia
Medical News Today: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com
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