Moral intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second

Brains evaluate instantly and constantly (System 1 from Kahneman) and moral judgements are mostly intuitive

  • People get morally dumbfounded: we have strong gut feelings about what is right and wrong, and we sometimes struggle to construct post hoc justifications for those feelings (e.g brother and sister having secret protected sex, or art exposition with shit on picture of Virgin Mary or Nelson Mandela)
  • Political judgements are particularly intuitive: rating competence from pictures seen 1/10th of a second gives a two third accuracy predictor of winner of political elections (Alex Todorov)
  • Affective reactions are in the right place at the right time in the brain: when people read stories involving personal harm - e.g explicitly kill as opposed to impersonal harm like let die - they show greater activity in regions of the brain related to emotional processing (Josh Greene)
  • Psychopaths reason but don’t feel and are severely morally deficient, while babies feel but don’t reason and have the beginnings of morality

Strategic reasoning is often used post hoc to justify moral intuitions

  • We are obsessively concerned about what others think of us and conscious reasoning functions automatically justifies any position we take (makes sense evolutionarily: preserving our reputation is more useful than finding the truth)
  • Reasoning can take us to almost any conclusion we want to reach because we ask “Can I believe it?” when we want to believe something, and “Must I believe it?” when we don’t
  • Each individual reasoner is good at finding evidence to support the position she already holds (usually for intuitive reasons). We should not expect individuals to produce truth-seeking, open-minded reasoning. But if some individuals can use their reasoning power to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond that allows them to interact civilly, the group can produce good reasoning

There is more to morality than harm and fairness

Three major clusters of moral themes (Richard Shweder)

Autonomy

  • People are, first and foremost, autonomous individuals with wants, needs and preferences. People should be free to satisfy these wants, needs and preferences as they see fit
  • Moral concepts: rights, liberty, justice
  • Purpose: allow people to coexist peacefully without interfering too much in each other’s projects
  • Dominant ethic in individualistic societies, in writings of utilitarians (John Stuart Mill, Peter Singer) and deontologists (Kant, Kohlberg)

Community

  • People are, first and foremost, members of larger entities such as families, teams, armies, companies, tribes, and nations. These larger entities are more than the sum of the people who compose them; they are real, they matter, and they must be protected. People have an obligation to play their assigned roles in these entities
  • Moral concepts: duty, hierarchy, respect, reputation and patriotism
  • Purpose: protect the institutions and collective entities upon which everyone depends
  • In such societies, the Western insistance that people should design their own lives and pursue their own goals seems selfish and dangerous (weakens the social fabric and destroys the institutions and collective entities upon which everyone depends)
  • Negative aspects: subordinates (particularly women) are often blocked from doing what they want

Divinity

  • People are, first and foremost, temporary vessels within which a divine soul has been implanted. People are not just animals with an extra serving of consciousness; they are children of God and should behave accordingly. The body is a temple, not a playground
  • Moral concepts: sanctity and sin, purity and pollution, elevation and degradation
  • Purpose: give a voice to feelings of elevation and degradation, give a sacred value to some objects or places, facilitating group binding
  • In such societies, the personal liberty of secular Western nations looks like libertinism, hedonism and a celebration of humanity’s baser instincts
  • Negative aspects: when you allow visceral feelings of disgust to guide your conception of what God wants, then minorities who trigger even a hint of disgust in the majority (homosexuals, obese people etc.) can be ostracized and treated cruelly

Western, educated, industrial, rich and democratic (WEIRD) societies are statistical outliers on many psychological measures, including moral psychology

  • The WEIRDer you are, the more you perceive a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships
  • Moral pluralism is true descriptively: as a matter of anthropological fact, the moral domain varies across cultures
  • The moral domain is unusually narrow in WEIRD cultures (largely limited to the ethic of autonomy). It is broader (including the ethics of community and divinity) in most other societies, and within religious and conservative moral matrices within WEIRD societies

Six foundations of morality

Care/harm

  • Adaptive challenge: protect and care for children
  • Original triggers: suffering, distress, or neediness expressed by one’s child
  • Current triggers: cute things
  • Characteristic emotions: compassion
  • Relevant virtues: caring, kindness

Fairness/cheating (proportionality)

  • Adaptive challenge: reap benefits of two-way partnerships
  • Original triggers: cheating, cooperation, deception
  • Current triggers: marital fidelity, slackers and free riders (e.g abuse of social safety net)
  • Characteristic emotions: anger, gratitude, guilt
  • Relevant virtues: fairness, justice, trustworthiness

Loyalty/betrayal

  • Adaptive challenge: form cohesive coalitions
  • Original triggers: threat or challenge to group
  • Current triggers: sport teams, nations
  • Characteristic emotions: group pride, rage at traitors
  • Relevant virtues: loyalty, patriotism, self-sacrifice

Authority/subversion

  • Adaptive challenge: forge beneficial relationships within hierarchies (perceived to be legitimate)
  • Original triggers: signs of dominance and submission
  • Current triggers: bosses, elders, military
  • Characteristic emotions: respect, fear
  • Relevant virtues: obedience, deference

Sanctity/degradation

  • Adaptive challenge: avoid contaminants
  • Original triggers: waste products, diseased people
  • Current triggers: taboo ideas (communism, racism), out-group members (immigrants)
  • Characteristic emotions: disgust
  • Relevant virtues: temperance, chastity, piety, cleanliness

Liberty/oppression

  • Adaptive challenge: resist bullies or tyrants in small groups
  • Original triggers: signs of attempted domination
  • Current triggers: government interference (e.g taxes), vulnerable groups, accumulation of wealth
  • Characteristic emotions: righteous anger (reactance)

