ONE Where Does Morality Come From?Read more at location 182
Note: Da dove viene la morale? 3 ipotesi (innatismo, culturalismo, Piaget). Piaget: razionalismo: l' uomo scopre da sè i principi morali secondo un progresso codificabile: l' educatore è spesso un ostacolo che ritarda il processo razionale che resta cmq necessario... L' apprendimento secondo Piaget (in particolare l' aprendimento etico) Turiel (razionalista): il bambino scopre che alcune regole morali sono in realtà convenzioni. Le uniche regole morali che conserva sono quelle che recano danno a terzi ( nel frattempo ha imparato a mettersi nei loro panni). L' ip. piace x le implicazioni politiche. Critica culturalista a Piaget: il concetto di "disgusto" mette in dubbio il lavoro di Turiel sulle regole naturali. Se esistono regole arbitrarie victimless è x' la cultura, e quindi l' educatore hanno un ruolo. Il test ideale¦ storie su disgusto e non rispetto. Confutato il razionalismo ingenuo: come può un bimbo costruire da sè il disgusto x certi fenomeni? Può farlo solo se ammaestrato da una cultura (sapere trasmissivo). H. propone invece una critica innatista a Piaget cercando una regola generale (innata) del disgusto: l' uomo, ovunque nel mondo, cerca la xfezione e si ricrea un sistema di purezze... Edit
A family’s dog was killed by a car in front of their house. They had heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog’s body and cooked it and ate it for dinner. Nobody saw them do this.Read more at location 184
A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a chicken. But before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he cooks it and eats it.Read more at location 192
Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous mind.Read more at location 199
The big question behind this research was: How do children come to know right from wrong? Where does morality come from? There are two obvious answers to this question: nature or nurture.Read more at location 213
But this is a false choice, and in 1987 moral psychology was mostly focused on a third answer: rationalism, which says that kids figure out morality for themselves.Read more at location 222
Piaget focused on the kinds of errors kids make. For example, he’d put water into two identical drinking glasses and ask kids to tell him if the glasses held the same amount of water. (Yes.) Then he’d pour the contents of one of the glasses into a tall skinny glass and ask the child to compare the new glass to the one that had not been touched. Kids younger than six or seven usually say that the tall skinny glass now holds more water, because the level is higher. They don’t understand that the total volume of water is conserved when it moves from glass to glass.Read more at location 227
In other words, the understanding of the conservation of volume wasn’t innate, and it wasn’t learned from adults. Kids figure it out for themselves, but only when their minds are ready and they are given the right kinds of experiences.Read more at location 233
Piaget argued that children’s understanding of morality is like their understanding of those water glasses: we can’t say that it is innate, and we can’t say that kids learn it directly from adults.Read more at location 239
We grow into our rationality as caterpillars grow into butterflies. If the caterpillar eats enough leaves, it will (eventually) grow wings.Read more at location 246
I’ll use the word rationalist to describe anyone who believes that reasoning is the most important and reliable way to obtain moral knowledge.Read more at location 249
Kohlberg found a six-stage progression in children’s reasoning about the social world, and this progression matched up well with the stages Piaget had found in children’s reasoning about the physical world.Read more at location 257
Kohlberg called the first two stages the “pre-conventional” level of moral judgment, and they correspond to the Piagetian stage at which kids judge the physical world by superficial featuresRead more at location 260
But during elementary school, most children move on to the two “conventional” stages, becoming adept at understanding and even manipulating rules and social conventions. This is the age of petty legalismRead more at location 262
After puberty, right when Piaget said that children become capable of abstract thought, Kohlberg found that some children begin to think for themselves about the nature of authority, the meaning of justice, and the reasons behind rules and laws. In the two “post-conventional” stages, adolescents still value honesty and respect rules and laws, but now they sometimes justify dishonesty or lawbreaking in pursuit of still higher goods, particularly justice.Read more at location 266
Kohlberg painted an inspiring rationalist image of children as “moral philosophers” trying to work out coherent ethical systems for themselves.Read more at location 269
But there’s a deeper reason so many young psychologists began to study morality from a rationalist perspective, and this was Kohlberg’s second great innovation: he used his research to build a scientific justification for a secular liberal moral order.Read more at location 275
Kohlberg’s most influential finding was that the most morally advanced kids (according to his scoring technique) were those who had frequent opportunities for role taking—for putting themselves into another person’s shoes and looking at a problem from that person’s perspective.Read more at location 277
