Human Superpowers of Moral Reasoning

Ultrasocial humans self-organize through moral systems

We morally judge ourselves and others constantly. We’re approving or disapproving of what we feel, think, do, and imagine, and do the same with other people. Most of those approvals/disapprovals are connected to moral standards, which our personalities and cultural surrounds cocreate in our adaptive unconscious to guide us throughout life. 

Eight billion people on earth cooperate and self-organize every day. We are the only ultra-social primate species, cooperating and creating in ways vastly more complex than other creatures. This cooperating and creating is made possible by our innate moral instincts. Moral drives to feel accepted by self and group mean craving approval and fearing disapproval. We’re programmed to comply with our cultural moral standards and feel a shame emotion if we violate them. Moral systems vary culture to culture, individual to individual, but they are all built on shared genetically determined foundations of fair/unfair, care/harm, loyalty/betrayal, respectful of authority/subversion of authority, sacred/profane, and liberation/oppression. 

Humans have two distinct but interconnected moral reasoning systems.

• Reflexive moral reasoning is our instantaneous judgement instinctively supported by our unconscious. An angry patron humiliates a server in the table next to you and you disapprove of him being unfair and causing unnecessary harm (he’s violating your care/harm and fair/unfair moral foundations). “What a jerk!” you say to your husband.
• Conscious-discriminative moral reasoning is consciously noticing moral disapproval and cross-validating it with core values. As you notice yourself disapproving of the hostile patron, your core value of having compassionate understanding for everyone leads you to wonder if that customer has some distress that needs attention. “I wonder if he’s in some kind of crisis?” you say to your husband.

Conscious-discriminative moral reasoning requires productive self-awareness—the gold standard of all therapy, coaching, and change work. Productive self-awareness of reflexive moral reasoning can observe our tendency to defend reflexive judgments (“That guy is such a jerk for yelling at the waiter! I’ll bet he’s always like that.”) and consider other data (“That guy might have a serious problem.”), adding a deeper dimension to moral reasoning which helps our interior moral systems grow and mature.

Try noticing your approvals and disapprovals today. See if there are any patterns of reaction that stand out to you. If you compassionately ask yourself how you feel about those patterns, you are integrating your reflexive and conscious-deliberative moral reasoning systems and accelerating growth on your moral line of development.