I’m reading Marc Hauser’s Moral Minds right now. It’s based on Hauser’s own research, at the Harvard Moral Sense Test, plus an impressive synthesis of a huge amount of other research in the sciences of the mind. The view Hauser elaborates is essentially this: just as there is a module in the human mind that enables us to acquire language, and which places quite detailed constraints on the content of any learnable and stable language, so there is a moral faculty which underlies our moral competence; this moral faculty is innate, but – like the language faculty – it only constrains the content of what is acquired, with cultural variation explaining variations. Variations can only be along permissible parameters.
This is a reasonably strong nativist view; like most such nativisms, it rests on data about the universality of the content, poverty of the stimulus arguments (ie, the amount of data the child is exposed to is insufficient to explain what she acquires) and evidence that children in different cultures go through the same developmental stages at the same time. I think the evidence Hauser amasses for the claim that something is innate is overwhelming, though I’m not sure it shows that the constraints he identifies are innate. Elsewhere I’ve argued that the basin of attraction of a convention al norm can be very large, which would explain universality of a convention without us needing to suppose that it is innate. Factors that might explain the size of the basin of attraction might include innate dispositions, without us wanting to say that the innate disposition is to that norm.
But I want to concentrate on another feature of Hauser’s view. Hauser argues for the claim that moral judgment is an essentially ‘cool’ – unemotional – process. That is, emotions play a role in morality, but not in judgment itself. The moral faculty assesses an action in terms of its causes (especially whether it is intentional) and its consequences, then it spits out a judgment (permissible, forbidden, obligatory). Only then do emotions play a role and that role is essentially motivating the action. Hauser says that psychopaths are a good test case for this view. Psychopaths have normal moral judgments, but are not motivated to act, and their deficits are emotional.
I think this view is wrong. Hauser is certainly right that there must be some kind of processing prior to our feeling an emotion – else the emotion would not be triggered. But I think there is good reason (at least sometimes) to identify the judgment with the outcome of the processing as modulated by the emotion, and not with the output of the module which triggers the emotion. The emotionally modulated judgment owes its content partially to the emotion, and therefore the emotion functions as part of the machinery producing the judgment.
I agree with Hauser that the psychopath is a good test case of his view. But I think it fails the test. Children as young as three are very good at distinguishing moral transgressions from conventional transgressions; that is, transgressions that are authority dependent (inasmuch as if the rules were different, the transgression would not be wrong) from those that are not. But psychopaths do very badly at distinguishing moral from conventional transgressions. They identify both kinds of transgressions as transgressions, as infringements of the rules, but they are unable to say which are wrong only because of the rules. Because they cannot make this distinction, they seem to be missing the ability to make moral judgments at all. Hence their emotional deficit explains and underlies a deficit at moral cognition, and not merely moral action.
