Introduction
“Can we all get along?” That appeal was made famous on May 1, 1992, by
Rodney King, a black man who had been beaten nearly to death by four Los
Angeles police officers a year earlier. The entire nation had seen a videotape
of the beating, so when a jury failed to convict the officers, their acquittal
triggered widespread outrage and six days of rioting in Los Angeles.
Fifty-three people were killed and more than seven thousand buildings were
torched. Much of the mayhem was carried live; news cameras tracked the action
from helicopters circling overhead. After a particularly horrific act of
violence against a white truck driver, King was moved to make his appeal for
peace.
King’s appeal is now so overused that it has become
cultural kitsch, a catchphrase1 more often said for laughs than
as a serious plea for mutual understanding. I therefore hesitated to use King’s
words as the opening line of this book, but I decided to go ahead, for two
reasons. The first is because most Americans nowadays are asking King’s
question not about race relations but about political relations and the
collapse of cooperation across party lines. Many Americans feel as though the
nightly news from Washington is being sent to us from helicopters circling over
the city, delivering dispatches from the war zone.
The second reason I decided to open this book with
an overused phrase is because King followed it up with something lovely,
something rarely quoted. As he stumbled through his television interview,
fighting back tears and often repeating himself, he found these words: “Please,
we can get along here. We all can get along. I mean, we’re all stuck here for a
while. Let’s try to work it out.”
This book is about why it’s so hard for us to get
along. We are indeed all stuck here for a while, so let’s at least do what we
can to understand why we are so easily divided into hostile groups, each one
certain of its righteousness.
People who devote their lives to studying something often come to
believe that the object of their fascination is the key to understanding
everything. Books have been published in recent years on the transformative
role in human history played by cooking, mothering, war … even salt. This is
one of those books. I study moral psychology, and I’m going to make the case
that morality is the extraordinary human capacity that made civilization
possible. I don’t mean to imply that cooking, mothering, war, and salt were not
also necessary, but in this book I’m going to take you on a tour of human
nature and history from the perspective of moral psychology.
By the end of the tour, I hope to have given you a
new way to think about two of the most important, vexing, and divisive topics
in human life: politics and religion. Etiquette books tell us not to discuss
these topics in polite company, but I say go ahead. Politics and religion are
both expressions of our underlying moral psychology, and an understanding of
that psychology can help to bring people together. My goal in this book is to drain
some of the heat, anger, and divisiveness out of these topics and replace them
with awe, wonder, and curiosity. We are downright lucky that we evolved this
complex moral psychology that allowed our species to burst out of the forests
and savannas and into the delights, comforts, and extraordinary peacefulness of
modern societies in just a few thousand years.2 My hope is that this book will
make conversations about morality, politics, and religion more common, more
civil, and more fun, even in mixed company. My hope is that it will help us to
get
I could have titled this book The
Moral Mind to convey the sense that the human mind is designed to “do”
morality, just as it’s designed to do language, sexuality, music, and many
other things described in popular books reporting the latest scientific
findings. But I chose the title The
Righteous Mind to convey the sense that human nature is not just
intrinsically moral, it’s also intrinsically moralistic, critical, and
judgmental.
The word righteous
comes from the old Norse word rettviss
and the old English word rihtwis,
both of which mean “just, upright, virtuous.”3 This meaning has been carried
into the modern English w o r d s righteous
and righteousness, although nowadays
those words have strong religious connotations because they are usually used to
translate the Hebrew word tzedek. Tzedek
is a common word in the Hebrew Bible, often used to describe people who act in
accordance with God’s wishes, but it is also an attribute of God and of God’s
judgment of people (which is often harsh but always thought to be just).
The linkage of righteousness and judgmentalism is
captured in some modern definitions of righteous,
such as “arising from an outraged sense of justice, morality, or fair play.” 4 The link also appears in the term self-righteous,
which means “convinced of one’s own righteousness, especially in contrast with
the actions and beliefs of others; narrowly moralistic and intolerant.”5 I want to show you that an
obsession with righteousness (leading inevitably to self-righteousness) is the
normal human condition. It is a feature of our evolutionary design, not a bug
or error that crept into minds that would otherwise be objective and rational.6
Our righteous minds made it possible for human
beings—but no other animals—to produce large cooperative groups, tribes, and
nations without the glue of kinship. But at the same time, our righteous minds
guarantee that our cooperative groups will always be cursed by moralistic
strife. Some degree of conflict among groups may even be necessary for the
health and development of any society. When I was a teenager I wished for world
peace, but now I yearn for a world in which competing ideologies are kept in
balance, systems of accountability keep us all from getting away with too much,
and fewer people believe that righteous ends justify violent means. Not a very
romantic wish, but one that we might actually achieve.
WHAT LIES
AHEAD
This book has three parts, which you can think of
as three separate books—except that each one depends on the one before it. Each
part presents one major principle of moral psychology.
Part I is about the first
principle: Intuitions come
first, strategic reasoning second.7 Moral intuitions arise
automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a
chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later
reasoning. If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out
the truth, you’ll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and
illogical people become when they disagree with you. But if you think about
moral reasoning as a skill we humans evolved to further our social agendas—to
justify our own actions and to defend the teams we belong to—then things will
make a lot more sense. Keep your eye on the intuitions, and don’t take people’s
moral arguments at face value. They’re mostly post hoc constructions made up on
the fly, crafted to advance one or more strategic objectives.
The central metaphor of these four chapters is that
the mind is divided, like a rider on an
elephant, and the rider’s job is to
serve the elephant . The rider is our conscious reasoning—the stream of words and images of which we are fully
aware. The elephant is the other 99 percent of mental processes—the ones that
occur outside of awareness but that actually govern most of our behavior.8 I developed this metaphor in my
last book, The Happiness Hypothesis,
where I described how the rider and elephant work together, sometimes poorly,
as we stumble through life in search of meaning and connection. In this book I’ll
use the metaphor to solve puzzles such as why it seems like everyone (else) is
a hypocrite9 and why political partisans are so willing to believe outrageous lies
and conspiracy theories. I’ll also use the metaphor to show you how you can
better persuade people who seem unresponsive to reason.
