Abstract
The paper provides a critical discussion of certain limitations of current nativist approaches to the question of moral development. The aim of the paper is to warn against a lingering reductive tendency found among certain contemporary moral nativists: a tendency to exaggerate the importance of innate mechanisms for moral development while simultaneously downplaying the importance of other factors in this process. The paper argues that the morally relevant input available in the social and cultural environment of human beings is much richer and more varied than typically acknowledged by moral nativists. By ignoring this richness the nativist runs the risk of distorting our understanding of the phenomenon we want to explain.
Caveat: In several places this paper refers to Marc Hauser’s writings. As I was finishing the paper Hauser was accused of and found solely responsible for eight counts of scientific misconduct. Furthermore Gilbert Harman has accused him of having plagiarized parts of his book Moral Minds from John Mikhail. To the best of my knowledge none of the problematic experiments are relevant for the argument of this paper. The general nativist position I discuss is shared by a number of people and is not necessarily dependent on Hauser’s work. As for Moral Minds I still think that it provides a reasonable overview of much current empirical research on moral psychology.
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- 1.
People sometimes distinguish between (moral) innatism and (moral) nativism, with innatism being the doctrine that the human mind is born with certain ideas and knowledge, and nativism being a specific modern version of this doctrine, which uses genetics, cognitive science and evolutionary biology to explain the existence of such innate ideas/knowledge. In this paper I use nativism indiscriminately to refer to all theories which take the human mind to be endowed with innate ideas/principles/mechanisms.
- 2.
See Hauser (2006) for a comprehensive overview of the biological, evolutionary and cognitive theories which inform contemporary moral nativism.
- 3.
Noam Chomsky is often credited as being the first to formulate (a version of) the poverty of the stimulus argument. Chomsky’s argument (see Chomsky 1957, 1959) did not concern morals, but was directed against empiricist accounts of language acquisition such as B.F. Skinner’s. Moral nativists such as Susan Dwyer, Marc Hauser and John Mikhail have later adopted Chomsky’s argument and directed it against empiricist accounts of moral development. It is worth noting however that already Plato formulated and made use of (a version of) what is nowadays known as the POS argument. See Meno 82A-86C, where Socrates gradually elicits sophisticated mathematical reasoning from a slave who has no previous experience with mathematics, and uses this as proof that knowledge is not something taught or learned, but something which is always-already embedded in the human mind, albeit in inarticulate and implicit form.
- 4.
The DDE can be more formally stated as follows: ‘A person may licitly perform an action that he foresees will produce a good and a bad effect provided that four conditions are verified at one and the same time: (1) that the action in itself from its very object be good or at least indifferent; (2) that the good effect and not the evil effect be intended; (3) that the good effect be not produced by means of the evil effect; (4) that there be a proportionately grave reason for permitting the evil effect’ (Mangan 1949, p. 43).
- 5.
One reviewer questioned the relevance of Hoffman’s work for discussions of moral nativism, since the primary focus of Hoffman’s research is on empathy and how to foster and develop pro-social motives whereas moral nativists are primarily concerned with moral cognition and the development of the capacity for moral judgment. However, the aspect of Hoffman’s research appealed to in this paper concerns the pervasiveness and complexity of disciplinary encounters in moral development. As such it can be fairly clearly separated from Hoffman’s research on pro-sociality (although the two are clearly linked). And research on disciplinary encounters is relevant for discussions of moral nativism because explicit parental admonitions, which nativists often take to be the most important moral input children are exposed to in moral upbringing, is a common and crucial form of disciplinary encounter.
- 6.
All citations and references to Hegel’s Outlines of the Philosophy of Right are to the numbered paragraphs in this work. Hegel’s additions (Zusatzen) to these paragraphs are indicated by a ‘Z’.
- 7.
Contrary to what many people might think Hegel is perfectly willing to admit the importance of (uncultivated) human nature in explaining and understanding the moral development of human beings. Hegel’s analysis of socially mediated affective and cognitive development is firmly grounded in a detailed account of human beings as part of and embedded within nature. For Hegel human beings are importantly (but not simply and not only) embodied and desiring creatures; creatures who want and need material things in order to survive and who utilize and develop their capacity for reason as a way of acquiring that which they desire. See e.g. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel 1971) or his philosophical anthropology as presented in part three of his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (Hegel 2007).
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Emily Hartz for comments and corrections on an earlier version of this paper. Also thanks to the anonymous reviewer who gave helpful suggestions and criticism. Finally thanks to the Centre for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen, for the postdoc funding that enabled me to write this paper.
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Nielsen, C.F. (2013). It’s Complicated – Moral Nativism, Moral Input and Moral Development. In: Musschenga, B., van Harskamp, A. (eds) What Makes Us Moral? On the capacities and conditions for being moral. Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy, vol 31. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6343-2_11
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