The interplay of emotions, experiences, and moral reasoning is the focus of moral psychology. The findings of moral psychologists reveal how the integration of our passions with our thoughts generates our deepest beliefs. The combination of feelings and facts creates meaning for us and is at the root of our moral reasoning. By recognizing the way we construct our values out of the interaction between our temperament and cultural circumstances, we can gain increased self-direction through utilizing both our passions and our reason.
Moral psychology also explicates how our values shape our identity. Our sense of self is not merely the result of accumulated experiences, but emerges from a personal history based on our beliefs and feelings. We are constantly making value-based choices; acting on what is important or meaningful. Inevitably, we are defined by the choices we make, as those choices are woven into a self-defining narrative. This narrative is an active creation emerging out of our value-based choices. When we are making meaningful choices and arbitrating between our competing needs and desires, we are engaged in moral reasoning. Moral reasoning is not limited to abstract notions of good and evil but is active whenever we are engaged within our own values, desires, and goals. Increasing our capacity for moral reasoning will help us increase our moral intelligence and flourish.
Topics in the text below:
The Nature of Moral Psychology
Evaluations Based on Preference and Familiarity
Moral Emotional Judgment
Moral Emotional Coherence
Rational Desire: Thinking and Feeling
Virtue is Balanced Thinking and Feeling
Learning, Cognition, and Moral Judgment
Social Intuition and Moral Judgment
The Nature of Moral Psychology
Moral psychology strives to move beyond the limits of moral and psychological theories in order to help us learn how to develop our moral intelligence. Through increasing our moral reasoning, we become better able to assure that our choices in life reflect our deepest needs and intentions.
Separately, psychology and moral theory have a great deal of trouble helping an individual answer the question of how one should live. Moral theory has a rich body of knowledge pertaining to concepts of good and duty; however, it can be difficult or impossible to utilize moral admonitions when struggling with meaningful or demanding real-life choices. Moral theory can help define broad parameters of choice, pointing out different patterns of moral behavior. This provides insight about how to approach a problem, but generally does not provide an answer to the question of what we should actually do. When we ask moral theories to tell us what choice to make there is a silence, reflecting the inherent contingencies of each person’s unique life, and the choice to be made will involve that person’s psychological make-up. This was a fundamental criticism made by Anscombe’s Modern Moral Philosophy.
Psychology is very good at addressing the contingencies of life but not at informing you about what choices to make or how to live life. Psychology has become ever more valuable in helping to understand why an individual does what he or she does, as well as helping to predict how a person might choose to act in the future. Psychology addresses the question of what we should do—through an examination of our motivations and consequences; however, psychology has eschewed exploring the question of what is the best choice for a person. This leaves us to develop our values out of the added self-awareness provided by psychological exploration. Psychological exploration examines the why and what of our lives, but does not directly guide our choices.
Psychology has matured into a valuable science for understanding why people do what they do, and contemporary moral theory has deconstructed numerous strategies for living a satisfying life. Moral psychology aims to integrate psychology and moral theories to better understand human nature. This perspective does not subsume psychological or moral questions one to the other. Moral psychology views human nature as a recursive process between psychological and moral events. As Carl Jung stressed, moral events and psychological events are not two distinct events, but are in fact an interlocked process. Moral psychology is not using psychology to explain morality, nor is moral psychology applying moral theory to psychology. Moral psychology is an all-encompassing construct that allows us to fully grasp the complex interweaving of our thoughts, feelings, and actions. Moral psychology is a construct for explicating human nature by integrating psychology and morality, enriching the exploration of human nature.
Evaluations based on preference and familiarity
Spinoza said it well when asserting that we value what we desire, not that we desire what we value. Making choices requires performing an evaluation, and most choices are fueled by our preferences. Comprehending the origins and sources of our preferences can give us adaptive flexibility in our life. Familiarity is a major source of preference and we will often choose what we have chosen in the past simply because it has been chosen in the past. This trap of familiarity is one major obstacle to changing how we make choices in the world. We often repeat our most self-deleterious choices because they are familiar. When we make choices strictly based on familiarity, we are circumventing using our evaluative capacity.
