The Origin of Moral Norms and the Role of Innate Dispositions

2018

Moral concepts, judgments, sentiments, and emotions pervade human social life. We consider certain actions obligatory, permitted, or forbidden, recognize when someone is entitled to a resource, and evaluate character using morally tinged concepts such as cheater, free rider, cooperative, and trustworthy. Attitudes, actions, laws, and institutions can strike us as fair, unjust, praiseworthy, or punishable: moral judgments. Morally relevant sentiments color our experiences—empathy for another’s pain, sympathy for their loss, disgust at their transgressions— and our decisions are influenced by feelings of loyalty, altruism, warmth, and compassion. Fullblown moral emotions organize our reactions—anger toward displays of disrespect, guilt over harming those we care about, gratitude for those who sacrifice on our behalf, outrage at those who harm others with impunity. A newly reinvigorated field, moral psychology, is investigating the genesis and content of these concepts, judgments, sent...

The paper provides a critical discussion of certain limitations of current nativist approaches to the question of moral development. The aim of the paper is to warn against a lingering reductive tendency found among certain contemporary moral nativists: a tendency to exaggerate the importance of innate mechanisms for moral development while simultaneously downplaying the importance of other factors in this process. The paper argues that the morally relevant input available in the social and cultural environment of human beings is much richer and more varied than typically acknowledged by moral nativists. By ignoring this richness the nativist runs the risk of distorting our understanding of the phenomenon we want to explain.

Handbook of personality, 2019

Morality covers the gamut of life-every action is governed by values-whether those we have chosen or those we have implicitly absorbed. Our morality is shaped by multiple factors: what we inherit, where we habitually put our attention, what actions we choose, and the perceptual sensitivities and capacities we develop from how we were raised. All these shape our values and character. As a result, the study of moral development requires a transdisciplinary and transmethodological approach. Disciplinary contributions from evolutionary systems theory, clinical studies, and developmental and personality research each provide insight into the moral development of humanity. Method-ologies of study must also be broad and address both a universalist and an individual-difference approach. The former seeks to find basic patterns across humanity-individuals and societies whereas the latter takes into account the diversity of influences on the development of an individual's moral dispositions. In this chapter , contributions from multiple disciplines and methods are included in an examination of the development of moral values.

International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2015

This article looks at the origins of human morality, and examines the contributions of both biological evolution and cultural evolution. Biological evolution may help explain certain categories of moral behavior (such as altruism), as well as certain morally relevant capacities (such as empathy). Cultural evolution may explain how different moral systems emerge in different times and places, and why they tend to foster aspects of human nature that enhance group success and discourage aspects of human nature that undermine it. Morality must be understood as the joint production of both biological and cultural evolution.

2021

The dominant theory of the evolution of moral cognition across a variety of fields is that moral cognition is a biological adaptation to foster social cooperation. This chapter argues, to the contrary, that moral cognition is likely an evolutionary exaptation: a form of cognition where neurobiological capacities selected for in our evolutionary history for a variety of different reasons—many unrelated to social cooperation—were put to a new, prosocial use after the fact through individual rationality, learning, and the development and transmission of social norms. This chapter begins with a brief overview of the emerging behavioral neuroscience of moral cognition. It then outlines a novel theory of moral cognition that I have previously argued explains these findings better than alternatives. Finally, it shows how the evidence for this theory of moral cognition and human evolutionary history together suggest that moral cognition is likely not a biological adaptation. Instead, like reading sheet music or riding a bicycle, moral cognition is something that individuals learn to do—in this case, in response to sociocultural norms created in our ancestral history and passed down through the ages to enable cooperative living.

Business, Science, and Ethics

Abstract: “Ought” cannot be derived from “is,” so why should facts about human nature be of interest to business ethicists? In this ar- ticle, we discuss why the nature of human nature is relevant to anyone wishing to create a ...

2006

Morality is one of the few topics in academe endowed with its own protective spell. A biologist is not blinded by her biological nature to the workings of biology. An economist is not confused by his own economic activity when he tries to understand the workings of markets. But students of morality are often biased by their own moral commitments. Morality is so contested, and the outcomes of those contests are so important to the researchers themselves, that it is often difficult for researchers to set aside their humanity and study ...

Zygon®, 1999

In recent years a number of biologists, anthropologists, and animal scientists have tried to explain the biological evolution of morality, and claim to have found the rudiments of morality in the altruistic or cooperative behavior of our nearest nonhuman relatives. In this paper, I argue that there is one feature of morality to which these accounts do not pay adequate attention: normative self-government, the capacity to be motivated to do something by the thought that you ought to do it. This is a feature of the form of moral motivation rather than merely of its content, one that I believe we do not share with nonrational animals. Unlike his more recent followers, Darwin, drawing on the sentimentalist tradition in moral philosophy, did try to explain how this capacity evolved. I explain Darwin's account and the way it drew on sentimentalist philosophy, and argue that such accounts are unsatisfactory. Drawing on the more radical accounts of the evolution of morality found in thinkers like Nietzsche and Freud, I speculate that moral motivation may have originated with the internalization of the dominance instincts, and sketch the beginnings of the path that the development of reason in both its theoretical and practical employments might have followed.

Dialogue and Universalism, 2014

The issue widely discussed under the heading of "naturalization of morality" involves at least three major components of "morality": (1) value-laden experience which is the source of all genuine values; (2) received morality, a system of behaviors and attitudes that are transmitted from generation to generation and control the exchange of primary values; and (3) an analytic-evaluative agency, here referred to as ethics, that assesses norms and assumptions underlying received moralities against an independent knowledge of values. This task requires the use of both scientific information (on values and received moralities) and domain-specific ways of ethical reasoning that are appropriate for the subject. While the transmission of moral systems is fully explicable and thus naturalized in terms of evolutionary theory and psychology, the ongoing naturalization of ethics appears to be more complex.

Recent experiments indicate that moral judgment is influenced by emotions and intuitions and at times insensitive to argument. To the extent that such factors are morally irrelevant, day-to-day moral judgments are under the suspicion of being inadequate, all the more if there are evolutionary explanations for the factors’ efficacy. Yet, though influences on judgment are quickly pronounced irrelevant, it is rarely asked where impressions of moral relevance come from. Cultural and evolutionary psychology might provide answers. Evolved emotional psychological processes mark matters of fundamental moral concern, and the perceived relation between an object of judgment and these concerns affects moral judgments and judgments of moral relevance alike. Since evolutionary influences are omnipresent, they do not render moral judgments inadequate. Rather, psychological remoteness from evolved moral concerns could explain why some determinants of moral judgments appear morally irrelevant. In particular, the vocabulary of evolutionary explanations might regularly engender impressions of irrelevance.