The Righteous Mind

I'm going to tell you a brief story. Pause after you hear it and decide whether the people in the story did anything morally wrong. A family's dog was killed by a car in front of their house. They had heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog's body and cooked it and ate it for dinner. Nobody saw them do this. If you are like most of the well-educated people in my studies, you felt an initial flash of disgust, but you hesitated before saying the family had done anything morally wrong. After all, the dog was dead already, so they didn't hurt it, right? And it was their dog, so they had a right to do what they wanted with the carcass, no? If I pushed you to make a judgment, odds are you'd give me a nuanced answer, something like, well, I think it's disgusting and I think they should have just buried the dog, but I wouldn't say it was morally wrong. Okay, here's a more challenging story. A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a chicken. But before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he cooks it and eats it. Once again, no harm, nobody else knows, and like the dog-eating family, it involves a kind of recycling that is, as some of my research subjects pointed out, an efficient use of natural resources. But now the disgust is so much stronger, and the action just seems so degrading. Does that make it wrong? If you're an educated and politically liberal Westerner, you'll probably give another nuanced answer, one that acknowledges the man's right to do what he wants, as long as he doesn't hurt anyone. But if you are not a liberal or libertarian Westerner, you probably think it's wrong, morally wrong, for someone to have sex with a chicken carcass and then eat it. For you, as for most people on the planet, morality is broad. Some actions are wrong, even though they don't hurt anyone. Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous mind. The next step is to understand where these many moralities came from in the first place. The Origin of Morality, Take 1 I studied philosophy in college, hoping to figure out the meaning of life. After watching too many Woody Allen movies, I had the mistaken impression that philosophy would be of some help. But I had taken some psychology courses too, and I loved them, so I chose to continue. In 1987, I was admitted to the graduate program in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. I had a vague plan to conduct experiments on the psychology of humor. I thought it might be fun to do research that let me hang out in comedy clubs. A week after arriving in Philadelphia, I sat down to talk with Jonathan Barron, a professor who studies how people think and make decisions. With my minimal background in philosophy, we had a good discussion about ethics. Barron asked me point blank, is moral thinking any different from other kinds of thinking? I said that thinking about moral issues, such as whether abortion is wrong, seemed different from thinking about other kinds of questions, such as where to go to dinner tonight, because of the much greater need to provide reasons justifying your moral judgments to other people. Barron responded enthusiastically, and we talked about some ways one might compare moral thinking to other kinds of thinking in the lab. The next day, on the basis of little more than a feeling of encouragement, I asked him to be my advisor, and I set off to study moral psychology. In 1987, moral psychology was a part of developmental psychology. Researchers focused on questions such as how children develop in their thinking about rules, especially rules of fairness. The big question behind this research was, how do children come to know right from wrong? Where does morality come from? There are two obvious answers to this question, nature or nurture. If you pick nature, then you're a nativist. You believe that moral knowledge is native in our minds. It comes preloaded, perhaps in our God-inscribed hearts, as the Bible says, or in our evolved moral emotions, as Darwin argued. But if you believe that moral knowledge comes from nurture, then you are an empiricist. You believe that children are more or less blank slates at birth, as John Locke said. If morality varies around the world and across the centuries, then how could it be innate? Whatever morals we have as adults must have been learned during childhood from our own experience, which includes adults telling us what's right and wrong. Empirical means from observation or experience. But this is a false choice, and in 1987, moral psychology was mostly focused on a third answer, rationalism, which says that kids figure out morality for themselves. Jean Piaget, the greatest developmental psychologist of all time, began his career as a zoologist studying…