Question

Review the philosophical arguments put forth by Hume and Rachels. Then, discuss at least two arguments (one from each author) with which you agree or disagree. Provide reasons and examples to support your view. Review McGinn’s short list and explanations of virtues (kindness, honesty, justice, Independence) in “Why Not Be a Bad Person.” Propose which of them that you would remove from the list and recommend at least two virtues you would add. Provide reasons and examples to support your view.

Answer 1

The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail:

A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment

Jonathan Haidt

University of Virginia

Research on moral judgment has been dominated by rationalist models, in which moral judgment is

thought to be caused by moral reasoning. The author gives 4 reasons for considering the hypothesis that

moral reasoning does not cause moral judgment; rather, moral reasoning is usually a post hoc construction,

generated after a judgment has been reached. The social intuitionist model is presented as an

alternative to rationalist models. The model is a social model in that it deemphasizes the private reasoning

done by individuals and emphasizes instead the importance of social and cultural influences. The model

is an intuitionist model in that it states that moral judgment is generally the result of quick, automatic

evaluations (intuitions). The model is more consistent than rationalist models with recent findings in

social, cultural, evolutionary, and biological psychology, as well as in anthropology and primatology.

Julie and Mark are brother and sister. They are traveling together in

France on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying

alone in a cabin near the beach. They decide that it would be

interesting and fun if they tried making love. At the very least it would

be a new experience for each of them. Julie was already taking birth

control pills, but Mark uses a condom too, just to be safe. They both

enjoy making love, but they decide not to do it again. They keep that

night as a special secret, which makes them feel even closer to each

other. What do you think about that? Was it OK for them to make

love?

Most people who hear the above story immediately say that it

was wrong for the siblings to make love, and they then begin

searching for reasons (Haidt, Bjorklund, & Murphy, 2000). They

point out the dangers of inbreeding, only to remember that Julie

and Mark used two forms of birth control. They argue that Julie

and Mark will be hurt, perhaps emotionally, even though the story

makes it clear that no harm befell them. Eventually, many people

say something like, "I don't know, I can't explain it, I just know

it's wrong." But what model of moral judgment allows a person to

know that something is wrong without knowing why?

Moral psychology has long been dominated by rationalist models

of moral judgment (Figure 1). Rationalist approaches in philosophy

stress "the power of a priori reason to grasp substantial

truths about the world" (Williams, 1967, p. 69). Rationalist ap-

Preparation of this article was supported by National Institute on Drug

Abuse Grant 1-RO3-DA12606-OI.

1 thank Sara Algoe. Jon Baron, Fredrik Bjorklund, Talbot Brewer,

Daniel Fessler, Alan Fiske. Nico Frijda, Chip Heath, Jeff Greenberg,

Dacher Keltner, Angeline Lillard. George Loewenstein, Charles

Mathewes. Ed Royzman, Paul Rozin, John Sabini, Jonathan Schooler,

Stacey Sinclair, Barbara Spellman, Stephen Stich, Stephen Stose, Daniel

Wegner, Daniel Willingham, and Timothy Wilson for helpful comments on

drafts.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jonathan

Haidt, Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, P.O. Box

400400, Charlottesville, Virginia 22904-4400. Electronic mail may be sent

to [email protected].

preaches in moral psychology, by extension, say that moral knowledge

and moral judgment are reached primarily by a process of

reasoning and reflection (Kohlberg, 1969; Piaget, 1932/1965; Turiel,

1983). Moral emotions such as sympathy may sometimes be

inputs to the reasoning process, but moral emotions are not the

direct causes of moral judgments. In rationalist models, one briefly

becomes a judge, weighing issues of harm, rights, justice, and

fairness, before passing judgment on Julie and Mark. If no condemning

evidence is found, no condemnation is issued.

This article reviews evidence against rationalist models and

proposes an alternative: the social intuitionist model (Figure 2).

