Haidt and Joseph, 2004

Strangeness is fascinating. Medievalmaps embellished with fantasticalbeasts, sixteenth-century wonder cham-bers ½lled with natural and technologicalmarvels, even late-twentieth-century su-permarket tabloids–all attest to the hu-man fascination with things that violateour basic ideas about reality. The studyof morality and culture is therefore anintrinsically fascinating topic. Peoplehave created moralities as divergent as those of Nazis and Quakers, head-hunters and Jains. And yet, when welook closely at the daily lives of peoplein divergent cultures, we can ½nd ele-

ments that arise in nearly all of them–for example, reciprocity, loyalty, respectfor (some) authority, limits on physicalharm, and regulation of eating and sexu-ality. What are we to make of this pat-tern of similarity within profound differ-ence? Social scientists have traditionallytaken two approaches.

The empiricist approach posits thatmoral knowledge, moral beliefs, moralaction, and all the other stuff of moral-ity are learned in childhood. There is no moral faculty or moral anything elsebuilt into the human mind, althoughthere may be some innate learningmechanisms that enable the acquisitionof later knowledge. To the extent thatthere are similarities across cultures,they arise because all cultures face simi-lar problems (e.g., how to divide powerand resources, care for children, and re-solve disputes) for which they have oftendeveloped similar solutions.

The nativist approach, on the otherhand, holds that knowledge about suchissues as fairness, harm, and respect forauthority has been built into the humanmind by evolution. All children who areraised in a reasonable environment willcome to develop these ideas, even if theyare not taught by adults. To the extentthat there are differences across cultures,they arise because of local variation inthe implementation of universal moral

Dædalus Fall 2004 55

Jonathan Haidt & Craig Joseph

Intuitive ethics: how innately preparedintuitions generate culturally variable virtues

Jonathan Haidt is associate professor of socialpsychology at the University of Virginia. His re-search focuses on morality and emotion and howthey vary across cultures. He is currently studyingthe positive moral emotions, such as awe, admira-tion, and moral elevation. In 2001 he was award-ed the Templeton Prize in Positive Psychology.

Craig Joseph is a postdoctoral research associate in the Committee on Human Development at theUniversity of Chicago. His research focuses on thecultural psychology of moral functioning and thevirtues, the psychology of political violence, andthe adaptation of Muslim communities to life inthe United States.

© 2004 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

knowledge (e.g., should relations amongsiblings be guided by rank and respectfor elders, or by equality and reciproci-ty?).

We would like to take the opportunityafforded by this Dædalus issue on hu-man nature to work through one aspectof the idea that morality is both innateand learned. We are not going to offer awishy-washy, split-the-difference ap-proach. Rather, we will present a modi-½ed nativist view that we believe fullyrespects the depth and importance ofcultural variation in morality. We will do this by focusing attention on a here-tofore ignored link: the link between in-tuitions, especially a subset of intuitionsthat we argue are innate in importantrespects, and virtues, which by and largeare social constructions.

We propose that human beings comeequipped with an intuitive ethics, an in-nate preparedness to feel flashes of ap-proval or disapproval toward certain pat-terns of events involving other humanbeings. The four patterns for which webelieve the evidence is best are those sur-rounding suffering, hierarchy, reciproci-ty, and purity. These intuitions under-gird the moral systems that cultures de-velop, including their understandings of virtues and character. By recognizingthat cultures build incommensurablemoralities on top of a foundation ofshared intuitions, we can develop newapproaches to moral education and tothe moral conflicts that divide our di-verse society.

Anthropologists often begin with so-ciological facts and then try to workdown one level of analysis to psycholo-gy. Laws, customs, rituals, and normsobviously vary, and from that variation it is reasonable to conclude that manypsychological facts, such as beliefs, val-ues, feelings, and habits, vary too. Evolu-

tionary psychologists, in contrast, workmostly in the space between psychologi-cal and biological levels of analysis. Hu-man brains are obviously products ofnatural selection, adapted to solve prob-lems that faced our hominid ancestorsfor millions of years. Since infant brainshardly vary across cultures and races, itis reasonable to suppose that many psy-chological facts (e.g., emotions, motiva-tions, and ways of processing social in-formation) are part of the factory-in-stalled equipment that evolution builtinto us to solve those recurrent prob-lems.

