Morality — Where Does It Come From and How Is It Enforced Upon Masses?
Though I have always carried great passion for the philosophy of morality, I was not familiar with the research field in moral psychology until I read Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind early this year. To be precise, I did not know this field even existed. If I had to guess, the first thought popping up in the head of a psychology student when hearing the term “morality” would be Piaget’s theory of moral development. No? Maybe you are not quite the average student then :)
It was not a random guess anyway. Historically, the study of moral development was what exclusively referred to when talking about the psychology of morality. Not anymore though. Moral psychology has expanded across many disciplines to involve major bodies of research on the biological, cognitive and cultural basis of moral judgment and behaviour. What makes this field pretty tricky to discuss is that, just like every other social science, it still keeps a deep hole for philosophy (aka debate) to fill in. This is where we need to draw the line between descriptive and normative analysis. There could be absolute consensus by scientists on the former, yet rarely on the latter.
Origins Of Morality
What got me interested in understanding the origins of morality was witnessing how poorly my society was communicating its cultural values to newer generations (including mine). I knew that disciplining and teaching were one way to raise children, but what I was certain of: it is not enough to enforce moral values upon them. I am sure every reader can cite an example from memory, of at least one person who lost the path though she was surrounded by the perfect family. Or even vice versa: perfect child from a messed up family. I would not have said “poorly” if I have not had a benchmark to compare our performance to. I do, and I will talk about that later after discussing Haidt’s work.
What I had hoped for before getting my head into all of this was finding intuitive basis to morality. That, I thought will help us find a way to revive our culture along with its values that are starting to wither. And that could be done by speaking to our nature, as oppose to the ‘classic’ conservative parenting style that is closer to indoctrination. The good news is: it can be done. The bad news: it is not that simple.
In his book, Haidt documents research on the theory of moral foundations first established by him and Craig Joseph in 2004, and goes through how these foundations are activated differently across various systems of belief. They argue that morality is like taste in many ways — an analogy made long ago by Hume and Mencius. They borrowed the idea of “modularity” from the cognitive anthropologists Dan Sperber and Lawrence Hirschfeld.
Modules are like little switches in the brain of all animals. They are switched on if triggered by a given ecological niche, and send out a signal that eventually changes the animal’s behaviour in a way that is evolutionary adaptive. For example, many animals react with fear within seconds of glimpsing a snake because their brains include neural circuits that function as snake detectors. These evolved cognitive modules, are adaptation to different phenomena that caused problems (or gave rise to opportunities) in the ancestral environment of the species.
Craig and Haidt thought this provided the perfect description of what universal moral “taste receptors” would evolve to be. They would be adaptations to long-standing threats/opportunities in social life that trigger instant intuitive reaction. The key word here is “trigger”, which is what needed to account for cultural variations. Sperber and Hirschfeld distinguished between the original triggers of a model and the current triggers.
The original triggers are the set of objects for which the module was designed (that is, the set of all snakes is the original trigger for a snake-detector module). The current triggers are all the things in the world that happen to trigger it (including real snakes, as well as toy snakes, curved sticks, and thick ropes, any of which might give you a scare if you see them in the grass). Haidt and Craig tried identifying the best candidates to represent the universal cognitive modules upon which cultures construct moral metrics, which they eventually dubbed Moral Foundations Theory. They narrowed down five adaptive challenges of social life that evolutionary psychologists often wrote about, these are shown in figure(1) along with the virtues and emotions connected to them as well as the triggers (original and current) that activate them.
The fact that morality has biological origins is not news. 20th century evolutionists have established (and continued to make progress in) that area of research, from detecting reciprocal altruism between simple organisms like Bacteria to studying complex social relations between primates like chimps and humans.
Cultural variation in morality can be explained in part by noting that cultures can shrink or expand the current triggers of any module. The current triggers can change in a single generation, even though it would take many generations for genetic evolution to alter the design of the module and its original triggers. In other words, cultures can propagate their values by triggering the one (or more) foundation that is related to these moral virtues. The question is, how is that “triggering” exactly done?
How Is Morality Enforced?
Haidt’s social intuitionism model (2001) would be a good place to start this section. The main claim of this theory is that moral positions are:
(1) initially intuitive, (2) rationalised (justified) after the judgment is made, (3) and this reasoning/rationalisation is mainly made to influence other people, (4) judgments can be changed under the influence of others with the progress of discussion and time. However, this possible change in judgment does not mean that the intuition itself would change. This is when moral dumbfounding enters the picture.
Moral dumbfounding occurs when people stubbornly maintain a moral judgement, even though they can provide no reason to support their judgements. Figure (2) down below presents the four cognitive states you might be in when processing a scenario that contains a moral dilemma about X.
