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THE MEANING OF MORAL FACULTY

Why we cannot have a moral module

Ariel James

Autonomous University of Madrid

Paper delivered at the First Seminar of IMEDES (Instituto Universitario de

Investigación sobre Migraciones, Etnicidad y Desarrollo Social), on April 8,

2014, at the Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain. The text is a selection

from Chapter 12 of the book, “Mind behind Culture: The Ontological Nexus

between Cognition, Magic, and Religion” (In press).

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Introduction

The Concept of Moral Faculty

My beginnings in anthropology were marked by the belief that social and

cultural systems could be understood as the extensions and projections of

symbolic thinking processes. At that time, I understood the concept of

"culture" as the projection of social and moral values of a group of

individuals.

However, over the years, this initial idea eventually became more nuanced and

I developed an anthropological perspective more focused upon the complex

feedback between cognition and culture. I now assume that cognition is the

prelude to culture through biological conditioning, but, at the same time, that

culture makes cognition possible in the course of long-term, evolutionary

processes.

I now understand the concept of “cognition” as the cerebral/mental process of

articulation between emotion, intuition and reasoning, with a genetically given

foundation.

I conceive “genetics” as the evolutionary principles of design for all living

beings, which have their own biological content, regardless of social/cultural

conventions.

I use the term “culture” as the set of all the conventional and symbolic

constructs of society, in the sense of material innovations and of ideological

worldviews.

I am not going to discuss whether human culture in general can influence the

long-term genetic configuration. I surmise it is quite obvious that this

influence can exist. In any case, I will defend the idea that the arbitrary

conventions of a given culture or of a system of cultures cannot be part of the

genetic program of mankind. Therefore, social rules (conventions resulting

from social agreements) are not genetic rules (biologically determined).

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In other words, our genetic programming in and of itself cannot know the

meaning of a social rule such as baptism in Christian culture, for example. If

genes could "know" the meaning of conventional rules, then culture would be

rendered unnecessary.

I will posit straightforwardly that human cognition is not only a conceptual

process but that it also includes structures of non-conceptual and emotional

content, closely linked to moral evaluations. I will also defend the idea that

certain cognitive structures are not focused on a single module, but distributed

throughout the biological body by genetic design.

My theoretical proposal is that the nexus between cognition and culture

develops via a distributed innate disposition or pre-disposition of all humans:

it is a moral perception of reality.

The basic idea behind a moral perception is that our intuitive ontology is

intertwined with the structure of moral judgment. I will argue that our

instinctive theory about the forms and properties of physical reality and of

impersonal events is, at the same time, an intuitive theory of values, loaded

with moral content.

The ontological perception of reality is at the same time a moral perception of

reality. Although this seems obvious to our intuition, given the existence of

such a unity, how would one then account for variances within and among

comprehensive conceptions? While this question is quite relevant, for now I

will focus on what is common to human cognition, rather than upon the

possible variances. By this, I mean to give attention to what is common to all

rather than to the multiplicity of differences.

I understand the concept “ontology” in the general way that it has been

proposed by De Cruz and De Smedt:

“Ontology is the philosophical discipline within metaphysics that studies what

is, i.e., what kinds of entities there are in the world, and how different

categories of entities are related to each other. The question of how particular

objects relate to universal properties is an example of an ontological question

(e.g., a particular cat and cats as a species). Next to a philosophical meaning,

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ontology can also refer to the intuitive metaphysical assumptions that people

make.” (De Cruz and De Smedt, 2007:157).

My suggestion is that the world that we define as the raw space of “brute”

facts is interpreted by our intuitive mind/brain system with the same

framework of assumptions with which we perceive and interpret the world of

values, meanings, and moral rules, regardless of particular cultural

differences.

It is not that we intuitively tend to "humanize" the world, but that the values of

the world are perceived as indistinguishable from human values from the

perspective of our cognitive system. I want to be very clear on this point: I am

not rehashing the old formula of Euhemerus and Feuerbach. My point is not

that human beings project their inner feelings upon the outside world, in the

form of deities, spirits, etc. On the contrary, what I propose is that, for our

intuitive mind, there is no difference between "psychological" values and

"ontological" values.

