There’s an interesting piece of research being done at Harvard’s Primate Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory. Basically, they have developed a test which they think will help them work out what moral intuitions are cross-cultural, evolved etc. And anyone can do it. In fact, the more people who do, the better the results.
On the web site they give more details:
“For hundreds of years, scholars have argued that our moral judgments arise from rational, conscious, voluntary, reflective deliberations about what ought to be. This perspective has generated the further belief that our moral psychology is a slowly developing capacity, founded entirely on experience and education, and subject to considerable variation across cultures. With the exception of a few trivial examples, one culture’s right is another’s wrong. We believe this hyper rational, culturally-specific view is no longer tenable. The MST [moral sense test] has been designed to show why and offer an alternative. Most of our moral intuitions are unconscious, involuntary, and universal, developing in each child despite formal education. When humans, from the hunter-gathers of the Rift Valley to the billionaire dot-com-ers of the Silicon Valley generate moral intuitions they are like reflexes, something that happens to us without our being aware of how or even why. We call this capacity our moral faculty. Our aim is to use data from the MST, as well as other experiments, to explain what it is, how it evolved, and how it develops in our species, creating individuals with moral responsibilities and concerns about human welfare. The MST has been designed for all humans who are curious about that puzzling little word �ought� � about the principles that make one action right and another wrong, and why we feel elated about the former and guilty about the latter.”
The link is below.
Links:
Moral Sense Test Site: http://moral.wjh.harvard.edu/