Making choices through a process based on evaluation is a universal human capacity, a capacity that can be developed and enhanced. The development of the capacity for making evaluations is distinct from the content of the evaluation. Often the focus of moral and psychological investigation has been on the various contents and objects of the evaluative process. This historical focus on the content of the evaluations generally results in a hierarchy of the contents; for example, pleasure is better than pain, or altruism is better than selfishness. The debate was over what you should value rather than how it is that you come to value what you value.
Emotions play a fundamental role in shaping what we value. The tone of our emotional responses shapes the determination of value by providing information about life events. Emotions are not values, but they are essential components of our values. Emotions inform us about how a certain situation affects us. Making evaluations of life events based on our emotions does not mean that our evaluative process is synonymous with the mere pursuit of what you desire. Our capacity for evaluation is not merely a reworked version of moral hedonism, the pursuit of satisfying desire; but rather, emotions provide information about a situation that aids evaluation.
A requisite of viable, evaluative reasoning is the ability to utilize our emotional responses as informative. However, raw emotions on their own are not inherently valid as sources of information. They are not consistent nor are they coherent enough to be intelligible as the sole criterion of moral judgment. By increasing our range of emotional experience and our capacity for making fine discriminations in our emotional responses, we enhance our moral reasoning. Our emotional evaluations are more viable when based on having a diverse range of emotional experience. When we understand that our emotional evaluations develop through learning and social conditioning, as well as through increasing our engagement with our emotional responses, we can begin to place more reliance on our emotional reactions as viable sources of information.
Moral emotional judgment
All of our feelings and emotions play a fundamental role in how we make subtle valuations; however, moral emotions are profoundly influential in our decision-making. Guilt, shame, gratitude, regret, and many other moral emotions carry considerable evaluative credence and play a role in moral judgment. This is because we ascribe meaning and value to given thought or experience via the moral emotion. Emotional displays, both verbal and nonverbal, communicate value between individuals. Our specific moral-emotion associations emerge from consensually-determined social and interpersonal interactions.
Social context, conditioning, and learning determine our associations to our moral emotions; however, the visceral experience of the moral emotions is an aspect of our innate emotional temperament. Although the specific content associated with the moral emotions is normatively conditioned, the moral emotions, in and of themselves, are evaluative by their very nature. Guilt and shame are among the strongest moral emotions and, according to Allan Gibbard, are constitutive of a moral experience. For example, when we feel guilt, we have the experience of having done something wrong and when we feel shame, we have the experience of being bad. The inculcation of these powerful, evaluative moral emotions occurs in childhood along predetermined, neurophysiological parameters detailed by Alan Schore. Through learning and conditioning, caregiver reactions to our behavior will magnify or mitigate our guilt and shame responses. Optimally, this early conditioning will help us use our feelings of guilt and shame to guide our behavior; however, when we do not get emotional support from our caregivers to help manage these powerful moral emotions, we may come to feel incapable or inadequate, culminating in a sense of personal deficit.
Throughout our life, we continue to gain familiarity with our moral-emotional responses. Although the initial experiences of guilt and shame would lack the associative learning needed to making moral judgments, through repeated interpersonal interactions, and later in life through self-reflection and discussion with others, the moral emotions will become associated with increased normative valuations. Over time these normative valuations would come to include the associated moral emotions of regret and norm determined correctives such as retribution or atonement.
In the course of life experiences, we generally increase our moral emotional repertoire to include secondary feelings of gratitude, regret, compassion, and beneficence, according to Robert Plutchik. These emotions arise out of learning and social conditioning in conjunction with the autonomic moral emotions of guilt and shame. These secondary emotions add to our capacity for making moral judgments that lead to adaptive growth and change. Benevolence and compassion are emotions that are also constitutive of a moral experience, even though they may lack the autonomic force of guilt and shame. However, when developed, benevolence and compassion are powerful moral emotions that can profoundly shape our actions and choices in the world. Without adequate social learning, we may fail to develop these adaptive, secondary moral emotions. The inability to feel gratitude or regret would severely limit our ability to mitigate feelings of shame and guilt. This deficit in moral-emotional experience would compromise our ability to regulate our emotions and to act appropriately, interpersonally. For example, the depravity of the psychopath, or the lack of capacity for empathy manifested by a narcissist, reflect inadequate development of secondary moral emotions.