Part II is about the second
principle of moral psychology, which is that there’s more to morality than harm and fairness. The central
metaphor of these four chapters is that
the righteous mind is like a tongue with six taste receptors. Secular
Western moralities are like cuisines that try to activate just one or two of these receptors—either
concerns about harm and suffering, or concerns about fairness and injustice.
But people have so many other powerful moral intuitions, such as those related
to liberty, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. I’ll explain where these six
taste receptors come from, how they form the basis of the world’s many moral
cuisines, and why politicians on the right have a built-in advantage when it
comes to cooking meals that voters like.
Part III is about the third
principle: Morality binds and blinds. The central metaphor of these four chapters is that human beings are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee . Human nature
was produced by natural selection working at two levels simultaneously.
Individuals compete with individuals within every group, and we are the
descendants of primates who excelled at that competition. This gives us the
ugly side of our nature, the one that is usually featured in books about our
evolutionary origins. We are indeed selfish hypocrites so skilled at putting on
a show of virtue that we fool even ourselves.
But human nature was also shaped as groups competed
with other groups. As Darwin said long ago, the most cohesive and cooperative
groups generally beat the groups of selfish individualists. Darwin’s ideas
about group selection fell out of favor in the 1960s, but recent discoveries
are putting his ideas back into play, and the implications are profound. We’re
not always selfish hypocrites. We also have the ability, under special
circumstances, to shut down our petty selves and become like cells in a larger
body, or like bees in a hive, working for the good of the group. These
experiences are
often among the most cherished of
our lives, although our hivishness can blind us to other moral concerns. Our
bee-like nature facilitates altruism, heroism, war, and genocide.
Once you
see our righteous minds as primate minds with a hivish overlay, you get a whole
new perspective on morality, politics, and religion. I’ll show that our “higher
nature” allows us to be profoundly altruistic, but that altruism is mostly
aimed at members of our own groups. I’ll show that religion is (probably) an
evolutionary adaptation for binding groups together and helping them to create
communities with a shared morality. It is not a virus or a parasite, as some
scientists (the “New Atheists”) have argued in recent years. And I’ll use this
perspective to explain why some people are conservative, others are liberal (or
progressive), and still others become libertarians. People bind themselves into
political teams that share moral narratives. Once they accept a particular narrative,
they become blind to alternative moral worlds.
(A note on terminology: In the United States, the
word liberal refers to progressive or
left-wing politics, and I will use the word in this sense. But in Europe and
elsewhere, the word liberal is truer
to its original meaning—valuing liberty above all else, including in economic
activities. When Europeans use the word liberal,
they often mean something more like the American term libertarian, which cannot be placed easily on the left-right
spectrum.10 Readers from outside the United States may want to swap in the words progressive or left-wing whenever I say liberal.)
In the coming chapters I’ll draw on the latest research in neuroscience,
genetics, social psychology, and evolutionary modeling, but the take-home
message of the book is ancient. It is the realization that we are all
self-righteous hypocrites:
Why do
you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own
eye?
… You
hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see
clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye. (MATTHEW 7:3–5)
Enlightenment (or wisdom, if you prefer) requires
us all to take the logs out of our own eyes and then escape from our ceaseless,
petty, and divisive moralism. As the eighth-century Chinese Zen master Sen-ts’an
wrote:
The
Perfect Way is only difficult
for those
who pick and choose;
Do not
like, do not dislike;
all will
then be clear.
Make a
hairbreadth difference,
and
Heaven and Earth are set apart;
If you
want the truth to stand clear before you,
never be
for or against.
The
struggle between “for” and “against”
is the mind’s worst disease.11
I’m not saying we should live our lives like Sen-ts’an.
In fact, I believe that a world without moralism, gossip, and judgment would
quickly decay into chaos. But if we want to understand
ourselves, our divisions, our limits, and our potentials, we need to step back,
drop the moralism,
Let us
now examine the psychology of this struggle between “for” and “against.” It is
a struggle that plays out in each of our righteous minds, and among all of our
righteous groups.
Intuitions
Come First,
Strategic
Reasoning Second
Central Metaphor
The mind
is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the
elephant.
Where Does Morality Come From?
I’m going
to tell you a brief story. Pause after you read 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.”
OK, 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.
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. 1 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 Baron, a professor who studies how people think and make
decisions. With my (minimal) background in philosophy, we had a good discussion
about ethics. Baron 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. Baron 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).2
But if you believe that moral
knowledge comes from nurture, then you are an empiricist.3 You believe that children are more or less blank slates at birth (as
John Locke said).4 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 mollusks and insects in his native
Switzerland. He was fascinated by the stages that animals went through as they
transformed themselves from, say, caterpillars to butterflies. Later, when his
attention turned to children, he brought with him this interest in stages of
development. Piaget wanted to know how the extraordinary sophistication of
adult thinking (a cognitive butterfly) emerges from the limited abilities of
young children (lowly caterpillars).
Piaget focused on the kinds of
errors kids make. For example, he’d put water into two identical drinking
glasses and ask kids to tell him if the glasses held the same amount of water.
(Yes.) Then he’d pour the contents of one of the glasses into a tall skinny
glass and ask the child to compare the new glass to the one that had not been
touched. Kids younger than six or seven usually say that the tall skinny glass
now holds more water, because the level is higher. They don’t understand that
the total volume of water is conserved when it moves from glass to glass. He
also found that it’s pointless for
adults to explain the conservation of volume to kids. The kids won’t get
it until they reach an age (and cognitive stage) when their minds are ready for
it. And when they are ready, they’ll figure it out for themselves just by
playing with cups of water.
