How can we explain kindness and cruelty? Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? Why do people so often disagree about moral issues? This course explores the psychological foundations of our moral lives.
Moral Universals
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Moralities of Everyday Life
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Origins of Morality
Here, we ask about which aspects of morality are universal. We discuss evolution, cross-cultural research, and the fascinating new science of the moral life of babies.
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Paul BloomBrooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Yale University
Psychology
So we ended in the last lecture by talking about diversity, the sort of diversity
pointed out by Herodotus, the sort of
diversity cataloged by Richard Shweder and other anthropologists.
But, now we can kind of shift gears a bit and think about things
in a different way, looking now at what places and people have in common.
And the first thing to realize is that the examples
provided by Herodotus and by Shweder and
others actually illustrate a sort of commonality.
Because, although cultures have different attitudes about how to treat the dead,
about how parents should interact with
their kids, about romantic love, about sexuality.
Although they have different attitudes, there are no cultures that don't care.
These are all examples of, of moral differences, but they're also examples of
moral commonalities, and these are the
very domains which are imbued with morality.
So, so, you know, you might have to.
You, you.
The right thing might be to eat your dead father.
The right thing might be to burn your dead father.
It might be to, as in our culture, many of us, to bury your dead father.
But you're not going to find anybody who says,
I don't care. Whatever, you know?
Dead bodies?
Who cares. Humans care about dead bodies.
Humans care deeply about the moral status of dead bodies,
of loved ones, and what one should do about them.
You may find societies that treasure romantic love.
That view this as a high moral ideal.
Others that view it as very disturbing and wrong.
Well, you're not going
to find cultures that say love, that doesn't really
matter from a moral point of view, couldn't care.
These are things that matter.
More to the point.
It's not the case that everything's up for grabs.
So, we're naturally fascinated by moral differences.
And we're actually fascinated by these in part because they matter
to us as we travel and as we interact with other people.
When I go to a foreign
land, I'm very interested in in how they think, and I'm
particularly interested in how they think that's different from how I think.
Is the way I raise my kids going to be shocking to them?
Are they going to be offended by something I do?
Are our customs different?
Are our, you know, rules for interaction different?
We want to know that because we're people,
and when we're interacting with other people it's
the differences that matter.
I don't want to open up a travel guide
and say, you know this far away place you're going?
The people there, they have noses, and they age over time.
Well. And they often have two arms and two legs.
I don't want to hear that.
That's not humanly interesting because I know it's true.
It's just obvious.
Arguably, you see the same thing with language.
So, the linguist, Noam Chomsky,
has pointed out that the thing that
captivates us with languages are their differences.
If I go to a foreign land, and they're speaking French or Thai or
Choctaw or Russian, or what have you, I don't understand any of those languages.
And the difference between what they're doing and what I
do, speaking English, barely, is, is, is, is it humanly relevant?
And Chomsky
points out though, that it turns out languages have deep universals.
The deep universals underline language and may in some way be the sort
of much more important from a scientific
point of view than their superficial differences.
But it's not the universals we focus on.
It's the differences, and you might say the same thing with morality.
So, there are moral universals that show up culture after culture
after culture.
We tend not to think of them or
talk about them because they aren't as humanly relevant.
In some sense they aren't as exotic. They aren't as interesting.
But what am I talking about, when I talk about human universals?
Well, here we could draw upon the work of scholars like, like Shweder himself.
Like his his student and a psychologist, Jonathan Haidt.
Psychologists like Pinker and, and, and anthros, anthropologists like Fisk who
have, who have sort of broken up the moral the moral world into
different parts, and without putting too much weight onto this I want to
suggest you can think about five categories when it comes to morality.
So one category is harm.
Harm is a critical universal aspect
of our moral systems, and in particular, wherever you
go, there's the belief in the wrongness of intentional assault.
You gotta have a reason.
To put it differently.
Wherever you travel, anywhere on this planet, if you walk up to
somebody and punched them in the face, you better have a good reason.
You better, you better, you better have an excuse.
There better be a justification.
Because otherwise the people are not going to stand for that.
You will have done something wrong. There's reciprocity.
Humans are social beings.
We find ourselves in, in, in relationships where we
share, where we cooperate, and there are norms of
sharing and cooperation saying how you should do it,
who you should do it with and so on.
There's also corta, correspondingly a universal notion that it's wrong to cheat.
It's wrong to say you'll do something and
not do it.
It's wrong to to, to, you know, weasel out of things.
It's wrong to free-ride.
Well, free-ride is a bit of a, a technical term.
To, to be a free-rider means you mooch off the hard work of others.
There is a hunt, for instance, and
everybody in the community is doing the hunting.
And you're sitting back.
And when the food comes you eat as much of it as everybody else.
Well, there is no place
on earth where if they notice, people notice
this, they won't think that you're a jerk.
That sort of free riding is universally disapproved of.
There's hierarchy, and this is actually a domain which we probably
know a little bit less about than some of these other domains.
But the idea is, wherever you look, there's some respect
for authority, some notion of honor and dignity and respect.
And, now this could be very rich.
So in a society where I live in, there is all sorts of hierarchies.
