Moral Selves, Evil Selves

Moral Selves, Evil Selves

The Social Psychology of Conscience

Steven Hitlin
 Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 3
1 Building a Social Psychology of Conscience 11
2 Moving Parts 35
3 Evolution, Society, and Conscience:
Social Influences on Morality 53
4 Processes of Conscience: How the Moral Mind Works 75
5 How Situations Subvert Conscience 93
6 Us and Them: Shifting Moral Provinces 113
7 Conscience in Individual Functioning: Self-Deception and
Moral Self-Biases 129
8 Conscience and Moral Horizons 147
9 The Moral Ambiguity of Personhood 167
10 The Possibility of Morality 185
Notes 203
Bibliography 227
Index 265
Chapter 3

Evolution, Society,
and Conscience:
Social Influences
on Morality

Hence, the tendency of society to satisfy its demands as cheaply as possi-

ble results in appeals to “good conscience,” through which the individual
pays to himself the wages for his righteousness, which otherwise would
probably have to be assured to him in some way through law or custom.
Georg Simmel1

Conscience is personal, but not idiosyncratic. It is a distinctly human capac-

ity that stems directly from our sociality. No other species forms long-term
plans, makes abstract moral judgments, or is motivated by shame, guilt, and
pride. This constellation of human moral faculties is intertwined with our
ability to develop a self that steers and evaluates our actions, both as we act
and after. We can experience emotions due to memories of past transgres-
sions and orient ourselves toward future goals that may be years away. We
can develop self-understandings that guide ongoing behavior, such as try-
ing to be a good citizen or a more caring family member. Other animals
develop Bright Line equivalents in the limited sense that they possess
approach and avoidance orientations toward their environment, but we
would not claim—with a few exceptions in our primate cousins2—that
animals form moral orientations toward the world. Only humans ask
themselves questions about what moral goals are most important and then
evaluate and potentially alter their behavior in light of those goals.
In this chapter, I focus on the social development of the capacity for
moral outlooks and broadly suggest how society fills its content. Both the
capacity and content of those outlooks are intrinsically social. Even human
evolution has shaped and been influenced by social processes that shape
54 Moral Selves, Evil Selves

our current biological capacities. This approach builds toward a model of

conscience that shows the universal human capacity for making moral
judgments, yet allows for (circumscribed) variation in moral outlooks
across societies and throughout history. There may be limitless potential
variation in what actions or objects lead to moral reactions of, say, disgust
or pride, but the range of emotions is limited by our biology. Even the
range of moral goals is limited.3 These capacities have developed over many
millennia within social environments, and while different people and groups
have different moral goals and aversions, all people are morally attracted
to and repelled by some things. We all develop Bright Lights and Bright
Lines, although the content of those goals and moral boundaries differs.
Even at the level of economic systems, any particular way of organizing
exchange is seen by its members as having a moral dimension.4 Whatever
system is in place (capitalism, socialism) is suffused with moral messages
about the moral rightness or wrongness of various actions that, if everybody
buys into them, sustain that system.
In humans, first-order Bright Lines are more strongly negative,5 with
our brains having evolved first to protect us from threats to our group’s
safety.6 Theoretically, there may be a large set of potential Bright Lines,
ranging from objects as diverse as foods to behaviors to goals. Shame, for
example, is a universal emotion, but with different triggers in different
cultures. In some places, a woman showing her face in public is cause for
shame for herself and her family. In America, some men spend thousands
of dollars to appear as if they are not losing their hair. The emotion is
physiologically similar, but the triggers vary by culture and circumstance.
While Bright Lines signal negative prohibitions, Bright Lights suggest
proactive, desirable goals that we orient toward. Bright Line triggers are po-
tentially limitless, but we have evolved to recognize, at their most abstract
level, a limited range of Bright Lines.7 Different societies and groups set out
different means to achieve valued ends such as power, security, or hedonism.
But, these broad ends (goals) are recognizable across societies. A concern
with justice is not unintelligible across cultures—justice is just differentially
achieved.8 Humans universally judge themselves and each other9 and pos-
sess the capacity to ask themselves “what kind of person should I be?” Of
course, some have more opportunity to choose and reach their goals than
others, but we all compare ourselves to others and to internalized social
standards.

Evolution and the Moral Brain

Evolution has shaped the capacity and limited the potential content of
conscience. Evolutionary theorizing produces the assumption that animals’
 Society and Conscience 55

physical behaviors and structures developed through processes of natural

selection. Organisms evolve devices that, if successful, address the basic prob-
lems of life, including finding energy, maintaining balanced internal chem-
ical states, repairing wear and tear, and fending off disease and injury.10
Applied to humans, this means that natural selection occurred within social,
not just physical, environments.11 Our ancestors were highly social beings—
humans have lived in groups as far back as we have data.12 We are the only
species on earth that demonstrates extensive cooperation among large
numbers of genetically unrelated individuals.13
Early in our evolutionary history, humans may have been hunter-
gatherers, but eventually evolutionarily successful Homo sapiens settled down
to become horticulturalists. This led to the creation of an “emotionally
charged sociocultural cage,” a set of norms that limited individual auton-
omy but kept the social group from devolving into conflicts.14 Our minds
evolved within these social constraints such that, while our brains share an
emotional layer with other animals, distinctively human frontal lobes evolved
on top of these emotional centers.15
Social scientists, with some notable exceptions, tend to focus on variation
among people based on social groupings or on biological differences.16 Less
attention is paid to what human beings share as members of a species, per-
haps because of a fear that too much focus on biology would somehow
overshadow our species’ social nature. However, social science should incor-
porate universal human capacities into our models where appropriate.
Things that appear to be universal across human societies include17 status;18
roles; divisions of labor;19 speech used for special occasions; proper names;
language to describe inner states, thoughts, and weather; tools; elementary
logic; facial expressions;20 a notion of people being partly responsible for
their actions; and a notion that people have inner lives and make plans.
Sexual attraction and childhood fears are other universal human elements.
People use fire, construct shelters, prepare for giving birth, and live in groups.
They make reciprocal exchanges,21 try to predict the future, have some form
of government, and regularly demonstrate conflict. They also distinguish
in-groups from out-groups22 and tend to form religious beliefs that include
ritual behavior. The details vary, but the capacities for these behaviors are
present in all societies. Human societies are organized along three dimen-
sions: horizontal (based on who we feel close to), vertical (based on hierarchy
and status), and divinity (based on sacredness).23 Since properly coding the
world is important for survival, our minds have evolved to quickly perceive
social information along these dimensions.
Another universal is the presence of moral codes, though content of
those codes may differ. Societal codes become internalized into conscience,
in concert with the self’s universal capacity to be both a subject and an object
56 Moral Selves, Evil Selves

(discussed in the last chapter).24 According to the evolutionary psychologist

Marc Hauser, “[A]ll humans are endowed with a moral faculty—a capacity
that enables each individual to unconsciously and automatically evaluate
a limitless variety of actions in terms of principles that dictate what is per-
missible, obligatory, or forbidden.”25 This faculty is analogous, he sug-
gests, to Noam Chomsky’s influential notion of the capacity for grammar
being universally human. Particular cultures develop different languages,
but the capacity for articulating social experience within notions of time,
quantity, and action are universally hard-wired into the human species.
Similarly, Hauser argues, humans have a moral sense that, like grammar,
is not necessarily consciously accessible. This sense implicates conscience,
what Darwin suggested would evolve from social instincts.26
Hauser traces an evolutionary argument for how our minds developed
this moral sense. Our most powerful emotions, such as disgust,27 stem from
our first-order processing, a highly adaptive system for an organism’s survival.
This portion of our brain developed many years before our reasoning
brain, and its fight-or-flight nature still resides within the larger apparatus.
Our primary, emotion-related faculties were present even before we split
off from our primate ancestors between 5 and 7 million years ago.28 As we
evolved a capability for language, we developed a second-order ability to
monitor situations that extended to social bonds, but the first-order pro-
cesses continued to develop concurrently. Hauser suggests that we have
evolved processes that automatically monitor issues of fairness and reci-
procity in social relations, evident at age four, and these processes appear as
part of the human organism and not as something handed down through
cultural teachings. What we share, across cultures, is a “moral grammar”
that circumscribes the potential moral systems we will internalize. It is not
that we agree on moral systems across societies, but that justice and fairness
norms develop in all societies. The content that triggers these first-order
reactions when perceived injustices occur differs across time and place, but
the first-order reactions are a part of our evolved brains.
Our brains have two broad regions: the frontal lobes and what Tancredi
refers to as the emotional brain.29 Our emotional brain has evolved layers
that deal with our ability to absorb information from our environment that
triggers our automatic nervous system (the hypothalamus). The amygdala
rapidly assesses our environments (working through the frontal lobes), ap-
plies emotional meaning to those stimuli, and stores our emotions to be
activated in the future. The emotional brain also involves the hippocampus,
which focuses the brain on incoming stimuli and helps activate emotions,
and the anterior cingulated cortex (good for problem solving and emotional
self-control). Our hypothalamus controls the opposing arousal and quies-
cent aspects of our automatic nervous system, regulates survival-related
 Society and Conscience 57

behaviors (such as desire for food and sex), and aims to achieve homeostasis.
This system evolved early in human history and is more primitive than the
problem-solving and planning aspects of our frontal lobes.
The frontal lobes are the “executive centers” of the brain and decide
how to respond to the signals sent by the emotional brain. The prefrontal
cortex is the central-most aspect of these lobes, connected with just about
every part of the brain, including the emotional centers. It guides inten-
tional acts, planning, and other internal thoughts and behaviors. The “self”
is thought to reside within the prefrontal cortex. The rest of the frontal
lobes are responsible for motor control and movement. The final relevant
parts of the brain are mirror neurons, a network that allows us to mirror
behavior based on others’ actions. This network observes social interaction,
develops patterned responses, and allows us to feel what we perceive others
are feeling:30
[M]irror neurons “learn” from observation of the patterns of others how to
behave morally in social situations. When a challenge occurs to moral deci-
sion making, the amygdala revs up inducing a range of emotions from fear and
anger to disgust. The inhibitory mechanism—the hippocampus and hypo-
thalamus as well as the prefrontal cortex—steps in to ameliorate the response.
This allows for clear-headed deliberation and a reasoned moral decision ...
Sometimes the amygdalar response, if very intense, may overpower the
inhibitory network. When this occurs the decision maker is no longer able
to be objective, which may lead to an immoral decision and behavior.31

Large frontal lobes allow us to inhibit responses, meaning that we have

the capacity (if not the will) to delay gratification in pursuit of long-term
goals.32 The interesting questions revolve around when, if, and why this
occurs. To paraphrase Vilayanur Ramachandran, humans do not have free
will as much as they have free won’t.33
This description is enough to carry us toward a social psychology of con-
science, as evolutionary processes have formed a biological substrate for the
dual-processing system at the root of conscience. The two systems connect
through the prefrontal cortex, with the faster, more immediately influential
system34 evolving earlier in our species’ history. Quite often, our precon-
scious processes are evaluating the world around us and calling for various
reactions long before our conscious mind has caught up. We may be rational
beings some of the time, but quite often, that rationality is in the service
of justifying a decision our first-order system has already made. Human
rationality, at least in everyday interaction, does not typically employ unbi-
ased Scientist Logic. Rather, our unconscious mind often forms conclusions,
and we use the Lawyer Logic of our conscious, reasoning brain to justify
those gut feelings.
58 Moral Selves, Evil Selves

Antonio Damasio is credited with demonstrating the ways in which our

emotional brains are, in fact, vital for making what we consider rational
decisions. Rather than rationally calculating costs and benefits, Damasio
suggests that the emotional aspect of the brain guides the prefrontal lobes
toward making desirable decisions.35 People who have damaged frontal lobes
have normal scores on tests of IQ and reasoning skills, but are unable to
make what seem to be simple choices about deciding on future plans or
get easily distracted by irrelevant side issues.36 Even when employing our
rational, second-order processes, we rely on first-order cues to help winnow
through the various options we are presented with. Damasio refers to these
as somatic markers: informative feelings needed for making good decisions.
These internal states, ranging between pain and pleasure, are nonverbal sig-
nals about how a situation fits with an organism’s set of values.37 Feelings
alone are not enough to guide us, but neither is cold rationality. These dif-
ferent processes are linked through a variety of brain structures; situations
call on emotionally charged scripts to guide behavior based on past experi-
ences, within a range of biologically limited values for improving one’s
physical and social condition.38

Evolution is Nasty: Are Humans?