Intuitionism in philosophy refers to the view that there are moral

truths and that when people grasp these truths they do so not by a

process of ratiocination and reflection but rather by a process more

akin to perception, in which one "just sees without argument that

they are and must be true" (Harrison, 1967, p. 72). Thomas

Jefferson's declaration that certain truths are "self-evident" is an

example of ethical intuitionism. Intuitionist approaches in moral

psychology, by extension, say that moral intuitions (including

moral emotions) come first and directly cause moral judgments

(Haidt, in press; Kagan, 1984; Shweder & Haidt, 1993; J. Q.

Wilson, 1993). Moral intuition is a kind of cognition, but it is not

a kind of reasoning.

The social part of the social intuitionist model proposes that

moral judgment should be studied as an interpersonal process.

Moral reasoning is usually an ex post facto process used to

influence the intuitions (and hence judgments) of other people. In

the social intuitionist model, one feels a quick flash of revulsion at

the thought of incest and one knows intuitively that something is

wrong. Then, when faced with a social demand for a verbal

justification, one becomes a lawyer trying to build a case rather

than a judge searching for the truth. One puts forth argument after

argument, never wavering in the conviction that Julie and Mark

were wrong, even after one's last argument has been shot down. In

the social intuitionist model it becomes plausible to say, "I don't

know, I can't explain it, I just know it's wrong."

The article begins with a brief review of the history of rationalism

in philosophy and psychology. It then describes the social

814

INTUITION AND MORAL JUDGMENT 815

Figure 1. The rationalist model of moral judgment. Moral affects such as sympathy may sometimes be inputs

to moral reasoning.

intuitionist model and recent relevant findings from a variety of

fields. These findings offer four reasons for doubting the causality

of reasoning in moral judgment: (a) There are two cognitive

processes at work—reasoning and intuition—and the reasoning

process has been overemphasized; (b) reasoning is often motivated;

(c) the reasoning process constructs post hoc justifications,

yet we experience the illusion of objective reasoning; and (d)

moral action covaries with moral emotion more than with moral

reasoning. Because much of this evidence is drawn from research

outside of the domain of moral judgment, the social intuitionist

model is presented here only as a plausible alternative approach to

moral psychology, not as an established fact. The article therefore

concludes with suggestions for future research and for ways of integrating

the findings and insights of rationalism and intuitionism.

It must be stressed at the outset that the social intuitionist model

is an antirationalist model only in one limited sense: It says that

moral reasoning is rarely the direct cause of moral judgment. That

is a descriptive claim, about how moral judgments are actually

made. It is not a normative or prescriptive claim, about how moral

judgments ought to be made. Baron (1998) has demonstrated that

people following their moral intuitions often bring about nonoptimal

or even disastrous consequences in matters of public policy,

public health, and the tort system. A correct understanding of the

intuitive basis of moral judgment may therefore be useful in

helping decision makers avoid mistakes and in helping educators

design programs (and environments) to improve the quality of

moral judgment and behavior.

Philosophy and the Worship of Reason

Philosophers have frequently written about the conflict between

reason and emotion as a conflict between divinity and animality.

Plato's Timaeus (4th century B.C./1949) presents a charming myth

in which the gods first created human heads, with their divine

cargo of reason, and then found themselves forced to create seething,

passionate bodies to help the heads move around in the world.

The drama of human moral life was the struggle of the heads to

control the bodies by channeling the bodies' passions toward

virtuous ends. The stoic philosophers took an even dimmer view of

the emotions, seeing them as conceptual errors that bound one to

the material world and therefore to a life of misery (R. C. Solomon,

1993). Medieval Christian philosophers similarly denigrated the

emotions because of their link to desire and hence to sin. The 17th

century's continental rationalists (e.g., Leibniz, Descartes) worshiped

reason as much as Plato had, hoping to model all of

philosophy on the deductive method developed by Euclid.

In the 18th century, however, English and Scottish philosophers

(e.g., Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith) began discussing

Figure 2. The social intuitionist model of moral judgment. The numbered links, drawn for Person A only, are

(1) the intuitive judgment link, (2) the post hoc reasoning link, (3) the reasoned persuasion link, and (4) the social

persuasion link. Two additional links are hypothesized to occur less frequently: (5) the reasoned judgment link

and (6) the private reflection link.