Moral emotions are essential to moral judgment and if we lack the capacity to experience a given moral emotion, our evaluative ability will be compromised. Conversely, emotional competence will be concomitant to having evaluative competence. The development of our moral emotions and the capacity to discriminate experiences that evoke them requires considerable moral intelligence. Delineating the elements required to develop our moral intelligence and to effectively utilize moral emotions is a major focus of moral psychology. However, defining the specific role played by any given moral emotion in our development is problematic because of the idiosyncratic nature of emotional experience. Each of us has our own unique stance around the feeling of guilt, shame, remorse, regret, benevolence, etc. That stance is developmentally and psychosocially determined. This makes it inherently problematic to ascribe a predetermined, normative function to any given emotion, even the strongest moral emotions. Although generalizations may be difficult, we can become aware of our unique stance toward our moral-emotional experiences.
Moral emotions act to organize our experiences into categories, such that when a moral emotion arises in us it evokes these categorical associations. At the most general level, these categorical associations distinguish between that which is harmful or beneficial. This appraisal was originally learned and conditioned; however, once these categorizations around our moral emotions are established, they will be experienced with a profound feeling of veracity. We come to experience the learned associations with a force fueled by the concomitant moral emotions. Moral intelligence requires that we can recognize the powerful categorization inherent in a moral emotion and remain reflective. When we see our moral emotions as information, we can become curious about the circumstances surrounding those feelings and expand how we might react. Rather than just reacting to disquieting emotions, we would be able to reflect and consider what information feelings such as guilt, shame, or disgust are attempting to convey.
It can be challenging, but worthwhile, to look beyond our overt, moral-emotional reaction in defining the meaning of an experience. Doing so can increase our range and discrimination of moral emotions. By bringing our awareness to the patterns of our emotional reactions and exploring the associated experiences, we increase our moral intelligence. We can move from long-standing reactive conditioning and into awareness and conscious choice.
Moral Emotional Coherence
Utilizing our moral emotions to make adaptive, moral choices requires that our experiences be reasonably coherent and intelligible. When our moral-emotional experiences have been consistent across similar situations, then these feelings will begin to make sense to us; they will feel rational because they are predictive. If these moral-emotional experiences also seem to fit the situation then we will begin to have coherent moral emotions. The elements that make our moral emotions coherent, consistent and thereby adaptive, emerge from the normative, social conditioning inherent in our culture and developmental history. Social conditioning, and establishment of moral norms, can be limiting, but it primarily serves to afford needed stability to our moral-emotional surround, without which we would be unable to garner any information from our moral emotions, says Allan Gibbard.
Norms emerge from the general, cultural environment and govern the association of moral emotions with certain behaviors and thoughts. Cultural norms are not uniform and differing sub-cultures or disparate situations may require reconciliation between disparately-accepted norms. Moral conflict is the way we experience a lack of coherence of our moral emotions. Being able to reconcile conflicting or incoherent moral experiences requires a conscious exploration of the competing, normative demands. In particular, we must develop the capacity to self-regulate our impulsivity while engaging in self-reflection. This is a process of internal deliberation, where we reflect upon our personal history, our emotional needs, and situational demands. This internal deliberation is not purely cerebral, but rather feels like being torn between powerfully, conflicting emotional pressures. By tolerating the distress while reflecting on our competing needs and desires, we can come to understand the narratives underlying the competing feelings and assess our ability to pursue one or another of the moral options. This process of moral deliberation increases our moral intelligence and we gain a feeling of self-control and self-efficacy in making these conflicted moral choices.
Engaging in moral deliberation requires that we are able to hold, in our minds, all salient facts and feelings about our dilemma. This is no small psychological feat since it requires a well-developed capacity for thinking and feeling. This reflective equilibrium, as described by John Rawls, is a mental stance that is both objective and subjective, but the objective and subjective are inextricably linked. When we are engaged in making moral decisions, our feelings and the facts we ponder are inextricably linked together. Nonetheless, reflective equilibrium holds out a promise of some degree of objectivity even if that objectivity is fundamentally subjective, according to Rawls. Reflective equilibrium utilizes all the relevant facts, personal values, and normative constraints, in order to arrive at a decision, a moral, reasoning judgment.
