RANDOLPH NESSE, M.D.
Psychiatrist, University of Michigan; coauthor, Why We Get Sick

What a great idea to ask people who study morality what they agree on! Most of the consensus statements are nice straight descriptions. Morality is intuitive, emotional, not in any one part of the brain, both biological and cultural, and somewhat different in different individuals and cultures. These statements seem bland, but they are sophisticated. The overarching conclusion, that morality can and should be studied scientifically as a natural and social phenomenon, seems undeniably correct to me.

Many will, however, find it provocative. I'd like to hear what they have to say. They should not be dismissed as merely religious or insufficiently rational. It seems entirely possible that there are good reasons, perhaps even evolutionary reasons, for widespread reluctance to think about morality as a natural phenomenon. It seems possible that people feel intuitively that an objective view of morality could undermine moral behavior.

On other thought…missing from the summary, but no doubt present throughout the detailed transcripts, is the back story that led to progress in studying morality. The death this week of George Williams makes the advances of the 1960s particularly salient. It seems to me that the discovery that natural selection does not work for the good of the species is a psychic trauma as great as that imposed by Copernicus and Freud. It still reverberates, as evidenced by Nowak's article in Nature last week, and subsequent commentaries.

I have a special interest in this, because I think Mary Jane West-Eberhard's ideas about social selection explain how selection can shape genuine altruism with no need for group selection. Just as sexual selection shapes extreme traits that make one preferred as a mate, extreme altruistic traits can be shaped if they result in being preferred as a social partner or group member.

I find this important not only as a way of escaping the interminable debate about levels of selection, but also because it could explain some otherwise mysterious things I see in the clinic, especially our shared extreme concern about what others think about us. I think this will prove crucial to any explanation of how selection shaped capacities for morality.

ALISON GOPNIK
Professor of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley; Author, The Philosophical Baby

We can agree that there are some innate building blocks for moral intuition and judgment. But surely one of the most dramatic and obvious features of our moral capacities, evident everywhere from democracy to feminism to gay marriage, is our capacity for change and even radical transformation with new experiences. Practices that once seemed self-evidently acceptable, such as slavery or the oppression of women, seem so no longer.

At the same time this transformation isn't just random but seems to have a progressive quality. How do we get to new and better moral conceptions of the world, if the moral nativists are right? The consensus statement , at least implicitly, suggests that the solution to this problem lies in a contrast between moral intuition and moral reasoning.

The implication is that change and revision are only possible through explicit moral reasoning which operates on top of an innate evolved set of moral intuitions. But, arguably, even young children seem able to understand both that social practices can change and that that change should minimize harm. The situation is analogous to that of our ability to learn about the world.

There also we might have thought that only self-conscious, explicit scientific reasoning allowed for change and progress. In fact, the developmental evidence suggest that, in both the cognitive and moral domains, we are capable of changing, revising and altering what we do and believe in the light of experience, and this ability is as deeply evolved a part part of our human nature as any.

PETER DITTO
Professor of Psychology, University of California, Irvine

People have a history of confusing what is with what ought to be. Any list of general principles underlying moral judgment should include this observation.

I agree with virtually everything in this consensus statement. This is not surprising given the quality of the contributors. But any scientific treatment of moral judgment must be clear about its defining characteristics, boundaries, and the nature of its relations with other kinds of judgment that have interested psychologists and philosophers. And yet the distinction between descriptive and prescriptive judgment has always been more blurry, both conceptually and empirically, than it first appears.

The is-ought problem has a venerable history in moral philosophy. Most attention has been directed toward our tendency to assume that what is ought to be. The naturalistic fallacy — assuming that what is natural is also morally good — is a classic example. More recently, Psychologist Paul Rozin has talked about the process of moralization, in which some behavior that is originally viewed as bad or good for pragmatic reasons — smoking cigarettes or vegetarianism — takes on moral value over time. Specifying the psychological process by which descriptive beliefs and pragmatic pressures are converted into vice and virtue will be crucial in understanding both personal and cultural variations in moral evaluation.

