The conflict that fierces within is an instinctive part of all of us.Who is to say what is right or wrong ? It is the war between good and bad, hate or love and much more.It starts the very day we open our eyes and enter this world and it continues until the day we finally close those eyes and leave the world. What is the driving force behind this which makes us to choose the best. Personally I feel that it is our
moral which tells us about all.Now, where do moral
rules come ? Some philosophers say it comes from reasoning. From God say believers now biologists are trying to unveil this puzzle scientifically. Earlier it was believed that, natural selection and the survival of the fittest may seem to support the most selfish values. But for animals that live in groups, selfishness must be strictly curbed or there will be no advantage to social living. In a series of recent articles and books, Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist at the University of Verginia, has been constructing a broad evolutionary view of morality that traces its connections both to religion and to politics.
Haidt began his research career by probing the emotion of disgust. Testing people''s reactions to situations like that of hungry family that cooked and ate its pet dog after it had become roadkill, he explored the phenomenonof moral dumbfounding- when people feel strongly that something is wrong but cannot explain why.
Dumbfounding led him to view morality as driven by two separate mental systems :
1. ancient
2. modern.
The ancient system , which he calls moral intuition, is based on the emotion-laden moral behaviors.
The modern system- he calls it moral judgment-came after language.
Emotional responses of moral
intuition occur instantaneously.Whereas moral
judgment comes later as the conscious mind develops a plausible rationalization for the decition already arrived at through moral intuition.
Moral
dumbfounding occurs when moral judgment fails to come up with a convincing explanation for what moral intuition has decided.
He described the disgust evoked by such a scene as allied to notions of physical and religious purity. Purity a moral system that promotes the goals of controlling selfish desires and acting in a religiously approved way.Notions of disgust and purity are common outside the West.
During his visit to India he saw that people recognized a much wider moral domain. Indians were concerned with integrating the community through rituals and committed to concepts of religious purity as a way to restrain behavior.
Haidt believes that religion has played an important role in human evolution by strengthening the cohesion proved by the moral systems.
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