A note on an issue I will take up later in this book—the idea that human
beings are naturally selfish. Self-interest is at the root of various models of
human action, and a recurring theme in the literature on morality is the
extent to which apparently selfless motives really are, deep down, selfish. After
all, this argument goes, natural selection is a nasty process of survival and
therefore we must be, at root, nasty, self-serving creatures. In addition to
a lack of empirical support,39 however, this argument relies on a mistaken
premise, what Frans de Waal refers to as the “Beethoven error.”40 By looking
into Beethoven’s dirty apartment, one might wonder how beautiful music
ever emerged. Similarly, the nasty process of evolution does not necessitate
that only nasty creatures might have evolved from it.
If it is evolutionarily adaptive for an organism to develop processes of
empathy or caring, then those processes will survive. Developing a reputa-
tion for being altruistic seems evolutionarily adaptive,41 and if we properly
shift the unit of evolution from the individual to the group, this problem
of an organism’s inherent selfishness recedes.42 Thus, we can support evo-
lutionary claims of the development of genuinely prosocial characteristics
in addition to self-interested ones. Even nonrational animals offer much
evidence of cooperative and social instincts.43 Our moral sense evolved out
of processes that encouraged the development of both individual and group
interests.44 A need for living in groups may be more cultural than biological;
 Society and Conscience 59

however, it is likely that some genetic selection for bonding in groups was
adaptive.45
There is neurological evidence suggesting that this hard-wired concern
with other humans activates different parts of the brain depending on the
nature of the moral dilemma. Emotional conflict is, itself, often indicative
of the brain encountering a moral issue.46 However, moral issues are pro-
cessed differentially if they engage “personal” judgments versus “impersonal”
ones.47 When reasoning about people we know, or we are directly implicated
in harming someone, emotional aspects of the brain light up. When we are
reasoning about an abstract, impersonal ethical issue, neuroimaging shows
only the frontal lobes being activated. The fact that our faster-processing
systems swing into action for dilemmas that implicate a personal issue sug-
gests that we have evolved to be quickly concerned about processing such
information. Actions that affect a loved one, for example, operate first
through our first-order processing. At the basic level, concern for those we
care about quickly affects our perception and biological responses.
Consider a difficult moral dilemma: Should you kill a crying baby if you
were in a group hiding from the Nazis? The baby’s cries might give away
your location and condemn the group to be found. Simple moral problems
rely on tried-and-tested solutions, but difficult moral issues can activate con-
flicting emotional versus cognitive regions.48 In this example, our emotional,
personal brain kicks in with disgust at the prospect of killing a baby, while
our second-order, conscious mind reasons through the costs and benefits.
Thus, we do not have one moral center in the brain; we have competing
systems reacting to moral stimuli.
To this point, we have gone through a summary of the biological sub-
strates for the mechanisms of the moral self. In the next chapter, we will go
into more detail about how the moral mind operates during social interac-
tion from a social, not a neurological, level of analysis. Suffice it to say, by
building a model of conscience on the dual-processing system, we are safely
within the bounds of biological and neurological research. Ultimately, the
multiplicity of brain systems that are implicated in any moral judgment or
decision suggests that simple models of moral reasoning do not reflect real
people in real situations. And much of what we think we will do—in moral
domains as in others—tends to get subverted by situational pressures such
that our behaviors diverge from our ideal.

Moral Development in the Individual

Hauser suggests that “underlying the extensive cross-cultural variation
we observe in our expressed social norms is a universal moral grammar that
enables each child to grow a narrow range of possible moral systems.”49
60 Moral Selves, Evil Selves

Humans have evolved with the capacity for both making instantaneous
moral judgments and reflecting on them, hot and cold processes that com-
prise the self’s moral dimension. This is not the self’s only dimension, but it
is experienced as core to one’s sense of oneself as a person of worth within
various groups and society as a whole. At the individual level, we are pre-
disposed to internalize boundaries between moral and immoral, between
acceptable actions and Bright Lines of forbidden or undesired conduct.
The fact that we are at root social beings has influenced the way evolu-
tion has shaped a moral apparatus that exists at multiple levels in the brain.
Not only has sociality influenced how we are wired, today, but our capacity
for language and interaction is at the root of how individuals, not just the
species as a whole, develop conscience. As I discuss a relatively brief overview
of the evidence for this position, recall that much of the published research
on morality involves conventional notions of altruism and aggression, mean-
ing that what we know about moral development occurs within a range of
actions and orientations that is narrower than the vision of conscience I am
setting forth in this book. Eventually, the empirical study of conscience
should encompass a broader range of moral concerns. In addition, much
of the developmental psychological research is done with Western samples.
While there is evidence that children develop moral capacities as part of
being human, the processes outlined here have been largely studied within
Western cultures.
Applying the metaphors of this book to biological analyses of the brain’s
development, we can hypothesize the order of moral development moving
from early childhood Bright Lines to the later development of Bright Lights.
Young children do not possess a capacity for conceptualizing themselves
far into the future, so their goals tend to be more immediate. Children’s
social learning occurs through actual and envisioned rewards and benefits
and grows more and more abstract as the child’s linguistic capacity increases.
While there may be a few biologically hard-wired tripwires located in our
automatic processing system (fear of snakes, perhaps), more advanced moral
issues of sharing, fairness, and delaying gratification are only recognizable
through language and the use of symbols and within an extended time
horizon. These symbols are perceived at both first- and second-order levels,
and as they age, children develop their ability to reason about moral con-
cerns. I will talk about emotions more in the next chapter, but there is evi-
dence for a subset of universally developed emotions within our species.
Children’s development involves the maturing of this capacity and a learn-
ing of their culture’s content that will trigger the appropriate moral emo-
tion at the appropriate time. What we mean by socialization is precisely
how children (or newcomers to a culture) learn the culturally appropriate
triggers for universal feelings such as fear, disgust, anger, and happiness.
 Society and Conscience 61

Socialization involves internalizing the cultural triggers into both the

conscious mind and, eventually, the preconscious mind.
Psychologists have primarily focused on early moral development, exam-
ining how social interaction “fills in” the innate capacity for developing moral
worldviews.50 Children are born with a “running start” toward prosocial
development,51 particularly with respect to empathy.52 During the second
year of life children become aware of external standards, and around age
four they begin to apply standards of good and bad to the self.53 Early on,
children encounter moral rules as tantamount to physical reality, unques-
tionable and unalterable. Because of this, younger children judge others’
actions without any concern for intentions.54 By age five, children realize
that some people hold moral and factual beliefs different from theirs, and
this knowledge contributes to tolerant judgments of others’ actions.55
Moral functioning involves learning and internalizing language based
in common social practices and symbolic material.56 Children develop their
moral sense as they develop an understanding of selfhood—where their
boundaries are and how they interact with other people. Learning language
is a vital step in this process. Only through shared symbols, including lan-
guage, can we begin to abstractly think of boundaries and similarities be-
tween ourselves and others. Language gives form to our sensations and to
pain and pleasure intuitions that are present in other animals,57 but allows
us greater capacity to reason, analyze, remember, and plan.58 Language
enables thought, and for children, thought is initially a tool that helps solve
concrete problems.59 Moral functioning needs thought, but also requires
emotion based in attachment to parental figures; children fortunate enough
to be loved acquire a moral sense that provides meaning to their lives.60
Children who are securely attached to and trust parents, especially mothers,
are more open to being socialized by that parent, regardless of their agenda.61
Moral learning universally involves a two-step process.62 First, children
learn “moral knowledge,” especially their society’s Bright Lines (“don’t stare
at strangers”) and potential Bright Lights (“be a good girl”). At this stage,
such rules are experienced as externally imposed. Children as young as six
develop “moral motivation, the second step in the process, a desire to follow
previously learned moral rules even in the absence of external sanction.”63
Children internalize moral motivation either in a committed way, whole-
heartedly adopting their parental values, or in a more situational way,
where they are cooperative but demonstrate moral behavior largely when
the parent (usually their mother) is actually around. The former approach
leads to prosocial morality being more important to the self; the latter ap-
proach leads to a shaky engagement with conventional morality.64 Mothers’
values are most influential when children both accurately perceive those
values and accept them as important.65 The values that children think their
62 Moral Selves, Evil Selves

