The Psychology of Morality – or Why We Want to Be Good
“But why??”
We’ve all been there when children ask this pivotal, often incessant question, primarily because we all went through this period as kids ourselves and some of us never stopped asking it. When the question is tied to moral behavior, all too often the unsatisfactory response comes back, “That’s just the way it is.”
Clearly, morality plays a powerful role in our lives. Its effects spans from human learning to charting a course for entire civilizations, and its power is seen in the beauty of the moral crusader and the horrible genocides of war. Which leaves many to wonder -- where does morality come from? How can we have conviction that something is true but have such a difficult time explaining the why? Why do we place value in ancient stories which communicate moral wisdom as through religious instruction? Why is it that seemingly everyone gets caught up in his or her own beliefs to the point that empathizing with someone who believes the opposite is next to impossible?
Evolved Capacities for Good (The Moral Mind)
Social psychologists like Jonathan Haidt are examining the origins of morality within the human mind. According to Haidt and others in his field, we are not born as a blank slate but rather our mind comes pre-packaged with evolved capacities for moral understanding. Naturally, the culture into which we are born determines how we will favor certain capacities over others. Specifically he describes five moral tools, similar to the physical senses, which can become more or less sensitive to as we navigate our world growing up. The five tools are: 1. Care/Harm; 2. Fairness/Reciprocity; 3. Ingroup/Loyalty; 4. Authority/Respect; 5. Purity/Sanctity. The first two, care and fairness, are valued at fairly consistent levels throughout every society around the world. However the remaining three, loyalty, authority and purity, vary greatly depending on the culture and political environment being studied. If we assume that the tribe was important for the evolution of human beings, then it’s easy to see how uniting into teams and dividing against other teams may have been a survival strategy that was imprinted onto our DNA.
Moral Development (Nurture)
So how do our morals take shape after we are born? Lawrence Kohlberg, whose theory of moral development was published over thirty years ago, described the progression of moral understanding through six stages with three different levels, the impetus being that children seemed to pick up a capacity for more advanced moral understanding when they began to enter the adolescent period. Kohlberg’s six stages are outlined below:
Level 1. Preconventional Morality
Stage 1 - Obedience and Punishment
Stage 2 - Individualism and Exchange
Level 2. Conventional Morality
Stage 3 - Interpersonal Relationships
Stage 4 - Maintaining Social Order
Level 3. Postconventional Morality
Stage 5 - Social Contract and Individual Rights
Stage 6 - Universal Principles
In the primary preconventional level, children begin by assuming a hierarchy of rules handed down through their authority figure until they start to realize that there are different viewpoints from their own. At this point, reciprocity is possible but only if it serves one’s own desires. During the second conventional level, children learn to differentiate between the morality taught by authorities and their own judgement of how familial and societal relationships are affected by morality. They learn to obey the laws of society in order to make decisions of right and wrong. Finally in the third postconventional level, people look at the complexities of what makes up a good society. The complex reasoning skills allow individuals to form universal ethical principles for achieving justice and equality.
Note that a distinguishing factor between stage 5 and stage 6 is civil obedience. Insistent that the sixth stage exists, Kohlberg however found it extremely difficult to identify individuals who consistently operated at that level. Only an extremely low percentage of adults could be classified at the highest stage worldwide. Continuing in the tradition of philosophers from Socrates to Aristotle to Kant, we have only recently seen an emergence of moral philosophers willing to pick up the sword of universal ethics. One such philosopher is internet podcaster and radio host Stefan Molyneux, whose book Universally Preferable Behavior attempts to provide a logical framework for validating moral theories on rational terms, without appealing to deontic moral action (those moral behaviors which are derived from a sense of duty to one’s tribe).
May the Feeling Be With You (Reason and Intuition)
But other than an evolutionary justification, how can we comprehend the current moral development or lackthereof in our society at large today? In his book Gut Feelings, Gerd Gigerenzer discusses morality from the perspective of intuition. He asserts, “Reasoning rarely engenders moral judgement; rather it searches to explain or justify an intuition after the fact.” Gigerenzer’s claim that we have unconscious reasons for our moral justifications explains why rules of thumb like ‘Do what the majority of your peers do’ ‘Don’t break ranks’ or ‘Blood is thicker than water’, can produce actions that we might applaud or condemn. These heuristics are beneficial because they protect us against selfish qualities that are a natural part of our moral landscape. Without social consequences or established rules of some kind in human interaction, the majority of people will tend to experience decay in their moral actions. You might think the idea of strict chastity is entirely prude today; however this was at one time the norm for maintaining order in society.
What’s on the other side of the coin? Our knowledge of how addicting conformity can be means, I would argue, that we are responsible for awareness of the dangers that emerge from a heavy reliance on this social drug. Throughout history we have seen examples of moral tragedies carried out by ordinary people for precisely this reason. It’s not to say you can’t trust your neighbor, but that when everyone around you is in complete agreement is when you might want to step back and see if truth isn’t slipping out the back door unnoticed.
Links:
http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind
http://childpsych.umwblogs.org/developmental-theories/lawerence-kohlberg/
Good post, Matthew. I have read Kohlberg and used it occasionally in my research. It's descent as a generalized understanding of moral development, but in practice, I've found that people used vastly different levels of moral reasoning for different issues. This is complicated because no adults want to believe they use lower level reasoning on moral issues and instead claim universal principles when in fact that is not what they are doing. I also found Kohlberg and other moral philosophers use some biased assumptions about what those levels should be. He lists "Individualism" as pre-conventional, yet there are different types of egoism, some principled and some not. He fails to address those differences.