Where does moral thinking come from? That's the question Haidt attempts to answer in the first chapter of his book. The answers traditionally trotted out to address the question have been either nature (nativism) or nurture (empiricism). Nativists view moral understanding as an innate feature of our minds. Everyone from birth already knows what's right or wrong (e.g. Jeremiah 31: 33-34). Empiricists see morality as something that is learned. We are blank slates until we are told what is right or wrong, whether it's from our parents, teachers, or some other authority figures.
Regardless, babies still look creepily evil.
However, this is a false dichotomy, Haidt says. He presents a third alternative, rationalism: the idea that kids figure out morality for themselves only when they are mature enough and only when they have the right kinds of experiences. A good analogy here is that of a butterfly. Butterflies aren't born as butterflies; they're born as caterpillars. And no one and nothing teaches caterpillars to become butterflies. They just do it after eating enough leaves and becoming mature enough. Similarly, no one teaches children to be moral, rather, children just acquire morality through their own interactions with their environment. Specifically, the kinds of interactions that foster moral development are ones within an egalitarian framework, ones which allow the child to easily take the perspective of another individual. In contrast, hierarchical relationships such as child/parent or student/teacher may in fact be obstacles to development, since they don't allow the student to empathize or deliberatively reason.
Going further, from a rationalist perspective, the rules children develop can be separated along related lines: moral and social-conventional. Moral rules are limited to considerations of harm and fairness. They are universal and unalterable. These rules are built upon engagement with other individuals and rational reflection. Other rules handed down from authority, like wearing a uniform to school, are not considered moral, only conventional, since they apply only locally and can easily be changed. Ultimately, rationalists say that morality is about empathy and perspective taking. Champions of this third view include Piaget, Kohlberg, and Turiel.
Rationalism, Haidt believes, too narrowly limits our understanding of morality. Take for instance the case of the Hua of New Guinea, who have developed elaborate networks of food taboos that are ostensibly social-conventional yet are treated in a moralistic way. "They talked about them constantly, judged each other by their food habits, and governed their lives, duties, and relationships by what the anthropologist Anna Meigs called 'a religion of the body.'" Or consider Biblical injunctions about certain impure practices (Leviticus 11, Deuteronomy 22: 9-11) The clincher for Haidt lie in his own research. He surveyed people from different social classes, ages, and cities to get their moral intuitions about vignettes designed to elicit disgust or indignation. He found that some people took moral umbridge against certain stories even though those stories were designed to eliminate any presumption of harm. Furthermore, these moral judgements took the form of universal injunctions against those actions presented in the stories. Morality, then, is not just about harm and fairness. There has to be some other source of morality besides taking the perspective of another individual and thereby accepting not to harm them. For Haidt, the answer would be innate moral intuitions, but that will be elaborated upon in a later post. (Though Haidt's answer seems at first blush similar to the nativist's, the elaboration will reveal more nuance.)
As an interesting aside, during Haidt's research, he found that people would try to invent victims. As an attempt to justify their moral judgements, people would contort the stories so as to find someone who was harmed. When it was pointed out to them that there was in fact no one harmed, people would still stick to their original judgements. Haidt describes this phenomenon as moral dumbfounding.
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