What is morality? Look it up on Wikipedia or most dictionaries, and you’ll get something about whether acts or intentions are right or wrong. But what is right and wrong? Right and wrong for what? The usual answer is right and wrong for values.
But what are values? Look that up, and after glossing over all the definitions related to financial value, you’ll find references to ethical, cultural, absolute, and relative values. Things that we value intrinsically, not because of their utility or for any calculated reason, but simply because we do. Typical examples are fairness, freedom, or loyalty.
But where do these values come from? Are they solely something we learn in society, conditioned responses we learn in early childhood? Or are they innate to some degree?
There is good evidence from moral and evolutionary psychology, as well as primatology, that values arise from a combination of social learning and human instinct. Another way of saying that is, values arise from human instincts, but those instincts often conflict with and contradict each other, and the resolution of those conflicts and contradictions are often prescribed in societal rules and mores.
We have many different instincts. A good number are concerned about our own survival, making sure we have food and shelter, that our basic needs are being met. Many are concerned about insuring these things for our progeny and kin. When I say that values and morality arise from instinct, people often assume that this class of instincts are the only ones I’m referring to.
But we are social animals, and we have pro-social instincts that urge us into collaboration and cooperation with others. This cooperation provides mutual survival advantages for all the participants. It’s an adaptive set of traits that we evolved over millions of years. Some of these traits are shared by our closest primate relatives.
It’s tempting to see these instincts as only enlightened self interest on our part. That we don’t really feel an impulse to be cooperative, to be pro-social, that when we feel an urge to be altruistic or to help someone in pain, we’re only doing it out of enlightened self interest, that we are homo economicus, purely rational self interested actors.
Yes, these instincts do provide a survival advantage. That’s why they evolved. But that is separate and apart from what goes on in our heads. We don’t do a calculation of our own benefit when we’re outraged by the cruel mistreatment of a child, or when we see a small animal suffering. (At least the vast majority of us don’t.)
Now, of course, it’s possible to rationalize explanations for these impulses. We can concoct a self serving explanation for why anyone does just about any act, but it’s unlikely to match what actually happens in the moment. In the moment, people’s reaction tends to be influence by what feels right, by their conscience, which is simply another word for the balance of pro-social instincts and societal learning that they possess.
This is most often illustrated by the classic trolley car dilemma. If you see a train bearing down on five people, but you have the opportunity to throw a switch and send the train on an alternate track where there is only one person in danger, most people, in an apparent utilitarian calculation, say they would throw the switch.
But alter the scenario where you’re on a bridge over the track, and the only way to save the five people is to push a large fat man off of the bridge into the path of the train, which will stop it, and most people won’t do it. Pushing the large fat man feels wrong, and when asked for their reasoning why, for what’s morally different between the two dilemmas, people will concoct a number of reasons, but it boils down to an intuitive sense.
An important detail to understand here is that while most of us have pro-social instincts, the strengths of the different ones vary among different people. This means that what seems obviously self-evidently right to one person may seem may seem obviously self-evidently wrong to another.
This is a powerfully difficult concept to grasp. It is in fact an incomprehensible concept for many people. Still, it’s worth the effort to understand it. Learning to see the world through the eye of others is the beginning of wisdom.
- Reason is a tool of emotion (selfawarepatterns.com)
- Instincts (alanala.wordpress.com)
- Notes and Queries: The Pseudoscience of Freudianism (ericwedwards.wordpress.com)
- Conservative or Liberal? Take This Test (clrforum.org)
- Thank Grandma (brandrepair.typepad.com)
- Tribalism and Medical Ethics (sciencebasedmedicine.org)
- James Fallon and the Myth of the Pro-Social Psychopath (kyoung4.wordpress.com)
- Psychoanalytic Training For Dummies And Beginners (bestdailyentries.blogspot.com)