The subjective-objectivity of reflective equilibrium emerges out of our ability to ponder the wide spectrum of relevant facts while under the emotional force of our needs and desires. Although we may never be able to see facts free from their emotional force, our deliberation offers the best chance of acting from the center of our core self. All our feelings and facts are intertwined, but through moral deliberation we are at least able to enroll the diversity of our competing needs and desires to inform our choices. We would be able to make a moral judgment that takes into account our self-determined values, arbitrating between competing values and integrating reconcilable needs and desires. There is no way for us to attain a complete knowledge of all aspects of a given situation, and our emotional involvement, says Allan Gibbard; however, through deliberation, aided perhaps by the objectivity of psychotherapy, we ought to be able to reduce the superfluous aspects of our situation or dilemma.
When we are able to engage in the process of reflective equilibrium, we can gain some objectivity toward the incidental life events that have conditioned us and can provide perspective on our values. These essential values will continue to irrefutably shape the entire cognitive process, but having our choices shaped by our essential values is a significant accomplishment. We do not need to be free of them, but through awareness can utilize them to make our choices. Our values did not arise in a vacuum, but arose through the normative process of acculturation and personal development reflecting culture, conditioning, and learning. These values are likely to be more adaptive and enduring than incidental, situational influences, as such these deeper values are the best to guide our choices. Without access to these deeper values, our choices would invariably be situationally determined, perhaps with chaotic, incoherent, and maladaptive outcomes.
When we are able to reflectively deliberate on our moral dilemmas and choices, we gain moral intelligence. One manifestation of this gain is the increased resolution of our deeper values. When we are exploring our deeper needs and filtering out situational demands, we become able to distinguish and clarify our values and motives. Exploring our long-standing, deeply held beliefs is a change process. Every time we engage in self-reflective deliberation in the face of our moral-emotional experiences, we add to self-understanding, including refinement of what we really believe in and hold dear.
Rational Desire: Thinking and Feeling
Moral intelligence is based on rational desire, the ability to feel and to think, simultaneously. Thinking without feeling can lead to endless rumination, while feeling without thinking can lead to injurious impulsivity. The faculties of thinking and feeling combine when we engage in moral reasoning. Adaptive moral judgment depends on the quality of our capacity to sustain rational desire, a fundamental aspect of virtue, according to Rosalind Hursthouse. Moral psychology aims to help us resolve the seemingly conflicting roles that reason and passion play in human moral activity.
Adaptive moral intelligence demands the integration of emotional and cognitive functioning. Such integration is not an abstract pursuit, but a personal journey of self-exploration and self-development. All too often when we divide emotions and reasoning, it is in service of maintaining maladaptive lifestyles or self-injurious behaviors. Distortions in thinking are commonly associated with addictive behaviors; similarly, emotional imbalances are the hallmark of discontent. Overcoming emotional and cognitive distortions requires their integration through self-awareness. Understanding our needs and desires in the context of a fully-elaborated personal history is vital to living a fulfilled life. With such self-knowledge, we can begin to compensate for transitory biases in determining how to proceed in life, thereby helping to contextualize our transient desires and in terms of our personal history and current circumstances.
Self-awareness reveals the biases that limit our ability to take reasoned action in the world. Emotional and cognitive filters bias and shape our reasoning by narrowing our memory, desire, and motivation. These filters on reasoning influence how we contextualize our personal history as well as shaping current states of mind. These filters develop over time through learning and conditioning. This conditioning is organized into value-based categories through their associated moral emotions. In this way, moral emotions set the filters that shape our thinking. This moral-emotional categorization is generally outside of awareness, leaving us with the sense that how we think about a situation is based on rational analysis. However, if we remain aware of this background influence, we can bring our attention to these value-based biases. Acting without understanding the value biases on rational thought constitutes a compromised capacity of moral intelligence. When we understand how our values bias our way of thinking, we can begin to step out of those limits. We can learn not just new facts, but we can learn how we use facts in a unique way, based on our history, temperament, and circumstances.
The integration of feeling and thinking is a form of practical reasoning. Practical reasoning occurs when we are aware of our emotional biases, allowing us to be fully cognizant of the broad context in which we are each embedded. Practical reasoning is the ability to remain aware of the distinction between factual knowledge and contextual understanding. Aristotle stressed practical reasoning as essential for living a fulfilled life. And, Plato placed this capacity in the middle of our soul, between pure desire and pure thinking. Moral intelligence is based on this middle ground, neither pure desire nor pure thinking. The combined emotion and cognition provides the broadest perspective on a given circumstance, facilitating the best possible evaluation of our situation.