It’s really hard for a child to see things from the teacher’s point of view, because the child has never been a teacher. Piaget and Kohlberg both thought that parents and other authorities were obstacles to moral development.Read more at location 280
you want your kids to learn about the social world, let them play with other kids and resolve disputes; don’t lecture them about the Ten Commandments. And, for heaven’s sake, don’t force them to obey God or their teachers or you. That will only freeze them at the conventional level.Read more at location 283
children’s progress toward the liberal ideal. For the next twenty-five years, from the 1970s through the 1990s, moral psychologists mostly just interviewed young people about moral dilemmas and analyzed their justifications.11 Most of this work was not politically motivated—it was careful and honest scientific research.Read more at location 286
Children construct their moral understanding on the bedrock of the absolute moral truth that harm is wrong.Read more at location 310
Turiel’s account of moral development differed in many ways from Kohlberg’s, but the political implications were similar: morality is about treating individuals well. It’s about harm and fairness (not loyalty, respect, duty, piety, patriotism, or tradition).Read more at location 313
the articles I was reading were all about reasoning and cognitive structures and domains of knowledge. It just seemed too cerebral. There was hardly any mention of emotion.Read more at location 323
I read a book on witchcraft among the Azande of Sudan.17 It turns out that witchcraft beliefs arise in surprisingly similar forms in many parts of the world, which suggests either that there really are witches or (more likely) that there’s something about human minds that often generates this cultural institution.Read more at location 329
That was my first hint that groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.18 I read a book about the Ilongot, a tribe in the Philippines whose young men gained honor by cutting off people’s heads.Read more at location 333
The author explained these most puzzling killings as ways that small groups of men channeled resentments and frictions within the group into a group-strengthening “hunting party,” capped off by a long night of communal celebratory singing. This was my first hint that morality often involves tension within the group linked to competition between different groups.Read more at location 338
I began to see the United States and Western Europe as extraordinary historical exceptions—newRead more at location 343
our lack of rules about what the anthropologists call “purity” and “pollution.” Contrast us with the Hua of New Guinea, who have developed elaborate networks of food taboos that govern what men and women may eat.Read more at location 345
the Hua certainly seemed to think of their food rules as moral rules. They talked about them constantly, judged each other by their food habits, and governed their lives, duties, and relationships by what the anthropologist Anna Meigs called “a religion of the body.”Read more at location 350
When I read the Hebrew Bible, I was shocked to discover how much of the book—one of the sources of Western morality—was taken up with rules about food, menstruation, sex, skin, and the handling of corpses.Read more at location 353
So what’s going on here? If Turiel was right that morality is really about harm, then why do most non-Western cultures moralize so many practices that seem to have nothing to do with harm?Read more at location 360
Westerners, even secular ones, continue to see choices about food and sex as being heavily loaded with moral significance? Liberals sometimes say that religious conservatives are sexual prudesRead more at location 362
But conservatives can just as well make fun of liberal struggles to choose a balanced breakfast—balanced among moral concerns about free-range eggs, fair-trade coffee, naturalness, and a variety of toxins, some of which (such as genetically modified corn and soy-beans) pose a greater threat spiritually than biologically.Read more at location 364
When anthropologists wrote about morality, it was as though they spoke a different language from the psychologists I had been reading.Read more at location 370
Shweder quoted the anthropologist Clifford Geertz on how unusual Westerners are in thinking about people as discrete individuals:Read more at location 375
Most societies have chosen the sociocentric answer, placing the needs of groups and institutions first, and subordinating the needs of individuals. In contrast, the individualistic answer places individuals at the center and makes society a servant of the individual.Read more at location 383
The sociocentric answer dominated most of the ancient world, but the individualistic answer became a powerful rival during the Enlightenment.Read more at location 385
Shweder thought that the theories of Kohlberg and Turiel were produced by and for people from individualistic cultures.Read more at location 389
Indian practices related to food, sex, clothing, and gender relations were almost always judged to be moral issues, not social conventions,Read more at location 405
Shweder found almost no trace of social conventional thinking in the sociocentric culture of Orissa, where, as he put it, “the social order is a moral order.”Read more at location 407