So how can we get those workingdown from sociological facts to connectwith those working up from biologicalfacts? Where exactly should we drivethe golden spike to link the two ap-proaches? The meeting point must be somewhere in the territory of psy-chology, and we suggest that the exactspot is the intuitions. Intuitions are thejudgments, solutions, and ideas that popinto consciousness without our beingaware of the mental processes that led tothem. When you suddenly know the an-swer to a problem you’ve been mulling,or when you know that you like some-one but can’t tell why, your knowledge is intuitive. Moral intuitions are a sub-class of intuitions, in which feelings ofapproval or disapproval pop into aware-ness as we see or hear about somethingsomeone did, or as we consider choicesfor ourselves.1

Intuitions arise because the mind iscomposed of two distinct processingsystems. Most of cognition can be re-ferred to as the intuitive, or automatic,

56 Dædalus Fall 2004

JonathanHaidt &Craig Josephonhumannature

1 For more on moral intuition, see JonathanHaidt, “The Emotional Dog and Its RationalTail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to MoralJudgment,” Psychological Review 108 (2001): 814 –834; James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense (NewYork: Free Press, 1993).

system. The human mind, like animalminds, does most of its work by auto-matic pattern matching and distributedprocessing. Our visual system, for exam-ple, makes thousands of interpretationseach second, without any conscious ef-fort or even awareness. It does this byrelying in part on built-in processingshortcuts, or heuristics (e.g., the as-sumption that lines continue behind ob-stacles that block parts of them), whichare integrated with learned knowledgeabout the things in one’s visible world.Analogously, many psychologists nowbelieve that most social cognition occursrapidly, automatically, and effortlessly–in a word, intuitively–as our minds ap-praise the people we encounter on suchfeatures as attractiveness, threat, gender,and status. The mind accomplishes thisby relying in part on heuristics, whichare then integrated with learned factsabout the social world.

But human minds are unlike other ani-mal minds in having a well-developedsecond system in which processing oc-curs slowly, deliberately, and fully withinconscious awareness. When you think inwords or reason through a problem orwork backward from a goal to your pres-ent position, you are using the reason-ing, or controlled, system. Most psycho-logical research on morality has lookedat deliberative moral reasoning, in partbecause it is so accessible. All you haveto do is ask someone, as Lawrence Kohl-berg did, “Do you think that Heinzshould break into the pharmacy to stealthe drug to save his wife’s life?”2 Kohl-berg developed a comprehensive ac-count of moral development by lookingat how people’s answers to these sorts

of dilemmas changed over the years ofchildhood and adolescence.

Yet recent research in social psycholo-gy suggests that the responses to suchdilemmas mostly emerge from the intu-itive system: people have quick gut feel-ings that come into consciousness assoon as a situation is presented to them.Most decide within a second or twowhether Heinz should steal the drug.Then when asked to explain their judg-ments, people search for supporting ar-guments and justi½cations using the rea-soning system.3 As with the visual sys-tem, we can’t know how we came to seesomething; we can only know that wesee it. If you focus on the reasons peoplegive for their judgments, you are study-ing the rational tail that got wagged bythe emotional dog.

We propose that intuition is a fertilebut under-studied construct for researchon morality. It is here that we can ½nd asmall number of basic units that mightunderlie a great diversity of culturalproducts. Analogous units comprise our perceptual systems. Three kinds ofreceptors in the skin (for pressure, tem-perature, and pain) work together togive us our varied experiences of touch.Five kinds of receptors on the tongue(for salt, sweet, bitter, sour, and, oddly,glutamate) work together with our senseof smell to give us a great variety of gus-tatory experiences. Might there be a fewdifferent kinds of social receptors thatform the foundation of our highly elab-orated and culturally diverse moralsense?

What can evolution put into a mind,and how does it put it there? Some have


Intuitiveethics: howinnately preparedintuitionsgenerate culturallyvariablevirtues

2 Lawrence Kohlberg, “Stage and Sequence:The Cognitive-Developmental Approach to So-cialization,” in David A. Goslin, ed., Handbookof Socialization Theory and Research (Chicago:Rand McNally, 1969).

