Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality by Darcia Narvaez

Author:Darcia Narvaez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

MORAL DESCRIPTION AND PRESCRIPTION

Everyone has morality—that is, everyone aims for what she perceives to be good in the moment. In comparison to a well-formed self, a malformed self just sees the “good” differently. The personal beliefs a person has about the social world plays a large role in perception of the “good.” Those with limited social experience in the evolutionary sense (evolved developmental niche) develop misconstruals of the good life. Instead of openhearted relational attunement, they “know” distance and distrust. What feels rewarding (good and right) is quite different from our human heritages.

Each mindset is an attractor state whose pathway is lubricated by experience. For any situation, particular mindsets are more attractive to an individual because he has been there before or has found them satisfying. They seem to offer the right thing to be or do, whether downgrading to self-preservational aggression or upgrading to communal imagination. Poorly tuned emotions can lead an individual to find pleasure in reestablishing less-than-optimal situations. For example, a child used to chaotic life will try to recreate it in the foster home. A man used to feeling safe with dominant status will impose it wherever he goes. A woman raised with a borderline parent will set up rejecting relationships in adulthood. These are subconscious and emotionally driven actions. In any case, “the psychic reflection of doing ‘the right thing biologically’ [is] feelings of satisfaction and pleasure” that come from predictability, especially in the case of habitual stress reactivity (Panksepp, 1998, p. 118).

Am I arguing that there is one way to be moral? No, there are multiple subjective ways (Table 8.6 maps different ethics.) The three orientations are subjectively “true”; that is, they feel “right” and “good” when activated. But across time, engagement and communal imagination are our human heritage. They are the normative human telos if we attend to basic needs and flourishing. Nevertheless, the attitudes and behaviors of the safety ethic are generally not included as moral orientations in moral theories, except as viciousness in virtue theory, and so the justifications for such behaviors by agents are reinterpreted as outside of morality. The view here is that the different mindsets, including safety, vicious, and detached, are phenomenologically felt as moral positions. So for example, the criminal feels justified in assaulting someone who “looked at him wrong,” which was taken as disrespect and thereby injustice, triggering a tit-for-tat safety ethic. Influenced by a treacherous Iago, Shakespeare’s Othello felt justified in murdering his wife for her supposed infidelity because his honor/pride/sense of superiority was at stake.

However, when we remain in a safety ethic, even when we know better, when we nurse it and knowingly use imagination for safety ends, we cease being a human self to others. We stubbornly stay out of relation, killing part of ourselves. In indigenous cultures, losing the ability to recognize the selfhood of other, even non-human beings, is a type of soul blindness. And when one loses the ability to see the “soul-stuff of the other souled selves that inhabit the cosmos,” one loses oneself (Kohn, 2013, p.

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