bodhi tree swaying

David Brooks of the New York Times is on a roll. He has an interesting article today giving a quick overview of some recent research on morality.

Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? Most people think it is a gift from God, who revealed His laws and elevates us with His love. A smaller number think that we figure the rules out for ourselves, using our capacity to reason and choosing a philosophical system to live by.

Moral naturalists, on the other hand, believe that we have moral sentiments that have emerged from a long history of relationships. To learn about morality, you don’t rely upon revelation or metaphysics; you observe people as they live.

This week a group of moral naturalists gathered in Connecticut at a conference organized by the Edge Foundation. One of the

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Jonathan Haidt, who I mentioned yesterday, gets a mention in a column today by David Brooks. It’s a quote that’s also a rather neat restatement of Davd Hume’s dictum that “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.”

The emotions are, in fact, in charge of the temple of morality, and … moral reasoning is really just a servant masquerading as a high priest.

MSNBC.com’s science section has an interesting although brief report on some thinking by Jonathan Haidt, whose work I’ve mentioned before:

Dark moralityUniversity of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt blows my mind with his theory of dark morality – which is a social-science parallel to dark energy and dark matter. When it comes to morals, everyone agrees that we should whenever possible avoid harming people and provide care for the needy. The same goes for issues of fairness and reciprocity (“Do unto others…”) Haidt calls these “visible morals,” analogous to the 4 percent of the universe that we can see.

But those represent just the tip of the iceberg: Most of the mechanics of morality have to do with three “dark morals”: in-group loyalty, respect for authority, and issues of purity and sanctity. This is what accounts for qualities such as patriotism, conformism and taboos about food and sex. (Haidt drew

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An interesting article on the psychology of conservatism:

“[People displaying] measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism and gun control,” the team wrote in its report, to be published in the journal Science tomorrow.

“Individuals displaying measurably higher physiological reactions to those same stimuli were more likely to favor defense spending, capital punishment, patriotism and the Iraq War.”

From: Conservatives Have Stronger Startle Reflexes?

This backs up other similar findings, such as those in this Psychology Today piece:

In 1969, Berkeley professors Jack and Jeanne Block embarked on a study of childhood personality, asking nursery school teachers to rate children’s temperaments. They weren’t even thinking about political orientation.

Twenty years later, they decided to compare the subjects’ childhood personalities with their political preferences as adults. They found arresting patterns. As kids, liberals had developed close relationships with peers

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