• First, we’re concerned with harm and care. As “communitarians under the skin” who survive through interconnection, and dislike seeing or feeling the pain of others, we have especially keen moral emotions related to threat as well as nurturing. This foundation underlies kindness and all forms of emotional and physical succor and protection.
• Second, we’re devoted to justice and fairness—the rules of reciprocity, autonomy, reputation management, revenge, and punishment that enable us to live as individuals in groups. This foundation generates laws and rights and depends on an underlying, unavoidable, sometimes self-centered belief in just deserts.
• Third, we depend on in-group loyalty for our survival. This foundation engenders patriotism, tribal pride, and self-sacrifice for the community; it’s also why we automatically treat out-group members differently than our personal cohorts, and always worse. Loyalty is crucial to ethics, but in-group favoritism is also our nemesis as it underlies tribal conflict, war, and aggression.
• Fourth, we care about authority and respect. As hierarchical animals with pecking orders to consider, we have a strong, instinctive attraction toward leadership and the respect of elders, as well as a reverence for tradition. This foundation
is both an enormous help, as when “good” authority figures lead us to higher ground, and a moral hazard, as when power mongers dupe us with charisma or we allow ourselves to forgo ethics in favor of obedience to questionable people or causes.
• Fifth, we have an innate, elevating need for purity and sacredness. This foundation, rooted in our central moral emotion— disgust—turns us from animality toward the divine, and explains our perennial taste for religion (of which some forty thousand have been created to date). Like the four other moral receptors, this hunger for purity can be abused when an individual, nation, or faith plays on our disgust reflex by portraying enemies as morally impure, as in the case of anti-Semites and homophobes.
As we get to know this moral organ, it’s helpful to remember that the first two foundations—harm/care and justice/fairness— concern themselves with the protection of individuals, while the three others serve the purpose of binding the group together.
In the same way that, as toddlers, our aptitude for language allowed for verbal acquisition before we determined how we would use it, or what particular language we would speak, so our universal moral grammar predisposes us to ethical choices without our full knowledge or understanding of what those choices will be. While the five innate principles I just described guide our moral judgments, they are largely inaccessible to conscious awareness. Having a strong moral reaction and being unable to rationally explain that reaction is what Haidt calls “moral dumbfounding”—further proof that emotions, and not reason, shape our moral impulses. Let’s say that a woman is cleaning out her closet and finds an old American flag. She doesn’t want the flag anymore, so she cuts it up into pieces and uses the rags to clean her bathroom. Does that feel wrong to you? If so, why? How about eating the family kitten that was run over by a car in front of your house? You’ve heard that cat meat is an epicurean delight in China; why not whip up some pussy lo mein? Most of us are disgusted by these suggestions—we find them wrong, unsavory, obnoxious. But why do we feel this way, exactly? Reaching inside for rational answers, we find nothing but feelings posing as facts. This is how moral dumbfounding works.
To make ethical life even more of a breeze, these five foundations—hardwired inside our skulls when mastodons still pounded the earth—depend largely on perceptions that have little to do with the actual situation at hand. Our moral choices depend on what we think or feel has happened, not on what really occurred. Interpretation is everything. The moral sense is just as prone to illusion as the rest of our senses, easily misled by filters ranging from language (think of euphemisms) to appearance (think of sheep’s clothing), to imaginative gymnastics of innumerable, self-deceiving kinds. To function properly, the moral faculty must interface accurately with other mental capacities—memory, attention, language, vision, emotion, and beliefs. Because it relies on specialized brain systems, damage to these systems can lead to deficits in moral judgment. When the brain is compromised, from birth or through accident, ethical ability suffers proportionately.
No two people make identical ethical choices because no two brains are exactly alike. We know this because the past twenty years have been a watershed time for neurology. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has enabled us, for the first time in history, to study the human body in the act of feeling—the moral science equivalent to putting a foot on the moon.
This has given us a laser beam look into how our ethical choices are made. Thanks to the fMRI machine, we now know that many of our behaviors, even morally loaded ones like altruism and rudeness (previously believed to be under our conscious control), are caused by unconscious automatic physiological responses. What’s more, we know that people can’t really stop themselves from making up post hoc explanations for whatever it is they’ve just done for unconscious reasons. Fallible though we may be, however, we’re not just apes with better hairdos. Homo sapiens are superior moral beings altogether, and here are the gamma waves to prove it.
