Morality

• 1. Introduction

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  Morality is not a single thing. It is a family of phenomena that stretches across every human society ever documented, and across many other social species as well. What it means to call an action right or wrong, a person virtuous or cruel, a relationship proper or improper, varies in ways that have fascinated and divided philosophers for centuries. This documentary will trace morality from its deepest biological roots to the laboratory, from ancient Latin word origins to the differences between how conservatives and liberals weigh duty and fairness today. Along the way, some findings will be surprising. People in at least 60 nations have believed for the last 70 years that morality is in decline. Research suggests that perception is an illusion. The story of morality is, it turns out, the story of what makes us social animals at all.

• 2. A Word's Long Journey

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  Geoffrey Chaucer was the first writer on record to use the word "moralite" in Middle English, around 1375. The term arrived through a chain of transformations stretching back to classical Latin. The root is the Latin noun mos, in its plural form mores, meaning manner, character, and proper behavior. That root passed through Late Latin as moralitas, then into Old French as moralite, before Chaucer picked it up. When it entered English it initially carried a narrow sense: moral qualities or virtuous conduct. By the mid-15th century the word had widened to mean a whole system of ethical duties. The Latin adjective moralis, meaning pertaining to manners, was itself coined by the Roman statesman Cicero, who created it specifically as a translation of the Greek term ethikos. That coinage eventually gave English two parallel words, "moral" and "ethical", whose meanings overlap heavily but carry slightly different philosophical connotations. The Latin root mos may derive from a Proto-Indo-European root reconstructed as meh1, meaning to intend or to measure, which is also proposed as the ancestor of the English word "mood" and the Ancient Greek verb maiomai, meaning to strive. Whether one is striving, measuring, or following manner, the ancient idea seems to be the same: orienting oneself toward a standard of conduct shared with others.

• 3. The Philosopher's Toolkit

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  Philosopher Simon Blackburn drew a line between two uses of the terms morality and ethics that are worth keeping distinct. He observed that "morality" tends to be reserved for systems like that of Immanuel Kant, which center on duty, obligation, and universal principles of conduct. "Ethics" tends to be used for the more Aristotelian approach, which is rooted in the notion of virtue and ties moral reasoning to practical life rather than abstract principle. Both words are used interchangeably in everyday speech, but in philosophy the distinction carries weight. At the level of theory, philosophers divide into moral realists and moral anti-realists. Realists hold that true moral statements report objective moral facts, independent of what any particular culture believes. Anti-realists deny this. Under the anti-realist umbrella, error theorists say moral statements make claims about objective facts that are simply false; ethical subjectivists say moral statements are claims about subjective attitudes rather than facts; and non-cognitivists say moral sentences do not describe the world at all but instead express emotions or issue commands. Some non-cognitivist positions, such as universal prescriptivism, are considered universalist in one sense even while rejecting moral realism. Divine command theory and ideal observer theory offer two more universalist paths: the first grounds morality in a god's edicts, the second in the hypothetical decrees of a perfectly rational being. These are not merely academic puzzles. Which theory one accepts shapes whether slavery can ever be called objectively wrong, or whether that judgment is only an expression of distaste.

• 4. Evolution's Long Rehearsal

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  Vampire bats offer one of the sharpest illustrations of morality's evolutionary roots. On some nights a bat fails to find prey; on others it manages a surplus. Those that fed will regurgitate part of their blood meal to save a group member from starvation. Because these animals live in close-knit groups over many years, the favor tends to be returned. Gerald Wilkinson documented this in 1984. The pattern, called reciprocity, is seen by evolutionary biologists as one way to understand the origins of human moral behavior. Its function across species is typically to secure a reliable supply of resources when food quality or quantity fluctuates unpredictably. Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce argued in 2009 that morality as a suite of behaviors, including empathy, reciprocity, altruism, cooperation, and a sense of fairness, is likely shared by all mammals living in complex social groups, citing wolves, coyotes, elephants, dolphins, rats, and chimpanzees. Chimpanzees have been shown to display empathy in a wide variety of contexts and to engage in deception, as well as social politics recognizable as gossip and reputation management. Christopher Boehm hypothesized in 1982 that increasing moral complexity through hominid evolution was driven by the need to avoid disputes and injuries as early humans moved to open savanna and began using stone weapons. The Westermarck effect, where close proximity during early childhood suppresses mutual sexual attraction, illustrates how evolutionary pressures can install moral intuitions directly in the nervous system: the taboo against incest reduces genetically risky inbreeding, and the aversion is felt as moral revulsion rather than rational calculation.