In other
words, the understanding of the conservation of volume wasn’t innate, and it
wasn’t learned from adults. Kids figure
it out for themselves, but only when their minds are ready and they are given the right kinds of
experiences.
Piaget applied this cognitive-developmental
approach to the study of children’s moral thinking as well.5 He got down on his hands and
knees to play marbles with children, and sometimes he deliberately broke rules
and played dumb. The children then responded to his mistakes, and in so doing,
they revealed their growing ability to respect rules, change rules, take turns,
and resolve disputes. This growing knowledge came in orderly stages, as
children’s cognitive abilities matured.
Piaget argued that children’s understanding of
morality is like their understanding of those water glasses: we can’t say that
it is innate, and we can’t say that kids learn it directly from adults.6 It is, rather, self-constructed as kids play with other
kids. Taking turns in a game is like pouring water back and forth between
glasses. No matter how often you do it with three-year-olds, they’re just not
ready to get the concept of fairness,7 any more than they can
understand the conservation of volume. But once they’ve reached the age of five
or six, then playing games, having arguments, and working things out together
will help them learn about fairness far more effectively than any sermon from
adults.
This is the essence of psychological rationalism:
We grow into our rationality as caterpillars grow into butterflies. If the
caterpillar eats enough leaves, it will (eventually) grow wings. And if the
child gets enough experiences of turn taking, sharing, and playground justice,
it will (eventually) become a moral creature, able to use its rational
capacities to solve ever harder problems. Rationality is our nature, and good
moral reasoning is the end point of development.
Rationalism has a long and complex history in
philosophy. In this book I’ll use the word rationalist
to describe anyone who believes that reasoning is the most important and reliable
way to obtain moral knowledge.8
Piaget’s insights were extended by Lawrence
Kohlberg, who revolutionized the study of morality in the 1960s with two key
innovations.9 First, he developed a way to quantify Piaget’s observation that
children’s moral reasoning changed over time. He created a set of moral
dilemmas that he presented to children of various ages, and he recorded and
coded their responses. For example, should a man named Heinz break into a
drugstore to steal a drug that would save his dying wife? Should a girl named
Louise reveal to her mother that her younger sister had lied to the mother? It
didn’t much matter whether the child said yes or no; what mattered were the reasons children gave when they tried to
explain their answers.
Kohlberg found
a six-stage progression in children’s reasoning about the social world, and this progression matched up well with the stages
Piaget had found in children’s reasoning about the physical world. Young children judged right and wrong by very
superficial features, such as whether a
person was punished for an action. (If an adult punished the act, then the act
must have been wrong.) Kohlberg called the first two stages the “pre-conventional”
level of moral judgment, and they correspond to the Piagetian stage at which
kids judge the physical world by superficial features (if a glass is taller,
then it has more water in it).
But during elementary school, most children move on
to the two “conventional” stages, becoming adept at understanding and even
manipulating rules and social conventions. This is the age of petty
legalism that most of us who grew up with siblings remember well (“I’m
not hitting you. I’m using your hand to hit you. Stop hitting yourself!”). Kids
at this stage generally care a lot about conformity, and they have great
respect for authority—in word, if not always in deed. They rarely question the
legitimacy of authority, even as they learn to maneuver within and around the
constraints that adults impose on them.
After puberty, right when Piaget said that children
become capable of abstract thought, Kohlberg found that some children begin to
think for themselves about the nature of authority, the meaning of justice, and
the reasons behind rules and laws. In the two “post-conventional” stages, adolescents
still value honesty and respect rules and laws, but now they sometimes justify
dishonesty or law-breaking in pursuit of still higher goods, particularly
justice. Kohlberg painted an inspiring rationalist image of children as “moral
philosophers” trying to work out coherent ethical systems for themselves.10 In the post-conventional stages,
they finally get good at it. Kohlberg’s dilemmas were a tool for measuring
these dramatic advances in moral reasoning.
Mark Twain once said that “to a man with a hammer,
everything looks like a nail.” Once Kohlberg developed his moral dilemmas and
his scoring techniques, the psychological community had a new hammer, and a
thousand graduate students used it to pound out dissertations on moral
reasoning. But there’s a deeper reason so many young psychologists began to
study morality from a rationalist perspective, and this was Kohlberg’s second
great innovation: he used his research to build a scientific justification for
a secular liberal moral order.
Kohlberg’s most influential finding was that the
most morally advanced kids (according to his scoring technique) were those who
had frequent opportunities for role taking—for putting themselves into another
person’s shoes and looking at a problem from that person’s perspective.
Egalitarian relationships (such as with peers) invite role taking, but
hierarchical relationships (such as with teachers and parents) do not. It’s
really hard for a child to see things from the teacher’s point of view, because
the child has never been a teacher. Piaget and Kohlberg both thought that
parents and other authorities were obstacles
to moral development. If you want your kids to learn about the physical world,
let them play with cups and water; don’t lecture them about the conservation of
volume. And if you want your kids to learn about the social world, let them
play with other kids and resolve disputes; don’t lecture them about the Ten
Commandments. And, for heaven’s sake, don’t force them to obey God or their
teachers or you. That will only freeze them at the conventional level.
Kohlberg’s timing was perfect.
Just as the first wave of baby boomers was entering graduate school, he
transformed moral psychology into a boomer-friendly ode to justice, and he gave
them a tool to measure children’s progress toward the liberal ideal. For the
next twenty-five years, from the 1970s through the 1990s, moral psychologists
mostly just interviewed young people about moral dilemmas and analyzed their
justifications.11 Most of this work was not politically motivated—it was careful and
honest scientific research. But by using a framework that predefined morality
as justice while denigrating authority, hierarchy, and tradition, it was
inevitable that the research would support worldviews that were secular,
questioning, and egalitarian.