3 See Haidt, “The Emotional Dog”; Richard E.Nisbett and Timothy DeCamp Wilson, “TellingMore Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports onMental Processes,” Psychological Review 84(1977): 231–259.

argued that the evolutionary process hascreated innate knowledge of variouskinds.4 For example, infants appear tohave hard-wired knowledge of faces andsweet tastes, because their brains comeequipped with cells and circuits that rec-ognize them. But our more complex abil-ities are often better described as a ‘pre-paredness’ to learn something. For ex-ample, humans are born with few hard-wired fears, but we come prepared to ac-quire certain fears easily (e.g., of snakes,spiders, mice, open spaces), and culturesvary in the degree to which they rein-force or oppose such fears. On the otherhand, it is very dif½cult to create a fear of flowers, or even of such dangerousthings as knives and ½re, because evolu-tion did not ‘prepare’ our minds to learnsuch associations.

So what moral intuitions might themind be prepared to develop? What arethe patterns in the social world to whichhuman beings might easily come to reactwith approval or disapproval? There ismore than one way to answer thesequestions; in this essay we take whatmight be called a meta-empirical ap-proach, surveying works by a variety ofsocial scientists to locate a common coreof moral values, concerns, and issues.

We focused on ½ve works–two thataim to describe what is universal,5 twothat describe what is culturally vari-able,6 and one that describes the build-

ing blocks of morality that are visible in other primates.7 We began by simplylisting the major kinds of social situa-tions these ½ve authors said people (orchimpanzees) react to with a clear evalu-ation as positive or negative. We thentallied the number of ‘votes’ each itemgot, that is, the number of authors, outof the ½ve, who referred to it directly.

The winners, showing up in all ½veworks, were suffering/compassion, reci-procity/fairness, and hierarchy/respect.It seems that in all human cultures, in-dividuals often react with flashes of feel-ing linked to moral intuitions when theyperceive certain events in their socialworlds: when they see others (particu-larly young others) suffering, and otherscausing that suffering; when they seeothers cheat or fail to repay favors; andwhen they see others who are disrespect-ful or who do not behave in a mannerbe½tting their status in the group. Withchimpanzees, these reactions occurmostly in the individual that is directlyharmed. The hallmark of human morali-ty is third-party concern: person A canget angry at person B for what she did toperson C. In fact, people love to exercisetheir third-party moral intuitions somuch that they pay money to see andhear stories about ½ctional strangerswho do bad things to each other.

The best way to understand our argu-ment is to begin with the notion of long-



4 For reviews see Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate(New York: Viking, 2002); Jerome Barkow, Le-da Cosmides, and John Tooby, eds., The AdaptedMind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generationof Culture (New York: Oxford, 1992).

5 Donald E. Brown, Human Universals (Phila-delphia: Temple University Press, 1991); Alan P.Fiske, Structures of Social Life (New York: FreePress, 1991).

6 Shalom H. Schwartz and Wolfgang Bilsky,“Toward a Theory of the Universal Content and Structure of Values: Extensions and Cross-

Cultural Replications,” Journal of Personalityand Social Psychology 58 (1990): 878–891; Rich-ard A. Shweder et al., “The ‘Big Three’ of Mo-rality (Autonomy, Community, and Divinity)and the ‘Big Three’ Explanations of Suffering,”in Allan M. Brandt and Paul Rozin, eds., Mo-rality and Health (New York: Routledge, 1997),119–169.

7 Frans de Waal, Good Natured: The Origins ofRight and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,1996).

standing adaptive challenges, and thento scan down each of the columns in ta-ble 1. For example, the prolonged depen-dence characteristic of primates, espe-cially humans, made it necessary, or atleast bene½cial, for mothers to detectsigns of suffering and distress in theiroffspring. Mothers who were good atdetecting such signals went on to rearmore surviving offspring, and over timea communication system developed inwhich children’s stylized distress signalstriggered maternal aid. Psychologicalpreparation for hierarchy evolved tohelp animals living in social groupsmake the most of their relative abilitiesto dominate others. Given the unequaldistribution of strength, skill, and luck,those individuals who had the rightemotional reactions to play along suc-cessfully and work their way up throughthe ranks did better than those who re-fused to play a subordinate role or whofailed to handle the perks of powergracefully.8 Similarly, a readiness for reciprocity evolved to help animals,

particularly primates, reap the bene½tsof cooperating with non-kin. Individuals who felt bad when they cheated, andwho were motivated to get revengewhen they were cheated, were able toengage successfully in more non-zero-sum games with others.9