parents hold are more influential on their beliefs than parents’ actual values.66
Perception is reality.
Recall that even though the content of these rules can change across
cultures, what they share at the first stage is the sense that the Bright Line is
a universal prohibition, not simply a social convention.67 Conventions are
experienced as particular to one’s culture, such as what side of the road to
drive on. Bright Lines, on the other hand, wall off actions that are seen as
morally deficient regardless of who performs them. The interaction be-
tween culture and moral development is complex,68 but appears to follow
the general two-step order of first internalizing external moral rules and then
developing a personal motivation to adhere to them in the form of person-
ally important values. Children from America and India are able to distin-
guish between cultural definitions of right and wrong by age five, suggesting
this is a universal developmental timetable.69 The motivation to follow these
definitions may be culturally shaped. Chinese children, for example, dem-
onstrate greater consistency between moral knowledge (step 1) and moral
motivation (step 2) than Icelandic children due to the greater societal con-
cern with altruism that motivates the design of school curriculums in
China.70
The most influential theory of moral development in the last forty years
was developed by Lawrence Kohlberg,71 who was famously influenced by
Piaget’s work on the social nature of children’s development72 and less
famously influenced by Dewey’s ideas on the development of the self.73
Kohlberg’s work posits six (later five) stages of possible moral development
for children, into adulthood. At the earliest levels, children act morally,
defined in the prosocial sense described in the last chapter, because they are
instructed to by people with authority. Only later on do some adults appeal
to higher ethical systems to undergird their moral beliefs. At first, for exam-
ple, we do not steal our sibling’s toys because parents and older family mem-
bers tell us not to and threaten us with punishment. Later on, we refrain
because we want to be “good” and feel rewarded if we live up to family and
community standards. At the higher levels, Kohlberg held, we obey the
social order through a deep understanding of abstract principles (individual
rights) and feel that violating those principles is a moral violation. Moral
breaches are, for those at these higher levels, more fundamental than simply
acting well to forestall others’ disapproval. Very few adults (only 1–2 percent
of people worldwide) reach the highest stages on Kohlberg’s scales.
At first blush, Kohlberg’s theory seems to add detail to the two-step
process discussed above. However, it has been a lightning rod for criticism.
For one thing, the word problems that respondents are asked to respond to
in order to gauge their supposed level of moral development reward people
who reason like moral philosophers, something most research subjects would
 Society and Conscience 63

have trouble with. Perhaps Kohlberg has developed a theory of moral jus-
tification based on the ability to articulate moral feelings, without really
delving into the feelings and intuitions themselves.74 Children demonstrate
moral reasoning that is, in practice, much more advanced than the Kohlberg-
stages would predict and can vary their reasoning based on context or prior-
ities.75 Kids are not less logical than adults; they are simply more susceptible
to letting emotional stimuli override their logical centers and are known to
demonstrate less impulse control.76 Kohlberg’s rational approach privileges
justice over other virtues as if it is the only principle that organizes social
life.77 Morality involves more than just issues of harm and justice.78
More problematically, the Kohlberg scheme has not received extensive
empirical support,79 especially when examined across cultures. For example,
Shweder and colleagues found elements of Kohlberg’s rare and elite reason-
ing (postconventional) in children and adults in both Brahmin Indian and
“untouchable” Indian populations. Thus, they argued, such reasoning was
not nearly as limited as Kohlberg suggested.80 They found a variety of prin-
ciples underlying perceived moral obligations, not simply one scheme based
on Western notions of rationality and justice. Shweder posits multiple
“natural laws,” arguing that morality extends beyond conventional discus-
sions of justice, harm, and rights to include issues of duty, hierarchy, and
interdependency.81 Children are able to differentiate between moral con-
cerns and social conventions as early as forty-two months, much earlier
than suggested in Kohlberg’s scheme.82 Perhaps most problematically,
individuals who engage in the most prosocial action do not score highly
on Kohlberg’s scheme83 or are no different than nonprosocial individuals
in the stage of moral development they have supposedly reached.84 People
who score highly on the Kohlberg scale do not act any more ethically than
those who score more poorly.
Finally, no discussion of Kohlberg’s scheme is complete without at least
mentioning the famous gender-based broadside leveled by Carol Gilligan.85
Briefly, Gilligan suggested that Kohlberg’s concern with justice-reasoning
precluded a particularly female way of moral development, namely, a con-
cern with care and empathy. She argued that women do not abstractly rea-
son about their moral principles and that women scored lower on average
than men on the Kohlberg scheme not because of any deficiency of women
but because of deficiencies in the theory.
Gilligan’s care-ethic has not fared much better than Kohlberg’s scheme
when tested empirically. There is very limited empirical support for the
notion of gender differences,86 and even if there are two sorts of ethics for
organizing moral outlooks (which, interestingly enough, more often than
not arrive at the same moral conclusion), there is little reason to believe they
are associated with gender.87 Defining morality as either justice-oriented
64 Moral Selves, Evil Selves

(Kohlberg) or care-oriented (Gilligan) is to oversimplify the matter; empir-

ical reality is not so neatly parceled. Children develop concerns reflecting
both justice and care standards, and the application of these standards
changes based on situational factors.88 Ultimately, the field of moral psy-
chology has moved from this abstract focus to more concern with practical
applications in concrete situations.89 The particular moral problem under
consideration seems more important than gender for explaining what ori-
entation, or mixture of orientations, an individual employs.90
Situations interact with one’s developmental age to determine how one
is likely to operate within moral realms. Over the last twenty years younger
generations across cultures have developed more self-expressive values than
older generations91 and draw different boundaries between what is moral and
merely conventional.92 Recall that moral rules are perceived as objective,
externally binding, and universally applicable, while conventional rules are
seen as more arbitrary and context-dependent.93 There is disagreement re-
garding the extent to which human beings are hard-wired to make this dis-
tinction,94 but evidence seems to support the notion that moral violations
are judged more harshly than conventional ones. We get angrier if some-
body steals from us (moral violation) than if they cut in line (conventional
violation).
Late adolescence is a particularly important time for the internalization
of moral beliefs.95 As we develop a sense of self, deeper moral concerns
become vital orienting points. These concerns are largely drawn from our fam-
ilies, peers, and cultural groups, and the Bright Lines we internalize feel invi-
olate. Adolescents tend to conflict with parents over personal issues, but not
over moral ones96—a psychologically healthy process not limited to Western
adolescents.97
This is an admittedly cursory overview, but sets the stage for looking at
social forces that influence the development of moral orientations. At early
ages, children are taught to draw Bright Lines around various behaviors they
are forbidden from engaging in. Some of these lines are aimed at develop-
ing a first-order desire to, say, not hurt one’s sibling, while others deal with
moral ideals like learning to share toys. Parents are the initial agents of social-
ization, but children, as they age, demonstrate a great deal of agency in their
own socialization,98 and some moral lines are self-taught through the neces-
sary negotiation with peers.99 We undergo a process similar to Kohlberg’s
first few stages, with moral prohibitions coming from the outside and then
getting internalized, even if the evidence is that most people live their lives
without consciously anchoring their moral orientation within abstract
principles such as justice or equity.
Our initial concerns are simply to be considered “good” by the adult
figures in our lives, and though our motivations become more varied as we
 Society and Conscience 65

age, this basic theme is discernable within most behaviorist or symbolic

interactionist ideas about what motivates us. Our definitions of the “good”
are influenced as we develop by our society, our subgroups, and the people
and institutions we interact with. Both duties and ideals, the two facets of
Bright Lights discussed in Chapter 1, develop in line with our entering adult-
hood as we assume more responsibility for our actions and develop a more
stable sense of self. A sociologist might point out that this learning is not
haphazard, but rather structured by society. Amitai Etzioni, for example, sug-
gests four social formations that transmit a society’s “moral infrastructure,”
each system situated within the next: families, schools, communities, and
the community of communities (wider society).100
We are taught Bright Lines so that they become embedded within our
automatic processing systems, to keep us safe and help us gain parental
approval. Later on, second-order goals can become internalized to the level
of guiding first-order, unconscious functions of the brain. Thus, first-order
reactions can be linked to very important second-order goals, such as the
shame we feel at telling a lie. The moral violation of lying is initially a second-
order understanding of the importance of truthfulness in social relationships,
but as we age that considered judgment becomes part of a first-order self-
understanding. Violations of these initially second-order visions of oneself
(“be honest”) seep into first-order Bright Lines we attempt not to violate and
feel poorly about if we do.
People vary as to how much they internalize these prohibitions and
exhortations, with some children finding them important regardless of
who is around and others still trying to please their parents. As we age,
we look beyond Bright Lines toward appealing Bright Lights. As these
goals and standards become more important to us, chosen largely by our
second-order, deliberative processes, they anchor who we think we are
and how we want to see ourselves. This process is not always consciously
chosen and involves the notion of identities: sets of meanings that proscribe
how we are to behave in various situations. We may consciously choose
to adopt an identity, such as being a lawyer or a poker-player, and through
that conscious choice we open ourselves to a variety of reactions that,
over time, become more internalized as the identity grows in importance.
As identities get internalized they move from consciously monitored
actions to more automatic, first-order guides. The first day I taught a
class, I was quite self-conscious of my props and my behavior. After a while,
meanings associated with “teacher” became more familiar and less con-
sciously evaluated as the standards for judging the adequacy of living up
to that identity became more automatic. A similar process occurs as we
become part of communities or groups and learn the appropriate moral
standards and boundaries.
66 Moral Selves, Evil Selves

Of course, we can develop identities without consciously trying at every

step. Much of what we develop as a sense of our gender—the ways we
move our body, wear our clothing, and use our voices—occurs before we
are consciously aware of it. If we fail to “fit in” with our peers, we may
consciously alter our behavior, but for the bulk of children who assimilate
to the crowd, much of this is done without conscious reflection. The devel-
opment of internal guides for behavior can skip the second-order, conscious
process and still develop as important first-order guides for perceiving
and acting in the social world. I never chose to become more masculine than
feminine, but my internal Bright Lines include making sure I stay within
a culturally acceptable boundary of masculinity.101 Morality can work in
the same way. We all have Bright Lines we will not cross, even if we didn’t
choose them consciously along the way.
Let us now turn to an overview of some of the ways social contexts
facilitate the development of Bright Lights and Bright Lines that operate
at our first-order level of processing, forming the feelings that tell us who
we “really” are. This overview sets the stage for a more microlevel under-
standing of conscience developed in the subsequent chapters of this book
and is thus intentionally more suggestive than exhaustive.