My final goal is to demonstrate the implications of this hypothesis for the

scientific understanding of our moral faculty. The intuitive system of the mind

perceives the material world of "brute" facts and events in the same manner

that it perceives the social world of meaningful values and norms. Our

intuitive brain works fundamentally as an “animistic”, “magical” and

“religious” mind.

The tools of our moral intuition are a special kind of values that I understand

to be "imperative values", or "ontological values"; they can be understood to

be "sacred values” (Atran et al; 2008, 2009). My proposal is that so-called

“sacred values” at an instinctive level are actually ontological values or

intuitive evaluations about the ontological relationship between physical

objects and facts, and social and cultural meanings. From my perspective, the

intuitive ontology of our cognitive system has an axiological and moral

configuration.

Does a coincidence of one's moral intuition and one's apprehension of the

world in fact exist? I believe so, at an intuitive level, prior to any process of

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cultural learning. Of course, one could argue that the fact that there is a

coincidence between the two does not imply that people are not free to

disregard those “coincidences”; nor does it imply that they are not able to

discard them. Perhaps there isn’t actually a coincidence of morality and

ontology at the intuitive level. In that case, the issue could be somewhat

problematic for my approach.

I surmise that there could be a disconnection between ontology and morality at

certain stages of ontogenetic development, but this dissociation is exactly that:

a kind of dissociation, disruption, or failure of some biological pattern or

design. By contrast, at a cultural level, the dissociation between ontology and

morality is often taken as given in many cases (Putnam, 2004; Badiou, 2005).

We already know that our brain perceives reality automatically in terms of

information inputs evaluated as good, bad, or neutral. But what I am

proposing is that our brain processes the "good" and the "bad" in terms of

perceptual sensations through the moral language of justice and injustice. The

human moral faculty automatically perceives “good” and “bad” contexts in

terms of the moral combinations of justice, appropriateness and righteousness.

Henceforth, I will posit the concept of "moral faculty" as a cognitive

disposition that interprets the information provided by the sensory experience

in terms of moral correctness. If the sensory context is evaluated as positive,

then our moral faculty automatically processes the context as if it were

something "fair." If the sensory context is evaluated as negative, then our

moral faculty automatically processes the context as if it were something

"wrong" or “unjust” in a moral sense.

The moral faculty is the ability of the intuitive brain to perceive the concepts

of "good" and "bad" using the categorical labels of "just" and "unjust." If our

intuitive mind only interprets the input “good” as something simply "good",

then there would be no strict moral intuition. In order for us to postulate the

existence of a moral intuition, we must recognize the existence of a necessary

nexus between perceptive values and moral norms. The moral faculty would

be responsible for unifying the sensory values (ontological), with the

imperative values (moral).

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Moral judgments are mostly unconscious decisions that are taken to grasp the

meaning of certain actions, based on computing processes. These in turn are

based on a universal moral-ontology. The intuitive concept of "justice" is the

innate assumption that there is a common middle ground of moral judgment

for all mankind. The moral perception of reality is the unconscious,

ontological, and highly metaphysical assumption that there is a "moral golden

mean" in a universal sense.

For that reason, if tomorrow my train line fails to operate and I am unable to

get to work on time for an important meeting, my intuitive brain automatically

assesses the situation as an "injustice." My brain unconsciously thinks that the

train is acting wrongly towards me, or it may conceive of something even

more metaphysical, such as that the entire universe is conspiring against me. I

assume that all human brains unconsciously think in much the same manner.

Taking a conscious and highly reasonable way of thinking, for me to claim

injustice, there ought to have been a threshold that is passed or an injury that is

clearly and manifestly undeserved.

Metaphysics and morality have the same root: the unconscious belief that

there is an orderly principle of justice beyond the individual consciousness.

There is a direct correspondence between the nature of the moral (ontological)

faculty, and the structure of the magical and religious thinking. The human

brain automatically interprets the absence of cosmological sense as if it were

an injustice.

Franz Kafka never said that the world lacks meaning. In my personal

interpretation, what Kafka really wanted to say is that the existence of a

universe without meaning or cosmological sense is unfair.