A useful set of terms for analyzing theways in which such abilities get builtinto minds comes from recent researchinto the modularity of mental function-ing.10 An evolved cognitive module is a



Table 1Four moral modules and the emotions and virtues associated with them

Suffering Hierarchy Reciprocity Purity

Proper domain(original triggers)

Actual domain(modern examples)

Characteristic emotions

Relevant virtues

Suffering and vulnerability of one’s children

Baby seals, cartoon characters

Compassion

Kindness, compassion

Physical size and strength, domination,and protection

Bosses, gods

Resentment vs.respect/awe

Obedience, deference, loyalty

Cheating vs. cooper-ation in joint ven-tures, food sharing

Marital ½delity, broken vendingmachines

Anger/guilt vs. gratitude

Fairness, justice, trustworthiness

People with diseasesor parasites, wasteproducts

Taboo ideas (communism,racism)

Disgust

Cleanliness, purity, chastity

9 See Robert L. Trivers, “The Evolution of Re-ciprocal Altruism,” Quarterly Review of Biology46 (1971): 35–57; Robert Wright, NonZero: TheLogic of Human Destiny (New York: Vintage,2000).

10 Modularity was ½rst proposed for perceptu-al processes by Jerry Fodor, Modularity of Mind(Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 1983). However,more recent modularity theorists argue thatmore flexible and only partially modularizedcognitive systems play a role in most areas ofhigher cognition. See Dan Sperber and Law-rence A. Hirschfeld, “The Cognitive Founda-tions of Cultural Stability and Diversity,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8 (2004): 40–46;Gerd Gigerenzer, Adaptive Thinking: Rationalityin the Real World (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2002).

8 Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics (NewYork: Harper & Row, 1982).

processing system that was designed tohandle problems or opportunities thatpresented themselves for many genera-tions in the ancestral environment of aspecies. Modules are little bits of input-output programming, ways of enablingfast and automatic responses to speci½cenvironmental triggers. In this respect,modules behave very much like whatcognitive psychologists call heuristics,shortcuts or rules of thumb that we of-ten apply to get an approximate solutionquickly (and usually intuitively).

One useful distinction in the modular-ity literature is that between the properand actual domains of a module. Theproper domain is the set of speci½c sce-narios or stimuli that the module wasevolved to handle. In the case of a suffer-ing/compassion module, the properdomain is the sight of one’s own childshowing the stereotypical signs of dis-tress or fear. The proper domain mayhave extended to distress shown by allkin as well. The actual domain, in con-trast, is the set of all things in the worldthat now happen to trigger the module.This includes the suffering of other peo-ple’s children, starving adults seen ontelevision, images of baby seals beingclubbed to death, and our pet dogs thatdroop, mope, whine, and break ourhearts as we prepare to go off to workeach morning.

The concept of modules is helpful forthinking about moral intuitions. Onepossibility is that moral intuitions arethe output of a small set of modules.When a module takes the conduct orcharacter of another person as its inputand then emits a feeling of approval ordisapproval, that output is a moral intu-ition. In strong cases, each of these mor-al modules triggers a full-fledged emo-tion: suffering triggers compassion; ar-rogant behavior by subordinates triggerscontempt; cheating triggers anger. But

in most cases our moral modules aretriggered by minor events, by gossip, bythings we read in the newspaper, and wedo not truly get angry, or feel compas-sion; we just feel small flashes ofapproval or disapproval.

For the three sets of moral intuitionswe have examined so far, the persistentadaptive challenge is a social challenge.But there is an odd corner of moral life,odd at least for modern Westerners, whotend to think of morality as strictly con-cerned with how we treat other people.That corner is the profound moraliza-tion of the body and bodily activities,such as menstruation, eating, bathing,sex, and the handling of corpses. A greatdeal of the moral law of Judaism, Hindu-ism, Islam, and many traditional socie-ties is explicitly concerned with regulat-ing purity and pollution.

