week 10 Flashcards
(3) Approaches to the evolution of morality
o Moral foundations theory
o Morality as cooperation
o Morality as side-taking
(3) Approaches to the evolution of morality
o Moral foundations theory
o Morality as cooperation
o Morality as side-taking
(4) Key points About Morality
Evolutionary basis
Is flexible, but within bounds
Intuitive, affect laden
Subject to rational reconsideration
What is Morality?
It is crucial to make a distinction between particular BEHAVIOURS that we may deem morally good, and the existence of BELIEFS about what constitutes immoral or moral acts
Why do ‘humans JUDGE others for engaging in behaviours that they themselves avoid, believe that such behaviours are “wrong”, and (in at least some cases) are MOTIVATED TO HARM (i.e. punish) people who engage in such behaviours.’ (italics in original). (Kurzban & Descioli, 2015)
Third-party moral judgement, nation, punishment (not involved or directly affected by behaviour but still judge others on the morality of their actions)
*why have humans evolved to judge others
in the moral domain, to punish those who
they believe have done wrong (moral
judgement)
The naturalistic Fallacy
- You cannot derive normative conclusions
from factual premises - Descriptive/Explanatory task of explaining
why we have evolved morality but this is
different from describing what is normative
or outlining what it should be (what is right or
wrong; a philosophers task!) - We can not draw normative conclusions
from factual descriptive tasks - Do not read morality in nature
- But descriptive and explanatory domains
can inform the normative domain - Morality is central to social living in humans
Moral Foundations Theory: Overview
(Graham et al., 2013; Haidt, 2012)
what it is and what its not
what does it draw from
four claims
• Is a descriptive/explanatory NOT normative
theory
• Draws on anthropology, evolutionary
psychology, social psychology,
neuroscience, cultural psychology,
primatology (evolutionary informed but
draws from other domains)
• Predicated on four main claims:
1. The human mind is organised in advance of
experience (morality is ‘innate’; it has
evolved)
2. Morality is heavily shaped by culture (social
learning influences morality; selected for in
biological terms but can be very culture
specific)
3. Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning
second
4. Moral pluralism (there are multiple moral
domains)
Morality is Innate
• Morality is innate (it has evolved)
• NOT genetically determined; rather morality
is ORGANISED in advance of the
experience
• Our minds are PREPARED to learn values,
norms, and behaviours that relate to
specific social problems (evolved moral
organism designed to learn morality)
• Young children before the age of 3 years
(prelinguistic prosocial species):
- are motivated to participate in joint
activities
- are actively prosocial and demonstrate
sympathy
- will distribute resources equally
• From age 3-6, children will:
- recognise and actively enforce social
norms (willing to third-party enforce
moral transgressions)
- demonstrate guilt, shame, and pride
(morally linked emotions)
• Plays a video of children: child help an adult
pick up a dropped object; open locked
cupboard (helping others complete task; is
not a prosocial behaviour seen in other
species)
• Actively help enforce social norms:
- Children help two puppets create a
drawing
- One puppet leaves the room while the
other stays and destroys the other
puppet’s drawing
- Children who watch this will protest: “You
can’t do that” (norm violation; damaging
others property is not allowed and
punishable offence)
- infants develop moralistic motivations and
evaluations that do not stem from
socialisation and are actually innate
*These children examples illustrate that
children are evolved to learn morality at a
very young age and enforce it
Culture
• Morality is variable across cultures and
historically (culture-specific; moral rules
change over time and are largely shaped by
culture but have some universal core
features; does this allow for moral progress)
• The moral mind is subject to multiple drafts
through cultural learning (moral rules are
updated and revised through social learning
as these change)
• Innately given moral foundations develop
within specific cultural contexts
• Results in somewhat cross-culturally
variable moral psychologies, although
organised around core themes
• Examples: Shrader morality in US and India
in the 1980s (cultural and historical)
- Shared moral transgression of harm, others
are variable across cultures.
Intuitionism
what is moral dumfounding?
• Moral evaluations occur rapidly and
automatically – affective primacy (quick
intuitive emotional reactions to moral
transgressions before we can think
cognitively about why it is? And justify our
emotional response; disgust; affect comes
before cognition)
• Deliberative moral reasoning can occur,
but normally in the service of intuition
• Importance of moral emotional responses
such as moralistic anger, disgust, sympathy,
compassion, guilt, shame.
*emotional reactions to scenarios that cause
no harm but are still considered wrong =
moral dumfounding
Moral Pluralism
*morality comes in multiple domains
• Beyond WEIRD societies (see Henrich et al.,
2010; western, educated, industrialised and
democratic; we need to look beyond weird
samples; morality is NOT universal; for
example, weird samples focus on fairness
and harm of actions but other countries do
not. Only focusing on weird sample
neglects a large proportion of cultural
variation in morality and our understanding
of the construct).
