Evolutionary Morality

Many will say moral rules come from reason or from God, but do they really? Some biologists are now saying that moral rules may have come from evolution. Animals that lived on their own using ‘selfish’ tactics to survive operate differently than those that lived in groups. The animals that lived in groups had to suppress their selfish feelings; otherwise, the group would fall to chaos. Perhaps, it is this idea of ‘society’ where we have developed our sense of moral rules.

Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist at the University of Virginia, has managed to trace this evolutionary morality to both religion and politics. One phenomenon he came across in experiments was what he called, moral dumbfounding whereas moral dumbfounding is described as, “when people feel strongly that something is wrong but cannot explain why.” At the time, Dr. Haidt was doing experiments that were exploring the emotion of disgust where he would test the reactions of people to stories that would provoke disgust. (“Testing people’s reactions to situations like that of a hungry family that cooked and ate its pet dog after it had become road kill.”) Dr. Haidt’s experiment lead him to believe that there were two moral systems acting on a person’s judgment; one of which is ancient, and the other modern. The idea behind the ancient system was that it was developed before language came into play, and modern came after language was introduced. The ancient system is described as our instinctual or emotional gut response that happens instantaneously, whereas the modern system is not instantaneous but develops a rational response. So, how does moral dumbfounding occur exactly? Dr. Haidt describes it as a confliction between the modern and ancient systems or morality, where the modern system of morality may not be able to come up with a reason that coincides with the ancient system of morality’s response.

After a visit to India where “Haidt saw that people recognized a much wider moral domain than the issues of harm and justice that are central to Western morality.“, Haidt returned and determined that there were 5 components of morality. These 5 components are not harming others, do as you would be done, loyalty, respect for authority, and purity. “Dr. Haidt believes that religion has played an important role in human evolution by strengthening and extending the cohesion provided by the moral systems. ‘If we didn’t have religious minds we would not have stepped through the transition to groupishness,’ he said. ‘We’d still be just small bands roving around.’” Interestingly enough, Haidt also found that there was a correlation with the 5 components with politics. He found that liberals attached great weight to the components that were connected with self-protection: not harming others and do as you would be done. Conservatives on the other hand were more spread out between all 5 components with less emphasis on not harming others and do as you would be done as compared with liberals but had more emphasis on the remaining three categories, loyalty, respect for authority, and purity than liberals. “Dr. Haidt who describes himself as a moderate liberal, says that societies need people with both types of personality. ‘A liberal morality will encourage much greater creativity but will weaken social structure and deplete social capital.’”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/18/science/18mora.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0