Filling in the Content: Social Structure

and Moral Codes
A social psychology of conscience should build on a sociology of morality.
I hope to bring to the discussion some nuance about the ways that situ-
ations, groups, subcultures, cultures, and entire societies suffuse individual
minds with moral concerns. I have touched on the intrinsically social
process of moral development. We depend on our families, peers, schools,
and wider societal structures to channel who we interact with, what we
do, and what we learn. Our biological capacity for internalizing moral stan-
dards gets filled in differentially. We assign greater or lesser moral worth
to different actions, ideals, and concerns, depending on the context of our
upbringing.
Many patterned social interactions combine to persuade us to draw
particular Bright Lines and be motivated by assorted Bright Lights. Any
individual, especially in twenty-first century Western culture, can be over-
whelmed by the sheer diversity of potential influences.102 How do we keep
track of the messages we hear about what, when, and where to be moral and
what morality means? Typically, we talk about some sort of national culture,
but that is difficult to precisely define and imposes uniformity on soci-
eties that, in practice, may not exist.103 The American ideal, a “melting pot,”
suggests an inherent heterogeneity. In addition to whatever it means to
 Society and Conscience 67

develop a national sense of morality, by the time one reaches adulthood

one has typically encountered messages from a school system, a religious
tradition, peers, family of origin, extended relatives, and media (tv, movies,
computer). All of these messages carry with them particular and conflict-
ing visions of the right way and wrong way to behave: the Bright Lights
that define various groups and the Bright Lines that “proper” people should
not cross.
Traditionally, the psychology of morality has been concerned with the
development of a rather focused, prosocial orientation toward the extent
that we want to help others. Certainly, this is a central area for exploring
morality, but we should broaden our focus to take into account the mes-
sages we receive throughout our lives beyond a simple concern with altru-
ism or the Golden Rule—messages that suggest we should care about
appearing attractive, saving money, and worshiping God. Being a properly
decent or moral member of a group or society involves a variety of other
concerns that address the “should” and “should not” aspects of our lives.
And these messages often conflict. What we should do at school is different
from what we should do at home or at church; in addition, perhaps we
should spend more time volunteering, cultivating an artistic interest, or
traveling. Somehow, people are able to chart a course through the morass
of messages, maintaining the fiction, at least, of having some internal coher-
ence. Eventually, I will suggest how conscience is flexible enough to anchor
this process, but first I will lay out the social and cultural background that
shapes the content of conscience.
At this point, I will not talk in detail about how societal messages become
internalized or how we juggle multiple and conflicting messages. Ultimately,
identity will be an important mechanism for thinking about how we main-
tain the various moral commitments that we develop, important for self-
definition and guiding behavior. For now, however, let us gloss over that
link and focus more broadly on some ways that structural factors influence
individual moral outlooks. Who we interact with is largely patterned,
even in complex societies, and one goal for a social psychology of conscience
would be a thorough mapping of where these interactions take place and
what messages become influential. I will not develop such a topology
here, but rather outline a suggestive mapping of the ways groups influence
individual consciences. Elsewhere, I have mapped this out more fully with
respect to values,104 the most distant Bright Lights. The social psychology
of conscience needs a little sociology to be as robust as possible.
Two terms are vital for organizing the links between social organization
and individual development: social structure and culture. Social structure
is “a persisting and bounded pattern of social relationships (or pattern of
behavioral intention) among the units (persons or positions) in a social
68 Moral Selves, Evil Selves

system.”105 Examining social structure means taking into account the pat-
terns of human interaction that are supported by various institutions, such
as the family, school, or religion. Social structures can be very abstract, such
as the labor market, or more local and formalized, such as a volunteer group.
People within social structures have circumscribed options for interacting
with others. A typical person cannot call up the president and make an
appointment, nor take a job without being hired. Social structures shape
our social statuses and our expectations for our behavior as well as that of
others.106 We develop our senses of right and wrong within the various
“moral communities” in which we interact.107
While social structure refers to the broad pattern of relationships, social
psychologists use the term “culture” to refer to “a set of cognitive and eval-
uative beliefs—beliefs about what is or what ought to be—that are shared
by the members of a social system and transmitted to new members.”108
Culture, in this usage, deals more with beliefs than with interaction patterns,
what I translate into social psychology as a concern with the “definition of
the situation” that is at the root of the worldviews that are so important for
understanding conscience.109
These two notions, structure and culture, cohere in the sociological
tradition termed “social structure and personality” (SSP). The SSP tradition
attempts to demonstrate how social structures influence individual psy-
chological functioning. Nonsociologists know that some people earn more
money than others and likely think that rich people see the world differently
than working-class people. The SSP tradition explores how precisely this
works and what contributes to the ways people of different social classes see
the world. It is too simple to claim that money causes these differences. If that
were the case, we could simply give a person enough money to change social
classes, and they would seamlessly fit into their new social position. A lot of
Hollywood comedies explore this premise, reflecting our notion that money,
itself, is not what causes people to believe things. Rather, people develop
within groups and families (structures) that have belief systems (cultures).
Melvin Kohn’s work is paradigmatic of SSP research. Along with col-
leagues, he has long focused on tracing how people’s values related to
work are shaped. Parents’ values toward work derive from the complexity of
their jobs, for both genders and across cultures, and lead to children choos-
ing jobs that often replicate their parents’ location in society.110 Specifically,
one’s occupational conditions shape this process through (1) the closeness of
supervision, (2) routinization of work, and (3) the substantive complexity
of the work. These three conditions contribute to a person’s level of self-
direction: how much they value autonomous action as opposed to conform-
ing to the direction of others. This body of literature demonstrates that
those who hold advantaged positions in the occupational social structure are
 Society and Conscience 69

more likely to have jobs with greater levels of self-direction than those in
less advantaged positions; people with jobs in the former category inter-
nalize this value and then teach it to their children.111 In turn, those chil-
dren grow up and look for jobs that fit their own values, meaning that
people choose to take the sorts of jobs that mirror what their parents valued
and what they were taught. Thus, we find intergenerational consistency in
social class partly due to the beliefs that children adopt based on their par-
ents’ jobs.112 Thus, differences in values along class lines become stable and
consistent and reproduce inequalities over time.113
Kohn suggests that social psychology, as a field, has not accorded a
central enough place to structure,114 but too much focus on structure is “out
of sync” with more recent, dynamic conceptions of human agents.115 Both
visions, one privileging patterns in social structural influences and the other
focusing on individual capacities to shape their own lives, are operative in
developing a social psychology of conscience. Certainly, our socialization
shapes who we are and what we choose. We are not mindlessly repeating
what our parents have told us, nor are we fully self-constructed. We are
shaped by the structures and cultures that we have developed within—
that shape our values and frame the choices and evaluations we make about
the world. We have free will, but we often choose to do what we are com-
fortable with, and that first-order feeling of comfort comes from our
upbringing and our experiences within particular structures and cultures.
The social structure and personality approach, while kept alive by
scholars in the tradition, has been subsumed by a broader field known as
life course studies.116 Life course studies encompass the study of a variety
of domains, ranging from how people age to issues of health, crime, and
family.117 Life course theory suggests that “individuals construct their own
life course through the choices and actions they take within the opportu-
nities and constraints of history and social circumstance.”118 We make
choices, but they are bounded ones.119 Thus, life course studies add notions
of time, history, and human agency to the social structure and personality
tradition but retain many of the insights linking individual psychology to
larger social and structures.120 One drawback of both approaches is that
they have tended to parcel out human lives into discrete domains and exten-
sively studied those domains.121 As Margaret Archer puts it, “sociological
specialisation [sic] means that researchers are only interested in one domain
of agential practice, be it employment, the family, education, religion, health
and so forth. Such can never be the case of agents themselves.”122 Real peo-
ple have to juggle a variety of concerns, and from one perspective their lives
might take a continuous course, while from another they might appear
more disjunct If you examine someone’s educational history their lives
might look much more linear than if you looked at their marital history.
70 Moral Selves, Evil Selves

In both cases their decisions were influenced by structures, but their agentic
choices were important as well and should be studied.123 Likely, interac-
tions in each domain affected the other, suggesting the need for
a multidimensional model of the social actor.124
Kohn’s work demonstrates one way that social structures shape our
worldviews—consistent constellations of concepts that shape how we
interpret the world.125 Part of what feels like a “should” in the domain of
employment, then, is shaped by one’s location in the social structure. An
advantage of drawing on life course theory is its focus (like cultural soci-
ology) on the historical contingency of societal patterns, suggesting that
we need to look at more than simply the structure of social positions to
understand why any particular person or group develops their “moral
compasses.”126 We develop systems of attitudes and values—preconscious
ideologies127 that shape our reactions to what we see around us.128

Ideologies always contain propositions about moral obligations—obligations

of patrons to clients, of clients to patrons, of members to communities, of
citizens to states and of state representatives to citizens, of persons to one
another in their basic dealings (e.g., honesty and integrity), and so on.129

Recall that our brain’s perceptual apparatuses are working much more
quickly than we can consciously follow, and thus our ideologies channel
how our minds interpret the social world and signal the strong reactions
we have to objects that cross a Bright Line or the intuitive attraction we
feel toward a value or goal that comprises a Bright Light. Our ideologies
are the starting point for organizing the world, and we go to great lengths to
justify ideologies that we perceive as natural.130 We may develop an ideol-
ogy to explain the world to us, such as a political ideology, but may do so
in the absence of any concrete information;131 we do not choose our ide-
ologies, but rather develop them subconsciously.132 For example, Alan
Wolfe finds that a core part of American middle-class ideology involves
the lessening importance of self-restraint and the increasing acceptability of
alternative forms of moral behavior, what he terms “morality writ small.”133
There is greater middle-class acceptance, he suggests, in terms of other
people’s right to draw Bright Lines different from one’s own, and this is
core to the ideology that Americans use to understand themselves and their
neighbors. Interestingly, many Americans are highly committed to their
moral principles but accept that people from other cultures might differ
on how they reason about moral issues, suggesting both an adherence to
principle and a tolerance of differing principles.134
More could be said about disentangling the structural and cultural
elements of this process, but such specifications are not my goal. I simply
 Society and Conscience 71

hope to expand our notion of conscience’s development beyond that of

learning what our parents believe, as if they existed in isolation from
a larger society that categorizes people based on money, race, religion,
and so on. Conscience is influenced by many forces, ranging from local
interactions with parents all the way up to macrolevel societal trends.
A different take on how distant structural and cultural forces combine
to shape the environments within which individuals develop conscience
comes from the political scientist Ronald Inglehart. He argues that eco-
nomic changes at the societal level are associated with worldwide shifts from
absolute values to a more relativistic, postmodern set of values.135 Under
the rubric of modernization theory, Inglehart and colleagues suggest that
political conflicts in Western societies revolve around those who take eco-
nomic security for granted and are concerned with “quality of life issues”
such as the environment and a sense of community (“postmaterialists”) and
those who are more concerned with issues such as a stable economy and law
and order (“modernists”). Thus, this view ties together the level of economic
development in a society with national-level trends in values, suggesting
that as societies become more economically developed, their members shift
toward more rational, tolerant, and participative (“postmodern”) values.
Such changes do not happen for everybody at once, leading to political ten-
sions and a sense that key social structures in a society may be changing.136
In twenty-first century America, this sense can be captured in fights over
the institution of marriage, for example.
These two orientations are not necessarily mirror opposites, with people
concerned with postmaterialist values somehow unconcerned with modern
issues of security and stability in the economy.137 Nor does each orientation
appear in exactly the same form in different countries. A nation’s particular
cultural heritage mediates the relationship between economy and domi-
nant values; the nation’s level of protestant, orthodox, or Islamic tradition
has an effect on national (and individual) value systems, even taking eco-
nomic factors into account.138 Even though modernization occurs in pock-
ets around the world, the world as a whole is not necessarily becoming more
secular: a nation’s cultural history is an important factor, as well. For exam-
ple, Americans are particularly concerned with Judeo-Christian notions
of morality, while the French draw boundaries around people who lack per-
sonal integrity or show little concern for others.139 The more people in a given
nation feel existential security, the less traditional their values; the more
secure they feel, the more secular their belief system.140 This thesis explains
shifts in values from agrarian to industrial societies and has been supported
using different measures and values,141 though it is not without criticism.142
There is a danger of focusing too much on any particular national culture
as representative of “the” way its members think. Cultures involve a myriad
72 Moral Selves, Evil Selves