• Haidt emphasises that there is more to
morality than harm and fairness: Multiple
moral domains (Graham et al., 2013)
• He claims there are five domains of fairness
which fall under individualizing
(individualistic cultures) or binding
foundations (collective cultures)
(5) Moral Foundations
> Individualising foundations
- Harm
- Fairness
> Binding foundations
- Loyalty
- Authority
- PurityHarm/Care (individualising domain)
• Intuition to not inflict harm on others for no
justified reason.
e.g. how much money would it take to hurt
someone?
• Adaptive Challenge (evolved to)
- Protect and care for children (kin and
other group members)
• Original Triggers (highly sensitive to these;
unless psychopaths who find it easy to
harm others)
- Suffering, distress (harm inflicted on
children, kin and other group members)
• Characteristic emotions
- Compassion for victim; anger at
perpetrator (elicits emotional reaction
to the victim and offender)
• Relevant virtues
- Caring, Kindness
Fairness/Cheating (individualising domain)
e.g., would you cheat in a card game?
• Adaptive Challenge
- Reap benefits of two-way partnerships
(violations of reciprocal altruism
relationships are punished and
facilitates asymmetric altruism; I help
you now and you help me latter)
• Original Triggers
- Cheating, cooperation, deceptions
(triggered to people who cheat these
relationships, reap benefits with no
cost incurred; defecting/lying)
• Characteristic emotions
- guilt if perpetrator; anger at perpetrator
• Relevant virtues
- Fairness, justice, trustworthiness
Loyalty/Betrayal (binding domain)
• Adaptive Challenge
- Form cohesive coalitions (cultural
evolution of facilitating cooperation
within large-scale groups)
• Original Triggers
- Threat or challenge to group
• Characteristic emotions
- Group pride; rage at traitors
• Relevant virtues
- Loyalty, patriotism, self-sacrifice
• Westerners still feel these emotions but
not to the extent of collectivist cultures
(would be willing to take money for some
of these acts)
Authority/Subversion (binding; finding your place within your social hierarchy)
• Adaptive Challenge - Forge beneficial relationships within hierarchies (hunter-gatherers who were egalitarian; agriculture and stratification had more of this; cultural evolution influenced this domain) • Original Triggers - Sign of high and low rank • Characteristic emotions - Respect, fear • Relevant virtues - Obedience, deference
Sanctity/Degradation (binding)
• Adaptive Challenge
- Avoid communicable diseases and
noxious foods (is its original adaptive
problem but through cultural evolution
now covers a wider range of
behaviours)
• Original Triggers
- Waste products, diseased people
(spoiled or noxious food)
• Characteristic emotions
- Disgust (avoidance mechanism)
• Relevant virtues
- Temperance, chastity, piety, cleanlinessMoral Pluralism
*we have five moral domains which are
triggered by different acts, elicit different
emotions and responses and the severity
of these violations will vary across cultures
(between and across cultures)
• The importance of these moral foundations
varies cross-culturally (between-cultures)
- greater emphasis on loyalty and sanctity
related moral concerns in eastern
compared to western cultures
• There are also significant and important
within-culture differences
- liberals and conservatives (more prominent
in USA than in Europe or NZ)
- Liberals (fairness-care; )
- Conservatives (authority-subversion;
sanctity-degradation; ingroup violations and
purity)
- This helps explain why there is so much
variability within cultures in judging the
morality of behaviour
Mean scores on Moral Foundation Subscales for Liberals, Conservatives
(Graham et al., 2011)
Liberal: care for victims of oppression is their
most sacred value (care/harm;
fairness/cheating)
Conservative: preserve the institutions and
traditions that sustain moral
community (General concern for all
(5) but more focused on authority-
subversion, sanctity-degradation,
loyalty-betrayal = all binding moral
domains)
(2) Morality as Cooperation
Curry et al., 2019
• There is widespread (although not
universal) agreement that the primary
evolutionary function of morality is to
promote cooperation within groups
(selected for via natural selection or
cultural evolution)
• ‘. . . Morality consists of a collection of
biological and cultural solutions to the
problems of cooperation recurrent in
human social life’ (Curry et al., p. 48)
facilitates the transition from small-scale to
large-scale societies
• There are multiple cooperation problems
and hence multiple types of morality
(multiple cooperation problems so multiple
domains of morality to fix this)
Family Values
- Favouring family members over non-kin
- Allocating resources to kin
Group loyalty
- Coordination to mutual advantage within
larger groups
Reciprocity
- Social exchange
- Reciprocal altruism
Bravery and Respect
- Contests between groups of individuals
(hawkes and doves)
Fairness
- Division of resources among individuals
Property rights
- Possession (people in possession of
property have a moral right to that
property; endowment effect in psychology)
*It does leave our key moral domains that
Haidt focuses on. Most glaring omission is
the infliction of harm is neglected.