816 HAIDT

alternatives to rationalism. They argued that people have a built-in

moral sense that creates pleasurable feelings of approval toward

benevolent acts and corresponding feelings of disapproval toward

evil and vice. David Hume in particular proposed that moral

judgments are similar in form to aesthetic judgments: They are

derived from sentiment, not reason, and we attain moral knowledge

by an "immediate feeling and finer internal sense," not by a

"chain of argument and induction" (Hume, 1777/1960, p. 2). His

most radical statement of this position was that "we speak not

strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion

and of reason. 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"1 (Hume. 1739-1740/1969, p. 462).

The thrust of Hume's attack on rationalism was that reason

alone cannot accomplish the magnificent role it has been given

since Plato. Hume saw reason as a tool used by the mind to obtain

and process information about events in the world or about relations

among objects. Reason can let us infer that a particular action

will lead to the death of many innocent people, but unless we care

about those people, unless we have some sentiment that values

human life, reason alone cannot advise against taking the action.

Hume argued that a person in full possession of reason yet lacking

moral sentiment would have difficulty choosing any ends or goals

to pursue and would look like what we now call a psychopath

(Cleckley, 1955; Hume, 1777/1960).

Hume's emotivist approach to ethics was not well received by

philosophers. Kant's (1785/1959) rationalist ethical theory2 was

created as an attempt to refute Hume, and Kant has had a much

larger impact than Hume on modern moral philosophers (e.g.,

R. M. Hare, 1981; Rawls, 1971), many of whom have followed

Kant in attempting to deduce a foundation for ethics from the

meaning of rationality itself.

Psychology and the Focus on Reasoning

Psychologists, however, freed themselves from the worship of

reason in the late 19th century, when they abandoned the armchair

and went into the laboratory. Until the cognitive revolution of the

1960s. the major schools of psychology did not see reason as the

master of anything, and their views on morality were compatible

with Hume's emphasis on emotions. Freud (1900/1976) saw people's

judgments as driven by unconscious motives and feelings,

which are then rationalized with publicly acceptable reasons. The

behaviorists also saw moral reasoning as epiphenomenal in the

production of moral behavior, explaining morality as the acts that

a society happens to reward or punish (Skinner, 1971).

to steal a drug that may save the life of his dying wife. Kohlberg

found a six-level progression of increasing sophistication in how

people handled such dilemmas. He claimed that children start as

egoists, judging actions by the good or bad consequences they

bring to the self, but as children's cognitive abilities expand they

develop the ability to "role-take," or see a situation from other

people's perspectives. The experience of role-taking drives the

child on to the less egocentric and more powerful conventional and

then postconventional levels of moral reasoning.

Kohlberg's focus was on development, but he often addressed

the question of mechanism. He consistently endorsed a rationalist

and somewhat Platonic model in which affect may be taken into

account by reason (as in Figure 1) but in which reasoning ultimately

makes the decisions:

We are claiming . . . that the moral force in personality is cognitive.

Affective forces are involved in moral decisions, but affect is neither

moral nor immoral. When the affective arousal is channeled into

moral directions, it is moral; when it is not so channeled, it is not. The

moral channeling mechanisms themselves are cognitive. (Kohlberg,

1971, pp. 230-231)

Kohlberg was quite explicit that the cognitive mechanisms he

discussed involved conscious, language-based thinking. He was

interested in the phenomenology of moral reasoning, and he described

one of the pillars of his approach as the assumption that

"moral reasoning is the conscious process of using ordinary moral

language" (Kohlberg, Levine, & Hewer, 1983, p. 69).

After Kohlberg

Kohlberg trained or inspired most of the leading researchers in

moral psychology today (see chapters in Kurtines & Gewirtz,

1991; Lapsley, 1996). Rationalism still rules, and there appears to

be a consensus that morality lives within the individual mind as a

traitlike cognitive attainment, a set of knowledge structures about

moral standards that children create for themselves in the course of

their everyday reasoning (see Darley, 1993).

The social interactionist perspective (Nucci & Turiel, 1978;

Turiel, 1983, 1998; Turiel, Killen, & Helwig, 1987), one of the

most widely used approaches at present, can serve as an illustrative

model. This research is based on a method developed by Nucci and

Turiel (1978) in which children are interviewed about rule violations.