of personal relationships, groups, and conflicts that can get obscured if

we focus too much on national-level trends and analyses.143 There is always
a great deal of variation within any culture. Thus, a social psychology of
conscience begins with these broad-stroke analyses, but quickly focuses in
on more proximate influences that shape individual notions of morality.
Culture shapes the worldviews people have—the beliefs people hold
about the nature of reality144—including those Bright Lights that they find
most important. One of the tricky things in studying moral worldviews
is that, for the people under examination, their worldview seems natural
and not like something to be analyzed at all.145 This suggests a debate over
whether such a universal moral code exists that all people should follow
regardless of cultural tradition.146 Evidence supports the thesis that a limited
amount of moral content potentially fills a universal human capacity. For
example, universality in emotional responses147 suggests commonalities
among moral emotions (see Chapter 4). Shweder suggests three moral ethics
that circumscribe the worldviews in a particular culture: autonomy, com-
munity, and divinity.148 People can utilize any of these ethics to address a
particular problem; they represent different organizing logics. If a person
draws upon an ethic of community, for example, they privilege the group
and value things like loyalty and obedience.149 Americans, for example, focus
more on autonomy than Hindus.150 Haidt suggests five potential moral
foundations based on our species’ evolution: harm and care, fairness and
reciprocity, in-group loyalty, authority and respect, and purity and sanc-
tity.151 Moral development within any particular culture involves highlight-
ing a combination of one or more of these ethics as the basis for addressing
moral dilemmas, but humans have evolved the capacity to make sense of
all five ethics. Different societies, or different groups within a society, may
privilege different elements of this typology, but the capacity exists every-
where. Values, as mentioned, similarly demonstrate particular content from
universal patterns.
A fuller sociological map of influences on individual conscience would
move from the distant level of the nation-state to more focused institutions
such as religious groups or family. There are many different vectors along
which Bright Lights and Bright Lines become shaped, including religion,
social class, and geography. Religiously, these become internalized through
“moral cosmologies,” general orientations toward spirituality along an
orthodox-to-modernist continuum. In this view, religion is not as important
for knowing somebody’s values as much as how theologically adherent they
are to that religion.152 Orthodox Jews and Catholics, for example, who stress
adhering to tradition over self-interpretation of moral laws, have more in
common with each other than Orthodox Catholics do with more liberal
Catholics. What religion one follows matters, just not as much as one’s
 Society and Conscience 73

adherence to orthodoxy; the more homogeneous a religious culture (and

the more regulated that religion is by the state), the more people participate
in that religion and the more faith they profess.153
Alternatively, we might focus on social classes as a discrete entity. For
people who are disadvantaged in the social structure and who perceive their
circumstances as a moral violation of justice or fairness, morality can
become an important rallying motivation for struggling against perceived
injustice.154 Around the world, groups that are oppressed develop value sys-
tems that contradict the dominant moral beliefs in such a way as to help
support the oppressed groups’ view of themselves as morally worthy.155
Social class does not operate in the same way in every culture; however;
lower-class Americans employ logics of community and divinity that are
closer to those employed by Brazilians of any class than do upper-class
Americans.156
Or, we might focus on gender’s place in circumscribing moral beliefs,
though there is much evidence that gender is not nearly as important as
other factors in determining values and worldviews.157 Values change a
little as people age,158 and there is evidence that gender matters for some
specific work-related values, such as requiring independence and becom-
ing realistic with respect to one’s workplace opportunities.159 All of these
forces combine to set the stage for individual conscience, and future
research should lay out the topography in more detail. For now, it should
hopefully suffice to demonstrate that these forces set the stage for the
social-psychological processes to follow.

Conclusion and Transition

Social structure and culture influence our moral worldviews. The human
capacity for seeing the social world in moral terms has evolved (in social
environments) such that a limited number of worldviews and values seem
possible to discern at the most abstract levels. It is sufficient at this stage to
demonstrate that structure and culture are important, distal forces that
shape the particular minds of particular people. The architecture of con-
science discussed in the rest of this book should be understood as develop-
ing within these parameters. Future research should present a full taxonomy
of the relationship between conscience and the range of social variables that
influence it. This is only a partial list illustrating that conscience develops
within a deeply social, multilayered environment. These forces contribute
to individual worldviews that shape the way people make sense of their
environments and develop fundamental senses of right and wrong.
Understanding human morality involves consideration of both universal
principles and culturally variable standards. As Hauser suggests, the capacity
74 Moral Selves, Evil Selves

for a moral sense is like the capacity for language—an innate capacity that
becomes instantiated within particular social contexts. Humans are hard-
wired to develop moral worldviews, though the specific content about right,
wrong, and what is obligatory or forbidden may differ across culture, nation,
ethnicity, and individual experience. The boundaries appear finite, how-
ever, anchored in species-specific capacities developed within a particular
history of meeting the demands of successful social groups.
These processes have led to a finite range of emotions and possible moral
judgments across societies even as their triggers might be variable. In
Chapter 4, I will discuss a more psychological perspective about how our
moral minds work and fill in some of the details behind Hauser’s notion
of a universal moral capacity. The chapter will sketch out how conscience
processes moral dilemmas and issues, abstracted from concrete situations.
Later on, we will see that regardless of what our mind decides, there are
a lot of factors within situations that preclude us from acting as we think we
should. Let us turn to how the individual mind processes moral informa-
tion, remembering that it has developed within a web of structural and
cultural forces.
Chapter 4

Processes of
Conscience: How the
Moral Mind Works

Morality is pervasive, in the sense that no voluntary human action is in

principle resistant to moral assessment.
Samuel Scheffler1

Our minds have evolved with a moral sense, a capacity for viewing the world
and ourselves in moral terms.2 The capacity for a moral sense is universal,
but it varies substantively—within certain boundaries—across different
cultures, groups, and societies. Human beings draw Bright Lines and are
motivated by Bright Lights, and the most important of these socially
learned moral signposts become internalized and viewed as core to a person’s
sense of self (see Chapter 8). We feel authentic when following our Brightest
Lights and feel morally deficient if we cross a Bright Line.
There is a growing body of psychological literature concerning the
mechanics of moral perception, judgment, and action. Most of these works
utilize the conventional notion of morality as altruism, a narrower definition
of morality than advocated here. Recall the distinction between mental
processes and actual behavior; what goes on in our minds, including emo-
tions, intuitions, and conscious reasoning, is only partially related to what
we actually do, in both moral and nonmoral domains. Does this mean that
what we think and feel is irrelevant? Of course not; even if there was no
relationship between thoughts, feelings, and behavior, the fact that we share
a cultural belief in a tight relationship among these phenomena is culturally
interesting. But what goes on in our heads does relate to what we actually
do; it is just not a straightforward relationship. People who report hold-
ing prosocial values are a bit more likely to engage in prosocial behavior, but
76 Moral Selves, Evil Selves

those values are just a subset of many important factors predicting such
behavior.3 What we know about internal processes is that judgment, emo-
tion, and intuition say something about our intentions to act but do not
have any connection with our actions per se.4 What we actually do is only
partially related to our intentions.
We judge the morality of others’ actions more critically when we believe
they have freely chosen those behaviors, because we assume they have acted
in concert with guiding principles they found legitimate. We do not hold
people to be morally (or legally) culpable for accidental actions and change
our moral evaluations if we discover mitigating circumstances. This means
we develop a theory of mind, a belief in how others process information
and form intentions that underlie actions.5 These theories are shaped by the
structures and cultures discussed in the last chapter. Understanding moral
action requires knowing something about the processes by which individuals
make sense of their social environments.
We do not judge other people, however, in the same manner as we judge
ourselves.6 We make what is known as the fundamental attribution error,
a core social-psychological principle that describes how we overemphasize
situational pressures in justifying our own actions, but overattribute others’
actions to their personal dispositions.7 In other words, we have a bias toward
assuming that others’ behavior is due to their personality or intentions, but
excuse our own actions based on situational factors. When I speed, I am
simply keeping up with traffic (situational factor); when others speed by me,
they are reckless maniacs (personality attribute). This suggests an inherent
bias in the ways we discern our own moral behavior: we focus on the sit-
uational pressures that lead us toward certain choices, but assume that others
just “are” that way. Cultural background plays a part in this; Hindus, for
example, refer more to context when explaining others’ behavior than
Americans.8 This chapter focuses on the psychological mechanisms that
translate structurally influenced cultural messages into personal moral judg-
ments of right and wrong and accordant intentions to act. Understanding
conscience necessitates understanding how moral judgments and reactions
work. These mental processes will later be merged with our ongoing sense
of self, forming the basis for determining who we are and where we stand
on defining moral issues. First, let us look at how the moral mind thinks
and feels.

Moral Judgment
Morality involves judgments about right and wrong,9 about what we feel
we and others should or should not do. We make these evaluations about
a range of social objects, from our personal thoughts and others’ actions
 Processes of Conscience 77

to political issues and abstract principles. We feel that we should not covet
our neighbor’s wife or that proper people should be quiet in movie theaters
or that nations should be allowed to start preemptive wars. In principle,
anything is subject to moral judgment; evaluation is ubiquitous and con-
stitutive of human lives. Thinking about moral issues is different from
thinking about other sorts of things given that it ultimately is concerned
with action,10 things that we feel we (or others) should or should not do.
It is, in this sense, a “practical activity,” shaped by a shared language within
a culture that shapes the evaluation of thoughts and actions.11 Morality is
the primary factor we use to judge others,12 though interestingly, we judge
ourselves based on competency, not morality. Perhaps our own moral worth
is taken for granted.
Judging is not a simple process. More accurately, it is wrong to say we
simply judge. Moral judgments come in two kinds: impersonal, which
trigger cognitive analysis and careful reasoning, and personal, which acti-
vate emotional centers in the brain.13 These two processes, perhaps
unsurprisingly, mirror the automatic and controlled distinction in our
dual-processing system. We form opinions about moral issues both delib-
eratively and intuitively, and those opinions do not always agree. When
confronted with a moral issue, we may have a snap judgment and we may
reason through the issue. The crying baby dilemma, presented in the last
chapter, is a prime example of an instance in which the two processes
conflict. An initial intuition is to protect babies, but one can also logically
reason about whether or not saving an entire family is a fair trade-off. The
same process is also at the root of racial stereotyping. Many people who do
not see themselves as prejudiced nonetheless automatically react in racially
biased ways. Some people are more likely than others to override these
intuitive reactions, but an unprejudiced action was not necessarily preceded
by an unprejudiced reaction.
Understanding moral judgment means simultaneously considering how
both elements of our dual-processing system influence moral perception.
This is a crucial step for understanding conscience, a cross-situational,
potentially self-contradictory aspect of individual selves extended in time.
Conscience involves an interplay between automatic and controlled moral
judgments, not simply a focus on one at the exclusion of the other. It employs
two sets of judgments—one deliberative and the other automatic—when
evaluating self and others. Automatic judgments occur fast and they occur
outside of conscious awareness, but what they often do is jump to a moral
conclusion that feels right, and our controlled processes unwittingly fill
in logically sound (enough) Lawyer Logic arguments to support that pre-
ordained conclusion. We are far from the dispassionate thinkers often posited
in ethical philosophy;14 second-order reasoning often “follows along and
78 Moral Selves, Evil Selves

provides a fancy rationalization to support the immediate judgment of

the automatic system.”15 The fact that we are not always attuned to our
automatic judgments or their influence on our conscious deliberation lies
at the root of one of the self’s primary paradoxes: Why do we so often behave
differently than we think we will?

