The Two-Front Forever War: Moral Nativism and Its Critics.

Abstract

For over a century, developmental psychologists have debated whether morality is innate (Allen & Bickhard, 2013; Antipoff, 1928; Bloom, 2013; Piaget, 1932; Tremblay et al., 1999; Turiel, 2015a). Before the era of developmental psychology, philosophers debated for centuries whether humans are, by nature, good or evil (Hobbes, 1651; Plato, 1998; Rousseau, 1762). The developmental debate about moral nativism resurfaced in the late 2000s, after the publication of studies that, to many scholars, demonstrated morally relevant abilities in infants (Hamlin et al., 2007; Warneken & Tomasello, 2006; for discussion, see Dahl, 2019; Hamlin, 2013; Thompson, 2012; Smetana, 2018). These claims in turn informed cognitive, evolutionary, and social psychological accounts of morality (Graham et al., 2013; Haidt, 2012; Haidt & Joseph, 2008; Hauser, 2007). While the terms of the debate have shifted – “innate,” “core,” “first draft,” and “natural,” to mention a few examples – the basic question of moral nativism remains: Do some parts of human morality emerge independently of learning and experience? After a century of data collection, we might expect that moral developmentalists would have settled this question and moved on. Yet, moral developmentalists have not settled this question, and Carpendale et al. (this issue, DOI 10.1159/000517221) remind us why. Alongside the empirical debate – about whether morality is innate – runs a second, paradigmatic debate that interferes with the empirical one (Witherington, 2015). That paradigmatic debate is about whether it even makes sense to separate morality into those components that are innate and those that are not. Carpendale et al. (this issue), among others, reject the dichotomy between innate and noninnate characteristics, and they propose instead that biological contributions are inseparable from environmental contributions to development (see also Allen & Bickhard, 2013; Gottlieb, 2007; Lickliter & Honeycutt, 2010; Piaget, 1932; Spencer et al., 2009). We may therefore call the moral nativism debate a two-front war: moral nativists argue both against scholars who propose that morality is learned rather than