Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
( Be you spiritual minded , and not being religious, know the truth and be set free from darkness and falsehood )
（你要有精神追求，不要有宗教信仰，要了解真理，摆脱黑暗和虚假）
The #1 bestselling author of The Anxious Generation and acclaimed social psychologist challenges conventional thinking about morality, politics, and religion in a way that speaks to conservatives and liberals alike—a “landmark contribution to humanity’s understanding of itself” (The New York Times Book Review).
Drawing on his twenty-five years of groundbreaking research on moral psychology, Jonathan Haidt shows how moral judgments arise not from reason but from gut feelings. He shows why liberals, conservatives, and libertarians have such different intuitions about right and wrong, and he shows why each side is actually right about many of its central concerns.
In this subtle yet accessible book, Haidt gives you the key to understanding the miracle of human cooperation, as well as the curse of our eternal divisions and conflicts. If you’re ready to trade in anger for understanding, read The Righteous Mind.
《焦虑的一代》是畅销书《焦虑的一代》的作者，也是广受赞誉的社会心理学家，他以一种对保守派和自由派都具有启发性的方式挑战了人们对道德、政治和宗教的传统思维——这是“对人类自我理解的里程碑式贡献”（《纽约时报书评》）。
乔纳森·海特凭借 25 年在道德心理学方面的开创性研究，展示了道德判断并非源于理性，而是源于直觉。他展示了自由派、保守派和自由意志主义者对是非对错的直觉为何如此不同，并展示了为什么每一方对其许多核心关注点的看法实际上都是正确的。
在这本微妙而易懂的书中，海特为你提供了理解人类合作奇迹以及我们永恒的分裂和冲突诅咒的关键。如果你准备好用愤怒换取理解，请阅读《正义之心》。
Contents
Introduction... xi
PART I Intuitions Come First, Strategic Reasoning Second
1 Where Does Morality Come From?
2 The Intuitive Dog and Its Rational Tail..... 27
3 Elephants Rule..... 52
4 Vote for Me (Here's Why)..... 72
PART II There's More to Morality than Harm and Fairness
5 Beyond WEIRD Morality.....95
6 Taste Buds of the Righteous Mind..... 112
7 The Moral Foundations of Politics.... 128
8 The Conservative Advantage..... 155
PART III
Morality Binds and Blinds
9 Why Are We So Groupish?..... 189
10 The Hive Switch..... 221
11 Religion Is a Team Sport..... 246
12 Can't We All Disagree More Constructively?..... 274
Conclusion..... 315
Acknowledgments..... 319
Notes..... 323
References..... 377
Index..... 407
ONE
Where Does Morality Come From?
I'm going to tell you a brief story. Pause after you read it and decide whether the people in the story did anything morally wrong.
A family's dog was killed by a car in front of their house. They had heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog's body and cooked it and ate it for dinner. Nobody saw them do this.
If you are like most of the well-educated people in my studies, you felt an initial flash of disgust, but you hesitated before saying the family had done anything morally wrong. After all, the dog was dead already, so they didn't hurt it, right? And it was their dog, so they had a right to do what they wanted with the carcass, no? If I pushed you to make a judgment, odds are you'd give me a nuanced answer, something like "Well, I think it's disgusting, and I think they should have just buried the dog, but I wouldn't say it was morally wrong."
OK, here's a more challenging story:
A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a chicken. But before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he cooks it and eats it.
Once again, no harm, nobody else knows, and, like the dog-eating family, it involves a kind of recycling that is as some of my research subjects pointed out an efficient use of natural resources. But now the disgust is so much stronger, and the action just seems so degrading. Does that make it wrong? If you're an educated and politically liberal Westerner, you'll probably give another nuanced answer, one that acknowledges the man's right to do what he wants, as long as he doesn't hurt anyone.
But if you are not a liberal or libertarian Westerner, you probably think it's wrong-morally wrong for someone to have sex with a chicken carcass and then eat it. For you, as for most people on the planet, morality is broad. Some actions are wrong even though they don't hurt anyone. Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous mind. The next step is to understand where these many moralities came from in the first place.