Based on our research and that of oth-ers, we propose that culturally wide-spread concerns with purity and pollu-tion can be traced to a purity moduleevolved to deal with the adaptive chal-lenges of life in a world full of dangerousmicrobes and parasites. The proper do-main of the purity module is the set ofthings that were associated with thesedangers in our evolutionary history,things like rotting corpses, excrement,and scavenger animals. Such things, and people who come into contact withthem, trigger a fast, automatic feeling ofdisgust. Over time, this purity moduleand its affective output have been elabo-rated by many cultures into sets of rules,sometimes quite elaborate, regulating agreat many bodily functions and prac-tices, including diet and hygiene. Oncenorms were in place for such practices,violations of those norms produced neg-ative affective flashes, that is, moralintuitions.11



11 For the complete story of how the actual do-main of disgust expanded into the social world,

Purity and pollution were importantideas in Europe from antiquity throughthe Victorian age, but they began to fadeas the twentieth century replaced themwith an increasingly medical and utili-tarian understanding of hygiene and anincreasing emphasis on personal libertyand privacy in regard to bodily matters.However, even contemporary Americancollege students, when we interviewthem in our studies of moral judgment,will confess to feeling flashes of disgustand disapproval when asked about viola-tions of purity taboos. Stories about eat-ing one’s dead pet dog, about harmlesscases of cannibalism, or even about ho-mosexuality may elicit feelings of dis-gust, which the students attempt, oftencomically, to justify afterward. The intu-ition is produced by the module, but theculture does not support a purity-basedmorality anymore (at least for liberalcollege students), so the students are left to struggle with the reasoning system toexplain a judgment produced by the in-tuitive system.

Thus far, we have argued two points:that much of mature moral functioningis intuitive rather than deliberative; andthat among our moral intuitions are asmall number that are primitive and in-nate, or at least innately prepared. In ad-dition to reflecting persistent adaptivetasks in the human evolutionary past,these prepared intuitions influence mor-al development and functioning by con-straining our moral attention and layingthe foundation for the development ofother moral concepts. We will now linkthese observations to another area of

philosophical and psychological think-ing about morality, namely, the area ofvirtue theory.

Virtue theorists are a contentious lot,but most would agree at least that vir-tues are characteristics of a person thatare morally praiseworthy. Virtues aretherefore traits as John Dewey conceivedthem–as dynamic patternings of per-ception, emotion, judgment, and ac-tion.12 Virtues are social skills. To pos-sess a virtue is to have disciplined one’sfaculties so they are fully and properlyresponsive to one’s local sociomoralcontext. To be kind, for example, is tohave a perceptual sensitivity to certainfeatures of situations, including thosehaving to do with the well-being ofothers, and to be sensitive such thatthose features have an appropriateimpact on one’s motivations and oth-er responses. To be courageous is to have a different kind of sensitivity andwell-formedness of response; to bepatient, still another.

Virtues, on this understanding, areclosely connected to the intuitive sys-tem. A virtuous person is one who hasthe proper automatic reactions to ethi-cally relevant events and states of affairs,for example, another person’s suffering,an unfair distribution of a good, a dan-gerous but necessary mission. Part of theappeal of virtue theory has always beenthat it sees morality as embodied in thevery structure of the self, not merely asone of the activities of the self. Even Ar-istotle supposed that in developing thevirtues we acquire a second nature, a re-½nement of our basic nature, an alter-ation of our automatic responses.



12 John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology (New York:Holt, 1922). See also Paul M. Churchland, “To-ward a Cognitive Neurobiology of the MoralVirtues,” Topoi 17 (1998): 83–96.

see Paul Rozin, Jonathan Haidt, and Clark R.McCauley, “Disgust,” in Michael Lewis andJeanette M. Haviland-Jones, eds., Handbook ofEmotions, 2nd ed. (New York: Guilford Press,2000), 637–653.

