In the New York Times, David Brooks describes a new understanding of morality among many psychologists, cognitive scientists and philosophers that is not based on reason and deliberation, but on “constantly evaluating what we see”:
As Steven Quartz of the California Institute of Technology said during a recent discussion of ethics sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation, “Our brain is computing value at every fraction of a second. Everything that we look at, we form an implicit preference. Some of those make it into our awareness; some of them remain at the level of our unconscious, but…what our brain is for, what our brain has evolved for, is to find what is of value in our environment.”
Think of what happens when you put a new food into your mouth. You don’t have to decide if it’s disgusting. You just know. You don’t have to decide if a landscape is beautiful. You just know.
Moral judgments are like that. They are rapid intuitive decisions and involve the emotion-processing parts of the brain. Most of us make snap moral judgments about what feels fair or not, or what feels good or not. We start doing this when we are babies, before we have language. And even as adults, we often can’t explain to ourselves why something feels wrong.
In other words, reasoning comes later and is often guided by the emotions that preceded it. Or as Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia memorably wrote, “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.”
Read the full op-ed here, and view a video clip from a March 4, 2009 panel discussion led by Brooks on the question of “How did the moral sense evolve?” at the Darwin 200: Evolution and the Ethical Brain conference.