If you force kids to explain complex notions, such as how to balance
competing concerns about rights and justice, you’re guaranteed to find age
trends because kids get so much more articulate with each passing year. But if
you are searching for the first appearance of a moral concept, then you’d
better find a technique that doesn’t require much verbal skill. Kohlberg’s
former student Elliot Turiel developed such a technique. His innovation was to
tell children short stories about other kids who break rules and then give them
a series of simple yes-or-no probe questions. For example, you tell a story
about a child who goes to school wearing regular clothes, even though his
school requires students to wear a uniform. You start by getting an overall
judgment: “Is that OK, what the boy did?” Most kids say no. You ask if there’s
a rule about what to wear. (“Yes.”) Then you probe to find out what kind of
rule it is: “What if the teacher said it was OK for the boy to wear his regular
clothes, then would it be OK?” and “What if this happened in another school,
where they don’t have any rules about uniforms, then would it be OK?”
Turiel discovered that children as young as five
usually say that the boy was wrong to break the rule, but that it would be OK
if the teacher gave permission or if it happened in another school where there
was no such rule. Children recognize that rules about clothing, food, and many
other aspects of life are social conventions,
which are arbitrary and changeable to some extent.12
But if you ask kids about actions that hurt other
people, such as a girl who pushes a boy off a swing because she wants to use
it, you get a very different set of responses. Nearly all kids say that the
girl was wrong and that she’d be wrong even if the teacher said it was OK, and
even if this happened in another school where there were no rules about pushing
kids off swings. Children recognize that rules that prevent harm are moral rules, which Turiel defined as
rules related to “justice, rights, and welfare pertaining to how people ought
to relate to each other.”13
In other words, young children don’t treat all
rules the same, as Piaget and Kohlberg had supposed. Kids can’t talk like moral
philosophers, but they are busy sorting social information in a sophisticated
way. They seem to grasp early on that rules that prevent harm are special,
important, unalterable, and universal. And this realization, Turiel said, was
the foundation of all moral development. Children construct their moral
understanding on the bedrock of the absolute moral truth that harm is wrong. Specific rules may vary
across cultures, but in all of the cultures Turiel examined, children still
made a distinction between moral rules and conventional rules.14
Turiel’s account of moral
development differed in many ways from Kohlberg’s, but the political
implications were similar: morality is about treating individuals well. It’s about harm and fairness (not
loyalty, respect, duty, piety, patriotism, or tradition). Hierarchy and
authority are generally bad things (so it’s best to let kids figure things out
for themselves). Schools and families should therefore embody progressive
principles of equality and autonomy (not authoritarian principles that enable
elders to train and constrain children).
Kohlberg and Turiel had pretty much defined the field of moral
psychology by the time I sat in Jon Baron’s office and decided to study
morality. 15 The field I entered was vibrant and growing, yet something about it
felt wrong to me. It wasn’t the politics—I was very liberal back then,
twenty-four years old and full of indignation at Ronald Reagan and conservative
groups such as the righteously named Moral Majority. No, the problem was that
the things I was reading were so … dry. I had grown up with two sisters, close
in age to me. We fought every day, using every dirty rhetorical trick we could
think of. Morality was such a passionate affair in my family, yet the articles
I was reading were all about reasoning and cognitive structures and domains of
knowledge. It just seemed too cerebral. There was hardly any mention of
emotion.
As a first-year graduate student, I didn’t have the
confidence to trust my instincts, so I forced myself to continue reading. But
then, in my second year, I took a course on cultural psychology and was
captivated. The course was taught by a brilliant anthropologist, Alan Fiske,
who had spent many years in West Africa studying the psychological foundations
of social relationships. 16 Fiske asked us all to read
several ethnographies (book-length reports of an anthropologist’s fieldwork),
each of which focused on a different topic, such as kinship, sexuality, or
music. But no matter the topic, morality turned out to be a central theme.
I read a book on witchcraft among the Azande of
Sudan.17 It turns out that witchcraft beliefs arise in surprisingly similar
forms in many parts of the world, which suggests either that there really are
witches or (more likely) that there’s something about human minds that often
generates this cultural institution. The Azande believed that witches were just
as likely to be men as women, and the fear of being called a witch made the
Azande careful not to make their neighbors angry or envious. That was my first
hint that groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to
order their societies.18
I read a book about the Ilongot, a tribe in the
Philippines whose young men gained honor by cutting off people’s heads.19 Some of these beheadings were
revenge killings, which offered Western readers a motive they could understand.
But many of these murders were committed against strangers who were not
involved in any kind of feud with the killer. The author explained these most
puzzling killings as ways that small groups of men channeled resentments and
frictions within the group into a group-strengthening “hunting party,” capped
off by a long night of communal celebratory singing. This was my first hint
that morality often involves tension within
the group linked to competition between
different groups.
These
ethnographies were fascinating, often beautifully written, and intuitively
graspable despite the strangeness of their content. Reading each book was like
spending a week in a new country: confusing at first, but gradually you tune
up, finding yourself better able to guess what’s going to happen next. And as
with all foreign travel, you learn as much about where you’re from as where you’re
visiting. I began to see the United States and Western Europe as extraordinary
historical exceptions—new societies that had found a way to strip down and thin
out the thick, all-encompassing moral orders that the anthropologists wrote
about.