One of the crucial tenets of virtue the-ory is that the virtues are acquiredinductively, that is, through the acqui-sition, mostly in childhood but alsothroughout the life course, of manyexamples of a virtue in practice. Oftenthese examples come from the child’severyday experience of construing, re-sponding, and getting feedback, but theyalso come from the stories that permeatethe culture. Each of these examples con-tains information about a number of as-pects of the situation, including the theprotagonists’ motivations, the protago-nists’ state of being (suffering, disabled,hostile, rich, etc.), the categorization ofthe situation, and the evaluation of theoutcome offered by more experiencedothers. Only over time will the morallearner recognize what information isimportant to retain and what can besafely disregarded.

As philosophers and cognitive scien-tists have recently been arguing, withrespect both to morality and to cogni-tion more generally, this kind of learningcannot be replaced with top-down learn-ing, such as the acceptance of a rule orprinciple and the deduction of speci½cresponses from it. Interestingly, this as-pect of virtue theory shows Aristotle tohave been a forerunner of the currentapplication of the neural network theoryof morality that is being developed byPaul Churchland, Andy Clark, and oth-ers.13 In this model, the mind, like thebrain itself, is a network that gets tunedup gradually by experience. With train-ing, the mind does a progressively betterjob of recognizing important patterns ofinput and of responding with the appro-priate patterns of output.

For those who emphasize the impor-tance of virtues in moral functioning,

then, moral maturity is a matter ofachieving a comprehensive attunementto the world, a set of highly sophisticat-ed sensitivities embodied in the individ-ual virtues. Of course, reasoning and de-liberation play important roles in thisconception as well; indeed, part of beinga virtuous person is being able to reasonin the right way about dif½cult situa-tions. But virtue theory is nevertheless a departure from theories of moralitythat see deliberation as the basic moralpsychological activity.

We believe that virtue theories are themost psychologically sound approach tomorality. Such theories ½t more neatlywith what we know about moral devel-opment, judgment, and behavior thando theories that focus on moral reason-ing or on the acceptance of high-levelmoral principles such as justice. But afundamental problem with many virtuetheories is they assume that virtues arelearned exclusively from environmentalinputs. They implicitly endorse the oldbehaviorist notion that if we could justset up our environment properly, wecould inculcate any virtue imaginable,even virtues such as ‘love all peopleequally’ and ‘be deferential to those who are smaller, younger, or weakerthan you.’ Yet one of the deathblows tobehaviorism was the demonstration thatanimals have constraints on learning:some pairings of stimuli and responsesare so heavily prepared that the animalcan learn them on a single training trial,while other associations go against theanimal’s nature and cannot be learned in thousands of trials. Virtue theorieswould thus be improved if they tookaccount of the kinds of virtues that ‘½t’with the human mind and of the kindsthat do not. Virtues are indeed culturalachievements, but they are culturalachievements built on and partly con-



13 See Larry May, Marilyn Friedman, and Andy Clark, eds., Mind and Morals (Cambridge,Mass.: mit Press, 1997).

strained by deeply rooted preparedness-es to construe and respond to the socialworld in particular ways.

Aristotle himself recognized the con-straining effect of human beings’ em-bodied and situated nature on ethicalexperience. As Martha Nussbaum pointsout, Aristotle de½ned virtues by refer-ence to universal features of humanbeings and their environments thatcombine to de½ne spheres of human experience in which we make normativeappraisals of our own and others’ con-duct14–not unlike what above we calledpersistent adaptive challenges. Aristo-tle’s and Nussbaum’s approach is also anativist one, albeit one that locates theinnate moral content in both the organ-ism and the environment. Our fourmodules of intuitive ethics are in a sense a pursuit of this Aristotelian project. Like Aristotle, we are seeking a deeper structure to our moral func-tioning, though in the form of a smallernumber of phenomena that are locatedmore in the organism than in the envi-ronment.

Let us now link our account of moralintuitions with this account of virtues.Briefly, we propose that the human mindcomes equipped with at least the fourmodules we describe above.15 Thesemodules provide little more than flashes

of affect when certain patterns are en-countered in the social world. A greatdeal of cultural learning is required torespond to the actual domain that a par-ticular culture has created, but it maytake little or no learning to recognizecases at the heart of the proper domainfor each module (e.g., seeing the facialand bodily signals of distress in a childor seeing a large male display signs ofdominance and threat while staringdown at you).

