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 markets1 . 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.
Specifically, we link our view of moral innateness with virtue theory, an ancient approach that is consistent with the insights of many modern perspectives. In doing so, we are extending our exploration of the possibilities of virtue theory, which we began in a previous article (Haidt & Joseph, 2004). We are not proposing that virtue ethics is the best normative moral theory. We speak only descriptively, and we note that there is a growing consilience between philosophical writings on virtue and emotions, empirical research on moral functioning, and cognitive science, a consilience that suggests that virtue theory may yield deep insights into the architecture of human social and moral cognition. In the final section, we discuss the importance of narrativity in moral functioning. In some respects, this is another corrective to what we see as an over-emphasis on deductive and calculative conceptions of value and rationality, among both philosophers and psychologists. We attempt to show, in this last section, that a narrative approach to morality fits well with the nativist “five foundations” view we developed in the first part of the paper, and also helps to explain how the intuitive, evolved foundations of morality are elaborated by cultural activity into the complex, diverse moral functioning that mature human beings display.