The distinction between morals and mere conventions is not a tool that children everywhere use to self-construct their moral knowledge. Rather, the distinction turns out to be a cultural artifact, a necessary by-product of the individualistic answer to the question of how individuals and groups relate. When you put individuals first,Read more at location 429
Turiel argued that once you take into account Indian “informational assumptions” about the way the world works, you see that most of Shweder’s thirty-nine stories really were moral violations, harming victims in ways that Americans could not see.Read more at location 438
I agreed with Turiel that Shweder’s study was missing an important experimental control: he didn’t ask his subjects about harm.Read more at location 444
I started writing very short stories about people who do offensive things, but do them in such a way that nobody is harmed. I called these stories “harmless taboo violations,”Read more at location 450
I made up dozens of these stories but quickly found that the ones that worked best fell into two categories: disgust and disrespect.Read more at location 453
For example, one of my disrespect stories was: “A woman is cleaning out her closet, and she finds her old American flag. She doesn’t want the flag anymore, so she cuts it up into pieces and uses the rags to clean her bathroom.”Read more at location 455
Turiel’s rationalism predicted that reasoning about harm is the basis of moral judgment, so even though people might say it’s wrong to eat your dog, they would have to treat the act as a violation of a social convention.Read more at location 458
Shweder’s theory, on the other hand, said that Turiel’s predictions should hold among members of individualistic secular societies but not elsewhere.Read more at location 461
Philadelphia would be the most individualistic of the three cities (and therefore the most Turiel-like) and Recife would be the most sociocentric (and therefore more like Orissa in its judgments).Read more at location 489
First, all four of my Philadelphia groups confirmed Turiel’s finding that Americans make a big distinction between moral and conventional violations. I used two stories taken directly from Turiel’s research: a girl pushes a boy off a swing (that’s a clear moral violation) and a boy refuses to wear a school uniform (that’s a conventional violation).Read more at location 491
I had included a probe question that directly asked, after each story: “Do you think anyone was harmed by what [the person in the story] did?” If Shweder’s findings were caused by perceptions of hidden victims (as Turiel proposed), then my cross-cultural differences should have disappeared when I removed the subjects who said yes to this question.Read more at location 505
But when I filtered out these people, the cultural differences got bigger, not smaller. This was very strong support for Shweder’s claim that the moral domain goes far beyond harm.Read more at location 508
In other words, Shweder won the debate. I had replicated Turiel’s findings using Turiel’s methods on people like me—educated Westerners raised in an individualistic culture—but had confirmed Shweder’s claim that Turiel’s theory didn’t travel well. The moral domain varied across nations and social classes.Read more at location 510
It was hard to see how a rationalist could explain these results. How could children self-construct their moral knowledge about disgust and disrespect from their private analyses of harmfulness? There must be other sources of moral knowledge, including cultural learning (as Shweder argued), or innate moral intuitions about disgust and disrespect (as I began to argue years later).Read more at location 513
Was this an example of the “informational assumptions” that Turiel had talked about? Were people really condemning the actions because they foresaw these harms, or was it the reverse process—were people inventing these harms because they had already condemned the actions?Read more at location 545
Yet even when subjects recognized that their victim claims were bogus, they still refused to say that the act was OK.Read more at location 556
These subjects were reasoning. They were working quite hard at reasoning. But it was not reasoning in search of truth; it was reasoning in support of their emotional reactions.Read more at location 560
Hume, who wrote in 1739 that “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions,Read more at location 561
In this chapter I considered a third possibility, the rationalist answer, which dominated moral psychology when I entered the field: that morality is self-constructed by children on the basis of their experiences with harm. Kids know that harm is wrong because they hate to be harmed, and they gradually come to see that it is therefore wrong to harm others, which leads them to understand fairness and eventually justice.Read more at location 575
People sometimes have gut feelings—particularly about disgust and disrespect—that can drive their reasoning. Moral reasoning is sometimes a post hoc fabrication.Read more at location 581
Morality can’t be entirely self-constructed by children based on their growing understanding of harm. Cultural learning or guidance must play a larger roleRead more at location 582
In the rest of this book I’ll try to explain how morality can be innate (as a set of evolved intuitions) and learned (as children learn to apply those intuitions within a particular culture).Read more at location 585