These flashes are the building blocksthat make it easy for children to developcertain virtues and virtue concepts. Forexample, when we try to teach our chil-dren virtues of kindness and compas-sion, we commonly use stories aboutmean people who lack those virtues.While hearing such stories children feel sympathy for the victim and con-demnation for the perpetrator. Adultscannot create such flashes out of thinair; they can only put children into situ-ations in which these flashes are likely to happen. We should emphasize that aflash of intuition is not a virtue. But it isan essential tool in the construction of avirtue.

Of course, it is possible to teach chil-dren to be cruel to certain classes of peo-ple, but how would adults accomplishsuch training? Most likely by exploitingother moral modules. Racism, for exam-ple, can be taught by invoking the puritymodule and triggering flashes of disgustat the ‘dirtiness’ of certain groups, or byinvoking the reciprocity module andtriggering flashes of anger at the cheat-ing ways of a particular group (Hitlerused both strategies against Jews). Inthis way, cultures can create variableactual domains that are much broaderthan the universal proper domains foreach module.

A second way in which cultures vary isin their relative use of the four modules.



14 Martha C. Nussbaum, “Non-Relative Vir-tues: An Aristotelian Approach,” in Martha C.Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, eds., The Qualityof Life (New York: Oxford University Press,1993).

15 There are probably many others. The bestcandidate for a ½fth might be an ‘ingroup’ mod-ule whose proper domain is the boundaries of aco-residing kin group, and whose actual domainnow includes all the ethnic groups, teams, andhobbyist gatherings that contribute to modernidentities. To the extent that people feel a bondof trust or loyalty toward strangers, the opera-tion of a such an ingroup module seems likely.

In our own research we have found thatAmerican Muslims and American politi-cal conservatives value virtues of kind-ness, respect for authority, fairness, andspiritual purity. American liberals, how-ever, rely more heavily on virtues rootedin the suffering module (liberals have amuch keener ability to detect victimiza-tion) and the reciprocity module (virtuesof equality, rights, and fairness). For lib-erals, the conservative virtues of hierar-chy and order seem too closely related tooppression, and the conservative virtuesof purity seem to have too often beenused to exclude or morally taint wholegroups (e.g., blacks, homosexuals, sexu-ally active women).16

A third way in which cultures divergeis in their assignment of very differentmeanings and intuitive underpinnings toparticular virtues. Take, for example, thevirtue of loyalty. Certainly there is a dif-ference between loyalty to peers andfriends on the one hand (that is, loyaltygrounded in reciprocity intuitions), andloyalty to chiefs, generals, and other su-periors (that is, loyalty in the context ofhierarchy), even though both have muchin common. Similarly, the virtue of hon-or can be incarnated as integrity (in reci-procity), as chivalry or masculine honormore generally (in hierarchy), or aschastity or feminine honor (in purity).And temperance is one thing in the con-text of reciprocity, where it may be es-sential for the flourishing of the group in conditions of scarcity, and somethingquite different in the context of purity,where it is often construed as a means ofenlightenment or spiritual development.In each of these cases, different moralunderpinnings provide the virtue withdifferent eliciting conditions and dif-

ferent appropriate behaviors andresponses.

A fourth source of cultural variation isthe complex interactions that virtues cangenerate, forming what one might callvirtue complexes, which express a greatdeal of a society’s conception of humannature and moral character. One excel-lent example comes from Reynold A.Nicholson’s Literary History of the Arabs, a masterful survey of pre-Islamic andIslamic Arab culture. One of the moralconcepts elucidated by Nicholson is thatof hamasa, which is often glossed simplyas ‘valor.’ Nicholson, however, de½nes itthis way: “‘Hamasa’ denotes the virtuesmost highly prized by the Arabs–brav-ery in battle, patience in misfortune,persistence in revenge, protection ofthe weak and de½ance of the strong.”17

There is no necessary connection be-tween these qualities; one could imaginesomeone brave in battle and protectiveof the weak, but impatient in misfortuneand inclined to bide his time when chal-lenged by someone stronger. But thepoint is that the Arabs do not imaginethis set of traits, or at least they do notaward it their ultimate praise. Even ifsome virtues tend to go together acrosscultures, the virtue complexes that eachculture generates are likely to be unique.

