SDA #1: The Moral Instinct - How Does Morality Play a Role in Our Decisions?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html?pagewanted=5&_r=1&ref=health

Response to the Moral Instinct by Stephen Pinker, New York Times, January, 13, 2008

Pinker argues in his article " Moral Instinct" that are three innate moral values to human beings: fairness, authority, purity, community, and harm. He uses the following examples to illustrate reactions to situations involving these values:

Stick a pin into your palm.
Stick a pin into the palm of a child you don’t know. (Harm.)

Accept a wide-screen TV from a friend who received it at no charge because of a computer error.
Accept a wide-screen TV from a friend who received it from a thief who had stolen it from a wealthy family. (Fairness.)

Say something bad about your nation (which you don’t believe) on a talk-radio show in your nation.
Say something bad about your nation (which you don’t believe) on a talk-radio show in a foreign nation. (Community.)

Slap a friend in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit.
Slap your minister in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit. (Authority.)

He continues to argue that these moral values are deeply rooted in the evolutionary genetic development but how it is not, in fact, a zero-sum game. Different social or cultural circumstances can very the degree to which someone attributes payback to the moral value in question. He uses modern examples of the teacher in Sudan who allowed her student to name a stuffed animal Muhammad and then has a crowd calling for her death as an example of a culture that places authority higher than harm in the value-chain.

Thus, fairness also can be seen as very gray in how individuals view a particular decision. One individual could view child labor as a necessity for a community while others might look at this as morally corrupt due to a fairness value.

Moral values although universal feelings are not necessarily directly linked to outcomes.