Winehole23
02-01-2012, 09:17 AM
In 1739 the philosopher David Hume wrote that "reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them." Hume disagreed with philosophers who aspired to reason their way to moral truth without examining human nature. An honest inquiry, he argued, reveals that reason is biased and weak while intuition propels our moral lives.
Haidt and his colleagues brought Hume into the laboratory by investigating how people react to harmless but disgusting stories that pit reason against intuition.
One tale featured a brother and sister named Julie and Mark who decide to make love while on vacation in France. She's on the pill; he uses a condom. The experience brings them closer. But they decide not to do it again. Was it OK?
Most people immediately condemn the siblings and then search for explanations. The dangers of inbreeding. Emotional damage. But when the experimenter points out that no harm befalls Mark and Julie, subjects typically resort to an answer like, "I don't know, I can't explain it, I just know it's wrong."
Haidt called the phenomenon "moral dumbfounding." He viewed it as a challenge to the "rationalist approach" that prevailed in moral psychology, a field heavily influenced by the ideas of Lawrence Kohlberg. Kohlbergian psychologists measured moral development as a series of increasingly sophisticated ways of reasoning about justice. A famous Kohlbergian task, for example, is the "Heinz dilemma": Should Heinz steal a drug to save his dying wife?
In 2001, Haidt chambered a bullet at rationalism in a classic paper that tied together moral dumbfounding, philosophy, and recent psychology findings on human judgment, while also bringing in anthropology and primatology. His conclusion: "Most of the action in moral psychology" is in our automatic intuitions. "People do indeed reason, but that reasoning is done primarily to prepare for social interaction, not to search for truth."
http://chronicle.com/article/Jonathan-Haidt-Decodes-the/130453/
Haidt and his colleagues brought Hume into the laboratory by investigating how people react to harmless but disgusting stories that pit reason against intuition.
One tale featured a brother and sister named Julie and Mark who decide to make love while on vacation in France. She's on the pill; he uses a condom. The experience brings them closer. But they decide not to do it again. Was it OK?
Most people immediately condemn the siblings and then search for explanations. The dangers of inbreeding. Emotional damage. But when the experimenter points out that no harm befalls Mark and Julie, subjects typically resort to an answer like, "I don't know, I can't explain it, I just know it's wrong."
Haidt called the phenomenon "moral dumbfounding." He viewed it as a challenge to the "rationalist approach" that prevailed in moral psychology, a field heavily influenced by the ideas of Lawrence Kohlberg. Kohlbergian psychologists measured moral development as a series of increasingly sophisticated ways of reasoning about justice. A famous Kohlbergian task, for example, is the "Heinz dilemma": Should Heinz steal a drug to save his dying wife?
In 2001, Haidt chambered a bullet at rationalism in a classic paper that tied together moral dumbfounding, philosophy, and recent psychology findings on human judgment, while also bringing in anthropology and primatology. His conclusion: "Most of the action in moral psychology" is in our automatic intuitions. "People do indeed reason, but that reasoning is done primarily to prepare for social interaction, not to search for truth."
http://chronicle.com/article/Jonathan-Haidt-Decodes-the/130453/