一
道德从何而来？
我要给你讲一个简短的故事。读完后，请暂停一下，判断故事中的人物是否做了任何不道德的事情。
一家人的狗在他们家门前被车撞死了。他们听说狗肉很好吃，所以他们把狗的尸体切开，煮熟后当晚餐吃掉。没人看到他们这样做。
如果你和我研究中的大多数受过良好教育的人一样，你会最初感到一丝厌恶，但在说这家人做了任何不道德的事情之前，你会犹豫不决。毕竟，狗已经死了，所以他们没有伤害它，对吧？而且这是他们的狗，所以他们有权对尸体做他们想做的事，不是吗？ 如果我逼你做出判断，你很可能会给我一个微妙的答案，比如“嗯，我认为这很恶心，我认为他们应该把狗埋掉，但我不会说这在道德上是错误的。”
好吧，这是一个更具挑战性的故事：
一个男人每周去超市买一只鸡。但在烹饪鸡肉之前，他与鸡肉发生性关系。然后他把它煮熟吃掉。
再说一次，没有伤害，没有人知道，而且，就像吃狗的家庭一样，它涉及一种回收利用，正如我的一些研究对象指出的那样，这是一种对自然资源的有效利用。但现在厌恶情绪更加强烈，这种行为似乎太可耻了。这是否意味着它是错误的？如果你是一个受过教育、政治自由的西方人，你可能会给出另一个微妙的答案，承认这个人有权做他想做的事，只要他不伤害任何人。
但如果你不是自由派或自由意志派的西方人，你可能会认为与鸡尸体发生性关系然后吃掉它是错误的——在道德上是错误的。对你来说，就像对地球上的大多数人一样，道德是广泛的。有些行为即使没有伤害任何人，也是错误的。理解世界各地，甚至社会内部的道德都不同这一简单事实，是理解你正义思想的第一步。下一步是了解这些道德观的起源。
THE ORIGIN OF MORALITY (TAKE 1)
I studied philosophy in college, hoping to figure out the meaning of life. After watching too many Woody Allen movies, I had the mistaken impression that philosophy would be of some help. But I had taken some psychology courses too, and I loved them, so I chose to continue. In 1987 I was admitted to the graduate program in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. I had a vague plan to conduct experiments on the psychology of humor. I thought it might be fun to do research that let me hang out in comedy clubs.
A week after arriving in Philadelphia, I sat down to talk with Jonathan Baron, a professor who studies how people think and make decisions. With my (minimal) background in philosophy, we had a good discussion about ethics. Baron asked me point-blank: "Is moral thinking any different from other kinds of thinking?" I said that thinking about moral issues (such as whether abortion is wrong) seemed different from thinking about other kinds of questions (such as where to go for dinner tonight), because of the much greater need to provide reasons justifying your moral judgments to other people. Baron responded enthusiastically, and we talked about some ways one might compare moral thinking to other kinds of thinking in the lab. The next day, on the basis of little more than a feeling of encouragement, I asked him to be my advisor and I set off to study moral psychology.
In 1987, moral psychology was a part of developmental psychology. Researchers focused on questions such as how children develop in their thinking about rules, especially rules of fairness. The big question behind this research was: How do children come to know right from wrong? Where does morality come from?
There are two obvious answers to this question: nature or nurture. If you pick nature, then you're a nativist. You believe that moral knowledge is native in our minds. It comes preloaded, perhaps in our God-inscribed hearts (as the Bible says), or in our evolved moral emotions (as Darwin argued).
But if you believe that moral knowledge comes from nurture, then you are an empiricist. You believe that children are more or less blank slates at birth (as John Locke said). If morality varies around the world and across the centuries, then how could it be innate? Whatever morals we have as adults must have been learned during childhood from our own experience, which includes adults telling us what's right and wrong. (Empirical means "from observation or experience.")
But this is a false choice, and in 1987 moral psychology was mostly focused on a third answer: rationalism, which says that kids figure out morality for themselves. Jean Piaget, the greatest developmental psychologist of all time, began his career as a zoologist studying mollusks and insects in his native Switzerland. He was fascinated by the stages that animals went through as they transformed themselves from, say, caterpillars to butterflies. Later, when his attention turned to children, he brought with him this interest in stages of development. Piaget wanted to know how the extraordinary sophistication of adult thinking (a cognitive butterfly) emerges from the limited abilities of young children (lowly caterpillars).
Piaget focused on the kinds of errors kids make. For example, he'd put water into two identical drinking glasses and ask kids to tell him if the glasses held the same amount of water. (Yes.) Then he'd pour the contents of one of the glasses into a tall skinny glass and ask the child to compare the new glass to the one that had not been touched. Kids younger than six or seven usually say that the tall skinny glass now holds more water, because the level is higher. They don't understand that the total volume of water is conserved when it moves from glass to glass. He also found that it's pointless for adults to explain the conservation of volume to kids. The kids won't get it until they reach an age (and cognitive stage) when their minds are ready for it. And when they are ready, they'll figure it out for themselves just by playing with cups of water.
In other words, the understanding of the conservation of volume wasn't innate, and it wasn't learned from adults. Kids figure it out for themselves, but only when their minds are ready and they are given the right kinds of experiences.
Piaget applied this cognitive-developmental approach to the study of children's moral thinking as well. He got down on his hands and knees to play marbles with children, and sometimes he deliberately broke rules and played dumb. The children then responded to his mistakes, and in so doing, they revealed their growing ability to respect rules, change rules, take turns, and resolve disputes. This growing knowledge came in orderly stages, as children's cognitive abilities matured.
Piaget argued that children's understanding of morality is like their understanding of those water glasses: we can't say that it is innate, and we can't say that kids learn it directly from adults. It is, rather, self-constructed as kids play with other kids. Taking turns in a game is like pouring water back and forth between glasses. No matter how often you do it with three-year-olds, they're just not ready to get the concept of fairness, any more than they can understand the conservation of volume. But once they've reached the age of five or six, then playing games, having arguments, and working things out together will help them learn about fairness far more effectively than any sermon from adults.