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Part One

The Paradox of the Clairvoyant Genes

Undoubtedly, there are some interesting definitions of a "moral faculty" that

may be also of use for our understanding of the structure of moral intuition

(Mikhail, 2002, 2009, 2011; Dwyer, 1999, 2003; Hauser, 2006). I will

concentrate here, however, on addressing the concept of “moral faculty” or

“moral intuition” as the cognitive process of the correlation between ethics

and ontology – the relationship between the moral order of our minds and the

natural order of the objects and facts of our world.

From my point of view, we have a special sense of morality, which is also the

same sense of the cognitive ontology. It is a generic and extensive faculty that

cannot be reduced to a single mental module. It works as a cognitive

mechanism distributed throughout the entire human body.

I shall propose that we have an extensive cognitive sense which encompasses

both the dispositions of intuitive ontology and instinctive morality, and that

this generic sense is necessarily distributed throughout the entire mind/body

system, with a universal character.

My main goal is to point out that certain cerebral/mental dispositions, such as

moral-ontological sense, free will, and the biological sense of identity, are

mental faculties with a domain-general. They are cognitive dispositions

extended throughout the entire body, and distributed in all of the biological

functions of corporeality.

In other words, the theory of modularity has exceptions and these are not by-

the-way; rather they are fundamental exceptions. Accordingly, my first

proposition is:

Any kind of cognitive faculty involved in moral judgment, the sense of free

will, or in the sense of personal identity, is a non-modular disposition, i.e., it

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cannot be a definable, distinct and localizable biological organ within the

brain/mind.

Below, I will explain with logical arguments and commonsensical examples

why I believe that innate morality cannot be an organ or a mental module. I

believe that questioning the validity of this assumption is a necessary step in

order to advance the scientific understanding of our cognitive system and of

human nature.

I focus my line of reasoning on some aspects of the theory of the "universal

moral grammar" (UMG), proposed by Marc Hauser and John Mikhail, among

other researchers. This theory states that (1) our innate sense of justice is

based on a moral grammar that (2) functions as a separate module of the

brain/mind. I agree only with the first part of the proposition, but I have strong

reluctance to accept the second part. I will explain in detail the reasons for my

objection of the idea of a supposedly moral module.

One of the main questions that should be tackled by scientific research into the

foundations of morality is: How do we acquire the ability to distinguish moral

infractions from non-moral infractions?

In the words of Marc Hauser, “How are we able to make the differentiation

between moral rules and social and cultural rules? In the same way that we

can spontaneously recognize the grammaticality of sentences without any

exposure to them, we can spontaneously recognize certain moral infractions

without exposure to the specifics.

If we just have a “generic ontology”, how we can spontaneously recognize

certain moral infractions without exposure to the specifics? What makes us

feel that we "ought" to do something or not do something?”1

1 This is selected from my email conversation with Marc Hauser (February 12, 2014). I

expressly acknowledge the courtesy of Marc Hauser for his willingness to engage in this

discussion with me, and his responsiveness to all my questions during this time.

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Using practical examples: “How is the child to decide between social

conventions that can be broken (you can eat asparagus with your hands, but

not your mashed potatoes) and moral conventions that can’t (you can’t stab

your brother with a knife no matter how much he annoys you)?” (Hauser,

2006: 19).

In other words, how are we able to make the differentiation between moral

rules and social and cultural rules? There are only three logical ways to

answer Hauser’s question:

a) The distinction between moral (universal) rules and non-moral (cultural)

rules is made culturally. In this case, we do not need an innate moral faculty.

b) The ability to differentiate is innate. This is a paradox because an innate

disposition cannot operate using non-innate contents, such as non-moral rules

determined by a specific cultural system.

c) The ability to differentiate includes both innate and cultural elements, a

logical consequence that follows from the hypothesis of the biological moral

object proposed by Marc Hauser (Hauser, 2006: 5-7, 19-22), and John Mikhail

(Mikhail, 2011: 102-104). But if a set of genetically determined unconscious

moral principles does exist, then these genetic principles cannot include the

presence of non-genetic elements (social values and norms of a given cultural

context).

