Moral psychology I: are we innately moral?

A classic question in philosophy is whether humans are by nature good or bad; whether we are born with an innate moral sense and are capable of altruism, or whether the rules of morality are simply things that we abide by for our own, selfish reasons.

Psychologists are able to inform this debate on the origins of morality.

Freud, one of the great early psychologists, held that morality is a function of the superego, which is created by the Oedipus complex through identification with the father or the mother.

But another approach has looked at whether and how people (and animals) can distinguish between moral rules and non-moral rules – whether they think that punching someone in the face is wrong in a different way to not wearing school uniform.

If the rules of morality are just rules like any other rules, then we would not distinguish between these different sorts of transgression. If, however, there is something “special” about morality, then we might expect different sorts of reaction. And if morality is in some sense innate, then we would expect these different sorts of reaction to kick in from an early age.

This is, in fact, what we find.

From a young age, children will distinguish so-called “moral transgressions” (punching someone in the face) from “conventional transgressions” (not wearing school uniform), on the basis that moral transgressions are:

1. Less authority-dependent (they are wrong even if no authority figure says so);
2. More serious; and
3. Less relative (they are wrong in all places at all times)

The basis of our moral sense seems to be that we find the suffering of other people naturally unpleasant.

A young child will stop trying to steal another child's toy if the other child displays a sad face. Rats will learn to press a lever to bring a distressed rat back down to earth from a raised platform, for no other reward than a reduction in the other rat's distress.

It is conceivable that our sense of morality is built up from this fundamental aversion to the suffering of other people, through relatively simple mechanisms of associative learning. We find another child's sadness unpleasant and we associate this unpleasant feeling with the action that brought it about – stealing his toy. We thereby come to find the action, and eventually just the thought of the action, unpleasant as well.

This contrasts with how we come to follow rules like wearing school uniform – we learn to wear school uniform correctly because we know that we will receive some external punishment if we don't. We don't find the transgressive action unpleasant in itself, in the way that we find the effects of stealing another child's toy intrinsically unpleasant.

Even if this is all true, it raises a big question for psychologists and philosophers to ponder: why have humans evolved to find the suffering of others intrinsically aversive?