The Social Animal

CHAPTER 18 MORALITY

ERICA HAD NEVER SEEN A HOTEL CORRIDOR LINED WITH sleeve talkers before. She got to the top floor of the Parabola overlooking Central Park in New York, and as she left the elevator she saw bodyguards astride doorways up and down the hall, looking apathetically at one another and occasionally talking into their sleeves for scheduling updates. Inside the suites there were Saudi princes, Russian oligarchs, African despots, and Chinese billionaires, and each had a retinue of jar-headed muscle types waiting outside the room for prestige and protection.

A hotel concierge led Erica from the elevator to her own head-of-state suite, oddly called the India Suite. In the manner of a eunuch crouching before divinity, he ushered her into a complex of rooms four or five times the size of her childhood apartments. It was like Ralph Lauren’s own personal heaven—a vast Anglophilic expanse with walnut paneling, various fireplaces with great stone hearths, English club chairs sprayed around alcoves, a large marble chess table in the corner, his-and-her showers in the bathroom suite in case you got the urge to shampoo in one and condition in the other. She wandered around the complex in a sort of wide-eyed disbelief, wondering things like “What? No trout stream?”

The concierge was on the wrong side of the service Laffer curve. At certain top-end facilities, the waiters and concierge types are at such a heightened state of attending to your every need that the more they do for you, the less convenient your life becomes. They refill your coffee cup after every sip so you have to remix sugar and cream just to keep it even. They brush down your jacket just as you’re trying to put on your coat. In this case, the concierge insisted on trying to unpack Erica’s suitcase and get her wireless service for her computer. Erica practically had to Taser the guy to get him to go away.

This was all the doing of her host, the man she called Mr. Make-Believe. She’d followed this guy’s career for years on the covers of business magazines, and when they’d met at a charity event he’d asked her to join his board of directors.

Mr. Make-Believe took a special interest in Erica, summoning her frequently, consulting with her earnestly, and even putting her on his Christmas-box list. Every year he sent a giant box of goodies to his closest friends, including things like laptops, pretentious biographies, Moroccan duvet covers, antique Venetian prints, and whatever other lavish geegaws illuminated his eclectic good taste.

Mr. Make-Believe operated on a world-historical scale. He’d started out with nothing in a dysfunctional southern Illinois suburb, and he’d turned himself into the perfect master-of-the-universe, graying-at-the-temples, polo-playing, charity-hosting, six-foot-one-inch executive man.

His motto was Never Think Like An Employee, and from some phenomenally early age he had just assumed he would own and run whatever organization he was a part of. He started his business career in college, busing students to Fort Lauderdale for spring break. Decades later, capping a long series of acquisitions, he had bought a major airline and put himself at the head, but he seemed to spend a good deal of his time posing for Christmas cards atop the Matterhorn, negotiating to buy prominent European soccer teams, making the society pages while attending charity performances of Dante’s Inferno on behalf of childhood-diabetes research, and attending Formula 1 races with his five perfect sons: Chip, Rip, Tip, Bip, and Lip.

Mr. Make-Believe was incapable of sitting still. He performed the slightest gesture in the manner of one who believes he is being watched admiringly by God. He studied photographs of JFK, and had spent hours in front of the mirror perfecting the one-thousand-yards-in-the-distance Man-of-Destiny stare. Yet every few minutes, a sort of wide-eyed laugh would break out of him, as if he couldn’t quite believe the fantastic life he was leading. It was sort of like watching Dennis the Menace wake up every few minutes and discover that he’s the pope.

He had a free day between meetings of the Aspen Strategy Group and the Trilateral Commission, so he’d invited Erica to come by for a consultation. Every year he put his goals for his airline on a single sheet of paper, and he wanted Erica to help him decide which priorities should make the list and which shouldn’t—improve online check-in or revamp employee–health benefit options; replace the CFO or reduce air slots to the upper Midwest. Getting her installed in this suite was one of his characteristic acts of oppressive hospitality.

They lunched in her suite because Mr. Make-Believe thought he was too famous to dine uninterrupted in the restaurant downstairs. He ordered wine from the Russian River Valley and obscure crackers from Portugal, showing the kind of discernment that Erica found annoying—like a push-up bra of good taste. They talked about the corporate mission statement, but also Chinese currency values, wind energy, yoga, lacrosse, and his love for books about heroes who die at the end—the Robert Jordan canon, he called it.