Virtue is balanced thinking and feeling
Patterns in the way we reflect on our moral-emotional experiences will emerge over time, eventually evolving into our character. Our ability to engage in the process of reflective equilibrium determines how we think about and react to life’s challenges. We each engage in this deliberation process with a uniqueness based on our emotional temperament and sociocultural circumstances. Ultimately patterns of moral-emotional behavior will develop. Our character is a manifestation of these enduring patterns of moral deliberation and reaction.
These patterns of deliberations feel like an aspect of our character. Most often, we are not aware of this process and actually feel that our character results from making a moral choice, such as choosing to be honest, fair, or dependable. However, our moral choices emerge from our capacity to integrate our thinking and feeling when dealing with a moral emotion. Through the deliberation process over time, consistencies develop in the way we evaluate certain situations. This pattern of development has occurred mostly out of awareness, so we have the experience of making a choice rather than having created a moral character out of our efforts to think, feel, and reflect. In effect, we develop our moral patterns from our deliberative history.
These patterns manifest as predispositions towards evaluating and acting in the world. They are not just our beliefs, but rather they are enduring moral emotional stances in the world. The enduring nature of these dispositional stances is the basis of our character, and the stances themselves can become virtues. Predispositions, virtue, and character are central to moral functioning, according to Nicolas Dent.
Since we are not always able to reflect upon all the choices that we must make, we come to rely upon our character and predispositions, or virtues, to shape our moral behavior in the world, on a daily basis. If we have developed our reflective equilibrium then we have created predispositions that are a thoughtful integration of reason merged with the motivating force of the passions. Such an integrated stance would be the hallmark of the virtuous character — reflective thinking and feeling with the capacity for passionate action. Virtue is a manifestation of our adaptive capacities for moral deliberation. Virtues are not merely character traits but are, as Robert Louden describes, “skills of perception and articulation. These are skills of moral perception and practical reason.”
The virtues are the felt sense of our moral values, such as courage and loyalty. These traits are not merely cognitively-held beliefs, they are our moral precepts innately tied to our sense of self. These stances emerge out of our evaluative deliberations throughout life, shaped by our individual psychological constitution and psychosocial experiences. An emotional stance toward events in the world is the result of having prioritized competing needs and desires. Some emotional stances are more adaptive than other emotional stances, but all stances are manifestations of the enduring patterns in our moral deliberations and subsequent choices made. During our moral deliberation, we engage in the process of arbitrating between our competing thoughts and desires. Moral predispositions emerge out of this history of deliberation, resulting in a self-determined hierarchy of our desires. Our choices come to embed us in what is experienced as our character or moral values.
Emotional stances are synonymous with the idea of virtue as an enduring, motivational pattern. We each create our hierarchy of which desires and needs we will prefer over others, character and virtue are shorthand labels for this process. Virtues are the attributes of being able to appropriately create a hierarchy between our motivations, according to Dent.
The development of our moral emotions is a necessary condition for the development of virtue. Merely having a moral-emotional experience is not inherently virtuous. Essential in the development of moral emotions is gaining the ability to discriminate between the various moral emotions, according to Rosalind Hursthouse. You need to be able access, and recognize, the moral emotions. Additionally, to be adaptive, you need to be able to scale the intensity of the moral-emotional response to the given the situation. Being aware of your moral emotions and having the moral intelligence to scale the appropriate intensity of the moral emotions is critical to the development of virtue. Virtues are not God-given attributes — we acquire them through the development of our moral intelligence, through reflective equilibrium, and being aware of our unique circumstances.
Learning, Cognition, and Moral Judgment
By understanding the forces that influence our capacity for moral deliberation and reflective equilibrium, we can enhance our moral intelligence. Social learning and conditioning, innate cognitive capacities, and interpersonal development — each contribute to our capacity for exercising adaptive, moral judgment when making decisions in life. Moral psychologists tend to differ in the relative weight that they place on learning, cognition, and interpersonal development; however, none dispute their combined influence on our moral development.