After giving an initial judgment, the child is asked to

respond to a series of probe questions designed to assess how the

child thinks about the rule in question (e.g., if there were no rule,

would the action be OK? Could the rule be changed?). Participants

are also asked to provide justifications of their judgments.

Kohlberg and the Cognitive Revolution

But then came Lawrence Kohlberg. Kohlberg's work was a

sustained attack on "irrational emotive theories" (1971, p. 188),

and his cognitive-developmental theory was an important part of

the cognitive revolution. Kohlberg built on Piaget's (1932/1965)

pioneering work, developing an interviewing method that was

suitable for use with adults as well as children. Kohlberg presented

participants with dilemmas in which moral and nonmoral claims

were present on both sides, and he then looked to see how people

resolved the conflicts. In his best known dilemma, a man named

Heinz must decide whether he should break into a druggist's shop

' This is one of Hume's most radical statements, taken from his first

book, A Treatise of Human Nature. His more mature work, An Enquiry

Concerning the Principles of Morals, raises reason from a slave to a

respected assistant of the moral sense, yet it maintains the basic position

that "the ultimate ends of human actions can never . . . be accounted for by

reason, but recommend themselves entirely to the sentiments and affections

of mankind" (1777/1960, p. 131).

2 Kant responded to Hume's skepticism about the powers of reason. He

argued that any rational agent could and should figure out the morally

correct thing to do by applying the categorical imperative: "I should never

act in such a way that I could not also will that my maxim should be a

universal law" (1785/1959, p. 18).

INTUITION AND MORAL JUDGMENT 817

In the social interactionist model, people are said to think about

the consequences of an action before determining whether the

action is a moral violation. Actions that lead to injustice, to harm,

or to the violation of rights are recognized as falling within the

moral domain and are treated differently from other kinds of rule

violations. Rules prohibiting moral violations are judged, even by

young children, to be universally applicable and unalterable. Actions

that involve no injustice, harm, or rights violations are treated

as violations of social conventions (involving locally agreed on

uniformities of behavior within social systems) or as personal

issues (areas of individual prerogative).

Researchers in this tradition are sensitive to how moral development

occurs in a social context, driven forward by children's

interactions with peers in such contexts as taking turns, sharing,

harming, and responding to harm. This emphasis on social interaction

is in harmony with the social part of the social intuitionist

model and is not a source of contention in the present article. The

central source of contention, and the focus of the present article

concerns the causal role of reflective, conscious reasoning.

Questioning the Causality of Reasoning

People undeniably engage in moral reasoning. But does the

evidence really show that such reasoning is the cause, rather than

the consequence, of moral judgment? Turiel, Hildebrandt, and

Wainryb (1991) examined young adults' reasoning about issues of

abortion, homosexuality, pornography, and incest. They found that

people who judged the actions to be moral violations also talked

about harmful consequences, whereas people who thought the

actions were not wrong generally cited no harmful consequences.

Turiel et al. (1991) interpreted these findings as showing the

importance of "informational assumptions"; for example, people

who thought that life begins at conception were generally opposed

to abortion, whereas people who thought that life begins later were

generally not opposed to abortion. In making this interpretation,

however, Turiel et al. made a jump from correlation to causation.

The correlation they found between judgment and supporting

belief does not necessarily mean that the belief caused the judgment.

An intuitionist interpretation is just as plausible: The antiabortion

judgment (a gut feeling that abortion is bad) causes the

belief that life begins at conception (an ex post facto rationalization

of the gut feeling).

Haidt, Koller, and Dias (1993) found evidence for such an

intuitionist interpretation. They examined American and Brazilian

responses to actions that were offensive yet harmless, such as

eating one's dead pet dog, cleaning one's toilet with the national

flag, or eating a chicken carcass one has just used for masturbation.