Erica had left the bedroom door open even though this was a business lunch. She let her shoes fall off her feet and moved them about on the carpet with her stockinged feet. She was sort of entranced by the guy. They both tapped their fingers nervously as they talked. And it really wasn’t the aridity of her own marriage at that point or her profound loneliness that made her sleep with him that day. It was mostly the novelty of having sex with a Forbes-cover boy and the excitement of having an experience she would always remember.

If there was any deeper longing she felt toward Mr. Make-Believe, it was her old fantasy of being part of some headline-grabbing power couple—part of some dynamic tycoon duo who would complement each other’s skills—the F. Scott and Zelda of the corporate world.

Their lunch meeting went on for about two hours. He finally put the moves on her with his piety. She was his most-valued advisor, he told her as they stood close in the living room. His second most-valued advisor, he continued, was the priest who had been ministering him for thirty-five years. Through him, Mr. Make-Believe had become active in Catholic Charities, the Knights of Columbus, the Papal Foundation, and various other bigwig Catholic groups. It was characteristic of this fellow that he would talk about his service to the Vatican in order to get between a married woman’s legs. He did not see himself as a guy who played by normal rules.

Erica let it be known by her body language that she was his for the taking, and as a matter of principle, Mr. Make-Believe could not let any opportunity for taking go unseized.

Shame

Years after, when she’d see his face on the cover of Forbes she’d allow herself a smile at her one episode of adultery. But on the night after it happened, her feelings were different.

The sex itself was nothing. Literally nothing. Just motions without any reverberations. But an hour or so after he left, she felt a strange sensation. It felt as though her insides were collapsing in on themselves. It came across her slowly at a business dinner as a background ache and then sliced sharpest, like being punctured by a blade, when she was alone back in the suite. She literally doubled over in pain, sitting there in a chair. She eventually realized it was self-hatred, shame, and revulsion. That night, she felt rancid in every way. Thoughts and images swarmed across her brain, not only of that afternoon’s event, but also randomly associated terrible moments from her past. Her remorse seethed, and she could do nothing to will it away.

Brain-befogged, in the darkest hours of the night, she found herself thrashing in bed, punching the pillow, sitting up, and then throwing herself back down with a thump. She found herself groaning out loud in a sort of foggy-headed agony. She found herself on her feet, walking around the rooms, rushing over to the minibar in the kitchen and opening little bottles of scotch, which had no soothing effect, since they were so small. She wasn’t really afraid of getting caught. She wasn’t even afraid of any possible consequences. At this stage in her life, she didn’t feel God’s presence or God’s judgment. She didn’t even think the word “guilt” applied to this storm. It was just pain, which would be replaced the next day, after a few hours of sleep with a dull lassitude and a general feeling of vulnerability. For the next several days, her emotions were all on the surface. She listened to depressing Tom Waits music. She couldn’t concentrate on work during the plane ride home but read a Faulkner novel instead. She was bruised and tender for weeks, and slightly different forever. She never committed adultery again, and the mere idea of it filled her with an intense and unthinking aversion.

Moral Sentiments

The traditional thing to say about this episode is that Erica had succumbed to selfish and shortsighted lust. In her passion, in her weakness, she betrayed the vow she had made to Harold on her wedding day.

This traditional understanding is based on a certain folk wisdom about the human mind. This folk wisdom presumes that there is a power struggle at the core of our moral decisions. On the one side there are the selfish and primitive passions. On the other side there is the enlightened force of reason. Reason uses logic to evaluate situations, apply relevant moral principles, resolve moral quandaries, and deduce a proper course of action. Reason then uses willpower to try to control the passions. When we act admirably, reason subdues passion and controls will. In Nancy Reagan’s phrase, it just says no. When we act in selfish and shortsighted ways, then we either haven’t applied reason, or passion has simply overwhelmed it.

In this approach, Level 2 consciousness is the hero. Level 1 instincts are the villains. The former is on the side of reason and morality; the other, on the side of passion, sin, and selfishness.

