Understanding how we acquire our beliefs and behaviors allows us to hold our personal truths lightly, and helps us better understand the truths of others. A normative perspective towards the nature of our beliefs can free us from the rigidities of absolutism. Norms are powerful socio-cultural forces that influence every aspect of our thinking and behavior. Our values, beliefs, and even what we hold as true, are moral norms arising out of the normative influence of culture on human development. The normative process as the origin of what we believe does not determine the veracity or pragmatic value of these truths.
Topics below:
Stabilizing Power of Norms
The Feeling of Having Morals
Innate Moral Potentialities
Stabilizing Power of Norms
Some truths are easy to hold lightly and others less so. This distinction is so universal that the truths we can take or leave are called conventional norms, whereas as those that seem to be absolute truths are called moral norms. Moral norms are felt to be true, generally, and conventional norms are felt to be true or appropriate under particular circumstances.
Although the content of what is normative varies widely among cultures, every culture recognizes the distinction between moral norms and conventional norms. This distinction is even readily apparent in young children. For example, if we tell six-year-olds that is okay to talk or push classmates while standing in line, they will invariably accept the talking in line, but remain doubtful that pushing in line is okay, even if the teacher told them it was okay. Conventional norms are easily adopted and easily given up, whereas moral norms may endure to the point of enormous cost to individuals or the entire culture. In Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms, Gerard Russell shares with us his observations of ancient religions in the Middle East that have held onto their religions and rituals over the centuries, at great cost and isolation. The followers of these ancient religions constitute small minorities among a Muslim majority, but nonetheless have been able to maintain their religious norms, even while adapting to their surrounding norms without diluting their religious moral norms.
The ubiquity of moral norms corresponds with the evolutionary psychological nature of moral norms. The ease with which they arise in every culture reflects the socially stabilizing influence of moral norms. The adaptive value is also reflected in their diversity. Cultures have unique and distinctive moral norms reflecting the unique demands of a human community living in a particular environment. Over time, Mankind has collected an infinite array of beliefs and ways to live together in a society. This collected wisdom is there for us to use in determining what type of values and beliefs we may want to endorse for ourselves, and this is at the root of The Wisdom in Moral Philosophy.
The Feeling of Having Morals
Moral content may be widely disparate in its subject matter; nonetheless, morality everywhere is felt to be intimate to who we are and what we value. The development of values and morals is invariant, always feeling like they are a part of us. This stems from the tying of moral content to powerful innate moral emotions such as guilt, shame, and gratitude.
Although we all have an innate capacity to feel a wide range of emotions, the meaning and use of these emotional experiences is learned through a normative process. We may come to our emotions naturally, but how we consider our feelings is learned, mostly through interactions with people we are close to, shaping our emotional value system. We learn what we should feel and what those feelings mean at a level that is so deep it does not feel like it was a learned experience; it just is what is — normative truth.
Regardless of the mechanism of acquisition, moral norms are going to be experienced as having a truth far beyond any truth of a conventional norm. This reflects our need to form these norms and the powerful moral emotions associated with this process. This combination of normative capacity and conditioning, combined with the power of emotions is the source of our Moral Phenomenology.
Innate Moral Potentialities
The psycho-evolutionary demands of living in human society have shaped our emotions and cognitive faculties in order to regulate our behavior. As human beings, we are equipped to recognize, accept, and adopt societal norms because of the associated moral emotions. The explicit content of the societal norm may vary, but the power of societal moral norms is fueled by the innate force of our moral emotions. Human beings may not have specific innate moral content; however, the linkage between our moral emotions and the adaptiveness of societal norms is an innate capacity. This is an innate capacity to develop moral norms, not necessarily specify innate morals. However, the limited parameters of living in a human society will likely result in predictable patterns of moral content in order to sustain a stable society and culture. These patterns may not reflect any innate moral content, but they do reflect innate potentiality for certain biases in the development of our beliefs and values. This psychobiological description does not address the truth of our beliefs; but by understanding our biological nature, we come to see the powerful forces in each of us to create meaning, values, and beliefs.
Read More: Social Intuition and Moral Judgment
The capacity to adopt moral norms is not the only innate cognitive faculty. Contemporary cognitive science is discovering that humankind is not, by any means, a blank slate at birth; in fact, we are equipped with numerous specific functional modules of cognition. Cognitive development is no longer viewed as uniform and ubiquitous. The interaction of the various innate cognitive modules generates a diversity of global functioning. There are numerous aspects of mind that are innate and they are all best considered as capacities that may or may not become articulated.