The Moral Instinct

Let's try some interactive linguistics. Consider some sentences you've never heard before:

1. Mickey said that Donald will feed himself.

Could Mickey feed himself? Now consider:

2. Mickey said that he will feed himself.

Could Mickey feed himself now? Try this one:

3. Mr. Green said that Mr. Red saw him.

Who did Mr. Red see: Mr. Red or Mr. Green (or someone else)?

4. My cousin who is happy is missing.

If you were to transform the above declarative sentence into an interogative, would it be

a) Is my cousin who happy is missing? or

b) Is my cousin who is happy missing?

What's remarkable about these tests is not how you, a veteran speaker of English, perform, but how a 4-year-old performs. Almost every 4-year-old knows that it couldn't be Mickey who will feed himself in (1), but that it could be Mickey in (2). Almost every 4-year-old knows that whoever it is that Mr. Red sees, it can't be Mr. Red. And interogative (a) almost never comes out of kids' mouths.

These (oft-repeated) experiments force linguists to ask: How could kids know this much about grammatical structure given how little they've been exposed to? Kids are not simply repeating themselves, for they've never heard these sentences before. The sentences they've been exposed to almost surely underdetermine their ability to generalize about these novel sentences. And it's wildly implausible that caregivers are instructing their charges on, say, the details of the binding principle (anaphors must have local antecedents). But if kids don't learn these principles, where do they come from?

The answer many linguists favor is: They are innate. They're part of our biological inheritance. Noam Chomsky described it as a Language Acquisition Device.

This strategy for mapping out one part of the human mind prompted other psychologists to wonder: Are there other domains in which the stimuli children are exposed to are too impoverished to account for what children know? Perhaps. Some moral psychologists are now maintaining that children exhibit a moral competence that outstrips the limited (and confusing) moral input from their environment. The data is suggestive.

Eliot Turiel (1983) and his colleagues asked children as young as three: Would be OK to talk without raising your hand if the teacher said it would be OK to talk without raising your hand? Kids did not hesitate: Yes! But when Turiel asked these same kids if it would be OK to hit one's friend if your teacher said it was OK, kids balked. Even omnipotent Miss Applebaum couldn't make hitting OK. When Larry Nucci (1983) asked Amish children whether it would be OK to work on Sunday if God said it was OK, 100 percent of kids said yes. But only 20 percent of those same kids said it be OK to hit someone else if God said it would be OK.

The justifications kids offer for refraining from hitting, say, are striking in their similarity to our own rough conception of moral rules: such rules are authority-independent, serious, and generalizable. This sets moral rules off from conventional rules, which lack such properties.

We must then ask: Since kids, across a wide spectrum of backgrounds, all exhibit this ability to distinguish moral from conventional rules, is it plausible that kids could have learned this from their environment? If the answer is no (as some insist), then the mind may well contain the moral analogue of the Language Acquisition Device. And this conclusion is bolstered if we can identify (as some allegedly have) other moral competencies that kids don't learn.

The Moral Nativism hypothesis is by no means the consensus view. In its current form, it's probably too strong Some psychologists and philosophers prefer to talk in terms of biases and dispositions, and many give pride of place to culture. What we can say is that moral education is not what our parents thought it was. We are not so much instilling morality in our children. We're shaping it.