Abstract
This paper defends a cognitive theory of those emotional reactions which motivate and constrain moral judgment. On this theory, moral emotions result from mental faculties specialized for automatically producing feelings of approval or disapproval in response to mental representations of various social situations and actions. These faculties are modules in Fodor's sense, since they are informationally encapsulated, specialized, and contain innate information about social situations. The paper also tries to shed light on which moral modules there are, which of these modules we share with non-human primates, and on the (pre-)history and development of this modular system from pre-humans through gatherer-hunters and on to modern (i.e. arablist) humans. The theory is not, however, meant to explain all moral reasoning. It is plausible that a non-modular intelligence at least sometimes play a role in conscious moral thought. However, even non-modular moral reasoning is initiated and constrained by moral emotions having modular sources.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Baillargeon, R., Spelke, E.S. and Wasserman, S. (1985), 'Object Permanence in Five-Month-Old Infants', Cognition 20, pp. 191–208.
Barnard, A. (1999), 'Modern Hunter-Gatherers and Early Symbolic Culture', in R. Dunbar, C. Knight and C. Power, eds., The Evolution of Culture: An Interdisciplinary View, Edinburgh, U.K.: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 50–68.
Bates, D.G. and Fratkin, E.M. (1999) Cultural Anthropology, 2nd edition, Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
Boehm, C. (1999), Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.
Bolender, J. (2001), 'A Two-Tiered Cognitive Architecture for Moral Reasoning', Biology and Philosophy 16, pp. 339–356.
Cashdan, E. (1989), 'Hunters and Gatherers: Economic Behavior in Bands', in S. Plattner, ed., Economic Anthropology, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 21–48.
Chien, A.J. (1996), 'Why the Mind May Not Be Modular', Minds and Machines 6, pp. 1–32.
Chomsky, N. (1965), Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Chomsky, N. (1982), Lectures on Government and Binding, Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Foris Publications.
Chomsky, N. (1987), 'Language: Chomsky's Theory', in R.L. Gregory, ed., The Oxford Companion to the Mind, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 419–421.
Chomsky, N. (1988), Language and Problems of Knowledge, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press
Cohen, M.N. and Armelagos, G.J. (1984), Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture, NewYork: Academic Press.
Cosmides, L. (1985), Deduction or Darwinian Algorithms?: An Explanation of the “Elusive” Con-tent Effect on the Wason Selection Test, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Ph.D. dissertation.
Cosmides, L. and Tooby, J. (1992), 'Cognitive Adaptations for Social Exchange', in J.H. Barkow, L. Cosmides and J. Tooby, eds., The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, New York: Oxford University Press.
Cosmides, L. and Tooby, J. (1994), 'Beyond Intuition and Instinct Blindness: Toward an Evolutionarily Rigorous Cognitive Science', Cognition 50, pp. 41–77.
Cowie, F. (1999), What's Within: Nativism Reconsidered, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cummins, D.D. (1996), 'Dominance Hierarchies and the Evolution of Human Reasoning', Minds and Machines 6, pp. 463–480.
Dunbar, R.I.M. (1992), 'Neocortex Size as a Constraint on Group Size in Primates', Journal of Human Evolution 20, pp. 469–493.
Dunbar, R.I.M. (1993), 'Co-evolution of Neocortical Size, Group Size, and Language in Humans', Behavioural and Brain Sciences 16, pp. 681–735.
Dunbar, R.I.M. (1996), Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, London and Boston: Faber and Faber.
Elman, J.L., Bates, E.A., Johnson, M.H., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Parisi, D. and Plunkett, K. (1996), Re-thinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development, Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press.
Fetzer, J.H. (1990), 'Evolution, Rationality, and Testability', Synthese 82, pp. 423–439.
Fiske, A.P. (1991), Structures of Social Life: The Four Elementary Forms of Social Relationships, New York: Free Press.
Fiske, A.P. (1992), 'The Four Elementary Forms of Sociality: Framework for a Unified Theory of Social Relations', Psychological Review 99, pp. 689–723.
Fiske, A.P. (1993), 'Social Errors in Four Cultures: Evidence about Universal Forms of Social Relations', Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 24, pp. 463–494.
Fiske, A.P. (1995), 'Social Schemata for Remembering People: Relationships and Person Attributes that Affect Clustering in Free Recall of Acquaintances', Journal of Quantitative Anthropology 5, pp. 305–324.
Fiske, A.P. and Haslam, N. (1997), 'The Structure of Social Substitutions: A Test of the Relational Models Theory', European Journal of Social Psychology 27, pp. 725–729.
Fiske, A.P., Haslam, N. and Fiske, S.T. (1991), 'Confusing One Person with Another: What Errors Reveal about the Elementary Forms of Social Relations', Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 60(5), pp. 656–674.