The stories were carefully constructed so that no plausible harm

could be found, and most participants directly stated that nobody

was hurt by the actions in question, yet participants still usually

said the actions were wrong, and universally wrong. They frequently

made statements such as, "It's just wrong to have sex with

a chicken." Furthermore, their affective reactions to the stories

(statements that it would bother them to witness the action) were

better predictors of their moral judgments than were their claims

about harmful consequences. Haidt and Hersh (2001) found the

same thing when they interviewed conservatives and liberals about

sexual morality issues, including homosexuality, incest, and unusual

forms of masturbation. For both groups, affective reactions

were good predictors of judgment, whereas perceptions of harmfulness

were not. Haidt and Hersh also found that participants were

often "morally dumbfounded" (Haidt et al., 2000); that is, they

would stutter, laugh, and express surprise at their inability to find

supporting reasons, yet they would not change their initial judgments

of condemnation.

It seems, then, that for affectively charged events such as incest

and other taboo violations, an intuitionist model may be more

plausible than a rationalist model. But can an intuitionist model

handle the entire range of moral judgment? Can it accommodate

the findings from rationalist research programs while also explaining

new phenomena and leading to new and testable predictions?

The social intuitionist model may be able to do so.

The Social Intuitionist Model

The central claim of the social intuitionist model is that moral

judgment is caused by quick moral intuitions and is followed

(when needed) by slow, ex post facto moral reasoning. Clear

definitions of moral judgment, moral intuition, and moral reasoning

are therefore needed.

Moral Judgment

Moral philosophers have long struggled to distinguish moral

judgments from other kinds of judgments (e.g., aesthetics, skill, or

personal taste). Rather than seeking a formal definition that lists

the necessary and sufficient features of a moral judgment, the

present article takes a more empirical approach, starting from a

behavioral fact about human beings: that in every society, people

talk about and evaluate the actions of other people, and these

evaluations have consequences for future interactions (Boehm,

1999). Many of these evaluations occur against the backdrop of

specific cultural practices, in which one praises or criticizes the

skills or talents of an individual (e.g., "she is a daring chef").

However, an important subset of these evaluations are made with

respect to virtues or goods that are applied to everyone in the

society (e.g., fairness, honesty, or piety in some cultures), or to

everyone in a certain social category (e.g., chastity for young

women in some cultures or generosity for lineage heads). These

virtues are obligatory in that everyone (within the relevant categories)

is expected to strive to attain them. People who fail to

embody these virtues or whose actions betray a lack of respect for

them are subject to criticism, ostracism, or some other punishment.

It is this subset of evaluations that is at issue in the present article.

(For more on moral goods, see Ross, 1930; Shweder & Haidt,

1993.)

Moral judgments are therefore defined as evaluations (good vs.

bad) of the actions or character of a person that are made with

respect to a set of virtues held to be obligatory by a culture or

subculture. This definition is left broad intentionally to allow a

large gray area of marginally moral judgments. For example,

"eating a low-fat diet" may not qualify as a moral virtue for most

philosophers, yet in health-conscious subcultures, people who eat

cheeseburgers and milkshakes are seen as morally inferior to those

who eat salad and chicken (Stein & Nemeroff, 1995).

Moral Reasoning

Everyday moral reasoners are sometimes said to be like scientists,

who learn by forming and testing hypotheses, who build

818 HAIDT

working models of the social world as they interact with it, and

who consult these models when making moral judgments (Turiel,

1983). A key feature of the scientist metaphor is that judgment is

a kind of inference made in several steps. The reasoner searches

for relevant evidence, weighs evidence, coordinates evidence with

theories, and reaches a decision (Kuhn, 1989; Nisbett & Ross,

1980). Some of these steps may be performed unconsciously and

any of the steps may be subject to biases and errors, but a key part

of the definition of reasoning is that it has steps, at least a few of

which are performed consciously. Galotti (1989), in her definition

of everyday reasoning, specifically excludes "any one-step mental

processes" such as sudden flashes of insight, gut reactions, or other

forms of "momentary intuitive response" (p. 333).

Building on Galotti (1989), moral reasoning can now be defined

as conscious mental activity that consists of transforming given

information about people in order to reach a moral judgment. To

say that moral reasoning is a conscious process means that the

process is intentional, effortful, and controllable and that the

reasoner is aware that it is going on (Bargh, 1994).