Nowhere
was this thinning more apparent than in our lack of rules about what the
anthropologists call “purity” and “pollution.” Contrast us with the Hua of New
Guinea, who have developed elaborate networks of food taboos that govern what
men and women may eat. In order for their boys
to become men, they have to avoid foods that in any way resemble
vaginas, including anything that is red, wet, slimy, comes from a hole, or has
hair. It sounds at first like arbitrary superstition mixed with the predictable
sexism of a patriarchal society. Turiel would call these rules social
conventions, because the Hua don’t believe that men in other tribes have to
follow these rules. But the Hua certainly seemed to think of their food rules
as moral rules. They talked about them constantly, judged each other by their
food habits, and governed their lives, duties, and relationships by what the
anthropologist Anna Meigs called “a religion of the body.”20
But it’s not just hunter-gatherers in rain forests
who believe that bodily practices can be moral practices. When I read the
Hebrew Bible, I was shocked to discover how much of the book—one of the sources
of Western morality—was taken up with rules about food, menstruation, sex,
skin, and the handling of corpses. Some of these rules were clear attempts to
avoid disease, such as the long sections of Leviticus on leprosy. But many of
the rules seemed to follow a more emotional logic about avoiding disgust. For
example, the Bible prohibits Jews from eating or even touching “the swarming
things that swarm upon the earth” (and just think how much more disgusting a
swarm of mice is than a single mouse).21 Other rules seemed to follow a
conceptual logic involving keeping categories pure or not mixing things
together (such as clothing made from two different fibers).22
So what’s going on here? If Turiel was right that
morality is really about harm, then why do most non-Western cultures moralize
so many practices that seem to have nothing to do with harm? Why do many
Christians and Jews believe that “cleanliness is next to godliness”?23 And why do so many Westerners,
even secular ones, continue to see choices about food and sex as being heavily
loaded with moral significance? Liberals sometimes say that religious
conservatives are sexual prudes for whom anything other than
missionary-position intercourse within marriage is a sin. But conservatives can
just as well make fun of liberal struggles to choose a balanced breakfast—balanced
among moral concerns about free-range eggs, fair-trade coffee, naturalness, and
a variety of toxins, some of which (such as genetically modified corn and
soybeans) pose a greater threat spiritually than biologically. Even if Turiel
was right that children lock onto harmfulness as a method for identifying
immoral actions, I couldn’t see how kids in the West—let alone among the
Azande, the Ilongot, and the Hua— could have come to all this purity and
pollution stuff on their own. There must be more to moral development than kids
constructing rules as they take the perspectives of other people and feel their
pain. There must be something beyond rationalism.
THE GREAT DEBATE
When anthropologists wrote about morality, it was as though they spoke a
different language from the psychologists I had been reading. The Rosetta stone
that helped me translate between the two fields was a paper that had just been
published by Fiske’s former advisor, Richard Shweder, at the University of
Chicago.24 Shweder is a psychological anthropologist who had lived and worked in
Orissa, a state on the east coast of India. He had found large differences in
how Oriyans (residents of Orissa) and Americans thought about personality and
individuality, and these differences led to corresponding differences in how
they thought about morality. Shweder quoted the anthropologist Clifford Geertz
on how unusual Westerners are in thinking about people as discrete individuals:
The Western conception of the person as a bounded,
unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic
center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive
whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its
social and natural background, is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a
rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures.25
Shweder offered a simple idea to explain why the
self differs so much across cultures: all societies must resolve a small set of
questions about how to order society, the most important being how to balance
the needs of individuals and groups. There seem to be just two primary ways of
answering this question. Most societies have chosen the sociocentric answer, placing the needs of groups and institutions
first, and subordinating the needs of individuals. In contrast, the individualistic answer places
individuals at the center and makes society a servant of the individual.26 The sociocentric answer
dominated most of the ancient world, but the individualistic answer became a
powerful rival during the Enlightenment. The individualistic answer largely
vanquished the sociocentric approach in the twentieth century as individual
rights expanded rapidly, consumer culture spread, and the Western world reacted
with horror to the evils perpetrated by the ultrasociocentric fascist and communist
empires. (European nations with strong social safety nets are not sociocentric
on this definition. They just do a very good job of protecting individuals from the vicissitudes of
life.)
Shweder thought that the theories of Kohlberg and
Turiel were produced by and for people from individualistic cultures. He
doubted that those theories would apply in Orissa, where morality was
sociocentric, selves were interdependent, and no bright line separated moral
rules (preventing harm) from social conventions (regulating behaviors not
linked directly to harm). To test his ideas, he and two collaborators came up
with thirty-nine very short stories in which someone does something that would
violate a rule either in the United States or in Orissa. The researchers then
interviewed 180 children (ranging in age from five to thirteen) and 60 adults
who lived in Hyde Park (the neighborhood surrounding the University of Chicago)
about these stories. They also interviewed a matched sample of Brahmin children
and adults in the town of Bhubaneswar (an ancient pilgrimage site in Orissa),27 and 120 people from low (“untouchable”)
castes. Altogether it was an enormous undertaking—six hundred long interviews
in two very different cities.
The interview used Turiel’s method, more or less,
but the scenarios covered many more behaviors than Turiel had ever asked about.
As you can see in the top third of figure 1.1, people
in some of the stories obviously hurt other people or treated them unfairly,
and subjects (the people being interviewed) in both countries condemned these
actions by saying that they were wrong, unalterably
wrong, and universally wrong. But the Indians would not condemn other
cases that seemed (to Americans) just as clearly to involve harm and unfairness
(see middle third).
Most of
the thirty-nine stories portrayed no harm or unfairness, at least none that
could have been obvious to a five-year-old child, and nearly all Americans said
that these actions were permissible (see the bottom third of figure 1.1). If
Indians said that these actions were wrong, then Turiel would predict that they
were condemning the actions merely as violations of social conventions. Yet
most of the Indian subjects—even the five-year-old children—said that these
actions were wrong, universally wrong, and unalterably wrong. Indian practices
related to food, sex, clothing, and gender relations were almost always judged
to be moral issues, not social conventions, and there were few differences between
the adults and children within each city. In other words, Shweder found almost
no trace of social conventional thinking in the sociocentric culture of Orissa,
where, as he put it, “the social order is a moral order.” Morality was much
broader and thicker in Orissa; almost any practice could be loaded up with
moral force. And if that was true, then Turiel’s theory became less plausible.
