Spirituality part of morality?

[Angrboda]

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.

Haidt, Jonathan (2012-03-13). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (pp. 30-31). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

I also read Descartes’ Error, by the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. 22 Damasio had noticed an unusual pattern of symptoms in patients who had suffered brain damage to a specific part of the brain— the ventromedial (i.e., bottom-middle) prefrontal cortex (abbreviated vmPFC; it’s the region just behind and above the bridge of the nose). Their emotionality dropped nearly to zero. They could look at the most joyous or gruesome photographs and feel nothing. They retained full knowledge of what was right and wrong, and they showed no deficits in IQ. They even scored well on Kohlberg’s tests of moral reasoning. Yet when it came to making decisions in their personal lives and at work, they made foolish decisions or no decisions at all. They alienated their families and their employers, and their lives fell apart.

Damasio’s interpretation was that gut feelings and bodily reactions were necessary to think rationally, and that one job of the vmPFC was to integrate those gut feelings into a person’s conscious deliberations. When you weigh the advantages and disadvantages of murdering your parents … you can’t even do it, because feelings of horror come rushing in through the vmPFC.

But Damasio’s patients could think about anything, with no filtering or coloring from their emotions. With the vmPFC shut down, every option at every moment felt as good as every other. The only way to make a decision was to examine each option, weighing the pros and cons using conscious, verbal reasoning. If you’ve ever shopped for an appliance about which you have few feelings— say, a washing machine— you know how hard it can be once the number of options exceeds six or seven (which is the capacity of our short-term memory). Just imagine what your life would be like if at every moment, in every social situation, picking the right thing to do or say became like picking the best washing machine among ten options, minute after minute, day after day. You’d make foolish decisions too.

Damasio’s findings were as anti-Platonic as could be. Here were people in whom brain damage had essentially shut down communication between the rational soul and the seething passions of the body (which, unbeknownst to Plato, were not based in the heart and stomach but in the emotion areas of the brain). No more of those “dreadful but necessary disturbances,” those “foolish counselors” leading the rational soul astray. Yet the result of the separation was not the liberation of reason from the thrall of the passions. It was the shocking revelation that reasoning requires the passions.

Haidt, Jonathan (2012-03-13). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (p. 39-40). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Our plan was to increase the amount of dumbfounding by having Scott play devil’s advocate rather than gentle interviewer.....

...In the second scenario, Scott offered subjects $ 2 if they would sign a piece of paper that said: I, ________, hereby sell my soul, after my death, to Scott Murphy, for the sum of $2. There was a line for a signature, and below the line was this note : This form is part of a psychology experiment. It is NOT a legal or binding contract, in any way. 27 Scott also told them they could rip up the paper as soon as they signed it, and they’d still get their $ 2. Only 23 percent of subjects were willing to sign the paper without any goading from Scott....

...For the majorities who said no, however, Scott asked them to explain their reasons and did his best to challenge those reasons. Scott convinced an extra 10 percent to sip the juice, and an extra 17 percent to sign the soul-selling paper. But most people in both scenarios clung to their initial refusal, even though many of them could not generate good reasons. A few people confessed that they were atheists , didn’t believe in souls, and yet still felt uncomfortable about signing.

Haidt, Jonathan (2012-03-13). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Yet moral judgments are not subjective statements; they are claims that somebody did something wrong. I can’t call for the community to punish you simply because I don’t like what you’re doing. I have to point to something outside of my own preferences, and that pointing is our moral reasoning. We do moral reasoning not to reconstruct the actual reasons why we ourselves came to a judgment; we reason to find the best possible reasons why somebody else ought to join us in our judgment.

Haidt, Jonathan (2012-03-13). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (p. 52). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.