This is the essence of psychological rationalism: We grow into our rationality as caterpillars grow into butterflies. If the caterpillar eats enough leaves, it will (eventually) grow wings. And if the child gets enough experiences of turn taking, sharing, and playground justice, it will (eventually) become a moral creature, able to use its rational capacities to solve ever harder problems. Rationality is our nature, and good moral reasoning is the end point of development.
Rationalism has a long and complex history in philosophy. In this book I'll use the word rationalist to describe anyone who believes that reasoning is the most important and reliable way to obtain moral knowledge.
Piaget's insights were extended by Lawrence Kohlberg, who revolutionized the study of morality in the 1960s with two key innovations. First, he developed a way to quantify Piaget's observation that children's moral reasoning changed over time. He created a set of moral dilemmas that he presented to children of various ages, and he recorded and coded their responses. For example, should a man named Heinz break into a drugstore to steal a drug that would save his dying wife? Should a girl named Louise reveal to her mother that her younger sister had lied to the mother? It didn't much matter whether the child said yes or no; what mattered were the reasons children gave when they tried to explain their answers.
Kohlberg found a six-stage progression in children's reasoning about the social world, and this progression matched up well with the stages Piaget had found in children's reasoning about the physical world. Young children judged right and wrong by very superficial features, such as whether a person was punished for an action. (If an adult punished the act, then the act must have been wrong.) Kohlberg called the first two stages the "pre-conventional" level of moral judgment, and they correspond to the Piagetian stage at which kids judge the physical world by superficial features (if a glass is taller, then it has more water in it).
But during elementary school, most children move on to the two "conventional" stages, becoming adept at understanding and even manipulating rules and social conventions. This is the age of petty legalism that most of us who grew up with siblings remember well ("I'm not hitting you. I'm using your hand to hit you. Stop hitting yourself!"). Kids at this stage generally care a lot about conformity, and they have great respect for authority-in word, if not always in deed. They rarely question the legitimacy of authority, even as they learn to maneuver within and around the constraints that adults impose on them.
After puberty, right when Piaget said that children become capable of abstract thought, Kohlberg found that some children begin to think for themselves about the nature of authority, the meaning of justice, and the reasons behind rules and laws. In the two "post-conventional" stages, adolescents still value honesty and respect rules and laws, but now they sometimes justify dishonesty or law-breaking in pursuit of still higher goods, particularly justice. Kohlberg painted an inspiring rationalist image of children as "moral philosophers" trying to work out coherent ethical systems for themselves.¹⁰ In the post-conventional stages, they finally get good at it. Kohlberg's dilemmas were a tool for measuring these dramatic advances in moral reasoning.