Children were not figuring out morality for themselves, based on the bedrock
certainty that harm is bad.
Actions
that Indians and Americans agreed were wrong:
• While
walking, a man saw a dog sleeping on the road. He walked up to it and kicked
it.
• A father
said to his son, “If you do well on the exam, I will buy you a pen.” The son
did well on the exam, but the father did not give him anything.
Actions
that Americans said were wrong but Indians said were acceptable:
•
A young married woman went alone
to see a movie without informing her husband. When she returned home her
husband said, “If you do it again, I will beat you black and blue.” She did it
again; he beat her black and blue. (Judge the husband.)
• A man had
a married son and a married daughter. After his death his son claimed most of
the property. His daughter got little. (Judge the son.)
Actions
that Indians said were wrong but Americans said were acceptable:
• In a
family, a twenty-five-year-old son addresses his father by his first name.
• A woman
cooked rice and wanted to eat with her husband and his elder brother. Then she
ate with them. (Judge the woman.)
• A widow
in your community eats fish two or three times a week.
• After
defecation a woman did not change her clothes before cooking.
FIGURE 1.1. Some of
the thirty-nine stories used in Shweder, Mahapatra, and Miller 1987. Even in
Chicago, Shweder found relatively little evidence of social-conventional
thinking. There
were plenty of stories that
contained no obvious harm or injustice, such as a widow eating fish, and
Americans predictably said that those cases were fine. But more
important, they didn’t see these behaviors as social conventions that could be
changed by popular consent. They believed that widows should be able to eat
whatever they darn well please, and if there’s some other country where people
try to limit widows’ freedoms, well, they’re wrong to do so. Even in the United
States the social order is a moral order, but it’s an individualistic order
built up around the protection of individuals and their freedom. The
distinction between morals and mere conventions is not a tool that children everywhere
use to self-construct their moral knowledge. Rather, the distinction turns out
to be a cultural artifact, a necessary by-product of the individualistic answer
to the question of how individuals and groups relate. When you put individuals
first, before society, then any rule or social practice that limits personal
freedom can be questioned. If it doesn’t protect somebody from harm, then it
can’t be morally justified. It’s just a social convention.
Shweder’s study was a major attack on the whole rationalist
approach, and Turiel didn’t take it lying down. He wrote a long rebuttal essay
pointing out that many of Shweder’s thirty-nine stories were trick questions:
they had very different meanings in India and America.28 For example, Hindus in Orissa
believe that fish is a “hot” food that will stimulate a person’s sexual
appetite. If a widow eats hot foods, she is more likely to have sex with
someone, which would offend the spirit of her dead husband and prevent her from
reincarnating at a higher level. Turiel argued that once you take into account
Indian “informational assumptions” about the way the world works, you see that
most of Shweder’s thirty-nine stories really were moral violations, harming victims in ways that Americans could
not see. So Shweder’s study didn’t contradict Turiel’s claims; it might even
support them, if we could find out for sure whether Shweder’s Indian subjects
saw harm in the stories.
When I read the Shweder and Turiel essays, I had two strong reactions.
The first was an intellectual agreement with Turiel’s defense. Shweder had used
“trick” questions not to be devious but to demonstrate that rules about food,
clothing, ways of addressing people, and other seemingly conventional matters
could all get woven into a thick moral web. Nonetheless, I agreed with Turiel
that Shweder’s study was missing an important experimental control: he didn’t
ask his subjects about harm. If Shweder wanted to show that morality extended
beyond harm in Orissa, he had to show that people were willing to morally
condemn actions that they themselves
stated were harmless.
My second
reaction was a gut feeling that Shweder was ultimately right. His explanation
of sociocentric morality fit so perfectly with the ethnographies I had read in
Fiske’s class. His emphasis on the moral emotions was so satisfying after
reading all that cerebral cognitive-developmental work. I thought that if
somebody ran the right study—one that controlled for perceptions of harm—
Shweder’s claims about cultural differences would survive the test. I spent the
next semester figuring out how to become that somebody.
I started writing very short stories about people
who do offensive things, but do them in such a way that nobody is harmed. I
called these stories “harmless taboo violations,” and you read two of them at
the start of this chapter (about dog-eating and chicken- … eating). I made up
dozens of these stories but quickly found that the ones that worked best fell
into two categories: disgust and disrespect. If you want to give people a quick
flash of revulsion but deprive them of any victim they can use to justify moral
condemnation, ask them about people who do disgusting or disrespectful things,
but make sure the actions are done in private so that nobody else is offended.
For example, one of my disrespect stories was: “A woman is cleaning out her
closet, and she finds her old American flag. She doesn’t want the flag anymore,
so she cuts it up into pieces and uses the rags to clean her bathroom.”
My idea was to give adults and children stories
that pitted gut feelings about important cultural norms against reasoning about
harmlessness, and then see which force was stronger. Turiel’s rationalism
predicted that reasoning about harm is the basis of moral judgment, so even
though people might say it’s wrong to eat your dog, they would have to treat
the act as a violation of a social convention. (We don’t eat our dogs, but hey, if people in another country want
to eat their ex-pets rather than bury them, who are we to criticize?) Shweder’s
theory, on the other hand, said that Turiel’s predictions should hold among
members of individualistic secular societies but not elsewhere. I now had a
study designed. I just had to find the elsewhere.
I spoke
Spanish fairly well, so when I learned that a major conference of Latin
American psychologists was to be held in Buenos Aires in July 1989, I bought a
plane ticket. I had no contacts and no idea how to start an international
research collaboration, so I just went to every talk that had anything to do
with morality. I was chagrined to discover that psychology in Latin America was
not very scientific. It was heavily theoretical, and much of that theory was
Marxist, focused on oppression, colonialism, and power. I was beginning to
despair when I chanced upon a session run by some Brazilian psychologists who
were using Kohlbergian methods to study moral development. I spoke afterward to
the chair of the session, Angela Biaggio, and her graduate student Silvia
Koller. Even though they both liked Kohlberg’s approach, they were interested
in hearing about alternatives. Biaggio invited me to visit them after the
conference at their university in Porto Alegre, the capital of the southernmost
state in Brazil.