Based on findings in evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, anthropology, economics, linguistics, and neurobiology, we’re reaching a level of self-transparency beyond our wildest imaginings. Crucial blind spots are being illuminated, including why we allow ourselves to cheat, but just so much; why we overestimate our virtue and underestimate the power of situations to bring out our Mr. Hyde; why, as the Germans say, “When the penis gets hard the mind goes soft”; why residents of flat places like Texas tend to be conservatives while individuals who live near water tend to be liberal; how men and women differ morally; why children are such good con artists; why non-abstinent, right-wing Christian teenagers are less likely than atheists to wear condoms during sex; and why we’re so hopeless at predicting what will make us happy. These and myriad other riddles are being solved by neurologists and psychologists.
Two discoveries, in particular, are amping up this revolution in moral science. The first is “neuroplasticity,” the discovery that our brains and behavior can be re-sculpted with practice. Once believed to be isolated lumps of gray matter cogitating between our ears, our brains turn out to be more like interloping wifi octopuses with invisible tentacles slithering in many directions at all times, constantly picking up messages we’re not aware of and prompting reactions in ways never before understood. Contrary to the old wives’ tale that humans are born with a fixed number of brain cells that only diminish over time, our bodies produce one hundred thousand new brain cells every day until we die. This has radically altered how psychologists think about personal change. While much of our behavior is hardwired from birth and ratified by the culture we live in, there’s far more room for re-sculpture through practice than the old leopard-and-its-spots cliché would have us believe.
The second great boon has come with the discovery of mirror neurons. In 1995, a neuroscientist at the University of Parma, Giacomo Rizzolatti, identified the mechanism whereby empathy (and a host of other behaviors) is communicated physiologically. The sole purpose of mirror neurons is to reflect what we see in the world around us and imitate it, instantly—literally “bringing the outside inside”—in order to harmonize with our environments. These “empathy neurons” (or “Dalai Lama neurons” as one brain scientist calls them) match up our inner reality with the world around us, helping to dissolve the barrier between self and other (the goal of most wisdom traditions, coincidentally). In order to know other people, nature provided us with a mechanism for becoming other people—at least a little bit. This does not happen deliberately; mirror neurons are a subconscious, body-to-body communication network that makes social life possible. They help to undergird moral behavior first learned in our infancy, smiling when our mother smiles, absorbing empathic tendencies from the way our parents care for us. Have you ever wondered why seeing a yawn makes you yawn too, or witnessing someone weeping automatically brings a tear to your eye? Mirror neurons are the answer. They are our primary physical means of stepping outside our own skin.
Humans share a need for self-transcendence. Wisdom traditions agree on this point as well. Our moral organ helps us to escape the hell of self-centeredness by learning to bridge opposing truths—our needs and those of others—thus becoming “bigger” people. Psychologist Peter Singer refers to this self-extension as “expanding the circle.” This call for empathic expansion has never been more urgent. We wince at images of our own greed—the polar bear stranded on a sheet of ice no bigger than a Winnebago. We’re disgusted by our own moral failings and recognize the need to dispel them. In the years since 9/11, with industrial waste from China blanketing the western coast of California and nuclear weapons in Pakistan, nothing seems more important than this circular expansion. With the decoding of the human genome, our species has become capable of enormous good, such as curing diseases, as well as great potential evil, as with human cloning. Since uncovering many of nature’s hitherto secret blueprints, we’ve become “increasingly important subcontractors in the work of Creation,” Lance Morrow writes, assuming greater and greater responsibility for good and evil in the world. As one scientist suggested to me, in fact, “At some time in the future, we will have to decide how human we wish to remain.”
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Very true, about not forgetting to exalt the good of man. Of course, feminists, and by extension this website, does not ever exalt the good of man. They don’t praise his self-sacrifice, his willingness to get up and do the worst, most dangerous, of jobs without complaint. When mines collapse, workers are hurt, not men. Men climb forty stories on rinky dink metal beams without safety harnesses, and stood with one man on the outside of a pole on loose planks and the other on the inside of the pole, on the other side of the planks, as they affixed… Read more »