How We Got Our Morals
Does morality develop from innate templates in our brain or is it a social construct? Like a fiddler on the roof, can we balance the disparate takes on the development of morality to form a coherent story? Ideas from Michel Foucault, Friedrich Nietzsche, Noam Chomsky, and Peter Kropotkin
As you walk down a street, brooding on ways to make ends meet, you notice someone dropping a 100 dollar bill; you pick it up and return it.
While hurrying to an important meeting, you cross an elderly person staggering while carrying a bag; you turn back and offer to help.
After the Nazi occupation in Poland, Maximilian Kobe, a Franciscan friar, was put to the Auschwitz concentration camp for refusing to become a mouthpiece for the German forces. There, he offered to sacrifice himself, in exchange for the life of a man, unknown to him. After two weeks of starvation, he was spared by a lethal injection.
From the everyday to the heroic, moral acts transcend the individual beyond the narrow confines of self-interest. The members of a group performing this kind of deeds typically benefit their comrades, but, like Maximilian Kobe, could also suffer the kind of…