Southern
Brazil is the most European part of the country, settled largely by Portuguese,
German,
and Italian immigrants in the nineteenth century. With its modern
architecture and middle-class prosperity, Porto Alegre didn’t look anything
like the Latin America of my imagination, so at first I was disappointed. I
wanted my cross-cultural study to involve someplace exotic, like Orissa. But
Silvia Koller was a wonderful collaborator, and she had two great ideas about
how to increase our cultural diversity. First, she suggested we run the study
across social class. The divide between rich and poor is so vast in Brazil that
it’s as though people live in different countries. We decided to interview
adults and children from the educated middle class, and also from the lower
class—adults who worked as servants for wealthy people (and who rarely had more
than an eighth-grade education) and children from a public school in the
neighborhood where many of the servants lived. Second, Silvia had a friend who
had just been hired as a professor in Recife, a city in the northeastern tip of
the country, a region that is culturally very different from Porto Alegre.
Silvia arranged for me to visit her friend, Graça Dias, the following month.
Silvia
and I worked for two weeks with a team of undergraduate students, translating
the harmless taboo stories into Portuguese, selecting the best ones, refining
the probe questions, and testing our interview script to make sure that
everything was understandable, even by the least educated subjects, some of
whom were illiterate. Then I went off to Recife, where Graça and I trained a
team of students to conduct interviews in exactly the way they were being done
in Porto Alegre. In Recife I finally felt like I was working in an exotic
tropical locale, with Brazilian music wafting through the streets and ripe
mangoes falling from the trees. More important, the people of northeast Brazil
are mostly of mixed ancestry (African and European), and the region is poorer
and much less industrialized than Porto Alegre.
When I returned to Philadelphia, I trained my own
team of interviewers and supervised the data collection for the four groups of
subjects in Philadelphia. The design of the study was therefore what we call “three
by two by two,” meaning that we had three cities, and in each city we had two
levels of social class (high and low), and within each social class we had two
age groups: children (ages ten to twelve) and adults (ages eighteen to
twenty-eight). That made for twelve groups in all, with thirty people in each group,
for a total of 360 interviews. This large number of subjects allowed me to run
statistical tests to examine the independent effects of city, social class, and
age. I predicted that Philadelphia would be the most individualistic of the
three cities (and therefore the most Turiel-like) and Recife would be the most
sociocentric (and therefore more like Orissa in its judgments).
The
results were as clear as could be in support of Shweder. First, all four of my
Philadelphia groups confirmed Turiel’s finding that Americans make a big
distinction between moral and conventional violations. I used two stories taken
directly from Turiel’s research: a girl pushes a boy off a swing (that’s a
clear moral violation) and a boy refuses to wear a school uniform (that’s a
conventional violation). This validated my methods. It meant that any
differences I found on the harmless taboo stories could not be attributed to
some quirk about the way I phrased the probe questions or trained my
interviewers. The upper-class Brazilians looked just like the Americans on
these stories. But the working-class Brazilian kids usually thought that it was
wrong, and universally wrong, to break the social convention and not wear the
uniform. In Recife in particular, the working-class kids judged the uniform
rebel in exactly the same way they judged the swing-pusher. This pattern
supported Shweder: the size of the moral-conventional distinction varied across
cultural groups.
The second thing I found was that people responded
to the harmless taboo stories just as Shweder had predicted: the upper-class
Philadelphians judged them to be violations of social conventions, and the
lower-class Recifeans judged them to be moral violations. There were separate
significant effects
of city (Porto Alegreans moralized more than Philadelphians, and
Recifeans moralized more than Porto Alegreans), of social class (lower-class
groups moralized more than upper-class groups), and of age (children moralized
more than adults). Unexpectedly, the effect of social class was much larger
than the effect of city. In other words, well-educated people in all three
cities were more similar to each other than they were to their lower-class
neighbors. I had flown five thousand miles south to search for moral variation
when in fact there was more to be found a few blocks west of campus, in the
poor neighborhood surrounding my university.
My third
finding was that all the differences I found held up when I controlled for
perceptions of harm. I had included a probe question that directly asked, after
each story: “Do you think anyone was harmed by what [the person in the story]
did?” If Shweder’s findings were caused by perceptions of hidden victims (as
Turiel proposed), then my cross-cultural differences should have disappeared
when I removed the subjects who said yes to this question. But when I filtered
out these people, the cultural differences got bigger, not smaller. This was very strong support for Shweder’s
claim that the moral domain goes far beyond harm. Most of my subjects said that
the harmless-taboo violations were universally wrong even though they harmed
nobody.
In other words, Shweder won the debate. I had
replicated Turiel’s findings using Turiel’s methods on people like me—educated
Westerners raised in an individualistic culture—but had confirmed Shweder’s
claim that Turiel’s theory didn’t travel well. The moral domain varied across
nations and social classes. For most of the people in my study, the moral
domain extended well beyond issues of harm and fairness.
It was hard
to see how a rationalist could explain these results. How could children
self-construct their moral knowledge about disgust and disrespect from their
private analyses of harmfulness? There must be other sources of moral
knowledge, including cultural learning (as Shweder argued), or innate moral
intuitions about disgust and disrespect (as I began to argue years later).
I once overheard a Kohlberg-style moral judgment interview being
conducted in the bathroom of a McDonald’s restaurant in northern Indiana. The
person interviewed—the subject—was a Caucasian male roughly thirty years old.
The interviewer was a Caucasian male approximately four years old. The
interview began at adjacent urinals:
INTERVIEWER:
Dad, what would happen if I
pooped in here [the urinal]?