Moral Reasoning

Moral reasoning involves thinking through the implication of moral prin-

ciples.16 Any particular culture’s or group’s justifications are learned during
the socialization process, in which new members learn to identify with that
group or culture. In the West, we expect that individuals with sound moral
judgment have the capacity to logically reason as well as to know about the
different contexts in which they will have to apply their reasoning abilities.17
Intentionality is an important concern for those studying morality. Can
an accidental behavior be immoral? Jerome Kagan suggests that human
behavior is fundamentally defined by intentionality, something evident
even in two-year-old humans but not in other species.18 In contrast, Frans
de Waal and others suggest that morality is based on emotional reactions
that are present in our primate cousins, who, they argue, demonstrate
rudimentary forms of moral behavior.19
This potential stumbling block appears to me to be a bit of a diversion.
I do not see where human intentionality precludes the idea that rudiments
of the capacity for making moral judgments also exist in primates. We can
be intentional and also emotionally motivated. We certainly judge others’
actions more harshly if we think those actions are either intentional or
careless, suggesting the importance we place on others’ capacity to reflect on
their own behavior and anticipate outcomes.
The underlying philosophical debate about morality revolves around the
universality of moral codes, and while I claim no special insight into what
humans should treat as moral, we can look at what they actually consider
as moral. The majority of psychological research has focused on moral
judgment as rational and deliberative, privileging second-order, controlled
mental processes20 typically focused on abstract notions of rights, justice,
and harm. Scholars have debated the extent to which moral judgment
means developing the ability to understand an invariant, universal moral
code,21 with some suggesting that morality is culturally relative.22 If one
believes in a single moral code, one will study the extent to which people
demonstrate a capacity to reach the highest levels of moral reasoning within
that code. If one thinks that moral codes can vary, it is silly to impose a
single moral reasoning scheme on the people one is researching. Empirical
evidence supports the idea that moral codes vary across cultures, but within
 Processes of Conscience 79

a limited range. The traditional focus on a logic of justice can be countered

by other valid logics (care, divinity) depending on one’s cultural perspective.
Regardless of the number of abstract moral logics, evidence supports
the view that specific moral judgments stem from particular cultural and
historical circumstances23 and do not reflect rational deliberation as much
as they reflect culturally shaped cognitive shortcuts. For example, only 28
percent of Americans are organ donors as compared with nearly 100 percent
of the French. This suggests that different cultures operate with different
default cognitive heuristics in defining moral behavior.24 It is unlikely that
people in these two nations rationally considered the morality of organ
donation but came to wildly divergent conclusions; more likely, their
environments privilege different presumptions, triggering different actions
that appeal to different cultural norms. Cultures thus offer ways for members
to judge the world, though we should also remember how much variation
exists within any culture.25 Cultures are not monolithic.
Moral reasoning involves working out of logical deductions based on
certain presuppositions, a combination of important principles and relevant
facts. Debates among different groups may or may not involve different
values. More often, opposing sides share similar values but believe in dif-
ferent facts, thus leading to differing conclusions.26 Such differences in
“informational assumptions” are important for understanding the reasoning
process. Even young children know the difference between facts and prin-
ciples.27 This presents an odd situation where, in one’s own culture, we may
draw Bright Lines around certain behaviors but accept that people in
other cultures—with different informational assumptions—draw different
lines.28 This is not relativism; people still believe their interpretations
properly shape right and wrong, but that others who believe differently
are using different facts, are self-serving, or are misinformed.29 Americans,
at least, are tolerant of others with different moral beliefs but have little
desire to spend personal time with them.30 This means that, in practice,
people accept there are different moral assumptions around the world
even if they believe they know the proper way to form unbiased moral
judgments. This does not address the epistemological issue of the existence
of multiple moralities, but suggests that people can function in a world
with multiple possible sets of informational assumptions. People just feel
that they, ultimately, have the right way of thinking. One might suggest,
as an aside, that the need to build a theoretical edifice for a single, universal
moral system is a Western concern; some ancient cultures seem more
accepting of the use of different ethical principles for different situations.31
This suggests what I might term the “Interstate Theory of Moral
Judgment”: people who behave differently from me have their own reasons;
they are just wrong for doing so. People who drive slower than I do on
80 Moral Selves, Evil Selves

highways are a bit of an annoyance; those who are faster are reckless. My
speed, however I justify it, is the vantage point for proper driving. I judge
others through that lens and morally judge them based on the reasons and
principles I use to justify my speed. We see ourselves as less susceptible to
bias and more likely to reason correctly;32 thus we feel justified in reasoning
from our own presuppositions without challenging them.
As abstract as a discussion of various ultimate moral principles can get,
ultimately moral judgment is a situation-specific process. Moral judgment
involves multidimensional rules and standards and depends largely on how
the facts at hand are interpreted.33 Particular situations call forth partic-
ular facts, knowledge, and, importantly, intuitions that shape our moral
judgments.

Moral Intuitions

The most exciting theory of moral judgment gaining precedence in the

literature is consonant with the dual-processing model. This theory focuses
on the primary—but long overlooked—place of our automatic processing
system in shaping our moral judgments where the slow cognitive system
competes with faster, emotionally laden intuitive reactions.34 Often, people
reach a moral conclusion (“X is wrong!”) but when asked to justify that
conclusion, they cannot. This is what Jonathan Haidt refers to as “moral
dumbfounding.”35 We just “know” what is right and wrong most of the
time. We might believe our knowledge comes from logically sound justi-
fications, but in fact, most of us are not aware of the various philosophical
edifices that justify particular beliefs and judgments nor can we articulate
a consistent philosophy.36 By using our intuitions we do not necessarily end
up with morally deficient conclusions; Kagan suggests that normal people
use intuitions to more quickly arrive at conclusions that rationality based
theories get to in a much more laborious fashion.37
Moral intuitions occur effortlessly and automatically at a preconscious
level and appear suddenly in our consciousness.38 Intuitions are not random,
but have their own rationale based on deep-seated heuristics within the
unconscious mind.39 Haidt’s social intuitionist model aims at systematizing
links between our dual-processing system and moral judgments,40 with the
priority placed on initial automatic intuitions that shape slower, second-order
moral reasoning. This approach is initially startling to a field that for years
has focused on the process of moral deliberation and is not without crit-
icism.41 However, it eloquently ties together the dual systems that influence
human cognition and fits with the available neurological and evolutionary
evidence, consonant with the notion that first-order human moral judgments
are anchored in our social, mammalian history42 embedded in some of the
 Processes of Conscience 81

oldest parts of the brain.43 Given this history, the prelinguistic need to
first identify and react to danger discussed in Chapter 2, negative reactions
are more strongly hard-wired than positive ones.
The social intuitionist model dovetails with Antonio Damasio’s previously
discussed somatic marker hypothesis, which posits that emotional expe-
riences become marked in our brains such that they are automatically
triggered if relevant stimuli are present. Rather than reanalyzing information,
our brains use emotional markers as shortcuts for determining the proper
responses.44 As we interact in the world, certain stimuli trigger somatic
markers and lead to automatic processing that leads to judgments of
potential actions. A sociologist looks at this finding and expects that, given
patterns in the world for where we interact and who we interact with, our
intuitions and somatic markers will occur somewhat predictably. According
to this line of thought, past experience with particular moral issues—such
as giving money to a homeless person—will be marked with certain intuitive
associations and quickly give rise to an inclination to act in a certain manner
in other, similar situations. If we have a positive association with giving
money based on past experience, then our current intuition might be to give
money to this stranger. A negative experience, more likely to stick with us,
will lead to a gut-level aversion to a related current stimulus. We might
reason through the various relevant moral principles (self-sufficiency, charity
to strangers) and make a decision that differs from our initial feeling, but
likely the judgment occurred before we entered into the slower process of
moral reasoning that sent us looking for confirmatory reasons.
The dual-attitude model builds on our minds’ dual-processing capac-
ities.45 We can have more than one attitude toward social objects, including
moral concerns. The implicit judgments we make arise faster and are harder
to change than our deliberative opinions. Gut feelings are often given
priority, with people reporting intuitions as perfectly valid inputs for deal-
ing with moral dilemmas even as they acknowledge intuitions as far from
infallible.46 We are often unaware that we are using biased Lawyer Logic in
our deliberation, rather than the unbiased reasoning we think we are engag-
ing in. Our first order-system, the “adaptive unconscious,” operates as a spin
doctor leading us to justify conclusions we are predisposed to want to reach.47
Values can be interpreted as articulations of deep-seated intuitions or
somatic markers about which possible Bright Lights are the most personally
attractive. Given the range of possible human values, some values will seem
more intuitively appealing than others, more indicative of who we feel we
“really” are.48 Some of us respond more to ideals of benevolence (taking care
of others in our lives), while others find issues related to personal security as
evoking stronger intuitions linked to more powerful somatic markers. We
judge others based on these intuitions without always being consciously
82 Moral Selves, Evil Selves

aware that we do so. We rarely articulate and reason about caring for friends
that share our values; our feelings just seem right, and we intuit a com-
monality with these friends. If pressed, we might articulate these shared
preferences, but we rarely have to do so.
Values are often treated as truisms, unreflective ways of seeing the world
that are rarely questioned.49 People do not always offer good reasons for
their values; an intuition anchored in the feeling evoked along the lines of
an important (if abstract) value supersedes a need to reason through that
value. It just feels self-evidently right.50 Values are limited, recall, and priv-
ileging one value often means downplaying another, given the necessary
trade-offs that occur in complex human lives. But if we can get somebody
to consciously think through the reasons that justify their values, they are
more likely to keep to those values when situational pressures would oth-
erwise lead them to behave contrary to those values.51 People who have been
forced to think through and articulate support for their values are more
likely to engage in behaviors that express those values.52 Even here, though,
reasoning is not employed in an unbiased assessment of our values, but
rather to build support for the first-order gut sense that certain abstract
aims are preferable to others. Moral intuitions are not just flashes of cold
insight, but rather take the form of recognizable emotions that suggest
culturally appropriate potential responses.

