So morality does not have a basis in reason?
There are many different possible ways to go in answering that question. For one thing, you could be asking about morality as
it should be, or moral dispositions
in reality. The prevailing idea of moral psychologists up until recently has been that people are basically rational in their moral judgments, and that this is something we learn how to do in our childhood development. However, the tide is turning more toward a view that morality is generally based on intuitions-- that we like to think of ourselves as scientists or judges, carefully weighing the evidence before coming to conclusions, but in actuality we are more like press secretaries or lawyers who are simply reporting or justifying decisions which have already been made without our knowing it. For those looking at this process through an evolutionary lens, the idea is to try and find where exactly those intuitions have come from-- is there something in the environment in which we lived 100,000 years ago which might have predisposed us toward thinking about morality in a certain way?
The psychologist Jonathan Haidt endorses what he called the Social Intuition Model (SIM) of morality, which basically says that most of our moral judgments by far are based on intuition, and that moral reasoning comes in mainly when we A) have the opportunity and the inclination to reflect privately to ourselves, or B) are in the process of trying to convince others of something we've already concluded. He says this is the reason why people so often butt heads when they're trying to persuade someone else of a moral viewpoint-- they don't realize that their own position came from their intuitions in the first place, and so did the other person's, so trying to use arguments to change their mind isn't going to be very effective. There's a saying that "You can't reason a person out of something they didn't reason themselves into in the first place," which is true to a great extent but obviously not completely....it is, of course, possible to argue people out of their positions sometimes, but it usually happens only over a long period of time and/or when the topic is not something to which they have great emotional ties.
Haidt says our moral intuitions can be differentiated into five domains:
1) reciprocity and fairness
2) aversion to suffering
3) respect for hierarchy
4) ingroup vs. outgroup
5) purity and pollution
...and that if your moral concerns lie mainly in different domains than the person you're trying to argue with, then you're not going to get very far because you're simply not building on the same ground in terms of what is fundamentally important. He describes liberals in the U.S. as being more concerned with domains 1 and 2, for example, and conservatives as caring more about 3-5. It's not that either group are only partially moral, but rather that their concerns of
how to be moral are founded on different intuitions. For Haidt, morality is both evolved and encultured-- we evolved to have these different domains in the first place, but our enculturation determines which ones we are more likely to emphasize.
It's humbling to think that perhaps we're not as rational as we like to think we are when it comes to moral judgments, but at the same time it might help people to communicate better if they can come to understand why arguing with others about morality can feel like bashing your head against a brick wall.
On the July 25, 2005 episode of The Daily Show, liberal host Jon Stewart tried in vain to convince conservative U. S. Senator Rick Santorum that banning gay marriage was an injustice. Quickly realizing the futility of this effort, Stewart remarked, “It is so funny; you know what’s so interesting about this is ultimately you end up getting to this point, this crazy stopping point where literally we can’t get any further. I don’t think you’re a bad dude, I don’t think I’m a bad dude, but I literally can’t convince you.”
-- Haidt & Graham, "When Morality Opposes Justice," pg. 12