SUBJECT: It would be yucky. Go ahead and flush. Come on, let’s
go wash our hands. [The pair
then moved over to the sinks]
INTERVIEWER:
Dad, what would happen if I
pooped in the sink?
SUBJECT: The people who work here would get mad at you.
INTERVIEWER:
What would happen if I pooped in
the sink at home?
SUBJECT: I’d get mad at you.
INTERVIEWER:
What would happen if you pooped
in the sink at home?
SUBJECT: Mom would get mad at me.
INTERVIEWER:
Well, what would happen if we all
pooped in the sink at home?
SUBJECT: [pause] I guess we’d all get in trouble.
INTERVIEWER:
[laughing] Yeah, we’d all get in
trouble!
SUBJECT: Come on, let’s dry our hands. We have to go.
Note the
skill and persistence of the interviewer, who probes for a deeper answer by changing
the transgression to remove the punisher. Yet even when everyone cooperates in
the rule violation so that nobody can play the role of punisher, the subject
still clings to a notion of cosmic justice in which, somehow, the whole family
would “get in trouble.”
Of course, the father is not really trying to
demonstrate his best moral reasoning. Moral reasoning is usually done to
influence other people (see chapter 4),
and what the father is trying to do is get his curious son to feel the right
emotions—disgust and fear—to motivate appropriate bathroom behavior.
INVENTING
VICTIMS
Even though the results came out just as Shweder had predicted, there
were a number of surprises along the way. The biggest surprise was that so many
subjects tried to invent victims. I had written the stories carefully to remove
all conceivable harm to other people, yet in 38 percent of the 1,620 times that
people heard a harmless-offensive story, they claimed that somebody was harmed.
In the dog story, for example, many people said that the family itself would be
harmed because they would get sick from eating dog meat. Was this an example of
the “informational assumptions” that Turiel had talked about? Were people
really condemning the actions because
they foresaw these harms, or was it the reverse process—were people inventing these harms because they had
already condemned the actions?
I
conducted many of the Philadelphia interviews myself, and it was obvious that
most of these supposed harms were post hoc fabrications. People usually
condemned the actions very quickly— they didn’t seem to need much time to
decide what they thought. But it often took them a while to come up with a
victim, and they usually offered those victims up halfheartedly and almost
apologetically. As one subject said, “Well, I don’t know, maybe the woman will
feel guilty afterward about throwing out her flag?” Many of these victim claims
were downright preposterous, such as the child who justified his condemnation
of the flag shredder by saying that the rags might clog up the toilet and cause
it to overflow.
But something even more interesting happened when I
or the other interviewers challenged these invented-victim claims. I had
trained my interviewers to correct people gently when they made claims that
contradicted the text of the story. For example, if someone said, “It’s wrong
to cut up the flag because a neighbor might see her do it, and he might be
offended,” the interviewer replied, “Well, it says here in the story that
nobody saw her do it. So would you still say it was wrong for her to cut up her
flag?” Yet even when subjects recognized that their victim claims were bogus,
they still refused to say that the act was OK. Instead, they kept searching for
another victim. They said things like “I know it’s wrong, but I just can’t
think of a reason why.” They seemed to be morally
dumbfounded— rendered speechless by their inability to explain verbally
what they knew intuitively.29
These subjects were reasoning. They were working
quite hard at reasoning. But it was not reasoning in search of truth; it was
reasoning in support of their emotional reactions. It was reasoning as
described by the philosopher David Hume, who wrote in 1739 that “reason is, and
ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other
office than to serve and obey them.”30
I had found evidence for Hume’s claim. I had found
that moral reasoning was often a servant of moral emotions, and this was a
challenge to the rationalist approach that dominated moral psychology. I
published these findings in one of the top psychology journals in October 199331 and then waited nervously for
the response. I knew that the field of moral psychology was not going to change
overnight just because one grad student produced some data that didn’t fit into
the prevailing paradigm. I knew that debates in moral psychology could be quite
heated (though always civil). What I did not expect, however, was that there
would be no response at all. Here I thought I had done the definitive study to
settle a major debate in moral psychology, yet almost nobody cited my work—not
even to attack it—in the first five years after I published it.
My dissertation landed with a silent thud in part
because I published it in a social psychology journal. But in the early 1990s,
the field of moral psychology was still a part of developmental psychology. If
you called yourself a moral psychologist, it meant that you studied moral
reasoning and
But
psychology itself was about to change and become a lot more emotional.
Where does morality come from? The two most common answers have long
been that it is innate (the nativist answer) or that it comes from childhood
learning (the empiricist answer). In this chapter I considered a third
possibility, the rationalist answer, which dominated moral psychology when I
entered the field: that morality is self-constructed by children on the basis
of their experiences with harm. Kids know that harm is wrong because they hate
to be harmed, and they gradually come to see that it is therefore wrong to harm
others, which leads them to understand fairness and eventually justice. I
explained why I came to reject this answer after conducting research in Brazil
and the United States. I concluded instead that:
•
The moral domain varies by
culture. It is unusually narrow in Western, educated, and individualistic
cultures. Sociocentric cultures broaden the moral domain to encompass and
regulate more aspects of life.
• People
sometimes have gut feelings—particularly about disgust and disrespect—that can
drive their reasoning. Moral reasoning is sometimes a post hoc fabrication.
• Morality
can’t be entirely self-constructed by children based on their growing
understanding of harm. Cultural learning or guidance must play a larger role
than rationalist theories had given it.
If morality doesn’t come
primarily from reasoning, then that leaves some combination of innateness and
social learning as the most likely candidates. In the rest of this book I’ll
try to explain how morality can be innate (as a set of evolved intuitions) and
learned (as children learn to apply those intuitions within a particular
culture). We’re born to be righteous, but we have to learn what, exactly,
people like us should be righteous about.
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