The side-taking hypothesis
DeScioli, 2016; DeScioli & Kurzban, 2013
• How do we explain moral judgements
(focuses on explaining it rather than;
describing its function in terms of
cooperative and neglecting incongruent
information)
• Moral judgements are not required for
cooperation (not present in non-human
animals and yet are cooperative)
• and, can lead to harmful outcomes (i.e.,
exile, economic issues, concentration
camps, hate crimes, homophobia, crusades
etc.; ironic that morality can cause harm)
• Moral judgements have evolved as
mechanisms for choosing sides in disputes
(coordinating audiences to take a side in
within-group conflict; very flexible process
can change over time, context and culture)
Evaluating these (3) Evolutionary Theories of Morality
• All three theories agree that moral
judgements (morality) evolved as a way of
reducing conflict (and, enhancing
cooperation/coordination; coordinating
members within a group)
• All accept that the content of moral
judgements will vary cross-culturally and
historically
• The most important domains of morality
overlap, but also differ
• What constitutes a good evolutionary theory
of morality?
- Explain why do people make moral
judgements
- AND explain why do they have consistent
themes, and vary across cultures and time
The Role of Punishment
• Our tendency to punish individuals who
violate moral norms is a deeply engrained
and cross-culturally universal feature of
human psychology
- Third party punishment universal
- Strong motivation to punish
- Punishment often rapid and intuitive
- Instantiated by specific neural circuits in
the brain - Young children enforce social norms
Summary 1
• Human morality is a produce of
evolutionary processes
• Morality has evolved (probably!) to enhance
cooperation
• There are multiple moral domains
• Moral judgements gravitate towards certain
themes for good evolutionary reasons, but
• There is substantial scope for variation in
the nature and content of morality
Two Take Homes Lessons and Questions
- Crime doesn’t exist in the world naturally,
what behaviour is deemed good and bad is
socially constructed and therefore varies
substantially across time and space. We
will argue it is based on moral violations
that guide criminalisation. - Trend in criminal offense classification has
become more harm focused rather than
loyalty and sanctity. - Have these legal changed been a good
thing? More liberal in western populations.
There has been moral progress! - Why do we punish substance use? Disgust
mechanism? Yes. Harm? No. individuals,
family and society is not the main
mechanism there is too many
inconsistencies on which ones are
punished and others not (legal
drugs/actives are more harmful than illegal
ones) = triggers sanctity and purity moral
judgements
The Classification of Crime
*There are many ways to classify crime
• Classification of individuals who committee
crime: ‘offenders’ (i.e., risk, motivations etc.)
• Classification of crimes: ‘offences’
(property, white collar, drug, violent)
• Most attempts to classify crimes focus on
the surface features of criminal acts – e.g.,
‘violent offences’, ‘property offences’
• I argue that crimes can be fruitfully
classified in terms of the sorts of moral
violation that they represent (i.e., the way
these crimes result in moral judgements
about the rightfulness and wrongness of
such acts).
Crime and Morality
• Crime is intimately related to morality
(punishment of moral rule violations)
• “The law is a set of formalised moral rules
aimed at influencing behaviour” (Wikstrom,
2017, p.504)
• There is no straightforward one to one
relationship between the class of morally
wrong acts and those that are formally
classified as ‘crimes’ (between moral acts
and crimes)
• However, there is a substantial overlap
*He will argue that the evolution of
punishment and law within the CJS stem
from fundamental intuitions about morality
> criminal offenses represent moral violations
that can be classified into five moral
foundations
they have their origin in biological and
cultural evolutionary process.
(4) Key points About Morality
Evolutionary basis
Is flexible, but within bounds
Intuitive, affect laden
Subject to rational reconsideration
What is Morality?
It is crucial to make a distinction between particular BEHAVIOURS that we may deem morally good, and the existence of BELIEFS about what constitutes immoral or moral acts
Why do ‘humans JUDGE others for engaging in behaviours that they themselves avoid, believe that such behaviours are “wrong”, and (in at least some cases) are MOTIVATED TO HARM (i.e. punish) people who engage in such behaviours.’ (italics in original). (Kurzban & Descioli, 2015)
Third-party moral judgement, nation, punishment (not involved or directly affected by behaviour but still judge others on the morality of their actions)
*why have humans evolved to judge others
in the moral domain, to punish those who
they believe have done wrong (moral
judgement)
The naturalistic Fallacy
- You cannot derive normative conclusions
from factual premises - Descriptive/Explanatory task of explaining
why we have evolved morality but this is
different from describing what is normative
or outlining what it should be (what is right or
wrong; a philosophers task!) - We can not draw normative conclusions
from factual descriptive tasks - Do not read morality in nature
- But descriptive and explanatory domains
can inform the normative domain - Morality is central to social living in humans