The horizontal dimension is intuition: you intuitively “see that” X is bad (in which case you start on the left edge of the figure). The vertical dimension is “reasoning-why”: you search for reasons why X is bad (you try to reason your way downward). There are only two safe, comfortable spots on the table: the lower-left corner, where your intuitions say that X is bad and you have reasons to support your condemnation, and the upper-right corner, where your intuitions say that X is good and you have reasons to support that claim. People in those two corners believe that they have knowledge, or justified true belief. So how does a typical moral argument proceed?
Let us assume X is two adult siblings having consensual safe sex and you find yourself in the lower-left corner: you intuitively condemn Nasser and Noura (the two siblings), and you think you have good reasons to back up this condemnation. You are debating this issue with a libertarian who believes that people should be able to do whatever they want, as long as they do not infringe on anyone else’s rights, so he starts off in the upper-right corner. Your opponent has an intuitive sense of the importance of personal autonomy, and he has reasons to support his endorsement of Nasser’s and Noura’s autonomy.
According to Margolis (1989), people do not change their minds unless they move along the horizontal dimension. Intuition is what most matters for belief. Yet a moral argument generally consists of round after round of reasoning. Each person tries to pull the other along the vertical dimension. Therefore, if your opponent succeeds in defeating your reasons, you are unlikely to change your judgment. You have been dragged into the upper-left quadrant, but you still feel, intuitively, that it is wrong for Nasser and Noura to have sex. The moral foundation associated with this act is most likely Sanctity/Degradation, which was forbidden (almost universally) in many cultures originally to avoid contaminants. In this case, it takes the form of birth defects and diseases incest caused which took thousands of years for humans to take notice of. This original adaptation (avoiding contamination), however, is not what drive our judgment today. Even knowing that the sex was consensual, safe, and both parties used two forms of birth control, this will not change the way you feel about the act itself.
If your mind acts like a servant that rationalises your pre-existing judgments, then it makes sense that morality cannot be taught, or at least cannot be taught directly. Teaching is an important step for later stages in our development because we can emphasise on our initial judgment using logic and evidence. Prior to that in the earliest stages, however, is the more challenging mission for every teacher. That is pushing the buttons that would trigger the right intuitive foundations, which if activated, on their own would drive people to connect the cultural values they are taught to the moral virtues their intuition make them care about. Go back and take a closer look at figure (1), and try guessing what these foundations are abstracted from?
Have this image as a hint:
Bingo. Stories. Storytelling is how cultures survive, because embedded in them everything a culture values. You know a great deal about a culture just by knowing what constitutes an ideal (a hero) in their stories. Stories can only be communicated through art, and art requires medium, skill, and creativity. Cultures with thriving industries on that front (entertainment, tv, movies, theatre, literature) are better at communicating their stories, hence their cultural norms and values. There is a reason Kpop fans are intrigued by Korean culture. They talk like them, eat their food, and unlike the average person they are drawn to have a romanticised image of Korea and the Korean people. I had a similar experience going through my anime phase when I was younger. I took Japanese language courses because I was genuinely interested. I learned using chopsticks, ate ramen almost every day and always dreamed of visiting Japan.
I purposely used these examples to show how the identity crisis we are currently having is not necessarily the product of western influence. Whoever is dominant in this game will succeed in propagating their values, whether it was Hollywood, Turkish tv, or Kpop culture. I used to feel ashamed of the fact that I can express myself better in English than my mother tongue, not anymore. I still do not believe it is something to be proud of, I just feel neutral about it. I am more neutral now because I understand how identities are beyond individual choices.
It is safe to say that art and cultural identity are two sides of the same coin. The following are few thoughts we need to question/discuss if we are serious about reviving our culture.
1- Which moral foundations are we targeting to trigger? And why?
2- Do we have a clear definition of what makes a “hero”? If yes, is that hero shared across all society? If not, shall we start a conversation about that?
3- Are we communicating our values well enough through art?
4- Are we using the right channels to display this art?
5- Do we care about beauty and symbolic representations in our everyday lives?
6- What should we let go of and what is worth preserving?
- Haidt, J., 2001. The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108(4), pp.814–834.
- https://web.archive.org/web/20160909124829/http://faculty.virginia.edu/haidtlab/articles/haidt.joseph.2004.intuitive-ethics.pub035.pdf
- https://web.archive.org/web/20170731065520/http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~jessegra/papers/GHKMIWD.inpress.MFT.AESP.pdf
- Harman, G., 1989. Patterns, Thinking, and Cognition: A Theory of Judgment. Howard Margolis. Ethics, 100(1), pp.200–200.