Therefore, options (b) and (c) are immediately transformed into option (d): we

must postulate the existence of an innate mechanism for the unification of real

facts, events, processes, beings and objects (ontology) and norms and values

(moral principles). Our brains do not contain a module specialized for moral

judgment, although our brains probably have a set of unconscious moral and

ontological principles underlying their biological functioning.

The innate moral sense must be, at the same time, an innate and instinctive

ontology. This leads to my second proposition:

There is an instinctive process of unification between the ontological data and

moral evaluation as a part of the architecture of our cognitive system, prior to

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any intervention of social and cultural instruction. An innate morality cannot

be separated from an innate ontology.

As an anthropologist, I tend to think that cultural conventions are always

present in any process of moral reasoning or moral sentiment. However, if we

follow exactly the line of reasoning of Generative Grammar, then cultural

conventions cannot be part of the moral grammar in its initial state, its phase

of genetic program (the Chomskyan fixed and genetically determined initial

state of the mind).

If we want to preserve the innate character of the moral faculty prior to any

formal instruction, if we exclude the intervention of cultural conventions only

for the initial state of innate morality, the moral faculty should be a moral

ontology.

The influence of social rules of a given culture cannot be removed entirely

from the picture, but, from a logical point of view, it cannot be an element of

our universal genetic programming.

The totality of Chomsky's grammatical program rests on the clear theoretical

and conceptual difference between cultural instruction and the biological

principles that are present genetically (Chomsky; 1995, 2002, 2007). If you

destroy that principle of difference between genetic rules and cultural

conventions, you cannot make an argument in the Chomskyan vein.

If the innate moral sense is not an ontological mechanism, it needs the

intervention of cultural conventions (i.e. non-moral norms) and, following

basic logic, it automatically ceases to be an innate mechanism.

By proposing a moral faculty separate from an innate ontology, we encounter

a logical and practical paradox; in such a case, the only remaining possibility

would be to appeal to a culture’s parochial conventions. If the moral faculty is

a pre-cultural module, then this module cannot produce judgments based on

cultural parameters.

Therefore, the moral faculty, by itself, cannot make a clear distinction between

moral (universal) norms and social/cultural (parochial) norms. In order to

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make a clear distinction, a process of enculturation would be necessary, or, as

I propose, through the action of an innate moral ontology.

Moral ontology provides the universal principles that regulate the moral value

of some facts that cannot be dictated by arbitrary cultural agreements or

impositions. For instance, even without exposure to cultural instruction, a

child can be traumatized after being the victim of a violent act. The act itself

has a pre-cultural meaning and value.

The “universal moral grammar”, proposed and highlighted by Hauser and

Mikhail, among others, implies a contradiction in terms, to the extent that one

cannot escape from the paradox of the "cultural" genes that magically know a

priori what the content of specific social rules is.

Can the “paradox of the clairvoyant genes” be solved?

I believe that we can solve it only if we assume that there is a strong

cerebral/mental unity between ontology and morality before considering any

cultural strategy of instruction.

If it is to survive, the theory of a universal moral grammar ultimately has two

possible alternatives:

1) To assume that the universal moral grammar can make that distinction

(between universal and social norms) in its initial state, which is a paradoxical

argument to the extent that we want to keep the nativist assumption.

2) To assume that there must be some kind of a strong unity between innate

morality and innate ontology.

If I am correct, what we really have is an innate disposition to the cognitive

unity between ontology and morality that encompasses the whole system of

mind and body (whatever the relation between mind and body may be).

This entails that the moral faculty cannot be a cognitive module "isolated" in

itself, nor can it be a mental organ. Our moral sense can be a universal

cognitive disposition without being an “autonomous” organ.

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The universal grammar structures in the moral sense cannot meet the same

guidelines as the grammatical structures in the linguistic sense that has been

proposed by Noam Chomsky. This is so because cultural education is not

necessary in order to grammatically distinguish between a good and a bad

sentence. By contrast, however, cultural education seems to be indispensable

to distinguish between an innate moral content and a conventional cultural

one.