道德的起源（第一部分）
我在大学学习哲学，希望弄清生命的意义。看了太多伍迪·艾伦的电影后，我误以为哲学会有所帮助。但我也选修了一些心理学课程，而且我很喜欢，所以我选择继续学习。1987 年，我被宾夕法尼亚大学心理学研究生课程录取。我有一个模糊的计划，想对幽默心理学进行实验。我认为做研究可能会很有趣，让我可以去喜剧俱乐部玩。
到达费城一周后，我坐下来与研究人们如何思考和做决定的教授乔纳森·巴伦交谈。凭借我（最低限度的）哲学背景，我们就伦理进行了一次很好的讨论。巴伦直截了当地问我：“道德思维与其他类型的思维有什么不同吗？” 我说，思考道德问题（比如堕胎是否错误）似乎不同于思考其他类型的问题（比如今晚去哪里吃饭），因为前者更需要向他人提供证明你的道德判断合理性的理由。Baron 热情地回应了，我们在实验室里讨论了一些将道德思维与其他思维进行比较的方法。第二天，在受到鼓励之后，我请他做我的导师，开始研究道德心理学。
1987 年，道德心理学是发展心理学的一部分。研究人员关注的问题包括儿童如何发展对规则的思考，尤其是公平规则。这项研究背后的大问题是：孩子们如何辨别是非？道德从何而来？
这个问题有两个明显的答案：天性还是教养。如果你选择天性，那么你就是本土主义者。你相信道德知识是我们头脑中与生俱来的。 它是预先加载的，也许是在我们被上帝铭刻的心中（如圣经所说），或者在我们进化的道德情感中（如达尔文所说）。
但如果你相信道德知识来自教养，那么你就是一个经验主义者。你相信孩子出生时或多或少是一张白纸（如约翰·洛克所说）。如果道德在世界各地和几个世纪之间各不相同，那么它怎么可能是天生的呢？我们成年后所拥有的任何道德观都必须是在童年时期从我们自己的经验中学到的，其中包括成年人告诉我们什么是对的，什么是错的。（经验主义的意思是“从观察或经验中”）。
但这是一个错误的选择，1987 年的道德心理学主要关注第三个答案：理性主义，它认为孩子们自己弄清楚道德问题。有史以来最伟大的发展心理学家让·皮亚杰的职业生涯始于在家乡瑞士研究软体动物和昆虫的动物学家。 他对动物从毛毛虫变成蝴蝶等过程所经历的阶段非常着迷。后来，当他的注意力转向儿童时，他也对发展阶段产生了兴趣。皮亚杰想知道成人思维（认知蝴蝶）的非凡复杂性是如何从幼儿（低等的毛毛虫）有限的能力中产生的。
皮亚杰关注孩子们所犯的错误类型。例如，他会把水倒进两个相同的水杯里，然后让孩子们告诉他杯子里的水量是否相同。（是的。）然后，他会把其中一个杯子里的水倒入一个高而细的杯子里，并让孩子将新杯子与没有动过的杯子进行比较。六七岁以下的孩子通常会说高而细的杯子现在能装更多的水，因为水位更高了。他们不明白水从一个杯子流到另一个杯子时，总体积是守恒的。他还发现，成年人向孩子解释体积守恒是没有意义的。 孩子们要等到他们的思想成熟到一定年龄（和认知阶段）才会明白这一点。当他们准备好时，他们只需玩水杯就能自己弄明白。
换句话说，对体积守恒定律的理解不是天生的，也不是从成年人那里学到的。孩子们自己能弄明白，但只有当他们的思想成熟并获得正确的经验时。
皮亚杰也将这种认知发展方法应用于儿童道德思维的研究。他跪在地上和孩子们玩弹珠游戏，有时他故意违反规则，装傻。然后孩子们对他的错误做出反应，通过这样做，他们展现出越来越尊重规则、改变规则、轮流和解决争端的能力。随着儿童认知能力的成熟，这种不断增长的知识是有序的。
皮亚杰认为，儿童对道德的理解就像他们对水杯的理解：我们不能说它是天生的，也不能说孩子直接从成人那里学到的。相反，它是在孩子们与其他孩子玩耍时自我建构的。游戏中的轮流就像在杯子之间来回倒水。无论你对三岁孩子做多少次这样的事情，他们还没有准备好接受公平的概念，就像他们无法理解体积守恒一样。 但是一旦他们到了五六岁，玩游戏、争论和共同解决问题将帮助他们比任何成人的说教更有效地学习公平。
这是心理理性主义的本质：我们成长为理性，就像毛毛虫长成蝴蝶一样。如果毛毛虫吃了足够多的叶子，它（最终）会长出翅膀。如果孩子获得了足够多的轮流、分享和操场正义的经验，它（最终）会成为一个有道德的生物，能够利用其理性能力解决越来越难的问题。理性是我们的天性，良好的道德推理是发展的终点。
理性主义在哲学中有着悠久而复杂的历史。在这本书中，我将使用理性主义者这个词来描述任何相信推理是获得道德知识的最重要和最可靠方式的人。
劳伦斯·科尔伯格扩展了皮亚杰的见解，他在 20 世纪 60 年代通过两项关键创新彻底改变了道德研究。 首先，他开发了一种方法，量化皮亚杰的观察结果，即儿童的道德推理能力会随着时间而改变。他设计了一系列道德难题，向不同年龄段的儿童展示，并记录和编码他们的反应。例如，一个名叫海因茨的男人是否应该闯入药店偷一剂可以救他垂死妻子的药？一个名叫路易斯的女孩是否应该向母亲透露她的妹妹对母亲撒了谎？孩子回答是或否并不重要；重要的是孩子们在试图解释他们的答案时给出的理由。
科尔伯格发现儿童对社会世界的推理有一个六个阶段的进展，这一进展与皮亚杰在儿童对物质世界的推理中发现的阶段非常吻合。幼儿根据非常肤浅的特征来判断是非，比如一个人是否因某种行为而受到惩罚。 （如果成年人惩罚了这种行为，那么这种行为一定是错误的。）科尔伯格将前两个阶段称为道德判断的“前习俗”水平，它们与皮亚杰阶段相对应，在这个阶段，孩子们通过表面特征来判断物质世界（如果玻璃杯更高，那么里面的水就更多）。
但在小学期间，大多数孩子会进入两个“习俗”阶段，变得善于理解甚至操纵规则和社会习俗。这是大多数与兄弟姐妹一起长大的人都记忆犹新的狭隘法制时代（“我没有打你。我是用你的手打你。别打自己了！”）。这个阶段的孩子通常非常在意顺从，他们非常尊重权威——即使不是在行动上，也是在口头上。他们很少质疑权威的合法性，即使他们学会在成年人对他们施加的限制内和周围进行操作。
青春期之后，皮亚杰说孩子开始具备抽象思维能力，而科尔伯格发现，一些孩子开始独立思考权威的本质、正义的意义以及规则和法律背后的原因。在两个“后习俗”阶段，青少年仍然重视诚实，尊重规则和法律，但现在他们有时会为不诚实或违法行为辩护，以追求更高的利益，尤其是正义。科尔伯格描绘了一个鼓舞人心的理性主义形象，将孩子描绘成“道德哲学家”，试图为自己制定连贯的道德体系。¹⁰ 在后习俗阶段，他们终于擅长于此。科尔伯格的困境是衡量道德推理这些重大进步的工具。
THE LIBERAL CONSENSUS
Mark Twain once said that "to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Once Kohlberg developed his moral dilemmas and his scoring techniques, the psychological community had a new hammer, and a thousand graduate students used it to pound out dissertations on moral reasoning. But there's a deeper reason so many young psychologists began to study morality from a rationalist perspective, and this was Kohlberg's second great innovation: he used his research to build a scientific justification for a secular liberal moral order.
