Haidt shows how evolutionary, neurological and social-psychological insights are being synthesized in support of three principles:. Unfortunately, few people other than philosophers can engage in such cool, honest reasoning when moral issues are at stake. The rest of us behave more like lawyers, using any arguments we can find to make our case, rather than like judges or scientists searching for the truth.
This doesn't mean we are doomed to be immoral; it just means that we should look for the roots of our considerable virtue elsewhere -- in the emotions and intuitions that make us so generally decent and cooperative, yet also sometimes willing to hurt or kill in defense of a principle, a person or a place.
Haidt argues that human morality is a cultural construction built on top of -- and constrained by -- a small set of evolved psychological systems. He presents evidence that political liberals rely primarily on two of these systems, involving emotional sensitivities to harm and fairness. Conservatives, however, construct their moral understandings on those two systems plus three others, which involve emotional sensitivities to in-group boundaries, authority and spiritual purity.
We often end up demonizing people with different political ideologies because of our inability to appreciate the moral motives operating on the other side of a conflict. Morality is hard to define, but all non-psychopaths experience strong gut reactions to certain moral violations. One way to understand it is from an evolutionary perspective. Our sense of morality is inherent and a fundamental part of being human. Morality fascinates us. The stories we enjoy the most, whether fictional as in novels, television shows, and movies or real as in journalism and historical accounts , are tales of good and evil.
We want the good guys to be rewarded— and we really want to see the bad guys suffer. Arguments about terminology are boring; people can use words however they please. But what I mean by morality—what I am interested in exploring, whatever one calls it— includes a lot more than restrictions on sexual behavior. Here is a simple example of morality :. A car full of teenagers drives slowly past an elderly woman waiting at a bus stop. One of the teenagers leans out the window and slaps the woman, knocking her down.
They drive away laughing. Unless you are a psychopath, you will feel that the teenagers did something wrong. And it is a certain type of wrong.
As a moral violation, it connects to certain emotions and desires. Babies' minds are a wonderful showcase for human nature. Babies are humans with the absolute minimum of cultural influence — they don't have many friends, have never been to school and haven't read any books. They can't even control their own bowels, let alone speak the language, so their minds are as close to innocent as a human mind can get.
The only problem is that the lack of language makes it tricky to gauge their opinions. Normally we ask people to take part in experiments, giving them instructions or asking them to answer questions, both of which require language.
Babies may be cuter to work with, but they are not known for their obedience. What's a curious psychologist to do? Fortunately, you don't necessarily have to speak to reveal your opinions.
Babies will reach for things they want or like, and they will tend to look longer at things that surprise them. Ingenious experiments carried out at Yale University in the US used these measures to look at babies' minds. Their results suggest that even the youngest humans have a sense of right and wrong, and, furthermore, an instinct to prefer good over evil.
How could the experiments tell this? Whether humans are born good or evil has been debated by philosophers for centuries. Maybe the two most famous opposing views on this debate are those of Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. To do this, babies less than a year old were made to watch a puppet show where different coloured shapes acted in ways that were clearly recognisable as morally right or wrong. After the play, the babies were asked which shape they wanted to play with: evil blue square or good yellow triangle.
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