Although the sanctity moral foundation is the least obviously useful in today’s world, it makes it possible for people to invest objects or places with irrational or extreme values - both positive or negative - which are important for binding groups together. It probably played a crucial role in the emergence of large cooperative societies

Two versions of society

Mill’s vision

  • Society is a social contract invented for our mutual benefit. All individuals are equal, and all should be left as free as possible to move, develop talents and form relationships. According to Mill, “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others”
  • Society at its best would be a peaceful, open, and creative place where diverse individuals respect each other’s rights and band together voluntarily to help those in need, or change the laws for the common good
  • Mill’s vision appeals to many liberals and libertarians
  • It relies exclusively on the Care, Fairness and Liberty moral foundations

Durkheim’s vision

  • Society is not an agreement among individuals, but as something that emerged organically over time as people found ways of living together, binding themselves to each other, suppressing each other’s selfishness, and punishing the deviants and free riders who threaten to undermine cooperative groups. The basic social unit is not the individual, it is the hierarchically structured family, which serves as a model for other institutions. Individuals are born into strong and constraining relationships that profoundly limit their autonomy. According to Durkheim, “Man cannot become attached to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. To free himself from all social pressure is to abandon himself and demoralize him”
  • Society at its best would be a stable network composed of many nested and overlapping groups that socialize, reshape and care for individuals who, if left to their own devices, would pursue shallow, carnal, and selfish pleasures
  • It would value self-control over self-expression, duty over rights, and loyalty to one’s groups over concerns for out-groups
  • It is usually hierarchical, punitive and religious; it places limites on people’s autonomy and it endorses traditions, often including traditional gender roles
  • Durkheim’s vision appeals to many conservatives
  • A Durkheimian society cannot be supported by the Care and Fairness and Liberty foundations alone, it needs to build on the Loyalty, Authority and Sanctity foundations as well

Liberal vs conservative moral matrices

Liberal three foundation morality

  • Care/harm: usually even more disturbed by signs of violence and suffering than other political ideologies
  • Liberty/oppression: in contemporary US, most concerned about the rights of vulnerable groups (racial minorities, women, animals etc.) and look to government to defend the weak against oppression by the strong
  • Fairness/cheating: support proportionality as long as does not conflict with above two, sometimes uncomfortable with retribution aspect of karma
  • Hint of sanctity/degradation: clean food and environmentalist movement

Conservative six foundation morality

  • Care about all moral foundations
  • Liberty/oppression: see liberty as the right to be left alone, free from government interference (Libertarian morality relies mostly on this, which is why they often side with Conservatives)
  • Fairness/cheating: care the most about fairness as proportionality
  • Loyalty/betrayal: patriotism
  • Authority/subversion: patriarchal family model
  • Sanctity/degradation: sanctity of life or marriage

Why do rural and working-class Americans generally vote Republican when the Democratic party wants to redistribute money more evenly?

  • Popular opinion: Republicans have duped these people to vote against their economic self-interest
  • But they are actually voting for their moral interests, they don’t want their nation to devote itself primarily to the care of victims and the pursuit of social justice

Democrats fail to understand Republicans because they see a Durkheimian world as a moral abomination which must be combated, not respected

What exactly are moral systems and where do they come from?

Definition of moral systems

Haidt’s definition: interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and make cooperative societies possible

  • Definition is functionalist, define morality by what it does as opposed to specifying what content counts as moral (“harm and fairness” is specific to WEIRD societies)
  • Definition is descriptive (what is) as opposed to normative (what ought to be); as a normative definition it would give high marks to fascist and communist societies or cults so long as they achieve high levels of cooperation by creating a shared moral order

Classical normative definitions

  • Utilitarianism (Jeremy Bentham): maximize overall welfare, usually focusing on individuals (maximize welfare of society by giving individuals what they want)
  • Deontology: in its Kantian form, make the rights and autonomy of others paramount

Haidt’s normative view for making laws and implementing public policies: Durkheimian version of utilitarianism recognizing that human flourishing requires social order and embeddedness. Social order is precious and difficult to achieve and binding foundations (Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity) have a role to play

Origins of morality

Classical explanations

  • Innate (nativist)
  • Childhood cultural learning (empiricist)
  • Self-constructed by children on basis of experience with harm (rationalist)
    • Children know that harm is wrong because they hate being harmed, they gradually reason that it is therefore wrong to harm others, which leads them to understand fairness and justice
    • Dominant paradigm in 1980s (Kohlberg)

Haidt’s explanation: innate (as set of evolved intuitions) and learned (as children learn to apply those intuitions within a particular culture); arguments for innate aspect through multilevel selection (individual and group):

  • Major transitions produce superorganisms
    • When the free rider problem is muted at one level of the biological hierarchy, larger and more powerful vehicles arise at the next level in the hierarchy, with properties such as division of labor, cooperation, and altruism within the group
  • Shared intentionality generates moral matrices
    • Ability to share intentions and other mental representations enabled early humans to collaborate, divide labor, and develop shared norms for judging earch other’s behavior (beginning of moral matrices)
    • Some of the six foundations of morality have explanations through group selection
  • Genes and culture coevolve
    • Example: it gave us a set of tribal instincts, we love to mark group membership and we cooperate preferentially with members of our group
  • Evolution can be fast
    • Example: fox domestication in a few dozen generations by selecting for most human-friendly animals
    • Human evolution did not stop or slow down 50000 years ago, it sped up, reaching it’s highest speed in the least 12000 years with sedentary agricultural civilizations

Caveat: Group selection is still very controversial (see Steven Pinker’s rebuttal). I personally find the explanations and evidence for it pretty unconvincing