The logical effect of the paradox of the clairvoyant genes is that if culture is

ultimately used to determine the universal rules of moral judgments, we would

not need a universal moral grammar. My suggestion is that our innate moral

sense has some sort of cognitive mechanism to automatically correlate facts,

beings and processes (innate ontology), with values/norms (innate morality),

before any social/cultural instruction.

Part Two

Some Consequences of Ten Impossibilities

We do not need a specific mental organ separated from the “generic” ontology

to do the basic discrimination between moral and non-moral rules. I suggest

ten principal reasons for this:

1) Our intuitive moral sense is not limited to the rules of syntax and linguistic

computing. It is actually the body itself which is responsible for regulating

moral balance, not only syllogistic reasoning. The real body is the one that

experiences shame, anger, frustration, empathy and compassion. Perceiving

the world through a moral prism is a need for the body, not just a product of

formal logic. It is not only a matter of mathematical operations, but an “a

priori” apperception, to use Kantian terminology.

2) There are people who are unable to understand and apply the simplest

moral reasoning, but, nonetheless, they have all their mental organs intact.

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I mean that there are people who are amoral or even immoral, although their

individual biological organs work well. Something fails in the overall system,

but not regarding specific individual organs. What probably fails is a

distributed and universal cognitive competence, which I understand as the

sense of complete unity between ontology and morality.

It is likely that unconscious moral judgments have more to do with the

activation of different levels of neuronal discharges, than with specific organic

states of the brain. If the general system of 1) neural connections and 2) the

chemical signals are somehow affected, moral judgment is affected

automatically. The converse is also true: it is important to note that when one

generates incoherent and clearly incorrect moral judgments, it may affect

neural and chemical connections.

In the architecture of our minds the most important issue is not the role of

individual organs, but the role of the main cerebral functions. For instance, the

blind can actually “see” through the sense of touch. The moral problematic is

not located just in a specific apparatus of the mind, but in the overall system of

correlations between logical reasoning, value judgments, emotions,

sentiments, symbolic thinking, and meta-cognitive assessment (Greene et al,

2001; Greene and Haidt, 2002). Moral intelligence is a meta-cognitive

problem beyond the specific mental organs. In this context, meta-cognitive

means a certain degree of second-order logic which underlies the logic of

specific mental operations.

3) An immoral action cannot have consequences focalized in only one part of

the human body, because, if this singular point were to disappear, then the

immoral character of the action would disappear as well. If someone has

intentionally injured my neck with a blow, that fact does not imply that the

action has exhausted its moral content after my neck has recovered and is

working well again.

The problem of recognizing wrongdoing cannot be located in a single mental

organ but in the interstices between different perceptual systems for moral

evaluation. Similarly, the ability to do good deeds requires the correlation

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between ontological, moral and practical processes which a single part of the

brain cannot provide.

4) If a mentally impaired person, such as someone affected by a stroke, could

make correct moral judgments, in spite of partial cerebral damage, and if tests

could show that the healthy and surviving part of the brain is directly involved

in moral judgment, we could say that a specific cerebral process exists for

moral evaluation. However, even in this extreme case, the surviving part of

the brain is the seat of multiple different cognitive functions, and not solely

of moral judgment.

But, if a person with severe brain damage, or some type of serious

psychological disorder responsible for a distorted image of reality (for

example a psychosis, paranoia, neurosis, schizophrenic delusions etc.) is

unable to produce and apply moral judgments based on facts, even if the

surviving part of the brain could understand the meaning of moral rules, then

the mechanism of innate moral sense could not be anything other than a

mental disposition distributed throughout the mind/body system in order to

correctly represent the world in an ontological sense.

A distorted image of reality automatically implies a distorted and misleading

vision of morality2. To the extent that a person with serious brain

damage continues to have the ability to accurately view reality, that person is

still morally responsible for all their actions. The acid test for ascribing "moral

responsibility" is not the existence of a moral module, but, rather, the

existence of a proper interpretation of physical and social reality. It is

therefore a perceptual and conceptual competence with solid ontological

foundations.

