How I think of the capacity for moral behavior

Some thoughts on why we sometimes do the right thing ...

When we observe human children, chimps, or bonobos in their social behavior, I think we find extensive evidence of moral thinking, although not carried to the extent of rationality we think of in adult humans.

This implies to me that there is no specific point where we suddenly become capable of exercising moral judgement over greedy self-interest. Rather it seems to me to be a more shaded developmental process combining local implicit norms of social behavior with learning to acknowledge and act on a wide range of normal human feelings. These feelings eventually form the basis for our shaky and relatively easily supressed (but nevertheless very real) moral sentiments. These seem to include things like feelings of guilt, feelings of empathy, a natural understanding of what equity or fairness mean, a capacity for self-control, and a sense of obligation to others.

This also implies to me that Freud was simply wrong about morality being primarily a matter of sociallization and the construction of the superego in internallization of parental roles. It is in more accurate biological terms, built upon an inborn capacity for specific types of judgement regarding behavior, along with reasoning and influenced by sociallization.

I consider it very likely that the vast majority of human beings who develop within a fairly wide range of social conditions aquire the initial dispositions for moral behavior very early. Then they either learn to develop thinking and behavior that builds on these dispositions further (what we eventually call "character" as opposed to "personality" or "temperament") ... or have it drummed out of them and learn to ignore the urgings of various moral feelings until, like the anorectic who eventually no longer feels hungry, they may even stop feeling them.

For example, infants show distress at the pain of others. Children make moral judgements of themselves and others that do not benefit them, and in fact work against them in terms of immediate gain. Adults do both of these things as well, and we tend to think of these things as "doing the right thing" (often simplistically but usefully defined as moral judgement that is self-sacrificing) when we see it happening. We all "know" that it is irrational to continue to act on a committment to others when no one is looking and we can't get caught. Yet many people develop the inner compass that urges them to keep their committments without external requirements or rewards to do so.

So I'm not sure there is a particular point where we take other things than self-gratification into consideration in our moral reasoning. We continue to be guided by expectation of reward througout our lives from the very start to the very end. We also (nearly all of us) have the potential to develop other kinds of guidance as well at early points along the way, which may be suppressed or developed. Capacities like self-control, the ability to judge fairness, a sense of what is just, a sense of obligation, and so on, develop from a combination of reasoning ability and basic moral sentiments, in some complex interaction with local social norms.

An important implication of this would be that neurologically and developmentally normal human beings are capable of being moral (and therefore "responsible") to pretty much the degree that they are capable of reason, so long as they have developed respect for and learned not to ignore the urgings of their moral sentiments.

This seems consistent to me with the traditional notion of wisdom as a still, small voice in our hearts that we can learn to heed or easily choose to ignore.

When we say that someone cannot distinguish right from wrong (for example, the legal definition of "insanity" implied by the M'Naughton ruling) does it mean they cannot reason conclusions adequately from their feelings about what is right and wrong, that they have no such feelings, or that they have learned not to listen to their heart? We don't make that distinction in general, but it might be very important.

kind regards,

Todd

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