A Case for Inherent Morality

[John 6IX Breezy]

@John 6IX Breezy

This is more up your alley. Is there a consensus in the field these days?

It's been a while since I explored the topic of moral psychology. (And if I weren't taking finals this week I could be of more use.)

However, I think I could at least point in a useful direction:

1. I believe the Yale puppet experiment in question is probably the one by Paul Bloom. If so, his book "Just Babies: The origins of good an evil"  offers a good review on the literature. (Its been years since I read it so I don't remember any specifics.)

2. The idea that we are blank slates is often disliked in psychology; and I think your Noam Chomsky analogy is a great example. Our brains are wired for morality in much the same way that it is wired for language. Meaning that the infrastructure is there, even if the contents are not. There are studies which show we are much better at reasoning through moral questions than we are through their non-moral counterparts. If I had more time I could look it up; I believe the researchers are famous evolutionary psychologists Tooby and Cosmides. In other words, our brains do not process all information equally; there is a bias towards normative thinking.

3. Moral reasoning develops throughout the lifespan. Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Development describe the ways people reason through moral dilemmas. Children tend to follow rules because they are rules, and want to avoid punishment. Whereas an adult understands rules to be road markers, and has no problem breaking them to achieve a better outcome.

p.s. And lastly, I saw something about natural selection in the comments. I just want to add that there is a lot of research and computations done on these sort of questions. As a brief overview, social behavior is usually broken down into four categories: Altruism, Selfishness, Spite, and Mutual Benefit. And evolutionary biologists calculate which behavioral traits are likely to be passed down, outcompete the others, and why they evolved. This starts opening the door to questions about kin selection, and other interesting topics.