• 5. The Brain Behind Right and Wrong

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  Large-scale meta-analyses of brain imaging data have now mapped the neural network that activates when humans reason about moral questions. That network overlaps significantly with two others: the network for representing other people's intentions, known as theory of mind, and the network for vicariously experiencing others' emotional states, known as empathy. Cognitive neuroscientist Jean Decety has argued that the ability to recognize and share another individual's experience was a key step in the evolution of social behavior and, ultimately, of morality. The inability to feel empathy is one of the defining characteristics of psychopathy, a finding that appears to support that view. Two specific regions have been identified as particularly important. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex, or VMPC, activates when people make explicit judgments of right and wrong; it is a region involved in valuation. The temporoparietal junction activates during intuitive reactions to situations that carry implicit moral content; it plays a key role in understanding intentions and beliefs. Transcranial magnetic stimulation of the VMPC has been shown to inhibit the ability of subjects to take intent into account when forming a moral judgment. Individuals with a lesion of the VMPC judge an action purely on its outcome. These findings suggest that the moral brain is not a single module but a domain-general system that can be dissected into cognitive and affective components, and that disrupting one component shifts the weight of judgment toward the others.

• 6. Across Cultures and Politics

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  Peterson and Seligman surveyed virtues across cultures and across millennia, concluding that six major virtues appear in all the cultures they examined: wisdom and knowledge; courage; humanity; justice; temperance; and transcendence. Humanity alone encompasses love, kindness, and social intelligence. A 2014 Pew Research study across 40 countries measured attitudes toward divorce, extramarital affairs, homosexuality, gambling, abortion, alcohol use, contraceptive use, and premarital sex, finding that the percentage of each population regarding these as acceptable, unacceptable, or not a moral issue at all varied enormously. Anthropologists from Oxford's Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology analyzed ethnographic accounts of ethics from 60 societies, drawing on over 600,000 words from more than 600 sources. They identified seven moral rules that appear across all of them: help your family, help your group, return favors, be brave, defer to superiors, divide resources fairly, and respect others' property. Jonathan Haidt's moral foundations theory, developed with colleagues, has been used to examine the divide between liberals and conservatives in the United States. Haidt found that Americans who identified as liberals tended to weight care and fairness above loyalty, respect, and purity. Self-identified conservatives valued care and fairness less, and the remaining three more highly. Both groups gave care the highest overall weighting. Haidt also traced the geographic roots of this division, linking stronger conservatism to closely knit, ethnically homogeneous communities, and stronger liberalism to port cities with a greater cultural mix. Fons Trompenaars tested members of different cultures with moral dilemmas directly, finding that expectations about whether a friend should lie to protect a driver who hit a pedestrian ranged from none to definite depending on the society.

• 7. The Illusion of Decline

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  A study by Adam M. Mastroianni and Daniel T. Gilbert found that people in no fewer than 60 nations hold the belief that morality has been deteriorating continuously, and that this conviction has been stable for at least the last 70 years. The study showed that people attribute this perceived decay to individuals growing less moral as they age and to successive generations being worse than the last. Yet when the same participants were asked to evaluate the morality of their own peers, those evaluations had not decreased over time. Mastroianni and Gilbert traced the illusion to two well-established psychological mechanisms: distorted exposure to information and distorted memory of information. People are more likely to hear about moral failures than quiet moral successes, and they remember bad events more vividly than good ones. The perception of decline, the study found, is attenuated or reversed when participants are asked specifically about people closest to them or about people who lived before they were born. The practical consequences of the illusion are real: the authors note it contributes to misallocation of resources, underuse of social support systems, and susceptibility to social influence. Lawrence Kohlberg, Jean Piaget, and Elliot Turiel each built cognitive-developmental theories in which morality forms through a series of constructive stages, with each higher stage considered morally superior. The challenge those theories face is the circularity the source acknowledges directly: the higher stages are called better because they are higher, and higher because they are better. Carol Gilligan's ethics of care approach located moral development instead in caring, mutually responsive relationships grounded in interdependence, particularly in parenting.

• 8. Religion, Society, and the Expanding Circle

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  The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Ethics states that religion and morality are to be defined differently and have no definitional connections with each other, describing them as two distinct kinds of value systems or action guides. The relationship is complex in practice. Philosopher David Hume observed that the greatest crimes have been found, in many instances, to be compatible with a superstitious piety and devotion, leading him to conclude that it is unsafe to draw any inference in favor of a person's morals from the fervor or strictness of their religious exercises. A 2001 review found the existing evidence on the relationship between religion and crime to be varied, contested, and inconclusive. A 2005 study by Gregory S. Paul, published in the Journal of Religion and Society, reported that higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion in prosperous democracies. Gary Jensen's response argued that a complex relationship exists, with some dimensions of religiosity encouraging homicide and others discouraging it. A study published in April 2012 in Social Psychological and Personality Science found that non-religious people scored higher on measures of compassion-motivated pro-social behavior, while religious people were found to be less motivated by compassion than by an inner sense of moral obligation. The Sentience Institute, co-founded by Jacy Reese Anthis, analyzes moral progress through the framework of an expanding moral circle. Noam Chomsky has stated that one of the most elementary moral principles is universality: if something is right for me, it is right for you; if it is wrong for you, it is wrong for me. That principle, Chomsky argues, is at the core of any moral code worth examining at all.