Fodor, J. (1983), The Modularity of Mind, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Fodor, J. (1998), In Critical Condition: Polemical Essays on Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Mind, Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press.
Fodor, J. (2000), The Mind Doesn't Work that Way: The Scope and Limits of Computational Psychology, Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press.
Gladwell, M. (2000), The Tipping Point, Boston, New York, and London: Little, Brown and Company.
Goodman, N. (1967), 'The Epistemological Argument', Synthese 17, pp. 23–28.
Gould, S.J. (1993), Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History, New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company.
Gould, S.J. and Vrba, E. (1981), 'Exaptation: A Missing Term in the Science of Form', Paleobiology 8, pp. 4–15.
Hardin, G. (1988), 'Commons Failing', New Scientist 120(1635), p. 76.
Haslam, N. (1997), 'Four Grammars for Primate Social Relations', in J. Simpson and D. Kenrick, eds., Evolutionary Social Psychology, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Hume, D. (1983), An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett. First published in 1751.
Jackendoff, R. (1992), Languages of the Mind: Essays on Mental Representation, Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press.
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1992), Beyond Modularity: A Developmental Perspective on Cognitive Science, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Leacock, E. (1978), 'Women's Status in Egalitarian Society: Implications for Social Evolution', Current Anthropology 19. Reprinted in Current Anthropology 33, Supplement (1992); and in J. Gowdy, ed., Limited Wants, Unlimited Means, (1998), Washington, D.C. and Covelo, CA: Island Press, pp. 139-164.
Lee, Richard B. (1998), 'Art, Science, or Politics? The Crisis in Hunter-Gatherer Studies', in J. Gowdy, ed., Limited Wants, Unlimited Means, Washington, D.C. and Covelo, CA: Island Press.
Lyons, J. (1991), Chomsky, 3rd ed., London: Fontana Press.
McGinn, C. (1997), Ethics, Evil, and Fiction, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Premack, D. and Premack, A.J. (1994), 'Moral Belief: Form versus Content', in L.A. Hirschfeld and S.A. Gelman, eds. 1, Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Putnam, H. (1967), 'The “Innateness Hypothesis” and Explanatory Models in Linguistics', Synthese 17, pp. 12–22. Reprinted in H. Putnam, 1975, Mind, Language and Reality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pylyshyn, Z. (1980), 'Computation and Cognition: Issues in the Foundations of Cognitive Science', Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3, pp. 111–132.
Sahlins, M. (1998), 'The Original Affluent Society', in J. Gowdy, ed., Limited Wants, Unlimited Means, Washington, D.C. and Covelo, CA: Island Press, pp. 5–41. Originally published in Sahlins, M. (1972), Stone Age Economics, New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
Slater, A. and Morrison, V. (1991), 'Visual Attention and Memory at Birth', in M.J. Weiss and P. Velazo, eds., Newborn Attention, Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Smith, S. and Young, P.D. (1998), Cultural Anthropology, Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Spelke, E.S. (1991), 'Physical Knowledge in Infancy: Reflections on Piaget's Theory', in S. Carey and R. Gelman, eds., Epigenesis of Mind: Studies in Biology and Culture, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 133–169.
Spelke, E.S., Breinlinger, K., Macomber, J. and Jacobsen, K. (1992), 'Origins of Knowledge', Psychological Review 99, pp. 605–632.
Sperber, D. (1994), 'The Modularity of Thought and the Epidemiology of Representations', in L. A. Hirschfeld and S.A. Gelman, eds., Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stromswold, K. (2000), 'The Cognitive Neuroscience of Language Acquisition', in M. Gazzaniga, ed., The New Cognitive Neurosciences, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
van Lawick-Goodall, H. and van Lawick-Goodall, J. (1970), Innocent Killers, Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
de Waal, F.B.M. (1991), 'The Chimpanzee's Sense of Social Regularity and Its Relation to the Human Sense of Justice', American Behavioral Scientist 34, pp. 335–349.
Wiessner, P. (1982), 'Risk, Reciprocity and Social Influences on !Kung San Economics', in E. Lea-cock and R. Lee, eds.,Politics and History in Band Societies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; and Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, pp. 61–84.
Wilson, D.S. and Sober, E. (1994), Re-Introducing Group Selection to the Human Behavioral Sciences, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17, pp. 585–608.
Woodburn, J. (1981), 'Egalitarian Societies', Malinowski Memorial Lecture given at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Reprinted in J. Gowdy, ed., Limited Wants, Unlimited Means, 1998, Washington, D.C. and Covelo, California: Island Press, pp. 87-110.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Bolender, J. The Genealogy of the Moral Modules. Minds and Machines 13, 233–255 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022902510039
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022902510039