Morality and the Emerging Field of Moral Psychology

Is there such a thing as a ‘moral instinct’?

In my March 11th column I began an exploration of some of the postulates of the emerging field of moral psychology. I would like to finish those reflections here by offering a more extensive critique of a lengthy article that ran in the New York Times Magazine in January entitled “The Moral Instinct,” authored by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker.

Moral psychology is an emerging field of research that delves into questions that have long captivated the curiosity of a broad array of disciplines in the Arts and Sciences: To what extent do our own bodies influence and determine our moral judgments and behavior? Are there genetic predispositions for everything from altruism to serial killing? How are we to make sense out of the uniquely human endeavor of formulating moral judgments? Can an understanding of neurobiology and genetics shed any light on this?

These are not only valid questions, they are important and fascinating ones.

Steven Pinker, today a dominant voice in this field, suggests in his Times Magazine essay that moral psychology is going to allow us to get at “what morality is.” His essay is an extensive exposé in layman’s terms of one of the fundamental theses of moral psychology, namely, that there is a “distinctive part of our psychology for morality” and when this psychological state is turned on, we begin to moralize. Pinker then notes two hallmarks of this moralizing psychological mindset: first, moral rules invoked in the state of moralization are claimed to be universal; second, persons who transgress those rules are considered punishable.

Now, I would suggest that Pinker and colleagues have not happened upon anything particularly remarkable here. If truth be told, they are simply noting a plainly obvious aspect of human nature: human beings moralize, we make value judgments. Cross-culturally and diachronically, human beings express an understanding of right and wrong behavior which we reward and punish respectively. That’s why I cannot help but agree with Pinker when he affirms:

In fact, there seems to be a Law of Conservation of Moralization, so that as old behaviors are taken out of the moralized column, new ones are added to it. Dozens of things that past generations treated as practical matters are now ethical battlegrounds, including disposable diapers, I.Q. tests, poultry farms, Barbie dolls and research on breast cancer.

Pinker is also absolutely correct when he affirms that most people do not engage in moral reasoning, but in moral rationalization. “They begin with the conclusion, coughed up by an unconscious emotion, and then work backward to a plausible justification.” Indeed, principled and painstaking moral reasoning is today an ever more a refined and atypical art.

But I would suggest that Pinker and colleagues err in educing this paucity of sound moral reasoning as evidence that morality is inherently unreasonable, that its sources are to be found exclusively in non-rational, non-cognitive depths of evolution-driven human psychology.

The apparent gap between (presumably irrational) moral convictions and their corresponding (rationalized) justifications does not constitute evidence for Pinker’s repeatedly un-argued assertion that we indeed have a “moral sense”, that is, a set of built in moral categories which are the product our own psychological evolution. Pinker and colleagues, by the way, are certainly not the first thinkers to suggest that human beings make moral determinations based on the operation of something they call a moral sense. As a putative explanation of morality, moral sense theory dates back at least to the mid 18^th century.

The upshot of Pinker’s essay, however, is that after going to extreme lengths to suggest precisely this—that our experience of morality is ultimately anchored in this “figment of the brain” he calls the moral sense—he will end by denying this very premise or at least severely qualifying it. I’ll get to that in a minute.

Not withstanding my critique, there is actually plenty of interesting material in Pinker’s essay, just as there are plenty of good and valuable insights to expect from the field of moral psychology—much or all of which will be perfectly compatible with (or at least accountable for) from within Aristotelian-Thomistic natural law theory.

For instance, Pinker spends much of the essay speculating on the significance of a set of instinctive moral intuitions which researchers suggest are shared in diverse ethnic and cultural traditions the world over. Pinker observes that such observations appear to lend credence to the theory that humans are hardwired with a “universal moral grammar”. Explaining an analogy from the political philosopher John Rawls, Pinker notes that just as the linguist Noam Chomsky suggested that infants are outfitted with a “universal grammar” enabling them by default to analyze speech by way of built in categories of grammatical structure, so too, an innate universal moral grammar “forces us to analyze human action in terms of its moral structure, with just as little awareness.”

Pinker goes on to explain how those moral structures could consist in such things as the following: the impulse to avoid harming others; the propensity toward altruism and fairness; our inclination to respect authority; our avoidance of physical filth and defilement as well as our avoidance of potentially risky sexual behavior; our willingness to share and sacrifice without expectation of payback.

Some moral psychologists have reduced these to a specific set of categories—namely ‘harm’, ‘fairness’, ‘community’, ‘authority’ and ‘purity’—which they understand to work as fundamental building blocks of our moral experience. These five categories, explains Pinker, “are good candidates for a periodic table of the moral sense not only because they are ubiquitous, but also because they appear to have deep evolutionary roots.” He adds, for good measure—and again without argumentation—that these five moral categories are “a legacy of evolution.”

Now even though, reading between the lines, we discover that Pinker must be quite convinced that these categories are the product of evolution (“figments of our brain”), he nonetheless sustains that “far from debunking morality, the science of the moral sense can advance it, by allowing us to see through the illusions that evolution and culture have saddled us with and to focus on goals we can share and defend.” By this he appears to suggest we should simply learn how to cope with inborn moral sense, quirks and all (such as our taboos against homosexual attraction, and our “yuck” response to the prospect of things like human cloning), leveraging our understanding of both its virtues and defects, in order to cobble together a kind of shared set of moral values and societal prerogatives we can all live with. Indeed, affirms Pinker, we must get around the quirkiness of that built in moral sense because it can potentially “get in the way of doing the right thing.”

Now, that begs a huge question, doesn’t it?

If not in terms of our built in moral sense, then in virtue of what exactly is Pinker proposing that we can know “the right thing” to do? His affirmation can only makes sense—contradicting what would appear to be a core assumption of his article, namely, that the moral sense is all we’ve got—if there is some other moral agency in us with which we can judge, refine, correct, or ignore our built in moral sense.

To be sure, it is entirely plausible that we are endowed with something like a moral sense, with certain built in predispositions toward empathy, altruism and the like, and that we can even discover something like these behaviors in non-human primates. Natural law theory can accommodate this rather easily, and on strikingly similar grounds as those on which Pinker holds his evolutional moral sense suspect: only human reason can function as the immediate criterion for adjudicating the reasonableness of such built in categories and tendencies in every given moral scenario in which they would come into play.

But if that’s the case, then the moral sense, as a figment of our brain, is as fascinating as it is impotent to explain all that Pinker purports it to explain about morality. Indeed, if I understand Pinker correctly at the end of his essay, he is affirming that, when the day is done, moral determinations will be guided by reason, and not by any moral sense at all. So, why, I must ask, didn’t he just say that in the first place?

Rev. Thomas V. Berg, L.C. is Executive Director of the Westchester Institute for Ethics and the Human Person.

Copyright 2008 The Westchester Institute for Ethics and the Human Person.