But it is the opposite process — our tendency to come to believe that what ought to be really is — that may be the more interesting and important confusion. Moral intuitions often violate principles of utility in that some act is treated as sacred or protected in a way which conflicts with cost-benefit logic.  If I refuse to betray one friend to save the lives of several others, my sense that disloyalty is morally wrong conflicts with well-rehearsed economic intuitions that an act of betrayal on my part would have produced a lower body count. 

Such moral dilemmas fascinate psychologists and philosophers, and capture the psychological lynch pin underlying real world political controversies regarding issues like capital punishment, the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, and even embryonic stem cell research. But when was the last time you heard someone say that capital punishment is morally wrong while conceding that it is effective at deterring future crime?  Years of psychological research confirm that mental systems abhor such dissonance. Instead, people who believe that enhanced interrogation is morally wrong also typically believe that it is ineffective in producing actionable intelligence, and those morally opposed to embryonic stem cell research almost always doubt its likelihood of producing medical breakthroughs.  Our moral intuitions tend to shape our descriptive beliefs such that we construct a world in which the right course of action morally becomes the right course of action practically as well.

The fluid relation between descriptive and prescriptive belief is both an age-old observation and a theoretical and empirical challenge for modern morality researchers. It also has important practical implications. The intractability of the venomous culture war that plagues contemporary American politics flows from this tendency to reify moral intuition with factual belief. It is difficult to resolve differences of moral opinion when each side has its own facts.

DANIEL R. KELLY
Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Purdue University; Author, Yuck! The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust (forthcoming)

Being a fellow traveler, it's difficult for me to find an easy point of disagreement with what's said in the Consensus Statement. But rather than just type out a verse of Kumbaya, I'll try to flesh out a more difficult concern. This sentence from Thesis 7 provides an entry point:

"Morality varies across cultures in many ways, including the overall moral domain (what kinds of things get regulated), as well as specific moral norms, practices, values, and institutions."

Here's a quick and dirty way to put my worry: I don't know how to unpack what the words "moral" and "morality" mean here, or what they are supposed to pick out, and exclude.

What falls within the "moral" domain is allowed to vary from one culture to the next, that much is clear. This suggests that the domain of "morality" is not characterized solely by the set of things that fall under it. The passage further indicates that something falls within the "moral" domain in virtue of a certain kind of response or regulation being brought to bear on it.

So while some cultures might "morally" regulate actions of type, A, B, C, and D, other cultures might "morally" regulate actions of type C, D, E and F, but not "moralize" actions of type A and B, leaving them unregulated, or regulated by something other than "morality". This would be one way to make sense of the idea that "morality" varies across cultures. But it doesn't answer my original question so much as redirect it: what does it means to "moralize", or what is distinctive of a type of regulation that qualifies it as "moral", and thus determines what falls in the "moral" domain?

An analogy with disgust might be helpful. We can make sense of the claim that the domain of disgust differs from one culture to the next by pointing to the fact that although what elicits disgust often varies between cultures — members of culture P are disgusted by oysters but love Funyuns, while members of culture Q are disgusted by Funyuns but love oysters — there is a distinctive response that is common to the members of culture P and culture Q, and can be characterized without reference to any particular elicitor.

So talking about a domain of "disgust" here can be unpacked fairly easily — it is the set of things that trigger this particular, common, psychologically unified response (gape face, a quick withdrawal, slight feelings of nausea, a sense of offensiveness and sensitivity to contamination). Saying the domain of "disgust" varies across cultures just means that what triggers people's disgust systems is a different mix or set of things from one culture to the next.

Returning to the question about "morality" or "moral" regulation, what is the analogous response or system that might be appealed to in order to characterize the domain of "morality"?

I am not sure how the authors of the consensus would answer this question. It seems especially problematic for two reasons. On the one hand the Consensus Statement suggests its authors hold that there is no such response or system; it contains the explicit claim that there is "no "moral center" in the brain". On the other hand, there is the idea, found in the work of several of the signatories, that another way in which "morality" can vary across cultures is that different cultures recruit different psychological systems (different emotions, for instance) to "moralize" or produce "moral" regulation. But if both the elicitors AND the responses or forms of regulation are allowed to vary, then I again lose my grip on what we're talking when we talk about "morality" or the "moral" domain.

