Why it's an essence that so often spoils, no one can say. Morality may be a hard concept to grasp, but we acquire it fast. A preschooler will learn that it's not all right to eat in the classroom, because the teacher says it's not. If the rule is lifted and eating is approved, the child will happily comply.
But if the same teacher says it's also O. In both cases, somebody taught the child a rule, but the rule against pushing has a stickiness about it, one that resists coming unstuck even if someone in authority countenances it. That's the difference between a matter of morality and one of mere social convention, and Schulman and others believe kids feel it innately. LibLynx for Selected Online Resources. Discovery Services. Online User and Order Help.
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About us. Stay updated. Corporate Social Responsiblity. Investor Relations. Review a Brill Book. Reference Works. Morality may be a hard concept to grasp, but we acquire it fast. If the rule is lifted and eating is approved, the child will happily comply. In both cases, somebody taught the child a rule, but the rule against pushing has a stickiness about it, one that resists coming unstuck even if someone in authority countenances it.
The same is true for people who steal or despots who slaughter. Merely being equipped with moral programming does not mean we practice moral behavior. Something still has to boot up that software and configure it properly, and that something is the community. Hauser believes that all of us carry what he calls a sense of moral grammar--the ethical equivalent of the basic grasp of speech that most linguists believe is with us from birth.
But just as syntax is nothing until words are built upon it, so too is a sense of right and wrong useless until someone teaches you how to apply it. What does, or ought to, separate us then is our highly developed sense of morality, a primal understanding of good and bad, of right and wrong, of what it means to suffer not only our own pain--something anything with a rudimentary nervous system can do--but also the pain of others.
That quality is the distilled essence of what it means to be human. The notion of the "other" is a tough one for Homo sapiens. Sociobiology has been criticized as one of the most reductive of sciences, ascribing the behavior of all living things--humans included--as nothing more than an effort to get as many genes as possible into the next generation. The idea makes sense, and all creatures can be forgiven for favoring their troop over others. But such bias turns dark fast. Schulman, the psychologist and author, works with delinquent adolescents at a residential treatment center in Yonkers, New York, and was struck one day by the outrage that swept through the place when the residents learned that three of the boys had mugged an elderly woman.
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