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Site Web Do the Right Thing Cognitive sciences search for a common morality Rebecca Saxe 8 Consider the following dilemma: Mike is supposed to be the best man at a friends wedding in Maine this afternoon. He is carrying the wedding r ings with him in New Hampshire, where he has been staying on business. Mike is on his way to the bus s tation with 15 minutes to spare when he realizes that his wallet has bee n stolen, and with it his bus tickets, his credit cards, and all his for ms of ID. At the bus station Mike tries to persuade the officials, and then a coupl e of fellow travelers, to lend him the money to buy a new ticket, but no one will do it. With five minutes to go before the buss departure, he is sitting on a bench tryin g desperately to think of a plan. Just then, a well-dressed man gets up for a walk, leaving his jacket, with a bus ticket to Maine in the pocket , lying unattended on the bench. In a flash, Mike realizes that the only way he will make it to the wedding on time is if he takes that ticket. The man is clearly well off and could easily buy himself another one. My own judgment comes down narrowly, but firmly, against stealing the tic ket. And in studies of moral reasoning, the majority of American adults and children answer as I do: Mike should not take the ticket, even if it means missing the wedding. But this proportion varies dramatically acro ss cultures. In Mysore, a city in the south of India, 85 percent of adul ts and 98 percent of children say Mike should steal the ticket and go to the wedding. Americans, and I, justify our choice in terms of justice a nd fairness: it is not right for me to harm this strangereven in a mino r way. We could not live in a world in which everyone stole whatever he or she needed. The Indian subjects focus instead on the importance of pe rsonal relationships and contractual obligations, and on the relatively small harm that will be done to the stranger in contrast to the much bro ader harm that will be done to the wedding. An elder in a Maisin village in Papua New Guinea sees the situation from a third perspective, focused on collective responsibility.
Examples of cross-cultural moral diversity such as this one may not seem surprising in the 21st century. In a world of religious wars, genocide, and terrorism, no one is naive enough to think that all moral beliefs ar e universal. But beneath such diversity, can we discern a common corea distinct, universal, maybe even innate moral sense in our human nature ? In the early 1990s, when James Q Wilson first published The Moral Sense, his critics and admirers alike agreed that the idea was an unfashionabl e one in moral psychology. Wilson, a professor of government and not psy chology, was motivated by the problem of non-crime: how and why most of us, most of the time, restrain our basic appetites for food, status, and sex within legal limits, and expect others to do the same.
behavior, though not always, and in some cases not obviously. A decade after Wilsons book was published, the psychological and neural basis of moral reasoning is a rapidly expanding topic of investigation w ithin cognitive science. In the intervening years, new technologies have been invented, and new techniques developed, to probe ever deeper into the structure of human thought. We can now acquire vast numbers of subje cts over the Internet, study previously inaccessible populations such as preverbal infants, and, using brain imaging, observe and measure brain activity non-invasively in large numbers of perfectly healthy adults. In evitably, enthusiasts make sweeping claims about these new technologies and the old mysteries they will leave in their wake. How far have these technologies come in teaching us new truths about our moral selves? And what will be the implications o f a new biopsychological science of natural morality? The truth, if it exists, is in the details, wrote Wilson, and therefore I will concentra te on the details of three sets of very recent experiments, each of whic h approaches the problem using a different method: an Internet survey, a cognitive study of infants, and a study of brain imaging. Each is at th e cutting edge of moral psychology, each is promising but flawed, and ea ch should be greeted with a mix of enthusiasm and interpretative caution . Moral psychologists call cases like these moral dilemmas. Over the last half century, batterie s of moral dilemmas have been presented to men and women, adults and chi ldren, all over the world. The questions at the heart of these studies a re these: How do people arrive at the moral judgment that an action, rea l or contemplated, is right or wrong? What are the rules governing these moral calculations, and from where do they come? Which, if any, of the fundamental components are universal? All of them, answered the eminent psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg. In the 1970s and 1980s, Kohlberg argued that moral reasoning is based on explic it rules and concepts, like conscious logical problem-solving; over the course of an individuals development, the rules and concepts that he or she uses to solve moral problems unfold in a well-defined, universal se quence of stages. These stages are biologically determined but socially supported. In early stages, moral reasoning is strongly influenced by ex ternal authority; in later stages, moral reasoning appeals first to inte rnalized convention, and then to general principles of neutrality, egali tarianism, and universal rights. It may be that what makes one culture, one sex, or one individual different from another is just how high and h ow fast it manages to climb the moral ladder. To test this hypothesis, moral dilemmas were presented to people of varyi ng ages and classes, both sexes, and many cultures (including people in India, Thailand, Iran, Turkey, Kenya, Nigeria, and Guatemala; Kohlbergs key methodological insight was to focus not on the answers that people give to moral dilemmas but on how they justify their choice. A seven-year-old and a white-haired philosopher may agree that Mike should not steal the ticket, but they will differ in their explanat ions of why not. The seven-year-old may say that Mike shouldnt steal be cause he will get caught and punished, while the philosopher may appeal to an interpretation of Kants categorical imperative: act only on a pri nciple that you would wish everyone to follow in a similar situation. Kohlbergs claims were deeply controversial, not least because the highes t stage of moral development was accorded almost exclusively to Western adults, and among those, mostly to men. Critics attacked everything from the specific dilemmas to the coding criteria to the whole philosophy of monotonic universal moral development. The psychologist Carol Gilligan, for example, argued that women justify their moral choices differently from men, but with equal sophistication. Men, she claimed, tend to reaso n about morality in terms of justice, and women in terms of care: While an ethic of justice proceeds from the premise of equalitythat everyone should be treated the samean ethic of care rests on the premise of non -violencethat no one should be hurt. Similar arguments were made for n on-Western culturesthat they emphasize social roles and obligations rat her than individual rights and justice. On the whole, this emphasis on g roup differences won the day. Kohlbergs vision was rejected, and the ps ychological study of moral universals reached an impasse. Very recently, though, the use of moral dilemmas to study moral universal s has reemerged. Marc Hauser of Harvard University and John Mikhail of G eorgetown University are among the cognitive scientists leading the char ge. The current theorists take as their model for moral reasoning not co nscious problem-solving, as Kohlberg did, but the human language faculty . That is, rather than moral reasoning, human beings are understood to be endowed with a moral instinct that enables them to categorize and judge actions as right or wrong the way native speakers intuitively reco gnize sentences as grammatical or ungrammatical. We can draw three predictions from the theory that morali...
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