The Moral Mind: How Five Sets of Innate Intuitions Guide the Development of Many Culture-specific Virtues, and Perhaps Even Modules

1 Introduction Morality is one of the few topics in academe endowed with its own protective spell. A biologist is not blinded by her biological nature to the workings of biology. An economist is not confused by his own economic activity when he tries to understand the workings of markets 1. But students of morality are often biased by their own moral commitments. Morality is so contested and so important to people that it is often difficult to set aside one's humanity and study morality in a clinically detached way. One problem is that the psychological study of morality, like psychology itself (Redding, 2001), has been dominated by politically liberal researchers (which includes us). The lack of moral and political diversity among researchers has led to an inappropriate narrowing of the moral domain to issues of harm/care and fairness/reciprocity/justice (Haidt & Graham, 2007). Morality in most cultures (and for social conservatives in Western cultures), is in fact much broader, including issues of ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity (Haidt & Graham, 2007; in press). This article is about how morality might be partially innate, by which we simply mean organized, to some extent, in advance of experience (Marcus, 2004). We begin by arguing for a broader conception of morality and suggesting that most of the discussion of innateness to date has not been about morality per se; it has been about whether the psychology of harm and fairness is innate. Once we have made our case that morality involves five domains, not two, we turn our attention to the ways in which this diverse collection of motives and concepts might be innate. We consider five hypotheses about the origins of moral knowledge and value, and we endorse one of them (a form of flexible and generative modularity) as being the best candidate. Next, we develop this version of modular morality by describing how the innately specified " first draft " of the moral mind gets modified during development. 1 Of course biologists and economists may be blindly loyal to academic theories, but we suggest that these biases are themselves often manifestations of moral commitments, e.g., the polemics of Steven Jay Gould.