Moral Emotions
Emotions motivate human life.53 They motivate what we do, determine
how we interact, fuel conflict, and recommend reconciliation.54 This has
not always been highlighted in the social sciences, though classic thinkers
such as Adam Smith and David Hume believed emotions were central to
understanding people, and strides have been lately made in correcting the
more recent omission of emotions.55

Our social makeup is so obvious that there would be no need to belabor

this point were it not for its conspicuous absence from origin stories within
the disciplines of law, economics, and political science. A tendency in the West
to see emotions as soft … has made theoreticians turn to cognition and
rationality as the preferred guides for human behavior. This is so despite the
fact that psychological research suggests the primacy of affect: that is, that
human behavior derives above all from fast, automated emotional judgments
and only secondarily from slower conscious processes … Humans seem in
fact, about as emotional in their dealing with each other as any social animal.56

Far from being the province of illogical people, emotions end up being vital
for the capacity to make (supposedly cold) rational judgments.57 They are
 Processes of Conscience 83

signals about how we perceive current concerns and how those concerns
fit into our ongoing lives: “Through their emotions, people comment, to
themselves if not to others, on what the interaction that is occurring says
about themselves in a given scene, and they also comment on the overall
stories that they are constructing as they shape a path through life.”58
Moral emotions are a subset of moral intuitions, motivational experiences
elicited by some trigger that conjure forth an instant, preconscious feeling.
Moral emotions are the link between moral standards (Chapter 3) and
moral behavior.59 Moral emotions require the integration of three aspects
of the mind: long-term planning structures, perceptions of the current
environment, and central motive states (behavior-related emotions).60 We
have especially strong emotional reactions when our core values and moral
beliefs are threatened,61 such as righteousness, ridicule, and vengeance.62
In Western culture, emotions are a purported window into the
“authentic” self.63 Social scientists get a better window into people’s moral
senses by asking about their emotions rather than asking them to justify
moral behavior by appealing to abstract moral codes.64 Normal people
are more likely to discuss feelings of shame, resentment, and pride, feelings
that suggest moral judgments, if not articulated, fully developed ethical
philosophies. Emotions represent responses to concrete social situations and
for a long time have been left out of discussions about (supposedly objective)
moral reasoning. But real-life moral conflicts are draining; they are not
treated as just abstract problems.65 They are draining precisely because of
the important emotional signals they conjure. Truly difficult moral dilemmas
do not have a clear-cut answer.
There is a finite list of moral emotions. Rather than reinvent another
wheel, I offer here an overview of Haidt’s four-family typology of moral
emotions:66 (a) other-condemning, (b) self-conscious, (c) other-suffering,
and (d) other-praising.

Other-Condemning Emotions

These emotions motivate people to change relations with those who are
perceived as having violated important relationships or moral codes.
They include anger, contempt, and disgust. There is cross-cultural evidence
supporting the thesis that anger stems from violations of autonomy, con-
tempt from violations of community standards, and disgust from violations
of divinity or purity.67 Anger involves short-term attack responses but
long-term reconciliation, while contempt is characterized by short- and
long-term exclusion and rejection.68 Moral anger (at the violation of a moral
standard) can be distinguished from personal anger (at being harmed) and
empathetic anger (at seeing someone else harmed).69 Disgust appears related
84 Moral Selves, Evil Selves

to extreme prejudice, motivating extreme biases when activated.70 Contrary

to popular belief, strong emotions such as anger do not necessarily represent
a loss of control; in the right circumstances, angered people work harder to
reason through support for their positions.71

Self-Conscious Emotions

These emotions include shame, embarrassment, and guilt. They are

quintessentially interpersonal emotions72 that derive from violations (or
anticipated violations) of personal and social standards. Thus, they function
to help uphold social order.73 Shame, in particular, is important for
understanding how society functions74 and has been described as a “moral
gyroscope.”75 Shame is a reflection of an act that violates an actor’s fun-
damental self-definition within a social community.76 It has two variants:
stigmatic, which destroys social bonds between the individual and the
community, and reintegrative, which helps align an offender’s deviance with
wider community norms.77
Shame and guilt can be elicited by different events: shame comes from
a major social violation and leads to a global feeling of smallness, while
guilt comes from specific, often interpersonal violations and leads to peo-
ple trying to fix them.78 Guilt may be the more directly moral emotion;
shame can occur in nonmoral situations such as performance failure
(a poor job interview) or because of socially inappropriate behaviors.79
Guilt and shame relate directly to feelings of worth, central to the con-
cept of self-esteem,80 which is in part a measure of the extent to which
people are living up to their most important values.81 Some argue that
self-esteem scales can be interpreted as measuring guilt and shame: guilt
deals with the self-worth aspect of self-esteem, while shame implicates the
self-depreciation aspect.82

Other-Suffering Emotions

These emotions include empathy and sympathy.83 Empathy involves the

sharing of another’s emotional state, while sympathy is more focused on
sharing their distress.84 Empathy seems to be a universal emotion and is
linked in a variety of studies with a greater tendency to help others and to
engage in prosocial behaviors.85 Individual levels of empathy and sympathy
seem to be consistent over time and are linked to aspects of self-control;
children and adults who demonstrate self-control are more likely to have
these prosocial emotions.86 Children who have positive, supportive parents,
especially mothers,87 are more likely to be empathetic children and more
likely to engage in prosocial behavior.88
 Processes of Conscience 85

Other-Praising Emotions

These emotions are the more positive set of moral emotions and reflect
the fact that humans appear to be appreciative of others’ positive moral
actions. Gratitude, awe, and elevation have all been less studied than more
negative emotions. Gratitude seems to have three moral functions: as a
barometer of moral relationships, as a motivating force, and as positive
reinforcement.89 We might add trust to that group, as trust appears nec-
essary for the development of a moral community.90 Individual levels of
trust appear shaped more by ongoing social experiences than by individual
predispositions,91 again suggesting the importance of social factors for moral
functioning.
This cursory overview of emotions is intended simply to give a modicum
of specificity to the later discussion of how internal moral reactions have
something to do with later action and self-interpretation. Specific emotions
signal us about the potential disjuncture between what is going on and
what was expected and implicates visions of who we are and who we want
to be. Emotions alone, however, are not enough to motivate moral action
above instinctive reactions such as disgust. For positive behaviors, especially,
moral emotions need to be shaped and refined according to specific social
and cultural frameworks that label the emotions and channel them
toward certain ends.92 This involves what is known in the sociological lit-
erature as “framing” and bridges the definitions of social reality given to
us by our assorted cultures and the emotional feelings and moral intuitions
we develop within those definitions.

Framing Intuitions
The sociologist Erving Goffman articulated the notion of framing to explain
how the social world influences an individual’s cognitive processes within
any given situation.93 His goal was not to describe how individuals think
but to explain how people within concrete situations “bracket” their pos-
sible understandings to interpreting the world through the relevant frame.
Upon meeting somebody, we try to define the potential interaction. If we
frame them as a potential business partner we will present ourselves dif-
ferently than if we frame the meeting as a one-time encounter. We inter-
pret their actions and statements through this frame and bracket off other
possible interpretations. The social rules for meeting business partners
effectively rule out all sorts of things we might do in a different situation:
yawn, flirt, interrupt, disclose personal information, or gossip about our
company secrets. Frames are a way of thinking about the local rules, eti-
quette, and norms that guide an interaction. They “rule out” potential
86 Moral Selves, Evil Selves

actions and interpretations while highlighting others. We take frames for

granted, noticing them primarily when norms get breached and people
have to work to “fix” a damaged interaction that is no longer going
according to the expected frame. Individuals manage their interactions
moment-by-moment according to the appropriate frame. Goffman put the
spotlight on their external importance; frames do not exist only in people’s
heads.94
Frames are “schemata of interpretation” that help people interpret the
events around them, and Goffman pointed out that accepted frames take
on a sacred character to the people who hold them.95 Frames are provided
by various social or cultural groups, often actively through “framing,”
attempts to get others to see the world through a particular lens.96 Frames
are, for our purposes, a good way to discuss the social patterning of the
informational assumptions97 people bring to their interpretations of situ-
ations, moral or otherwise. It is not enough to suggest that people look at
moral dilemmas and intuit or reason a judgment or randomly feel an
emotion; people bring a host of culturally shaped presuppositions with
them. These presuppositions may have idiosyncratic elements, but they
are socially shaped such that people with similar backgrounds tend to
interpret, or frame, situations similarly.
The sociological concept of frames can be translated into actual behavior
by drawing on the notion of “if/then” statements developed by a person-
ality psychologist, Walter Mischel:98 “Personality is better conceived as a
set of unique cognitive and affective variables that determine how people
construe the situation. People have chronic ways of interpreting and eval-
uating different situations, and it is these interpretations that influence
their behavior.”99 Each person has a “behavioral signature,” predispositions to
responding to situations that are not inflexible personality attributes, but
rather situation-specific ways of viewing and reacting to situations.100
We then have socially shaped personal frames that construe meaning,
and these interpretations involve judgments of the if/then variety. The
very way we interpret somebody’s words or gestures is vital for under-
standing how we will (or will not) react. Social actions only make sense
against a background of shared meanings. We do not need to reevaluate
each and every message we get; responses trigger if/then interpretations
within the situationally appropriate frame that, motivated by the accordant
emotion, direct our behavior. Interpretation is at the root of many social-
psychological traditions, including cognitive psychology and symbolic
interactionism. Linking frames to if/then behavioral heuristics allows us to
synthesize these various traditions.
What a focus on conscience needs to consider is how much framing
occurs outside of our second-order, conscious control.101 These meanings
 Processes of Conscience 87

and interpretations occur unconsciously; we rarely have to think about the

operation of our if/then statements, even if we can verbalize them. When
we ask somebody about their presuppositions they may tell us conscious
theories that only partially map onto these preconscious frames.102 We
develop theories of reality that involve hierarchical beliefs, principles, and
schemas that are, at root, the essence of our personality.103 We cannot always
explain the lenses through which we see the world; we just see the world.
The if/then approach helps make sense of what, at first, seems to be a
major analytical problem for personality psychology; namely, we do not act
the same across situations or over the course of our lives. If we simply had
stable personalities, we would expect greater consistency in others’ behavior
across time and situation than we actually observe. Numerous studies find
that, instead of acting consistently, we change depending on where we are
and who we are interacting with. I may be extroverted with my friends, but
quiet at work. I may be conscientious where my family is concerned, but
rather careless in public. Rather than just categorizing somebody as globally
neurotic or extraverted, we are better off figuring out how they see the
world in different situations. If/then statements are a way of capturing
the unconscious heuristics dictating how people will interpret a situation
(“IF a stranger approaches me with a mean look THEN I will run away”).
Imbuing people with one stable personality profile is too broad a brush
to understand the complexity of human behavior. Understanding how
cultures and groups frame situations and how those frames get internalized
and translated into expectancies for situated action is at the root of linking
macrosocial structures to microaction.104
Frames allow us to create a bridge between the discussion of conscience
and the discussion of worldviews from the last chapter. We can see the
importance of framing for triggering particular first-order moral reac-
tions,105 especially when there are multiple ways to present a moral issue.106
Our worldviews are made up of schematic frames linked to informational
assumptions that contribute to particular if/then action dispositions. The
social world is often ambiguous, especially with respect to possible moral
interpretations of actions and ideals; we develop what Janet Walker terms
“habits of moral interpretation,” formed early in life, that simultaneously
perceive and constitute the moral world.107 Moral action, she argues, does
not come from deliberative choice inasmuch as certain people feel certain
imperatives in certain situations. Conscience involves the particular con-
stellation of internalized worldviews and informational assumptions that
lead to particular imperatives or intuitions for particular people in par-
ticular situations. The study of conscience does not simply focus on what
any one person considers moral, though that is an important aspect. Any
action is potentially subject to moral scrutiny; so what matters are the
88 Moral Selves, Evil Selves