In some moods, I worry that this sort of complaint just exhibits the sort of persnickety hairsplitting that is merely distracting rather than insightful. After all, we all seem to be able to recognize paradigmatic instances of, for example, moral judgment. Moreover, developing sciences need some slack in the key terms they use, since they attempt to gain knowledge about what we are interested in by doing more than just reflecting on meaning or analyzing concepts. And rather than stipulating rigid definitions of the subject matter at the outset, we need to be able to investigate the subject matter itself, and allow what is empirically discovered about the phenomena inform how we understand the terms we use to discuss it.

However, conceptual clarity is needed to make progress even in this project, especially as it moves beyond its early stages. While talking about the subdiscipline of "Moral Psychology" at a rather general level seems both useful and harmless, I suspect thinking about this issue carefully can yield rewards, for instance, in helping to formulate more fine-grained descriptive claims, distinguishing different explanatory hypotheses, and clarifying what, exactly, interesting and provocative statements like Thesis 6, which crucially turns on a distinction between moral and non-moral, might be denying.

KEES VAN DEN BOS
Professor, Social Psychology, Utrecht University

The authors of the consensus statement should be commended for their attempt to formulate clear and insightful points on which they have consensus regarding the concept of morality. This is an important step toward real progress in what rightfully is called the new science of morality.

This noted, a striking observation is that a definition of what morality entails is missing from the statement. This suggests that there is no consensus on what the content of morality really is.

I would like to propose that the science of morality entails at least two issues: (1) what is right and wrong (normative morality), and (2) what people think is right and wrong (perceived morality). The second topic should not be equated with the first. The first issue is a topic for moral philosophers, and the second issue is of concern for moral psychologists (and others interested in behavioral science).

Is it merely an oversight that the consensus statement does not entail a definition of morality? I do not think so. My hunch is that there is no consensus about what is right and wrong because this issue has been hotly debated for centuries now (starting with the ancient Greeks, such as Aristotle and Aristippus, going on with philosophers such as Hume and Kant, and continuing toward this day with psychologists such as Haidt and Bloom). 

My impression is that there never will be consensus about what is right and wrong. This is partly due to the fact that a lot of moral philosophers adopt an implicit or not so implicit rationalist or Kantian perspective on morality, and (secretly or quite openly) are not inclined to give way to more intuitionist notions of morality. Related to this, a lot of moral psychologists (including developmental psychologists) adhere to a reasoned-oriented, cold-cognitive Kohlbergian notion of morality and moral development.

The assumptions present in these research programs have been worthwhile, yielding several interesting top-down, theory-inspired research endeavors and theory developments. This noted, now is the time to let go of these top-down approaches, at least temporarily.

The new science of morality needs a paradigm shift, temporarily letting go of the rationalist-intuitionist and cognitive-emotion debates. Real progress would be made if we would include, and focus more on, out-of-the-box, creative bottom-up oriented research.

Sticking to issues dictated or suggested by theoretical stances that have been around (and hotly debated) for some time may not be the way to go for the new science of morality. Instead, it may be good to side-step longstanding debates in morality (such as whether morality is based on careful, deliberate cognitive thoughts or more intuitive, gut-based, affect-oriented reactions). One way to achieve this may involve scrutinizing carefully what exact psychological processes people are going through when making moral decisions.

LINDA J. SKITKA
Professor of Psychology, University of Illinois, Chicago

Moral motivations have inspired much good in human history, and morality does have important connections to what it takes to flourish both individually and collectively. However, a singular focus on the pro-social aspects of morality and moral motivation neglects the fact that people can and often do use morality to justify using any means possible to obtain their desired ends. By way of recent example, Scott Roeder approached Dr. George Tiller in a church foyer, and shot him once in the head, instantly killing him on the morning of May 31, 2009. Pro-life political action groups had specifically targeted Dr. Tiller's clinic for protests and legal action, in part because his clinic provided late-term abortions when they were medically indicated. Glenn Beck repeatedly referred to Dr. Tiller as a "baby killer" on Fox news. Roeder had previously posted anti-Tiller comments on various Internet sites, such as "Tiller is the concentration camp 'Mengele' of our day and needs to be stopped." Scott Roeder thought he was taking a morally courageous stand against evil: Therein lies the problem.

