Brain Rules for Baby (John Medina) / quote 73 of 91
What moral means, and whether it is innate
What exactly does “moral” mean? Are any moral absolutes embedded into our brains, or is moral awareness only culturally understood? These questions have occupied philosophers for centuries. The word “moral,” in both its Greek and Latin incarnations, has a strong social underpinning. It originally outlined a code of conduct, a consensus of manners and customs possessing equal parts “heartily recommend it” and “don’t you dare.” That’s the definition we’ll use: a set of value-laden behaviors embraced by a cultural group whose main function is to guide social behavior. Why would we need such rules in the first place? It may have to do with that strong evolutionary requirement for social cooperation. Some researchers believe our moral sense—really a specific suite of socializing behaviors—developed to aid that cooperation. Regular massacres, after all, are not exactly in the best interests of a species whose effective founding population was less than 18,500 individuals (some say less than 2,000). In this Darwinian view, our brains come preloaded at birth with certain limited moral sensibilities, which then develop in a semi-variable fashion, depending upon how we are raised. “[W]e are born with a universal moral grammar,” says cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, “that forces us to analyze human action in terms of its moral structure …” Popular candidates for which moral sensibilities we possess include distinctions between right and wrong, proscriptions against social violence such as rape and murder, and empathy. Yale psychologist Paul Bloom lists a sense of justice, emotional responses to thoughtfulness and altruism, and a willingness to judge another person’s behavior. Psychologist Jon Haidt sees five categories: harm, fairness, loyalty, respect for authority, and something intriguingly called spiritual purity.