For this reason, all known judicial and legal systems grant a special status to

individuals with cognitive problems related to the interpretation of reality (this

may include considerable softening of penalties, or even complete absolution

2 When brain damage affects an individual’s representation of reality, this likewise affects

the moral interpretation of reality. The sense of morality depends on certain ontological

objectivity that is previous to any socially constructed interpretation.

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of legal responsibility). “Juridical” intuitions recognize that the moral status of

human actions cannot be separated from the ontological interpretation of

reality. Moral sense has been historically conceived as a general property of

the whole personality, not as some distinct apparatus inside the human mind.

The cognitive unity of fact and value is the intuitive basis of all systems of

jurisprudence that humanity has known. The cognitive basis of any formal and

historical form of justice and jurisprudence is moral ontology.

5) The inner principles of action of one organ usually cannot apply to the

particular functioning of other organs. The lungs cannot regulate the functions

of the sense of hearing, for example. But, even the sense of smell has a moral

content. The moral sense is pervasive throughout all other mental and

biological organs, and may even inhibit the functioning of some other organs

(if not of all of them). If the moral sense is an ontological competence

distributed throughout the entire human body, it therefore cannot be a single

organ.

6) The primordial biological function of each bodily organ is the self-

preservation of the organism. This is something that certainly cannot be said

to be the fundamental objective of the moral faculty. The moral faculty not

only protects the organism to which it belongs but also takes into account all

of the other organisms that factor in the moral context. Moral sense may

therefore be considered a biological competence that is universal and impartial

in scope. By contrast, if the organs of the human body were equally impartial

and fair in their function (that is, if they were directed towards preserving the

stability of other organisms to which they do not belong), they probably would

stop working.

7) Moral sense cannot be a physical object because physical objects (organs,

modules etc.) are interchangeable from the point of view of our intuitive

jurisprudence. Take, for example, the Hammurabi Code or the Talion Law of

ancient Semitic peoples, wherein a person’s hand could be cut off for having

deprived another person of his hand. By contrast, no one can deprive you of

your moral sense as a penalty for previously depriving another person of one

of her bodily organs.

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The old phrase “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth” means that the eyes

and teeth are interchangeable from the point of view of our intuitive concept

of justice. Even today in some parts of the world, theft is penalized with the

privation of a hand, a barbaric practice. Probably the concept of

"proportionality" in systems of justice is derived from the comparison between

the values of different human organs.

Nonetheless, there is no single intuitive comparison between arms and eyes on

the one hand, and a supposed moral organ on the other. At the level of folk

psychology the concept of morality cannot be conceived as an organ

comparable to an arm or an eye. Moral damage is not limited to the part of the

body injured by during an attack.

The reason the moral faculty cannot be a biological object according to folk

psychology is almost self-evident. Consider the following: the moral sense 1)

cannot be exchanged for any other sense, 2) is not subject to bargaining or

negotiation (that it, it is ultimately a non-transferable good3), and 3) cannot be

subject to barter, loan, or donation (that is, it is not subsumed in the logic of

gift and counter-gift). Again, from a logical perspective, the reason is self-

evident: the morality, as a parameter of measurement, cannot be the object that

it measures.

Like it or not, the moral sense has nothing to do with the logic of social

markets. Likewise, our brain was not designed by evolutionary factors for the

benefit of the rules of the game of capitalism. Actually, at the stratum of

cognitive schemes, there are fundamental structures that are not subject to any

sort of negotiation; this would be the case for our intuitive ontological-moral

feelings, the inner sense of being (prior to any socially constructed identity),

the abstract concepts of free will and freedom of thought, among others.

3 The fact that moral faculty is not transferable as a specific object from one body to

another does not negate the existence of shared moral content in a generic and universal

sense.

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8) If we postulate a single moral module, anyone with a sort of supposedly

moral disability can justify his own wrongdoing as a result of some "factory

defects."

Morality cannot be a cerebral "organ" exactly like the linguistic universal

grammar simply because problems and failures in the application of the

linguistic module do not have moral consequences. Instead, a hypothetical

psycho-biological damage to the moral faculty may serve to justify the

annulment of the concept of moral responsibility.

A person can say after committing a crime, "I was justified because my moral

module didn't work properly." But if innate ontology is already a moral

disposition rooted in the architecture of human cognitive system, then no one

can easily disable the concept of "moral responsibility."