But this folk metaphor didn’t really jibe with the way Erica experienced her escapade with Mr. Make-Believe. When Erica slid into sex with him and then suffered agony because of it, it wasn’t because she had succumbed in a moment of passion and then realized calmly afterward that she had violated one of her principles. In fact, she was more passionate the night after, while in pain thrashing around in her bed, than she had been during the seduction and the sin. And it certainly wasn’t because she later consciously reasoned her way through a quandary and then coolly came to rethink her decision. That’s not how it felt at all. The regret had snuck up on her just as mysteriously as the original action.

Erica’s experience didn’t feel like a drama between reason and passion. Instead it seemed more accurate to say that Erica had felt her situation one way with Mr. Make-Believe, while he was in the room in front of her and she had acted in a certain way, and then later that night a different perception of the situation had swept over her. Somehow one emotional tide had replaced another.

She almost felt as if she were two different people: one of whom had seen the seduction in a mildly titillating way, and the other who had seen it as a disgrace. It was as it says in Genesis, after Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden. Their eyes were opened up, and they saw that they were naked. Later, she looked at herself and was unable to explain her own actions: “What in God’s name was I thinking?”

Furthermore, the mistake with Mr. Make-Believe had left some sort of psychic scar. When similar circumstances arose in the years that were to follow, she didn’t even have to think about her response. There was no temptation to resist because the mere thought of committing adultery again produced an instant feeling of pain and aversion—the way a cat avoids a stove on which she has been burned. Erica didn’t feel more virtuous because of what she had learned about herself, but she reacted differently to that specific sort of situation.

Erica’s experience illustrates several of the problems with the rationalist folk theory of morality. In the first place, most of our moral judgments, like Erica thrashing about that night in agony, are not cool, reasoned judgments, they are deep and often hot responses. We go through our days making instant moral evaluations about behavior, without really having to think about why. We see injustice and we’re furious. We see charity and we are warmed.

Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia provides example after example of this sort of instant moral intuition in action. Imagine a man who buys a chicken from the grocery store, manages to bring himself to orgasm by penetrating it, then cooks and eats the chicken. Imagine eating your dead pet dog. Imagine cleaning your toilet with your nation’s flag. Imagine a brother and sister who are on a trip. One night they decide to have protected sex with each other. They enjoy it but decide never to do it again.

As Haidt has shown in a string of research, most people have strong intuitive (and negative) reactions to these scenarios, even though nobody is harmed in any of them. Usually, Haidt’s research subjects cannot say why they found these things so repulsive or disturbing. They just do. The unconscious has made the call.

Furthermore, if the rationalist folk theory, with its emphasis on Level 2 moral reasoning, were correct, then you would expect people who do moral reasoning all day to be, in fact, more moral. Researchers have studied this, too. They’ve found there’s relatively little relationship between moral theorizing and noble behavior. As Michael Gazzaniga wrote in his book Human, “It has been hard to find any correlation between moral reasoning and proactive moral behavior, such as helping people. In fact, in most studies, none has been found.”

If moral reasoning led to more moral behavior, you would expect people who are less emotional to also be more moral. Yet at the extreme end, this is the opposite of the truth. As Jonah Lehrer has pointed out, when most people witness someone else suffering, or read about a murder or a rape, they experience a visceral emotional reaction. Their palms sweat and their blood pressure surges. But some people show no emotional reaction. These people are not hyper-rational moralists; they are psychopaths. Psychopaths do not seem to be able to process emotion about others’ pain. You can show them horrific scenes of death and suffering and they are unmoved. They can cause the most horrific suffering in an attempt to get something they want, and they will feel no emotional pain or discomfort. Research on wife batterers finds that as these men become more aggressive their blood pressure and pulse actually drop.

Finally, if reasoning led to moral behavior, then those who could reach moral conclusions would be able to apply their knowledge across a range of circumstances, based on these universal moral laws. But in reality, it has been hard to find this sort of consistency.