Moral idealism is empirically associated with various kinds of prosocial implications, but it is also empirically associated greater intolerance of alternative points of view, greater resistance to procedural solutions to resolve conflict, greater distrust of otherwise legitimate authorities to "get it right," rejection of non-preferred decisions and policy outcomes regardless of whether they are associated with exemplary fair or legitimate procedures and authorities, and greater acceptance of vigilantism and violence to achieve morally convicted ends. When people moralize objectives, they also adopt the position that any means to attain them are permissible: in these cases "the ends justify any means." The normative implications of these findings are potentially reassuring (moral idealism acts as protection against obedience to potentially malevolent authorities) and terrifying (moral idealism associated with rejection of the rule of law, and provides a motivational foundation for vigilantism, acts of terrorism, war).

Whereas morality may indeed facilitate individual and collective flourishing, it is important to also keep in mind that moral motivations have served as the foundation and justification for any number atrocities that humans have felt justified in committing on others different from themselves, who no doubt also felt equally morally justified in their positions or causes. Moral motivations are therefore most accurately characterized as double-edged swords: they can give rise to great good or great evil. Moreover, the same behavior will sometimes be interpreted as good or evil depending on which side of the political, social, or cultural fence the perceiver happens to be on, or the group to which the perceiver belongs. For example, few in the U.S. would say that the terrorist attacks on 9/11 were moral, but more than 67% in a Gallup poll of nine Muslim countries did. Good and evil therefore at times represent post hoc and subjective categorizations, not differences in the motivational foundations of the behavior of those being judged.

JONATHAN BARON
Professor of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania

Moral judgments often favor non-optimal options. As a result, especially when judgments are collective, outcomes are worse than they could be if people simply tried to maximize the good (utility). Here are some examples, drawn from a much longer list:

• People prefer harmful omissions over less harmful actions. They favor passive euthanasia, even when it involves protracted suffering, over active euthanasia.

• They prefer indirect harms over less harmful direct ones. Some Catholic hospitals will perform a hysterectomy to save the life of a mother threatened by pregnancy (killing the fetus indirectly) but will not abort the fetus (allowing another pregnancy).

• They favor (on moral grounds) policies that provide a small benefit to an in-group or nation at the expense of a large harm to an out-group.

• They judge that criminal and tort penalties should be levied on the basis of the harm caused rather than their effect in deterring future harm or negligence.

• They prefer larger proportional risk reductions that benefit few people to smaller proportional reductions that benefit more.

Judgments consistent with utility maximization would be easy to explain by any functionalist theory: biological evolution, cultural evolution, and individual development. But judgments like these pose challenges.

One type of explanation, neglected in the consensus statement, is that moral judgments are sometimes biased in the same way as other judgments. For example, people attend to risk ratios ("reduce the risk to myself by 50%") when they ought to attend to differences ("reduce the risk from .000002 to .000001").

Indeed, many "moral biases" occur in non-moral domains. Many biases result from heuristics, simple rules that usually produce good outcomes, but which are over-generalized to cases in which some reflection would indicate that they subvert the purposes that justify their use in general. (Sometimes the decision maker can do no better than to use a heuristic, even though someone else could understand that it is non-optimal.)

These heuristics, including the moral ones, are sometimes used unreflectively, but sometimes they are non-intuitive and invoked only upon reflection. I suspect that this happens in the early stages of learning a culturally or institutionally endorsed moral system with rules that may require harmful choices, such as refusing an abortion that would prevent the death of both mother and fetus.
Moral heuristics could be associated with emotion, but need not be caused by it and can be used in its absence.

Individuals differ enormously in the sorts of judgments that I listed, partly as a function of culture and age. These differences cannot be fully explained in terms of differences in willingness to reflect.

One explanation is that heuristics arise in childhood when parents try to convey simple rules. Thus, they are not necessarily part of our evolved cognitive machinery, but, like children's misunderstandings in arithmetic, arise in the course of normal interaction in a social environment.

If some world problems are the result of potentially remediable flaws in citizens' reasoning, then, optimistically, we have a path to their solution.

ROBERT KURZBAN
Psychologist, UPenn; Author, Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind

I agree with much of the consensus on morality, particularly in terms of its naturalness as a psychological phenomenon —  and so in need of an explanation in terms of evolved function — and its importance in our lives. I'm not as sure, however, that I am ready to agree that morality supports human flourishing. Or, perhaps more modestly, I think that it might be worth thinking not only about the good that morality does, but also reflecting on its destructive power, undermining, rather than promoting human potential and growth.