Kohlberg's most influential finding was that the most morally advanced kids (according to his scoring technique) were those who had frequent opportunities for role taking for putting themselves into another person's shoes and looking at a problem from that person's perspective. Egalitarian relationships (such as with peers) invite role taking, but hierarchical relationships (such as with teachers and parents) do not. It's really hard for a child to see things from the teacher's point of view, because the child has never been a teacher. Piaget and Kohlberg both thought that parents and other authorities were obstacles to moral development. If you want your kids to learn about the physical world, let them play with cups and water; don't lecture them about the conservation of volume. And if you want your kids to learn about the social world, let them play with other kids and resolve disputes; don't lecture them about the Ten Commandments. And, for heaven's sake, don't force them to obey God or their teachers or you. That will only freeze them at the conventional level.
Kohlberg's timing was perfect. Just as the first wave of baby boomers was entering graduate school, he transformed moral psychology into a boomer-friendly ode to justice, and he gave them a tool to measure children's progress toward the liberal ideal. For the next twenty-five years, from the 1970s through the 1990s, moral psy- chologists mostly just interviewed young people about moral dilemmas and analyzed their justifications." Most of this work was not politically motivated - it was careful and honest scientific research. But by using a framework that predefined morality as justice while denigrating authority, hierarchy, and tradition, it was inevitable that the research would support worldviews that were secular, questioning, and egalitarian.
自由主义共识
马克·吐温曾经说过，“对于一个拿着锤子的人来说，所有东西看起来都像钉子。”科尔伯格提出道德困境和评分技术后，心理学界有了一把新锤子，一千名研究生用它敲打出关于道德推理的论文。但许多年轻心理学家开始从理性主义的角度研究道德，还有一个更深层次的原因，这是科尔伯格的第二个伟大创新：他利用自己的研究为世俗的自由主义道德秩序建立了科学依据。
科尔伯格最具影响力的发现是，道德最先进的孩子（根据他的评分技术）是那些经常有机会扮演角色的孩子，他们把自己放在别人的立场上，从那个人的角度看待问题。平等关系（例如与同龄人）需要扮演角色，但等级关系（例如与老师和父母）则不需要。 孩子很难从老师的角度看待问题，因为孩子从未当过老师。皮亚杰和科尔伯格都认为父母和其他权威人士是道德发展的障碍。如果你想让你的孩子了解物质世界，就让他们玩杯子和水，不要给他们讲体积守恒定律。如果你想让你的孩子了解社会世界，就让他们和其他孩子一起玩耍，解决争端，不要给他们讲《十诫》。看在上帝的份上，不要强迫他们服从上帝、他们的老师或你。这只会让他们停留在传统的水平上。
科尔伯格的时机非常完美。就在第一批婴儿潮一代进入研究生院时，他将道德心理学变成了一首婴儿潮一代喜爱的正义颂歌，并为他们提供了一种衡量儿童在实现自由理想方面进步的工具。 在随后的二十五年里，从 20 世纪 70 年代到 90 年代，道德心理学家大多只是采访年轻人，了解他们的道德困境，并分析其理由。”这类工作大部分不是出于政治动机——而是谨慎而诚实的科学研究。但是，由于使用将道德预先定义为正义，同时贬低权威、等级制度和传统的框架，研究不可避免地会支持世俗的、质疑的和平等主义的世界观。
AN EASIER TEST
If you force kids to explain complex notions, such as how to bal- ance competing concerns about rights and justice, you're guaranteed to find age trends because kids get so much more articulate with each passing year. But if you are searching for the first appearance of a moral concept, then you'd better find a technique that doesn't require much verbal skill. Kohlberg's former student Elliot Turiel developed such a technique. His innovation was to tell children short stories about other kids who break rules and then give them a series of simple yes-or-no probe questions. For example, you tell a story about a child who goes to school wearing regular clothes, even though his school requires students to wear a uniform. You start by getting an overall judgment: "Is that OK, what the boy did?" Most kids say no. You ask if there's a rule about what to wear. ("Yes.") Then you probe to find out what kind of rule it is: "What if the teacher said it was OK for the boy to wear his regular clothes, then would it be OK?" and "What if this happened in another school, where they don't have any rules about uniforms, then would it be OK?"
Turiel discovered that children as young as five usually say that the boy was wrong to break the rule, but that it would be OK if the teacher gave permission or if it happened in another school where there was no such rule. Children recognize that rules about clothing, food, and many other aspects of life are social conventions, which are arbitrary and changeable to some extent.¹²
But if you ask kids about actions that hurt other people, such as a girl who pushes a boy off a swing because she wants to use it, you get a very different set of responses. Nearly all kids say that the girl was wrong and that she'd be wrong even if the teacher said it was OK, and even if this happened in another school where there were no rules about pushing kids off swings. Children recognize that rules that prevent harm are moral rules, which Turiel defined as rules related to "justice, rights, and welfare pertaining to how people ought to relate to each other."¹³
In other words, young children don't treat all rules the same, as Piaget and Kohlberg had supposed. Kids can't talk like moral philosophers, but they are busy sorting social information in a sophisticated way. They seem to grasp early on that rules that prevent harm are special, important, unalterable, and universal. And this realization, Turiel said, was the foundation of all moral development. Children construct their moral understanding on the bedrock of the absolute moral truth that harm is wrong. Specific rules may vary across cultures, but in all of the cultures Turiel examined, children still made a distinction between moral rules and conventional rules.¹⁴
Turiel's account of moral development differed in many ways from Kohlberg's, but the political implications were similar: morality is about treating individuals well. It's about harm and fairness (not loyalty, respect, duty, piety, patriotism, or tradition). Hierarchy and authority are generally bad things (so it's best to let kids figure things out for themselves). Schools and families should therefore embody progressive principles of equality and autonomy (not authoritarian principles that enable elders to train and constrain children).