9) The central feature of the human condition is the moral character of people.

If the moral character of people, that is, their human dignity, depends on a

single mental organ, the act of divesting them from that organ immediately

transforms them into beings without moral value.

A human being without moral attributes, properties and capacities could

automatically be considered as a non-person. Human dignity cannot depend

on a single mental “organ” or on a particular cognitive or biological system.4

I could provide a list of possible ethical problems arising from the assumption

that a moral organ exists. All of these examples can be summarized in one

point: any biological organ may be absent or deficient -including the linguistic

organ- and yet a person still has her moral competence and personal dignity.

On the contrary, if a person does not have a moral organ, then he/she would

not be a complete person, in the ethical sense.

This possibility could, with a single blow, annihilate the two universal

principles of justice: equality of rights of all human beings, and universal

4 In this respect, history provides several examples of the atrocities committed in the

search for the seat of the soul.

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respect for their personal dignity. In my opinion, this could very much be a

type of Pandora's Box.

10) My last point is purely commonsensical. It has to do with the cycle of

birth, life and death of a biological organ. Any biological organ is designed by

genetic laws in order to develop its full potentiality and, then, it is exposed to

decay, deterioration and eventually to complete collapse, with the passage of

time. I do not think the same can be said of the moral sense. A person does not

have to be less moral at eighty than when he or she was thirty, for example. A

person’s moral conscience at eighty years old may, in fact, be of a higher

quality than it was at thirty years old. Obviously this does not apply to other

biological organs.

There are complex variables that connect with moral sense, such as the factor

of self-awareness -which comes with life experience, age, and wisdom- in

which moral intuition works as a cognitive capacity through

time. Psychological research into the stages of moral development has been

proposed by Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, based on deontological

assumptions that cannot be simply discarded if we endeavor to come to a

coherent scientific understanding of morality.

The concept of Kohlberg’s "stages of moral development" does not

necessarily exclude the concept of "innate morality", to the extent that both

approaches can share the basic assumptions of a Kantian “prior-to-society

perspective.” It is likely that, in using moral reasoning, certain capabilities

cannot be explained without appealing to a concept of well defined stages of

cognitive-moral development (Kohlberg, 1981). In this sense, the philosopher

Jürgen Habermas has pointed out that:

“Moral development means that a child or adolescent rebuilds and

differentiates the cognitive structures he already has so as to be better able to

solve the same sort of problems he faced before, namely, how to solve

relevant moral dilemmas in a consensual manner. The young person himself

sees this moral development as a learning process in that at the higher stage he

must be able to explain whether and in what way the moral judgments he had

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considered right at the previous stage were wrong” (Habermas

[1983]1995:125).

My third proposition is a consequence of the ten points already expounded:

Our moral sense is the basis of any philosophical concept of human dignity,

and of any scientific concept of human nature. Therefore, the preservation of

human dignity and the correct comprehension of human nature cannot be

reduced to variables dependent on the functionality of a single biological

organ.

The extreme fragility of the human condition is of such a delicate nature that

any well-intentioned attempt to measure the breadth and depth of their roots

could have disastrous consequences. That means that even the neutral goals of

our aseptic science must have limits. In the real world there are neither neutral

values nor human actions detached from moral consequences.

Conclusion

The Moral Module in a Pound of Flesh

My provisional conclusion is that the universal grammar theory, as postulated

by Noam Chomsky, cannot be completely transferred to the field of moral

intuition exactly as it works in the field of linguistic research. If we want to

apply that theory to the field of morality, we must make many changes,

significant changes.

From my point of view, the moral sense is a cognitive disposition that we use

via all the biological organs (the very organs that other animals possess). The

moral sense is neither conditioned by culture, nor is it conditionable. This

point has been studied by Banerjee, Huebner and Hauser, in their work on

resistance of the moral faculty to cultural factors: “…the idea that the

principles underlying our moral judgments are, to some extent, independent of

our cultural backgrounds, and importantly, separate from the factors that guide

our moral behavior” (Banerjee, Huebner and Hauser, 2010).

