Moral Origins

In preceding issues of this blog I have argued that the prime motivator for pro-social (unselfish) behavior among economic liberals is the emotion of compassion. I also argued that compassion probably developed from a broadening of the scope of the maternal love that itself became necessary to ensure the survival of offspring when it became advantageous to introduce them to the world while their brains were still developing and they were therefore ill-equipped to fend for themselves without parental nurturing.

For a more complete explanation, see the archives for :

• Issue 2. Economic Liberals and Premature Birth
• Issue 3. The Love Potions: Oxytocin for Her, Vasopressin for Him

So how about conservatives? I will now argue that the prime motivator for prosocial behavior among conservatives — both economic conservatives and social conservatives — is sense of conscience, which itself develops through the internalizing of a fear of punishment.

Since none of us is a pure type — liberal or conservative — we all exhibit both compassion and a conscience, but we differ in the relative importance of each influence. How do they differ?

Compassion

Compassion is pain (or pleasure) by proxy, through empathy. It causes us to feel pain or pleasure in direct response to the pain or pleasure that another person is experiencing or may experience, similar to what we feel in anticipation of pain or pleasure to ourselves. A typical mother who recognizes an imminent danger of injury to her child feels an emotion similar to what she feels when she recognizes a danger of injury to herself. Because of this it has been argued that compassionate behavior may not be true altruism, because its purpose may be to alleviate the empathic pain felt by the actor, not the actual pain of the victim. Holmes Rolston, who disagrees with that position, nevertheless states it well:

A standard claim is that persons aroused by the plight of others often act to aid them, but that the real goal is to reduce unpleasant arousal, not directly to help others…. What the Good Samaritan was really doing was repairing his own good mood, interrupted when he came on the ugly scene. Actual altruism, if there is any, requires a benefactor with intentions directed toward the end state of increasing the other’s welfare.1

I won’t delve into that controversy at this point.

Conscience

If compassion is pain or pleasure by proxy, through compassion, then what is a conscience? The emotion triggered by our conscience is a sense of guilt. That guilt results from a sense that we have done something morally wrong. If we encounter an injured child, we may feel compassion, but we don’t feel guilt unless we have done something to cause the injury. We feel guilty, on the other hand, when we have done something morally wrong, even if it luckily didn’t cause harm to anyone.

But what is this feeling of guilt, and why is it uncomfortable? Why shouldn’t I feel joy and pride that I have gotten away with misbehavior? Isn’t that good for me? How is it bad? Well, one answer is that if I am religious and believe in Heaven and Hell and an omniscient God, then I haven’t really gotten away with anything. God dangles an enormous carrot in the form of eternal bliss in Heaven, and wields an enormous stick in the form of eternal torture in Hell (and eternity is a long time when you’re in pain), and furthermore you can’t fool the guy, even with a good lawyer. So the discomfort of a guilty conscience, for the religious, is just normal anticipation of great pain, forever and ever and ever and ever …

But how about the nonreligious, or the religious in name only. Don’t they experience a similar guilty conscience when they do something immoral? Who do they think will punish them? Sometimes, of course, we get found out and punished by our community, either with a jail sentence or at least with social disapproval. But that’s not all.

My Parents Made Me Feel It

We have all, or almost all, grown up with parents who did their best to make us feel good when we behaved “properly,” and especially feel bad when we did something wrong, and those feelings were generally reinforced by reward or punishment, at least in the form of their approval or disapproval. The result, and usually their intent, was to cause us to internalize their rules of behavior, so that we felt good when we followed them and bad when we violated them. It worked! Just like Pavlov’s dogs salivating in response to the feeding bell, we still feel good when we follow the rules, and bad when we don’t. We might have modified the rules slightly, but we can’t escape our conscience. Our parents might be miles away now, or dead, but they are still represented in our conscience. They may not control our eternal assignment to Heaven or Hell, but they can make us feel good or bad in the present just as though they were still there to reward or punish us.

Our conscience pains us when we feel we deserve punishment, even, or perhaps especially, when we don’t expect to have to pay our debt with actual punishment. Many people have confessed to crimes for which they would otherwise never have been found guilty, just to salve their conscience.

Liberal Compassion and the Conservative Conscience

So the liberal part of each of us, that part driven by compassion, is motivated to unselfish behavior by the pain (and sometimes the pleasure) of others, transplanted to us through empathy. The conservative part, that part driven by conscience, is motivated to unselfish behavior by the pain of guilt (and sometimes the pleasure of pride), which is an internalized memory or anticipation of punishments and rewards.

The compassion of our liberal selves inspires us to humanitarian behavior. The conscience of our conservative selves inspires us to follow whatever moral rules we have internalized. Humanitarianism and moral rules aren’t always compatible.

See you next Friday morning.

Endnotes