更简单的测试
如果你强迫孩子们解释复杂的概念，比如如何平衡对权利和正义的相互冲突的关注，你肯定会发现年龄趋势，因为孩子们的表达能力随着时间的流逝而大大增强。但是，如果你正在寻找道德概念的首次出现，那么你最好找到一种不需要太多语言技能的技巧。科尔伯格的前学生艾略特·图里尔开发了这样一种技巧。他的创新是给孩子们讲一些关于其他违反规则的孩子的短篇故事，然后给他们一系列简单的是或否探究问题。例如，你讲一个孩子穿着普通衣服上学的故事，尽管他的学校要求学生穿校服。你首先要得到一个总体判断：“这样可以吗？这个男孩做了什么？”大多数孩子说不行。你问是否有关于穿什么的规定。 （“是的。”）然后你探究规则是什么：“如果老师说男孩穿普通衣服没问题，那可以吗？”和“如果这件事发生在另一所没有校服规则的学校，那可以吗？”
Turiel 发现，年仅五岁的孩子通常会说男孩违反规则是错误的，但如果老师允许或者发生在另一所没有这种规则的学校，那就没问题。孩子们认识到，关于衣服、食物和生活中许多其他方面的规则都是社会习俗，在某种程度上是任意的和可改变的。¹²
但如果你问孩子们伤害他人的行为，比如一个女孩因为想玩秋千而把一个男孩推下秋千，你会得到一组非常不同的回答。几乎所有的孩子都说女孩错了，即使老师说没问题，即使这件事发生在另一所没有关于把孩子推下秋千的规则的学校，她也是错的。 孩子们认识到防止伤害的规则就是道德规则，图里尔将其定义为与“人们应该如何相互联系的正义、权利和福利”有关的规则。¹³
换句话说，年幼的孩子并不像皮亚杰和科尔伯格所认为的那样对所有规则都一视同仁。孩子们不会像道德哲学家那样说话，但他们正忙着以一种复杂的方式整理社会信息。他们似乎很早就明白，防止伤害的规则是特殊的、重要的、不可改变的和普遍的。图里尔说，这种认识是所有道德发展的基础。孩子们在伤害是错误的绝对道德真理的基础上构建他们的道德理解。具体规则可能因文化而异，但在图里尔研究的所有文化中，孩子们仍然区分了道德规则和传统规则。¹⁴
图里尔对道德发展的论述与科尔伯格的论述在许多方面有所不同，但政治含义是相似的：道德就是善待个人。 它关乎伤害和公平（而不是忠诚、尊重、责任、虔诚、爱国主义或传统）。等级制度和权威通常是坏事（所以最好让孩子们自己去弄清楚）。因此，学校和家庭应该体现平等和自主的进步原则（而不是让长辈训练和约束孩子的专制原则）。
MEANWHILE, IN THE REST OF THE WORLD...与此同时，在世界其他地区......
Kohlberg and Turiel had pretty much defined the field of moral psychology by the time I sat in Jon Baron's office and decided to study morality. The field I entered was vibrant and growing, yet something about it felt wrong to me. It wasn't the politics-I was very liberal back then, twenty-four years old and full of indignation at Ronald Reagan and conservative groups such as the righteously named Moral Majority. No, the problem was that the things I was reading were so... dry. I had grown up with two sisters, close in age to me. We fought every day, using every dirty rhetorical trick we could think of. Morality was such a passionate affair in my family, yet the articles I was reading were all about reasoning and cognitive structures and domains of knowledge. It just seemed too cerebral. There was hardly any mention of emotion.
当我坐在乔恩·巴伦的办公室里，决定研究道德时，科尔伯格和图里尔已经基本定义了道德心理学领域。我进入的这个领域生机勃勃，正在不断发展，但我却觉得有些不对劲。问题不在于政治——当时我非常自由，24 岁，对罗纳德·里根和保守派团体（如道德多数派）充满愤慨。不，问题是我读的东西太……枯燥了。我和两个姐姐一起长大，年龄和我差不多。我们每天都吵架，用尽了我们能想到的所有肮脏的修辞手段。道德在我家是如此令人热衷的事情，但我读的文章全是关于推理、认知结构和知识领域的。这似乎太过理智了。几乎没有提到情感。
As a first-year graduate student, I didn't have the confidence to trust my instincts, so I forced myself to continue reading. But then, in my second year, I took a course on cultural psychology and was captivated. The course was taught by a brilliant anthropologist, Alan Fiske, who had spent many years in West Africa studying the psychological foundations of social relationships. Fiske asked us all to read several ethnographies (book-length reports of an anthropologist's fieldwork), each of which focused on a different topic, such as kinship, sexuality, or music. But no matter the topic, morality turned out to be a central theme. student, I didn't have the confidence to trust my instincts, so I forced myself to continue reading. But then, in my second year, I took a course on cultural psychology and was captivated. The course was taught by a brilliant anthropologist, Alan Fiske, who had spent many years in West Africa studying the psychological foundations of social relationships. Fiske asked us all to read several ethnographies (book-length reports of an anthropolo- gist's fieldwork), each of which focused on a different topic, such as kinship, sexuality, or music. But no matter the topic, morality turned out to be a central theme.
