The Art of World-Making by Harry D. Gould

Author:Harry D. Gould
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

The shared norms and institutions of a moral community constitute the human “nest” that makes moral communities beneficial in an evolutionary sense (see also Wilson 2002). But the building blocks in Haidt’s evolutionary story are emotions. Our emotions may help us, as Hume argued, to fashion moral communities. But the success of these communities also alters us and makes us capable of feeling the necessary things. It is in this sense, the moral psychologists argue, that our emotional capacities are themselves evolutionary adaptations.

The synthesis of moral psychology with evolutionary arguments makes it seem that ethical systems rest on building blocks. So does Habermas’s notion of communicative rationality. And the final chapter of World of Our Making, in its focus on judgment, connects these pieces together into a general account of moral systems. When we understand all the building blocks – when we understand all the parts – then it appears that we understand everything necessary for ethical systems. We have “solved” the problem of ethical origins. The psychological proponents of MFT appear to make just such an argument.

But this misconstrues what ethical systems do. We are accustomed to thinking of obligations as things that, if they exist, constrain our behavior. So we must either prove or disprove their existence. Yet Onuf (1989) helps us to conceive instead of ethical systems – not just the capacity for moral judgment, but ethical systems as they operate socially – in a very different way: as solutions to a problem that we, as social scientists, didn’t know we had.

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