Moral Intuition

Commentators on intuition have generally stressed the fact that

a judgment, solution, or other conclusion appears suddenly and

effortlessly in consciousness, without any awareness by the person

of the mental processes that led to the outcome (Bastick, 1982;

Simon, 1992). Bruner (1960) said that intuition does not advance

in careful steps; rather, it involves "manoeuvers based seemingly

on an implicit perception of the total problem. The thinker arrives

at an answer, which may be right or wrong, with little if any

awareness of the process by which he reached it" (p. 57). It must

be stressed that the contrast of intuition and reasoning is not the

contrast of emotion and cognition. Intuition, reasoning, and the

appraisals contained in emotions (Frijda, 1986; Lazarus, 1991) are

all forms of cognition. Rather, the words intuition and reasoning

are intended to capture the contrast made by dozens of philosophers

and psychologists between two kinds of cognition. The most

important distinctions (see Table 1) are that intuition occurs

quickly, effortlessly, and automatically, such that the outcome but

not the process is accessible to consciousness, whereas reasoning

occurs more slowly, requires some effort, and involves at least

some steps that are accessible to consciousness.

Building on Bastick (1982), Bruner (1960), Simon (1992), and

others, moral intuition can be defined as the sudden appearance in

consciousness of a moral judgment, including an affective valence

(good-bad, like-dislike), without any conscious awareness of

having gone through steps of searching, weighing evidence, or

inferring a conclusion. Moral intuition is therefore the psychological

process that the Scottish philosophers talked about, a process

akin to aesthetic judgment: One sees or hears about a social event

and one instantly feels approval or disapproval.

The Links in the Model

The social intuitionist model is composed of four principal links

or processes, shown as solid arrows in Figure 2. The existence of

each link is well established by prior research in some domains of

judgment, although not necessarily in the domain of moral judgment.

The model is therefore presented as a proposal to spur

thinking and new research on moral judgment.

1. The intuitive judgment link. The model proposes that moral

judgments appear in consciousness automatically and effortlessly

as the result of moral intuitions. Examples of this link in nonmoral

cognition include Zajonc's (1980) demonstrations that affectively

valenced evaluations are made ubiquitously and rapidly, before

any conscious processing has taken place. More recent examples

include findings that much of social cognition operates automatically

and implicitly (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999; Greenwald &

Banaji, 1995).

2. The post hoc reasoning link. The model proposes that moral

reasoning is an effortful process, engaged in after a moral judgment

is made, in which a person searches for arguments that will

support an already-made judgment. Nisbett and Wilson (1977)

demonstrated such post hoc reasoning for causal explanations.

Kuhn (1991), Kunda (1990), and Perkins, Farady, and Bushey

(1991) found that everyday reasoning is heavily marred by the

biased search only for reasons that support one's already-stated

hypothesis.

3. The reasoned persuasion link. The model proposes that

moral reasoning is produced and sent forth verbally to justify one's

Table 1

General Features of the Two Systems

The intuitive system The reasoning system

Fast and effortless

Process is unintentional and runs automatically

Process is inaccessible; only results enter awareness

Does not demand attentional resources

Parallel distributed processing

Pattern matching; thought is metaphorical, holistic

Common to all mammals

Context dependent

Platform dependent (depends on the brain and body that houses it)

Slow and effortful

Process is intentional and controllable

Process is consciously accessible and viewable

Demands attentional resources, which are limited

Serial processing

Symbol manipulation; thought is truth preserving, analytical

Unique to humans over age 2 and perhaps some language-trained apes

Context independent

Platform independent (the process can be transported to any rule following

organism or machine)

Note. These contrasts are discussed in Bruner (1986), Chaiken (1980), Epstein (1994), Freud (1900/1976), Margolis (1987), Metcalfe and Mischel (1999),

Petty and Cacioppo (1986), Posner and Snyder (1975), Pyszczynski and Greenberg (1987), Reber (1993), Wegner (1994), T. D. Wilson (in press), and

Zajonc (1980).

INTUITION AND MORAL JUDGMENT 819

already-made moral judgment to others. Such reasoning can sometimes

affect other people, although moral discussions and arguments

are notorious for the rarity with which persuasion takes

place. Because moral positions always have an affective