I read a book on witchcraft among the Azande of Sudan." It turns out that witchcraft beliefs arise in surprisingly similar forms in many parts of the world, which suggests either that there really are witches or (more likely) that there's something about human minds that often generates this cultural institution. The Azande believed that witches were just as likely to be men as women, and the fear of being called a witch made the Azande careful not to make their neighbors angry or envious. That was my first hint that groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.¹⁸
I read a book about the Ilongot, a tribe in the Philippines whose young men gained honor by cutting off people's heads. Some of these beheadings were revenge killings, which offered Western readers a motive they could understand. But many of these murders were committed against strangers who were not involved in any kind of feud with the killer. The author explained these most puzzling killings as ways that small groups of men channeled resentments and frictions within the group into a group-strengthening "hunting party," capped off by a long night of communal celebratory singing. This was my first hint that morality often involves tension within the group linked to competition between different groups.
These ethnographies were fascinating, often beautifully written, and intuitively graspable despite the strangeness of their content. Reading each book was like spending a week in a new country: con- fusing at first, but gradually you tune up, finding yourself better able to guess what's going to happen next. And as with all foreign travel, you learn as much about where you're from as where you're visiting. I began to see the United States and Western Europe as extraordinary historical exceptions-new societies that had found a way to strip down and thin out the thick, all-encompassing moral orders that the anthropologists wrote about.
Nowhere was this thinning more apparent than in our lack of rules about what the anthropologists call "purity" and "pollution." Contrast us with the Hua of New Guinea, who have developed elab- orate networks of food taboos that govern what men and women may eat. In order for their boys to become men, they have to avoid foods that in any way resemble vaginas, including anything that is red, wet, slimy, comes from a hole, or has hair. It sounds at first like arbitrary superstition mixed with the predictable sexism of a patriarchal society. Turiel would call these rules social conventions, because the Hua don't believe that men in other tribes have to follow these rules. But the Hua certainly seemed to think of their food rules as moral rules. They talked about them constantly, judged each other by their food habits, and governed their lives, duties, and relationships by what the anthropologist Anna Meigs called "a religion of the body."²⁰
But it's not just hunter-gatherers in rain forests who believe that bodily practices can be moral practices. When I read the Hebrew Bible, I was shocked to discover how much of the book - one of the sources of Western morality - was taken up with rules about food, menstruation, sex, skin, and the handling of corpses. Some of these rules were clear attempts to avoid disease, such as the long sections of Leviticus on leprosy. But many of the rules seemed to follow a more emotional logic about avoiding disgust. For example, the Bible prohibits Jews from eating or even touching "the swarming things that swarm upon the earth" (and just think how much more disgusting a swarm of mice is than a single mouse)." Other rules seemed to follow a conceptual logic involving keeping categories pure or not mixing things together (such as clothing made from two different fibers).²²
So what's going on here? If Turiel was right that morality is really about harm, then why do most non-Western cultures moralize so many practices that seem to have nothing to do with harm? Why do many Christians and Jews believe that "cleanliness is next to godliness"?²³ And why do so many Westerners, even secular ones, continue to see choices about food and sex as being heavily loaded with moral significance? Liberals sometimes say that religious conservatives are sexual prudes for whom anything other than missionary-position intercourse within marriage is a sin. But conservatives can just as well make fun of liberal struggles to choose a balanced breakfast-balanced among moral concerns about free-range eggs, fair-trade coffee, naturalness, and a variety of toxins, some of which (such as genetically modified corn and soybeans) pose a greater threat spiritually than biologically. Even if Turiel was right that children lock onto harmfulness as a method for identifying immoral actions, I couldn't see how kids in the West - let alone among the Azande, the Ilongot, and the Hua - could have come to all this purity and pollution stuff on their own. There must be more to moral development than kids constructing rules as they take the perspectives of other people and feel their pain. There must be something beyond rationalism.