I'm supposed to respect
the president, I'm supposed to respect my boss.
My, my students are supposed to respect me to varying degrees.
but, but everywhere, there's something like this.
At minimum, within the family.
Where our sort of expectations and requirements about
how a child is supposed to deal with
his or her parents, and the parents are supposed to deal with his or her children.
There's purity.
Purity is extremely interesting and, and, and one way to put
this, and this actually comes from, from Shweder, to some extent.
Is that wherever you are you find it morally important
to protect yourself and others from contamination, physical or spiritual.
I know it's a little bit vague.
And, and this is something which I find
interesting enough I want to devote more time
to it later but now just, just to, to sort of zoom in a little bit.
Wherever you go there's going to be moral restrictions
having to do with food and sex and death.
It's not just like oh, we like to eat this and not that or, or
we think this sexual position is particularly fantastic
or, you know, don't step on the corpse.
Rather, it's. It is wrong to eat this.
It is right to eat that, or it's wrong to eat this
on that day of the week or that time of the year.
This sort of sex is forbidden.
This sort of
sex is morally out of bounds.
When somebody dies you should do this and that and this
and that, and not do this and that and this and that.
The details, of course, as we've discussed differ but there are to my knowledge from
anything I've read, there are no societies
who are indifferent about these matters of purity.
And finally, there's some issue, there's always a morality of community.
We make a moral, we make a distinction
between in-groups and out-groups, between us and them.
And this isn't just a psychological distinction, this isn't just
that we notice it, but rather this distinction has moral significance.
There's a value given to loyalty to your group.
We condemn people who betray their group. We condemn heretics.
We condemn people who, who defect to the other group.
And a lot of our sort of group dynamics, a lot, a lot of the way the world works.
Turns on the critical and natural moral
distinctions they make between themselves and other people.
So, you have these universals and in, in fact we, we could now, just, just to
look at in a somewhat different way, forget
about the categories and, and think of specific examples.
So these are specific examples, which I would suggest are true everywhere.
There's a ban on arbitrary assaults.
No punching somebody wihtout a good reason.
You should keep promises.
When you make a, a promise to someone, you say you'll do something, you should.
If you just, you know, don't do it, then something's gone wrong.
Some degree of sexual modesty.
Now this of course, varies hugely.
There are parts of the world where a man, you know,
if, if he's not going out with a vest and a nice
jacket and a tie, he, you know, he's doing something horribly wrong.
There's other parts of the world where he just
has to have a penis pouch, and that's it.
But, there's always rules.
There's rules on some degree of, of modesty.
Regarding how much of your body you show, and also regarding
where you urinate and defecate, and where you have sexual intercourse.
It doesn't,
you're not going to find any people for whom this doesn't matter.
Some obligation to share.
At least share with those with your children.
With, with your friends.
Anger towards cheaters and free-riders.
Anger towards those who for whatever reason have chosen to violate
the moral rule that you would hoped that they would do.
And they don't share. Protection of children.
Just like there's no society, where you can't punch somebody just
at will, there's no society where it's fine to kill children.
A taboo on incest.
So, there's a particular sexual taboo, that gets sketched out in different ways,
but but wherever you go for
instance brother-sister incest is considered morally wrong.
It's not just oh we don't like that, we don't
typically do it but rather it, there's something wrong with it.
If, if, if it was believed, if you came into this country and you said, oh this is
what I do all the time I have intercourse
with my siblings, people would look down on you.
There are rules about appropriate foods.
There's obligation to family, and finally, to go
back to Herodotus, there's special treatment of the dead.
Now, you have these universal moral principles, these universal moral
ideas and it might be very tempting to say wow, so that must be hardwired.
That must be innate.
That must be a part of how our brains work.
That must be the product of natural selection, of biological evolution.
But it doesn't necessarily follow. All sorts of things that are universal
could arise in the course of cultural evolution, not biological evolution.
That is,
they could be cultural solutions to universal problems.
So take the, the restriction against hitting.
It might be an effect, I think I will argue that, that, that it is.
That there's some built in mechanism that, that, that kicks
in when you see one person arbitrarily assault another one.
But, to be fair, there are other theories for
why all societies have some sort of ban on hitting.
The idea being that even if you didn't start
off with any instinctive desire not to be hit or
not to have somebody hit another person, still the
culture couldn't survive if you would just hit each other.
So imagine two societies side by side.
One society, people just smacked each other whenever they felt like it.
The other society, where it was viewed as wrong to do so.
It's clear the society which
views it wrong to do so would be a better society will, will,
will work better, will be better at, at battle, will be better at everything.
Then a society where people were just simply smacking each other.
The philosopher Jesse Prinz, put this quite nicely, quite succinctly, when he
wrote how would society work if you could punch your neighbor regularly?
Well, not very well.
so, we should, as we consider the origins of these universals, we should have on
the table that some of this morality
might arise as cultural solutions to universal problems.
At the same time, though, what I want to
suggest is that some of morality has a different origin.
In particular, some of morality may have evolved through natural selection.
And how this can happen, how this can work, is going to be the topic
of the next couple of lectures.
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