The Psychology of Morality

In class on Wednesday, we considered two scenarios published by the moral psychologist Jon Haidt.

In one exercise, we evaluated how we felt about a set of comparable scenarios. (Would you rather stick a pin in your own palm? or the palm of child you don't know?) Haidt argued that if people are only motivated by self-interest, as classical economics assumes they are, then they would rather stick a pin in someone else's hand.

However, most (or all) of us would rather stick a pin in our own palm than in a child's palm. Also, there were a number of situations in which a "rational" person would have no particular preference, but people with particular moral outlooks do. For instance, some people would never slap their father, not even with his permission or as part of a comedy skit, though they would have no problem slapping a friend in that situation.

What this exercise showed is that many people have moral commitments that are distinct from their own rational self-interest. One such moral commitment, founded on a shared emotion, is that incest is wrong even if it creates no deplorable consequences. On a rational level, it's hard to explain why it would be wrong. But on an emotional level, the reaction is very strong and immediate. It would not be surprising if there were a biological and evolutionary reason for such an emotion.

If you're interested in Jon Haidt's work, here is a TED talk called "The real difference between liberals and conservatives" and here is a Bloggingheads interview on "Happiness and the Foundations of Morality."

I also promised to pass along a fascinating article on psychopaths. It is by John Seabrook and published in The New Yorker. Seabrook says that psychopathy is

the condition of moral emptiness that affects between fifteen to twenty-five per cent of the North American prison population, and is believed by some psychologists to exist in one per cent of the general adult male population. (Female psychopaths are thought to be much rarer.) Psychopaths don’t exhibit the manias, hysterias, and neuroses that are present in other types of mental illness. Their main defect, what psychologists call “severe emotional detachment”—a total lack of empathy and remorse—is concealed.