THE GREAT DEBATE
When anthropologists wrote about morality, it was as though they spoke a different language from the psychologists I had been reading. The Rosetta stone that helped me translate between the two fields was a paper that had just been published by Fiske's former advisor, Richard Shweder, at the University of Chicago. Shweder is a psy- chological anthropologist who had lived and worked in Orissa, a state on the east coast of India. He had found large differences in how Oriyans (residents of Orissa) and Americans thought about person- ality and individuality, and these differences led to corresponding dif- ferences in how they thought about morality. Shweder quoted the anthropologist Clifford Geertz on how unusual Westerners are in thinking about people as discrete individuals:
The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background, is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world's cultures.²⁵
Shweder offered a simple idea to explain why the self differs so much across cultures: all societies must resolve a small set of questions about how to order society, the most important being how to balance the needs of individuals and groups. There seem to be just two primary ways of answering this question. Most societies have chosen the sociocentric answer, placing the needs of groups and institutions first, and subordinating the needs of individuals. In contrast, the individualistic answer places individuals at the center and makes society a servant of the individual. ²⁶ The sociocentric answer dominated most of the ancient world, but the individualistic answer became a power- ful rival during the Enlightenment. The individualistic answer largely vanquished the sociocentric approach in the twentieth century as individual rights expanded rapidly, consumer culture spread, and the Western world reacted with horror to the evils perpetrated by the ultrasociocentric fascist and communist empires. (European nations with strong social safety nets are not sociocentric on this definition. They just do a very good job of protecting individuals from the vicissitudes of life.)
Shweder thought that the theories of Kohlberg and Turiel were produced by and for people from individualistic cultures. He doubted that those theories would apply in Orissa, where morality was socio-centric, selves were interdependent, and no bright line separated moral rules (preventing harm) from social conventions (regulating behaviors not linked directly to harm). To test his ideas, he and two collaborators came up with thirty-nine very short stories in which someone does something that would violate a rule either in the United States or in Orissa. The researchers then interviewed 180 chil- dren (ranging in age from five to thirteen) and 60 adults who lived in Hyde Park (the neighborhood surrounding the University of Chicago) about these stories. They also interviewed a matched sample of Brahmin children and adults in the town of Bhubaneswar (an ancient pilgrimage site in Orissa),7 and 120 people from low ("untouchable") castes. Altogether it was an enormous undertaking-six hundred long interviews in two very different cities.
The interview used Turiel's method, more or less, but the scenar- ios covered many more behaviors than Turiel had ever asked about. As you can see in the top third of figure 1.1, people in some of the stories obviously hurt other people or treated them unfairly, and subjects (the people being interviewed) in both countries condemned these actions by saying that they were wrong, unalterably wrong, and universally wrong. But the Indians would not condemn other cases that seemed (to Americans) just as clearly to involve harm and unfairness (see middle third).
Most of the thirty-nine stories portrayed no harm or unfairness, at least none that could have been obvious to a five-year-old child, and nearly all Americans said that these actions were permissible (see the bottom third of figure 1.1). If Indians said that these actions were wrong, then Turiel would predict that they were condemning the actions merely as violations of social conventions. Yet most of the Indian subjects-even the five-year-old children-said that these actions were wrong, universally wrong, and unalterably wrong. Indian practices related to food, sex, clothing, and gender relations were almost always judged to be moral issues, not social conventions, and there were few differences between the adults and children within each city. In other words, Shweder found almost no trace of social conventional thinking in the sociocentric culture of Orissa, where, as he put it, "the social order is a moral order." Morality was much broader and thicker in Orissa; almost any practice could be loaded up with moral force. And if that was true, then Turiel's theory became less plausible. Children were not figuring out morality for themselves, based on the bedrock certainty that harm is bad.
Even in Chicago, Shweder found relatively little evidence of social-conventional thinking. There were plenty of stories that contained no obvious harm or injustice, such as a widow eating fish, and Americans predictably said that those cases were fine. But more important, they didn't see these behaviors as social conventions that could be changed by popular consent. They believed that widows should be able to eat whatever they darn well please, and if there's some other country where people try to limit widows' freedoms, well, they're wrong to do so. Even in the United States the social order is a moral order, but it's an individualistic order built up around the protection of individuals and their freedom. The distinction between morals and mere conventions is not a tool that children everywhere use to self-construct their moral knowledge. Rather, the distinction turns out to be a cultural artifact, a necessary by-product of the individualistic answer to the question of how individuals and groups relate. When you put individuals first, before society, then any rule or social practice that limits personal freedom can be questioned. If it doesn't protect somebody from harm, then it can't be morally justified. It's just a social convention.
[[ Actions that Indians and Americans agreed were wrong:
● While walking, a man saw a dog sleeping on the road.
He walked up to it and kicked it.
● A father said to his son, "If you do well on the exam, I will buy you a pen." The son did well on the exam, but the father did not give him anything.
__________________________
[[ Actions that Americans said were wrong but Indians said were acceptable:
● A young married woman went alone to see a movie without informing her husband. When she returned home her husband said, "If you do it again, I will beat you black and blue." She did it again; he beat her black and blue. (Judge the husband.)
● A man had a married son and a married daughter. After his death his son claimed most of the property.
His daughter got little. (Judge the son.)
[[ Actions that Indians said were wrong but Americans said were acceptable:
• In a family, a twenty-five-year-old son addresses his father by his first name.
• A woman cooked rice and wanted to eat with her husband and his elder brother. Then she ate with them. (Judge the woman.)
• A widow in your community eats fish two or three times a week.
● After defecation a woman did not change her clothes before cooking.
FIGURE 1.1. Some of the thirty-nine stories used in Shweder, Mahapatra, and Miller 1987.