On the account we have sketched,morality is innate (as a small set ofmodules) and socially constructed (assets of interlocking virtues). It is cogni-tive (intuitions are pattern-recognitionsystems) and it is emotional (intuitionsoften launch moral emotions). Butabove all, morality is important to peo-ple in their daily lives, and to societiesthat seem forever to lament the declin-ing morals of today’s youth. We will



16 For a compatible and much more compre-hensive treatment see George Lakoff, Moral Pol-itics: What Conservatives Know That Liberals Don’t(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

17 Reynold A. Nicholson, A Literary History ofthe Arabs (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1930), 79.

therefore close with suggestions forusing intuitive ethics in moral educationand in dealing with moral diversity.

Moral education, on our account, is a matter of linking up the innate intu-itions and virtues already learned with a skill that one wants to encourage. Par-ents and educators should therefore rec-ognize the limits of the ‘direct route’ tomoral education. It is helpful to espouserules and principles, but only as anadjunct to more indirect approaches,which include immersing children inenvironments that are rich in stories andexamples that adults interpret with emo-tion. Those stories and examples shouldtrigger the innate moral modules, if pos-sible, and link them to broader virtuesand principles. Another indirect ap-proach involves arranging environmentsso that messages about what is good andbad are consistent across sources (par-ents, teachers, television, movies, after-school activities, etc.). Conservative par-ents who homeschool their children,limit what they can watch on television,and read to them from William Ben-nett’s Book of Virtues are therefore likelyto be successful in tuning up their chil-dren’s moral-perceptual systems in thedesired ways. Liberal parents who trynot to ‘impose their morality’ on theirchildren, by contrast, may well be disap-pointed by the results. Depriving chil-dren of frequent moral feedback, includ-ing displays of the parent’s moral emo-tions, or exposing them to many con-flicting messages, may deprive the intu-itive system of the experiences it needsto properly tune up. If virtues are socialskills, then moral education should be acomprehensive and sustained trainingregimen with regular feedback.

Moral diversity, on our account, re-sults from differences in moral educa-tion and enculturation. As we suggestedabove, one of the main sources of moral

diversity originates in political diversity.On such currently divisive issues as gaymarriage, therapeutic cloning, and stemcell research, liberals focus on promot-ing individual welfare and individualrights. Conservatives understand thesearguments, but they have a more multi-vocal moral life, drawing on a wider setof moral intuitions.18 They also have tointegrate their deeply intuitive aversionto ‘playing God’ and their more ½nelyhoned and valued sense of disgust. LeonKass, President Bush’s bioethics advisor,for instance, bases his critique of humancloning in part on the fact that it offendsand repulses many people. He grantsthat disgust is not by itself an argument,but he suggests that there is a form ofwisdom in repugnance. “Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how toshudder,” he wrote.19

So how can we all get along in a moral-ly diverse society? The ½rst step is sim-ply to recognize that all sides in the de-bate are morally motivated. We tend toassume the worst about our opponents,to regard them as perfectly villainous.But when liberals assume that conserva-tives are motivated by little more thanhatred and bigotry, they show about asmuch psychological insight as PresidentBush’s statement that the 9/11 hijackersdid what they did because they “hate ourfreedom.” Only when moral motives are acknowledged can intelligent dis-course begin.

The second step is to try to frame ap-peals in language that may trigger newintuitions on the other side. For exam-ple, conservatives tend to value socialorder and stability; a concerted effort toshow that gay marriage is about orderand stability, that it’s about helping peo-



18 Lakoff, Moral Politics.

19 Leon Kass, “The Wisdom of Repugnance,”New Republic, 2 June 1997, 17–26.

ple to form life-long commitments thatwill often create stability for children,may be more effective in changing heartsand minds than the familiar argumentsabout rights and fairness.

It is our hope that a fuller understand-ing of the links between virtues andintuitions will lead to greater toleranceand respect–between liberals and con-servatives, between people of differentnations, and, perhaps in the far distantfuture, between nativists and empiri-cists.



Documents

Haidt and Joseph, 2004