 As the consensus statement notes, morality is highly variable. What does this mean? It means that the particular things that are moralized — that are considered "wrong" — vary from place to place and time to time. And, importantly, to say that an act is "wrong" means, at its heart, that people who perform these particular categories of behavior can be punished with impunity by their neighbors or the state.

This is all (more or less) to the good when what is moralized are things such as intended harm of innocents. It is easy to imagine that flourishing is facilitated when the weak are protected by sanctions or the threat of sanctions on potential aggressors. But what of other acts that have been moralized? What are we to make of historical prohibitions on dancing, or on other forms of art? What about the moralization of various sorts of mutually beneficial transactions, or the prohibition on charging interest, which, historically, has acted as a substantial drag on economic growth and development? And what about the moralization of acts of consensual pleasure among consenting adults?

When we think about morality and its relationship to flourishing or well-being, we have the strong intuition that morality's opposite is immorality. But is that the right antonym? What would be the effect on human flourishing if human psychology — and thus the societies we produced — were amoral? Amorality doesn't necessarily mean selfish or cruel. It means an absence of rightness or wrongness. Given that "morality" is frequently the justification for various kinds of intolerance, surely it is worth reflecting on the balance between the flourishing morality supports, set against the coercive force morality enables.

LIANE YOUNG
Cognitive Psychologist, Post-Doctoral Fellow, MIT, Department, Brain & Cognitive Sciences

The notion of a "moral center" in the brain has fallen rapidly out of fashion. Just a decade ago, the quest for a moral center was at the core of moral neuroscience. Using brain imaging, researchers recorded neural responses to moral versus non-moral stimuli — across many people and experimental tasks. Subjects read statements with moral content versus non-moral content, statements about morally good or bad actions versus grammatical or ungrammatical statements, and statements describing moral versus social violations. Other studies presented pictures: moral scenes (e.g., physical assaults) versus non-moral scenes (e.g., body lesions). Stimuli were matched along a number of dimensions, including emotional salience and social content (e.g., number of people) — researchers were after the "moral center", not the "emotion center" or "social center".

In spite of efforts to eliminate confounds, what emerged, broadly, was neural evidence of greater emotional and social processing during moral cognition — but no moral center. This may have helped shape moral neuroscience, as we know it, which has all but forgotten its prior focus on uncovering psychological processes and neural substrates dedicated to morality. Now, the focus is on the very cognitive components previously identified as potential confounds, including emotion and social cognition, in addition to other cognitive capacities, i.e. cognitive control, causation, agency, group membership.

Where does that leave the moral center? Once we've accounted for all the domain-general components of morality, is there any kind of cognition that we could call uniquely moral, that resides in the moral center of the brain? What would constitute a moral center? Candidates include: a dedicated mechanism takes non-moral inputs from other cognitive domains and computes a uniquely moral judgment, a uniquely moral computation (e.g., universal moral grammar), or uniquely moral content in the computation (e.g., HARM, HURT).

This is what the early moral neuroscientists were after. In a sense, the first moral psychologists took the same approach. Developmental psychologists focused on the capacity to distinguish moral violations (e.g., hitting a classmate) from violations of social convention (e.g., wearing pajamas to class).

Making this distinction has represented one of the primary measures of moral maturity. Compared to conventional judgments, moral judgments have been hypothesized to be authority-independent (e.g., an act is still immoral even when endorsed by authority), and universal across space and time. Moral judgments have been thought to entail other consequences too, including punishment or reward, directed individuals or communities, and choices concerning friendship or other social alliances.

The moral-conventional distinction, as characterized, has been controversial, but it may nevertheless track a psychological boundary between the truly moral and the merely conventional. The longevity of this boundary in the science of morality reveals an intuitive interest in morality as its own domain — with unique cognitive signatures, and unique neural substrates. On this view, moral judgment could depend on domain-general contributions but, at the core, be fundamentally different from other kinds of cognition. The challenge then would be to first figure out what "morality" is — and then perhaps search for a "moral center" in the brain.