Although reflecting only one aspect of the capacity for moral reasoning, cognition has a profound effect on our ability to make moral choices. As our cognitive abilities increase so does the complexity of our moral reasoning, and limited, cognitive capacity might prevent our moral judgment from expanding beyond simple rule-following behavior. With increased, cognitive development, we gain a capacity for conceptualization and become less reliant upon unreflective rule-following. We also gain the ability to include the perceived intentionality underlying moral choices, allowing good intention to mitigate against rigid enforcement of rules. Ultimately, as abstract reasoning comes to the fore, an individual would have moral reasoning tied to an integration of individual intentionality and consequences of actions.
The cognitive development attained by young children results in their perception that moral behavior is following rules that they interpret as factually established. As children develop more cognitive flexibility, they may see the rules as consensually determined, serving a good purpose. As a child grows and develops cognitively, moral reasoning goes beyond measuring morality in terms of relative damage done or rules broken, and comes to include overall intentionality of the wrongdoer.
The various cognitively-determined, moral perspectives seen in individuals occur across cultural, moral norms. The variations of moral behavior can be framed on a continuum between fixed-law and social-contract morality. For example, some cultures have a fixed-law morality, often based in myth and religion. At the other end of the spectrum are cultures based on social morality that rely upon concepts of intention, fairness, and consequences. This continuum of moral development parallels the child’s cognitive development.
The two cognitive functions that underlie this evolving, moral reasoning are object-constancy and perspectivism. When we attain to object-constancy, we are able to see that changing the shape of something does not fundamentally alter the thing itself. In moral reasoning, object-constancy allows us to develop the construct of morality as broadly constituting the Good. Ultimately, fully developed object-constancy can allow us to envision the existence of deep, universal principles of justice, according to Lawrence Kohlberg.
In practical terms, object-constancy allows us to leave behind magical thinking where situations change just because we can imagine that they will. A good example of magical thinking occurs when a drug addict declares that he or she will never do drugs again. Feeling bad about something and deciding never to do it again may not result in change if the decision fails to take into account the precipitating conditions nor in repairing situational damages. The attainment of object-constancy allows us to psychologically live in a world that is predictable and one that allows for sustainable growth and change. With object-constancy, we are able to conceptualize our world as enduring but mutable. However, object-constancy is not a sufficient level of cognitive development to gain the optimal level of moral intelligence.
Perspectivism is the cognitive capacity that allows us to see the relativity of moral choices. Perspectivism is built upon on our cognitive capacity for object-constancy and helps us comprehend that other people may have their own unique, moral sensibilities. When we have the ability to take the view of another person, we gain perspective. This shift in view is not equivalent to an endorsement of the view, but the mental capacity to see that there are other views. Perspectivism is a developmental milestone related to attaining theory of mind. Theory of mind is a human, cognitive development that allows us to deeply apprehend that other people have minds of their own, with their own subjectivity based upon their life experience and psychological constitution. Perspectivism is the basis of contextualism, an essential element of Wisdom Phronesis.
Social Intuition and Moral Judgment
The content of our moral reasoning is acquired through social learning; however, our innate, motivational systems will organize that learning into discrete categories.
Cognitive skills will determine the flexibility of our moral reasoning, but social learning will determine the specific moral beliefs and attitudes we adopt as our own. Social-learning theory describes how moral behavior is vicariously acquired by observing the consequences of certain actions. Fundamentally, our observations of reward and punishment come to define good and bad. Thoughts and behaviors that we see rewarded are good, the ones punished are bad, and those that lead to satisfaction without punishments are permitted.
Although learning gives rise to the content of our moral beliefs, there are innate emotionally-mediated, motivational systems within which the content will aggregate. One such innate motivational system is the need we have to evaluate situations in terms of benefit, harm, or consequence. This is an innate motivation to make an evaluation and is subjectively experienced as a need to know what something means for us. Numerous motivational systems have evolved over time to help us meet predictable human needs. Some of these motivations serve needs that are moral in nature because they help regulate our behavior living in complex social-ecologies. Human beings did not evolve in isolation.
