Tuesday, October 21, 2014
Are we instinctively moral?
From a young age humans are "wired" to be people-pleasers. Toddlers will frequently perform acts that they know will please an adult and the child has a distinction between good and bad because at a young age he/she is taught the difference and is rewarded for the good acts performed and punished when a bad act is committed. In "The Moral Instinct" by Steven Pinker he explains that morality is present "early in childhood" because the children perform generous acts such as "offer[ing] toys", helping and comforting others. Through this we can see that morality develops during childhood and it isn't necessarily taught to us but it is more of an instinct because it provides emotional responses and actions. In “Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?” by Robert Wright he tells us that sometimes how reasoning (logos) is not only controlled by facts, rationality or coherent but that it is “sometimes more about gut feeling” (instinct) allows humans to determine if behaviors are morally good or bad. But that is not to say that logic does not play a role in being inclined to morality. Wright tells us about the study performed on the brain when asked about situation of the trolley problem, whether to kill five people or one person. The area of the brain that is “associated with logical thought” is active when the people chose the utilitarian solution to save as many people as they could because there was not as much emotional connection. Society also plays a major role in determining human morality. Pinker provides situations that “universally” would be considered immoral such as the situation where the two siblings decide to “make love”. Is this situation considered immoral because it’s instinctive or because society has instilled in individuals that such actions are immoral? This has to do with the credibility of the person claiming acts to be immoral, an authority figure could make such immoralities known in order to effect a large group. But I believe in this situation most would instinctively consider this action immoral because most people don’t view their sibling in such a way and wouldn’t even fathom the idea. In the “Thou Shalt Not Commit Logical Fallacies” one of the fallacies is “appeal to authority” explaining that if a person with authority believes something others will believe it to be true as well. This shows that although one may think that they choosing the right belief system when it comes to determining morality but it actually is determined by personal instincts.
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In order to decide whether we are instinctively moral, we have to first decipher the word itself. According to dictionary.com, to be moral is a person’s standards of behavior or beliefs concerning what is and is not acceptable for them to be. In “Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?” Robert Wright presents the work of Harvard psychology professor Joshua Greene. His experiment entitled the “trolley problem,” describes two different scenarios where you have the capability to save five people from a train wreck that will end in a tragedy, at the expense of one person. The difference in the two is that in one, you simply pull a level to redirect the train tracks, causing one person to get hit in the crossfire and die, while in the other you push them off of a footbridge onto the tracks, acting as a barrier to stop the train and end a life while saving five. Greene discovered that by choosing one scenario you are using the more emotional part of the brain, while the other uses more of the logical side. We are all born into this world the same way, no matter the circumstances. Once we begin growing up, we are effected both negatively and positively by our lifestyles, environment, and the people we grow up with and chose to put ourselves around. I believe we are all born pure and with a good sense of what is necessarily right or wrong. Though those may differ as we grow and learn, everyone still has an instinctive sense of moral. Though some are able to bury it down deeper than others, to where it is almost nonexistent, I refuse to believe anyone is capable of completely dehumanizing themselves.
ReplyDeleteThe question whether morality is instinctual, will vary depending who you talk too. However, I think it all comes down to that we were all raised and grow up in different ways, so what you may think is moral what not be what I think is moral. In The Moral Instinct, it states, “morality is not just any old psychology, but close to our conception of the meaning of life,” which shows that’s it’s such a massive topic that it could be interrupted in so many ways. Our morality comes from the way we were raised and out environment, anything that could influence us. When we were young, we didn’t know what was considered right or wrong unless we saw or learned it from other people. But it’s a mixture of our surrounds along with our instincts that makes for what we perceived to be moral. We automatic make our own decisions and have our own personality and rights and wrongs even at an early aged stated in Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?, but we don’t finalized these understandings until we see someone that we look up to verify if it’s okay. Morality and the meaning of life are correlated in the sense that both they both come from the interruption of our environment and our instincts.
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