Moral Reflex, Moral Sense

Is morality something learned or is it innate? Is morality dependent upon religion or not? There is a lot of debate about such issues - morality is a contentious subject - but recent research appears to weigh against the presumption that religion is required to learn morality.

Anjana Ahuja writes:

Harvard academics started off with the commonly held premise that “moral psychology is a slowly developing capacity, founded entirely on experience and education, and subject to considerable variation across cultures”.

How different their views are now: “We believe this hyper rational, culturally-specific view is no longer tenable . . . When humans, from the hunter-gathers of the Rift Valley to the billionaire dot-com-ers of the Silicon Valley, generate moral intuitions they are like reflexes, something that happens to us without our being aware of how or even why.”

The discovery of a moral reflex, Professor Gazzaniga says, points to the existence of an instinctive “universal ethic” gifted to us by our ancestors. A society without morals would wipe itself out; evolution would inevitably have favoured the acquisition of a moral sense. And so, he argues, somewhere along the timeline of human history, the human brain became the ethical brain. It probably happened before the emergence of organised religion, and certainly well before 2005 years ago.

You can take the test moral test here. Do you think that there is some sort of basic "universal ethic" underlying all ethical behavior just like there may be a basic "universal grammar" that underlies all languages? If so, what sorts of implications might that have for us?

Read More:

• Guide to Ethics and Morality
• News About Ethics