One of Haidt's central points, and the one he begins the book with, is that humans by nature desire to be righteous. We are not only "intrinsically moral" but also "intrinsically moralistic, critical, and judgmental" (xix). We do not merely want to be right; we judge everyone who might feel differently. These righteous minds of ours make it possible for us to exist in large cooperative groups but also demand that those same groups be marked with "moralistic strife" (xx). In fact, some degree of conflict is what allows societies to flourish.
Haidt's first chapter addresses the question posed in this post title: where does morality come from? Haidt's central claim here is the claim that dominates Part 1 of the book: intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. There are two traditional explanations for morality: nativist or empiricist. A nativist believes morality to be inscribed in our nature, whether by God or by evolution (Christians and Darwin are in agreement here). The empiricist position is that we are born more or less as a blank slate and we learn from our culture and upbringing what is right and what is wrong.
While Haidt was receiving his education in the field, a third option had emerged and immediately dominated: rationalism, which says that kids "figure out morality for themselves" (6). It is neither innate, nor learned directly from adults, but "self-constructed, as kids play with other kids" (7). We learn principles of fairness by playing games, and we reason to these conclusions in a utilitarian, greater-good mode of rationality. Haidt points out that liberals were quite taken with the idea of children as "moral philosophers trying to work out coherent ethical systems for themselves" (9). Indeed, most proponents of this moral development schema actively argued that "parents and other authorities were obstacles to moral development" (10). Further studies seemed to show that children intuited that rules about clothing, food, and many other things were merely social conventions, which can be changed or modified, while rules that prevented harm of others were moral rules. Thus, morality outside of principles of harm were all relegated to mere social convention, something perhaps valuable but ultimately mutable.
Haidt felt the instinct to challenge this (liberal) conviction. For him it seemed "too cerebral" and lacking the emotion most of us feel about moral issues. When another child steals a toy from my son, he doesn't respond, "Dear sir, you have violated our social convention concerning property rights and a greater moral issue of harm to my welfare. Do consider returning the stick I am pretending is a sword forthwith." Haidt's research led him to tribes around the globe and over time he developed the conclusion that Western views of morality were almost entirely unique in the world.
Many of the differences in morality between the West and other cultures can be distilled to the intense individualism of the West in contradistinction to the sociocentrism, wherein the group or the tribe comes first, of much of the rest of the world. The liberal theories of western psychologists make sense in a western framework but would be unrecognizable to vast swathes of other cultures. In an individualist culture, anything that assaults the freedom of the individual can be questioned. In a sociocentric culture, anything that assaults the harmony and functionality of the group must be challenged.
As part of his doctoral research, Haidt organized a study to challenge the western perception of moral development. He wanted to pit "gut feelings about important cultural norms against reasoning about harmlessness, and then see which force was stronger" (22). One of the biggest surprises in Haidt's research was the number of people who tried to create victims in a clearly victimless violation. One of the taboo stories he had given was about eating a dead dog:
A family's dog is 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 harmfulness is the deciding factor in moral decisions, then this scenario should not alert moral alarms for people. But people feel a natural disgust toward dog-eating and tried to explain their revulsion in terms of harm (i.e. many people said the family would be harmed by getting sick from eating the meat). Haidt discerned that these justifications were simply "post hoc fabrications." People knew right away that something was wrong, but after the fact tried to come up with a rational explanation for why it was wrong. They reasoned from their gut and then counted on their brains for justification.
The Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume 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" (qtd. in Haidt 29). This is a controversial position and I have been in more than one good-natured argument on the subject in the past six months. We want to believe we are rational creatures, driven by our minds to discover truth and make moral decisions reasonably. But the evidence is pointing in the other direction. As Haidt claims, "moral reasoning [is] often the servant of moral emotions" (29).
Rather than coming from our minds, morality seems to come from our gut.