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Our concept of morality cannot be conditioned by the existence of an object

because, in the hypothetical event of its absence or deficiency, the whole

meaning of morality could disappear. Every object is conditioned and it is also

conditionable by external factors, like all physical, biological, and mental

apparatus. We cannot say that the same applies to the moral sense.

Our innate sense of morality is an ontological logic, which has as its function

to constrain possible human actions, without, at the same time, being a distinct

organic apparatus. It is, therefore, an innate propensity of the entire organism

to act according to certain abstract principles. Human moral faculty has three

main features: it is extensive, it is permanent, and it is not susceptible to

modification by influence of social conventions. It is simply something

biologically given as a result of complex interaction between genes and the

environment.

The innate moral principles are a common human possession, but without the

necessity of being considered part of a distinct moral apparatus, with its own

independent structure and developmental path. The moral faculty is indeed a

real competence of our mind, it is not a Fodorian module; it works as a

domain-general of human mind/body system.

Thus, the internal functioning of the human mind/brain system has at least

three different processes or cognitive structures:

1) The presence of mental and biological organs and modules, which operate

as innate mechanisms with distinct evolutionary functions, fixed in the genetic

design;

2) The existence of mental and biological dispositions that are not organs, nor

modules, but, rather, distributed, extensive and generic faculties, equally fixed

in the genetic design, and probably the majority of higher cognitive processes;

3) The probable existence of mental and biological dispositions which are not

autonomous and distinctive but mixed and intertwined, as the overlapping

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ontological-moral sense. In other words, one capacity cannot do without the

presence of the other5.

I do not believe that the capabilities of human cognition could be completely

exhausted in just these three possibilities. Perhaps other possible combinations

exist.

Moral intuition and ontological sense are two sides of the same coin. We

cannot conceive the real world without appealing to moral rules. Nor can we

conceive of moral principles divorced from the ontological perception of the

real world. Moreover, and I would like to be quite explicit on this point, which

is my fourth and last proposition:

Non-modularity is a prerequisite sine qua non to any rational concept of the

human moral faculty.

If innate morality is a modular disposition, it automatically ceases to have

moral content. This is because the human sense of morality cannot be:

1) Delimited in any conceivable way,

2) Separated from the ontological sense of reality,

3) Interchangeable for any other organ or by a mechanical or digital device;

4) Subject to bargaining or negotiation;

5) The subject of barter, loan, or donation;

6) Transferable to another body;

7) Subject to quantitative measurement;

8) Indifferent to moral consequences, as is the case with other bodily organs;

9) Age, grow old, degenerate and die;

5 The internal functioning of the human mind/brain is presumably also informed by some emotive and sentimental processes that are of domain-general.

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10) Be detached from the whole human condition; and

11) Be extirpated by any means.

My conclusion is, therefore, that innate morality is not a domain specific,

cannot have a particular distinct neurological apparatus, cannot be

computationally “autonomous”, and must not under any circumstances be the

object of scientific manipulations.

If this hypothesis seems too strange, I would like to propose a small fun

thought experiment.

Imagine you are a person actually endowed with the alleged “Moral Organ.”

Now imagine that, because you have committed some kind of heinous felony,

the judge condemns you to sacrifice your deficient moral organ. However, this

particular organ must be extirpated without harming any other organ of the

body.

The key requirement in this organ extraction is that you must remove it

without shedding a single drop of blood from any other bodily organ. Do you

think the removal of the moral module would be possible?

If you think that it is possible, I would like to recommend the reading of “The

Merchant of Venice,” a dramatic theatrical work written in 1598 by an

enigmatic poet.

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Ariel James

Anthropologist and Political Scientist, PhD in Social Anthropology,

Autonomous University of Madrid; researcher at the Institute on Migration,

Ethnicity and Social Development (IMEDES), and at the Spanish Association

of Orientalists (AEO); Author of Chamanismo: el otro hombre, la otra selva,

el otro mundo (2004); Tribus, Armas y Petróleo: La Transición hacia el

Invierno Árabe (2011); and Siria. Guerra, Clanes, Lawrence (2012).

For comments: arieljames.trapero@uam.es