Daniel Little — Moral intuitions as evolutionary modules

People have moral reactions to the situations they observe around themselves -- within the work environment, in the family, on the street, or in international affairs. This is a psychological fact that is prior to moral philosophy. How should we understand this feature of ordinary human consciousness and cognition?

Jonathan Haidt is a moral psychologist who has some fairly original ideas on this subject. His most recent book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, attempts to lay out a theory of moral psychology that puts moral intuition and judgment ahead of conscious moral reasoning, and independent from the content of what we refer to as moral philosophy.

Understanding Society
Moral intuitions as evolutionary modules
Daniel Little | Chancellor, University of Michigan at Dearborn

Ethics as a branch of philosophy is usually understood as moral reasoning. Reasoning is reflection on experience. Socrates: "An unexamined life not is not worth living" (Plato, Apology 38a). Social and political philosophy are closely connected with ethics through the study of action.

Experience is not merely of factual occurrences, based on perception of events "objectively," but also involves subjective appreciation that is bound up in the experience. Understanding is gained from reflection on experience. Knowledge is the confluence of experience and understanding through a process of reasoning that yields conclusions. Wisdom is the ability to use knowledge practically.

Recent investigation in cognitive science, by Antonio Damasio in particular, shows that the reason cannot be divorced from feeling in that they are inextricably conjoined in brain functioning. There are no "facts" that are not subjectively appreciated, although some matters more appreciated than others, such as routines hardly noticed. Moral intuition and aesthetic intuition applies to those matters that are more subjectively appreciated than others.

In The Feeling of What Happens, Damasio laid the foundations of the "enchainment of precedences": the nonconscious neural signaling of an individual organism begets the protoself which permits core selfand core consciousness, which allow for an autobiographical self, which permits extended consciousness. At the end of the chain, extended consciousness permits conscience. [Wikipedia]

Conscience is the basis of moral intuition. This is captured in the creation myth:  God forbids Adam and Eve eating "the fruit of the tree knowledge of good and evil" (Gen. 2:17). When they eat the forbidden fruit, their eyes are opened, and realizing they are naked, they are ashamed (Gen. 3:7). Here in the ancient narrative lies a teaching story that contemporary study of the brain also reveals scientifically. Moral intuition is somatic in addition to mental. In intuition feeling predominates over mind and in reasoning, mind predominates over feeling.

The explains why there are different moral types. People feel differently, and apparently early learning plays a crucial role in this. Those with a more visceral response relate to events more somatically than those accustomed to taking a more reasoned mental approach. 

George Lakoff has observed that conservative morality is more visceral and impassioned than liberal, which is more reasoned and more aloof. This is why conservatives are not swayed by liberal reasoning, and why liberals resist what they consider to be the "raw" reactions of conservatives.

In addition, some people are more empathetic than others, and those with a deficiency of feeling enabling them to mirror others feelings are sociopathic — not so much immoral as amoral. This seems to be the result of both endowment of mirror neurons and conditioning.

However important this somatic factor is, it is not the whole story of morality. But to ignore it as the foundation of morality in biology and evolutionary science is fatal to any moral theorizing.