frames applied by the actor as well as by others who might judge that
action.
Political debates offer concrete examples of framing in action. Discourses
about, for example, the nature of abortion (“choice” vs. “life”) are intended
to conjure up a particular frame and draw on a morally tinged set of
informational assumptions that are suspected to lead to particular if/then
moral judgments. Likely, most Americans value both the importance of
giving people choice in their lives and supporting life. But the abortion
discourse appeals to one or the other value, rendering that interpretation
and its accordant sense of moral rightness or outrage as paramount.
Depending on how broadly we frame an issue, we can appeal to general
moral sentiments that make it seem as if only our side has the moral high
ground. The interesting social science issue is how different frames compete
for perfectly valid moral intuitions in the same person. Depending on the
framing of an issue, different moral emotions can be conjured forth, espe-
cially when somebody is unfamiliar with an issue. As we get informed
about issues, we build more complicated frames and develop informational
assumptions that link up to broader values, largely reflecting our Bright
Lights but potentially altering them. Informational assumptions are not
simply interchangeable with our broader moral principles, though they
are difficult to empirically disentangle.108
Values are the Brightest Lights, the most abstract principles that guide
the development of particular worldviews, frames, and if/then behavioral
predispositions. Values frame cognition, but the range of human values are
multiple, conflicting, and potentially ambiguous.109 Values are broad frames
that resonate with particular if/then reactions. Framing an issue along a value
of “life” (“benevolence,” in the values literature) might contradict—in a
specific case—with a value of “autonomy” or “choice,” depending on which
principle we prioritize; we will then tease out a particular moral judgment.
Certain words preconsciously register as more personally relevant, and if
tradeoffs are necessary, they will be given priority. But the range of human
values suggests that different frames can call up meaningful value-intuitions
in anyone, if we just frame an issue in terms that resonate with that person’s
informational assumptions. We all value, to some extent, personal freedom
and security; the political issue is how to juggle potential tradeoffs and
how to motivate voters for our side by appealing to these intuitions. This
is where informational assumptions play in, for example, whether someone
defines a fetus as a “person” or not.
Moral considerations are both different and take primacy from other
considerations we incorporate into our potential if/then procedures. For
example, take adolescents who commit crime. Changing formal sanctions
do not shift adolescents’ criminal behaviors nearly as much as shifts in their
 Processes of Conscience 89

own decisions about what is moral or not.110 Threatening heavier pun-

ishments will not deter crime nearly as much as creating an internal shift
toward adolescents framing such activities as immoral. This shift happens
most often when peers shift their interpretations about what constitutes
acceptable behavior, redefining certain previously acceptable actions as
immoral. Thus, new informational assumptions enter into the second-order,
then first-order, judgment processes such that adolescents decide to resist
behaviors or temptations they used to define as morally acceptable. The
same definitional process occurs with respect to corporate crime; people
who draw boundaries (Bright Lines) around certain sorts of activities as
immoral are more likely to refrain from those activities regardless of official
sanctions.111 For others, however, smaller threats meant they were more likely
to engage in questionable behaviors they had not fully decided were immoral.
Scholars disagree about the relative primacy of reasoning, intuition, and
broader frames in setting out how individuals’ moral minds operate. Haidt’s
valuable contribution is to offer psychologically sound explications of
classic philosophical principles most often associated with Hume, namely,
the often-quoted notion that “reason is a slave to the passions.” Marc
Hauser’s recent treatment goes through the philosophical dialogue at
length, ultimately ending up with an understanding similar to what I am
presenting, here; broader moral principles frame intuitions that in turn
lead to particular moral emotions that lead to moral judgments. Our
informational assumptions are important filters, as well, but they develop
over time in specific contexts through socialization into various groups
and identities, so their place in the moral judgment process reflects ongoing
development. Pinpointing whether principles or assumptions come first
for any specific judgment, viewed from the development of the person
over their life course, is at best an issue that needs more empirical explo-
ration and at worst a chicken-and-egg exercise. I am more interested in
the larger point; socialization leads to worldviews that can be seen as both
informational assumptions and broader, guiding moral principles, and
these constructs frame how we interpret specific situations and social
objects. This lets us situate the social intuitionist perspective within a
larger social understanding of the origin of these frames as well as lay the
groundwork for later incorporating them into a notion of the self, with
conscience as the pivot.
The discussion, to this point, runs the risk of suggesting that we are
mindlessly captive to our internalized if/then statements or that we respond
unthinkingly to others’ attempts to frame (or reframe) our understanding
of situations. This is an overly abstract interpretation112 and not a view I
am trying to defend. People are reflective about these issues and do not
mindlessly apply principles to situations without taking into account all
90 Moral Selves, Evil Selves

sorts of contextual issues.113 Neither emotion nor frames lead to triggers

that we unthinkingly apply to situations, though they influence them more
than popular (and social scientific) opinion often suggests. We can replace
these emotional intuitions with effort, over time, or override them and
behave according to more calculated, second-order conclusions.114 Haidt
suggests this process of change is more likely to occur within the context
of group interaction than alone,115 but the possibility of the lone person
in her room changing her moral intuitions is at least theoretically possible,
if empirically rare. The take-home point is that while we often invent rea-
sons (using Lawyer Logic) to justify emotional reactions, both processes
support—and potentially can alter—each other.116 The key is to focus on
a person in context and over time.
Thus, one goal for developing a social psychology of conscience is to
begin to specify a greater empirical disentangling of the relationship among
principles and values (Bright Lights), informational assumptions, frames,
and individual if/then behavioral predispositions. I am offering a provisional
ordering of these concepts, consistent with the dual-process model but
situated within a sociological focus on the influences of social structure
and culture on individuals’ interpretations. But it is intentionally a pro-
visional ordering; my broader goal is to identify the important factors in
the process for future researchers to delve into more deeply. Intuitions are
vital clues to our larger informational assumptions, but they are not the
entire package, nor are they often enough to handle complex moral issues.

Moral judgments are often more than intuitions; they involve concepts about
different groups, social relationships, perspectives on society, and distinctions
between when rights should be applied and when they should be denied
…[such] reactions are complex and involve reasoning about rights, fairness,
and welfare, as well as about the injustices of the dominance and power
exerted by one group on another.117

The actual process is muddier than can be properly captured, here, especially
when considering that we can, over time, reconsider our intuitive responses
and even alter them. An interesting research question involves why we so
often fail to do so and are content with our already developed worldviews
and so rarely challenge them. The larger point, motivating this book, is
that we cannot meaningfully talk about human beings without engaging
this moral dimension. To be human is precisely to take moral stands and
have moral reactions to potentially moral issues.
From a sociological perspective, we become settled in the frames we use
to interpret the world around us largely as we become more embedded in
sets of particular relationships and social positions. Part of our if/then
 Processes of Conscience 91

automatic and considered response processes involve our particular social

identities and the situations that we act within. These identities and sit-
uations, as we will discuss, become largely patterned in our lives. Considering
the life course as a whole adds a notion of time to the discussions about moral
processing overviewed, above, issues I will return to in Chapters 8 and 9.
Cultures exist before new members internalize them, and their accordant
worldviews (informational assumptions and frames) are encountered dif-
ferentially depending on an individual’s age, experiences, and circumstances.
Any snapshot of a particular moral judgment by a particular person runs
the risk of obscuring both general patterns in judgments by groups of
people and the notion that the person being studied is, herself, someplace
along a personal life journey that influences that particular decision. That
journey has personally significant signposts (Bright Lights) and forbidden
side-trips (Bright Lines).
Society and culture exist before we do; conscience attempts to build a
workable sense of coherence—partially illusory, I will suggest—among
competing frames and moral claims. Conscience is a constant interplay
between potentially conflicting, socially shaped first- and second-order
judgments made within the ongoing human life course. Forming a place
in moral space is part of being human, but it happens as part of a personal
life-project, not simply according to a short-term, isolated application of
abstract moral principles.

Conclusion and Transition

Haidt’s social intuitionist model anchors the situational aspects of this
model of conscience as a dual-level process. This book aims at expanding
and developing the social intuitionist model in two directions: first, by
offering additional nuance about the structural and cultural forces that
pattern the development of moral intuitions, and second, by suggesting
how these intuitions are vital for conscience, the self’s moral core. Typically,
research on moral judgment deals with abstract, one-time dilemmas; a social
psychology of conscience can build on those findings toward a model of
the actor as dealing with multiple situations, identities, life-domains, ideals,
and future plans. Our intuitions serve as important guides for these
choices, while they also channel our explanations if we act in ways contrary
to our grander moral ideals.
As we act, our minds are motivated by two streams of motivation: current
sensory data from the environment and stored representations of events,
assumptions the brain develops through its experiences.118 I have referred
to these as Bright Lights and Bright Lines, socialized understandings that
determine how we perceive and react to the social world. Emotions fuel
92 Moral Selves, Evil Selves

our actions, and different signals will compel different responses, depending
on cultural and situational norms. But emotions are linked to informational
assumptions and to frames.
Some emotions are more under voluntary control than others; we may
feel shame based on things we cannot control, such as where our parents
or even our ancestors come from. These negative feelings, whether due to
our own actions or because people or groups that we align ourselves with
do poorly (like a sports team or political party), signal a crossing of a Bright
Line. Feelings of pride, on the other hand, might need to be downplayed to
be polite in a particular encounter, but suggest we have taken strides toward
a Bright Light, or successfully refrained from crossing a Bright Line. The
feelings a particular situation calls forth implicate our first-order processing,
monitoring situations through filters of socially shaped worldviews and
informational assumptions. Feelings do not always involve moral issues,
obviously, but anything we say or do is at least susceptible to moral eval-
uation by us or others.
The tools are in place for an abstract understanding of morality, cog-
nition, and feeling. We have a sense of how we judge ourselves and others
and how society shapes the assumptions underlying those judgments in
patterned ways. Let us move from abstract definitions into a more concrete
realm. Morality is central to how people think and perceive the world. If
this is the case, why do people so often act in immoral ways, or at least fail
to live up to their moral standards? Chapters 5 and 6 deal with this potential
conundrum on two different levels: first, how social situations influence
what we do, and second, how our social groups shape our perceptions. What
we think (and feel) tells us something about what we will do, but not as
much as we popularly believe.