Review article on the evolution of morality discussions

A wide ranging article by Jonathan Haidt & Selin Kesebir on Morality. Excerpt from the conclusion:
"The long debate over the relative roles of “emotion” and “cognition” seems to have given way to an emerging consensus on the first principle: “intuitive primacy but not dictatorship.” New discoveries about emotion, intuition, and the ways that brains respond to stories about moral violations have led to a pronounced shift away from information processing models and toward dual process models. In these models, most (but not all) of the action is in the automatic processes, which are cognitive processes that are usually affectively valenced. The second principle, “moral thinking is for social doing,” reflects the growing recognition that much of human cognition was shaped by natural selection for life in intensely social groups. Human cognition is socially situated and socially functional, and a great deal of that functionality can be captured by viewing people as intuitive politicians and prosecutors, not as intuitive scientists. The third principle, “morality binds and builds,” reflects the emergence of multi-level selection theory and of gene-culture co-evolutionary theory. Groups may not be significant units of selection for the great majority of other species, but once human beings developed the capacity for cumulative cultural learning, they invented many ways to solve the free-rider problem, increase the entitativity of their groups, and increase the importance of group-level selection pressures relative to individual-level pressures (which are always present and powerful).

Many other narratives could be told about the last century of moral psychology, and any narrative leaves out inconvenient exceptions in order to create a coherent and readable story. The particular narrative told in this chapter will probably be rejected by psychologists who were already united by a competing narrative. For example, many cognitive developmentalists believe the redemption occurred forty years ago when Lawrence Kohlberg (1969) vanquished the twin demons of behaviorism and psychoanalysis. Moral psychology, like any human endeavor, is influenced by moral psychology, which means that there is often a tribal or team aspect to it.
It remains to be seen whether the intuitionist team replaces the rationalist team and gets to write the history of moral psychology that graduate students will learn in 20 years.

For today’s young researchers, however, this chapter closes with three suggestions, each meant to be analogous to the 19th century American journalist Horace Greeley’s advice to “go west young man!” "
Jonathan Haidt's home page here.