The existence of innate moral-emotional patterns, independent of cognitive development, is validated by the power that interpersonal development has on our moral behavior. The nature of interpersonal, emotional development shapes every aspect of how we experience our moral emotions. Interpersonal, moral development was a focus for Feminist Psychology, developed by Carol Gilligan, that stressed our fundamental need for care and nurturance as a moral motivation.
The moral psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, has identified five psychobiological, motivational patterns along which our moral beliefs and avocations tend to aggregate. The Social Intuitionist Model of moral beliefs identifies five basic needs that drive moral experience: care and nurturance, fairness and reciprocity, authority and respect, in-group loyalty, purity and sanctity. These five categories represent strong, biologically-determined needs. The contents of these needs-systems will be socially acquired, but the nature of the needs are inherent in each of us. Our experiences in these five areas can trigger powerful emotional responses, outside our familiar emotional range. This intensity contributes to the speed and force of our social learning and conditioning within these categories. The emotional conditioning in these areas is compelling and will shape cognitively our associations. This learning and conditioning is so strong and expeditious because it reflects our innate biases to organize moral experience along these five needs.
Social Intuitionist Model of moral beliefs asserts five basic modes or common principles underlie moral feelings. These five aspects are emergent to our cognitive modularization, reflecting that our cognitive process is not one mind.
- Care and Nurturance
It is good to care for others, being sensitive to their pain and suffering and it is bad to be cruelly indifferent. - Fairness and Reciprocity
We have strong biases for a set of emotional responses related to tit-for-tat, including a negative response to those who do not play fair. The emotional response to fairness and reciprocity when violated can evoke an enduring sense of retribution as a means to set the balance right. - Authority and Respect
We easily resonate to status-hierarchies and can become keenly aware of navigating social structures, becoming angry when others violate our view of property-hierarchies and respect. - In-Group Loyalty
We are easily biased to favor our group and are quick to identify with a group as being ours, often with prejudice towards people outside our own group. This in-group loyalty can form very quickly, and any group affiliation can trigger this value-system. - Purity and Sanctity
When our sense of purity is violated, it evokes emotions of disgust, often triggered by rules regarding food, sex, hygiene, etc. We each have the capacity to develop strong feelings that our belief is sacred. Historically, this may have been associated with God or Country; but in contemporary culture, many people may hold the environment as sacred and environmental violations as morally wrong.
According to Haidt’s Social Intuitionist Model, our moral intuitions are psycho-evolutionarily determined categories for creating values and beliefs. These predispositions have evolved to assist us in managing the complexities of living in human societies. The actual content of the values and beliefs are shaped by our social learning, but the categorization and power of that content is fueled by the underlying innate needs. The needs are innate and the content is learned. Our moral beliefs neither are innate intuitions nor are they merely socially-learned conditioning; they are both intuition and conditioning. We experience these predispositional categories in action whenever we touch upon our sense of fairness, respect, loyalty, sanctity, or compassion.
Our predisposition to hold certain categories of moral beliefs is tied to the powerful, evaluative aspect of our emotions. When we have strong feelings, we also have strong motivations of attraction or revulsion, giving rise to moral evaluations and beliefs in what is good or bad, right or wrong. Our emotions fuel our moral beliefs and give rise to the patterns of beliefs, our value-systems.
The value-systems are emergent to the evaluative aspect of emotions, particularly our moral emotions. The moral emotions such as guilt, shame, remorse, regret, gratitude, distain, benevolence, and compassion, are developed psycho-biologically in evolutionary time to facilitate social interaction. There is a wide range of research with differing degrees of how much of the content of these value-systems is learned and how much is innate. The consensus is: there is a predisposition to categorize experiences along these moral-emotional dimensions. It suffices to say, that these patterns of value-systems and moral-emotional responses are fairly ubiquitous and enduring; however, the specific content that comes to be associated with our value-systems will vary widely based on social conditioning.
Whatever the content, the value-systems hold that content very tightly and generally, not very amenable to rational influence. The content that comes to be associated with the moral emotions is not readily altered by reason; in fact, the rationality around value-systems is often a post hoc, narrative creation. We have deep beliefs, the origin of which we remain only dimly aware, and we are quick to create a story to justify the belief. However, the content of value-systems is not immutable — Social Intuition Model indicates that these value systems evolve through reflective engagement with another — as occurs in psychotherapy or moral discourse.