THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYthey didn’t think harm caused through inaction less bad than harm
caused through action, as most previous participants had done. Hauser
and his colleague Linda Abarbanell concluded that the action principle
could be an aspect of morality that is culturally determined, and that
perhaps other close-knit communities with extensive social obligations
between members also see harmful inaction as being just as immoral as
harmful action.
These ideas about a moral grammar also chime with the work of the
psychologist Jonathan Haidt at the University of Virginia. He conducted
studies in which he presented participants with odd stories in which
nobody gets hurt, but which nonetheless provoke in participants the
sense that something is morally wrong. In one example, a brother and
sister decide to try having sex together, taking all the necessary contra-
ception precautions. In another, a family decide to cook and eat their
dog after it is killed in a traffic accident. People react with moral disgust
to these scenarios and yet they struggle to explain why – a phenomenon
that Haidt calls moral dumbfounding – thus bolstering the idea that
we have an inbuilt moral intuition divorced from reason. This modern
view of morality as an intuition or a universal grammar flies in the face
of more traditional theories, such as those of the Harvard psychologist
Lawrence Kohlberg, in which moral judgement was seen as emerging
from rational thought and consideration.
In a further development of his ideas, Haidt proposed that our
moral intuitions are grounded on five foundations, each of which is
calibrated according to our cultural background. These are Harm/
care (relating to kindness and nurture); Fairness/reciprocity (issues of
equality and treating others as you would wish to be treated); Ingroup/
loyalty (patriotism and self-sacrifice), Authority/respect (leadership and
tradition); Purity/sanctity (taboos around the body and diet). According
to Haidt, the first two are universal, tend to correlate with each other,
and are especially valued by liberals. The remaining three also tend to
correlate with each other, but are less universal, and tend to be valued
more by conservatives. See which dimensions you value most highly at
http://www.yourmorals.org.
Haidt argues that for a successful society there needs to be a balance
between the five moral foundations – a blend of the liberal and conserva-
tive positions. He recognizes that the danger with his own self-declared
liberal position is that it downgrades the Authority, Ingroup and Purity
moral dimensions, associating these values with racism and segregation.
And yet, it is the order, tradition, and sense of community and belonging