A century’s worth of experiments suggests that people’s actual behavior is not driven by permanent character traits that apply from one context to another. Back in the 1920s, Yale psychologists Hugh Hartshorne and Mark May gave ten thousand schoolchildren opportunities to lie, cheat, and steal in a variety of situations. Most students cheated in some situations and not in others. Their rate of cheating did not correlate with any measurable personality traits or assessments of moral reasoning. More recent research has found the same general pattern. Students who are routinely dishonest at home are not routinely dishonest at school. People who are courageous at work can be cowardly at church. People who behave kindly on a sunny day may behave callously the next day, when it is cloudy and they are feeling glum. Behavior does not exhibit what the researchers call “cross-situational stability.” Rather, it seems to be powerfully influenced by context.

The Intuitionist View

The rationalist assumptions about our moral architecture are now being challenged by a more intuitionist view. This intuitionist account puts emotion and unconscious intuition at the center of moral life, not reason; it stresses moral reflexes, alongside individual choice; it emphasizes the role perception plays in moral decision making, before logical deduction. In the intuitionist view, the primary struggle is not between reason and the passions. Instead, the crucial contest is within Level 1, the unconscious-mind sphere itself.

This view starts with the observation that we all are born with deep selfish drives—a drive to take what we can, to magnify our status, to appear superior to others, to exercise power over others, to satisfy lusts. These drives warp perception. It wasn’t as if Mr. Make-Believe consciously set out to use Erica, or attack her marriage. He merely saw her as an object to be used in his life quest. Similarly, murderers don’t kill people they regard as fully human like themselves. The unconscious has to first dehumanize the victim and change the way he is seen.

The French journalist Jean Hatzfeld interviewed participants in the Rwandan genocide for his book Machete Season. The participants were caught up in a tribal frenzy. They began to perceive their neighbors in radically perverse ways. One man Hatzfeld spoke with murdered a Tutsi who lived nearby: “I finished him off in a rush, not thinking anything of it, even though he was a neighbor, quite close on my hill. In truth, it came to me only afterward: I had taken the life of a neighbor. I mean, at the fatal instant I did not see in him what he had been before; I struck someone who was no longer either close or strange to me, who wasn’t exactly ordinary anymore, I’m saying like the people you meet every day. His features were indeed similar to those of the person I knew, but nothing firmly reminded me that I had lived beside him for a long time.”

These deep impulses treat conscious cognition as a plaything. They not only warp perception during sin; they invent justifications after it. We tell ourselves that the victim of our cruelty or our inaction had it coming; that the circumstances compelled us to act as we did; that someone else is to blame. The desire pre-consciously molds the shape of our thought.

But not all the deep drives are selfish ones, the intuitionists stress. We are all descended from successful cooperators. Our ancestors survived in families and groups.

Other animals and insects share this social tendency, and when we study them, we observe that nature has given them faculties that help them with bonding and commitment. In one study in the 1950s, rats were trained to press a lever for food. Then the experimenter adjusted the machine so that the lever sometimes provided food but sometimes delivered an electric shock to another rat in the next chamber. When the eating rats noticed the pain they were causing their neighbors, they adjusted their eating habits. They would not starve themselves. But they chose to eat less, to avoid causing undue pain to the other rats. Frans de Waal has spent his career describing the sophisticated empathy displays evident in primate behavior. Chimps console each other, nurse the injured, and seem to enjoy sharing. These are not signs that animals have morality, but they have the psychological building blocks for it.

Humans also possess a suite of emotions to help with bonding and commitment. We blush and feel embarrassed when we violate social norms. We feel instantaneous outrage when our dignity has been slighted. People yawn when they see others yawning, and those who are quicker to sympathetically yawn also rate higher on more complicated forms of sympathy.

Our natural empathy toward others is nicely captured by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in a passage that anticipates the theory of mirror neurons: “When we see a stroke aimed and just ready to fall upon the leg or arm of another person, we naturally shrink back our leg, our own arm; and when it does fall, we feel it in some measure and are hurt by it as well as the sufferer.” We also feel a desire, Smith added, to be esteemed by our fellows. “Nature, when she formed man for society, endowed him with an original desire to please, and an original aversion to offend his brethren. She taught him to feel pleasure in their favorable, and pain in their unfavorable regard.”

In humans, these social emotions have a moral component, even at a very early age. Yale professor Paul Bloom and others conducted an experiment in which they showed babies a scene featuring one figure struggling to climb a hill, another figure trying to help it, and a third trying to hinder it. At as early as six months, the babies showed a preference for the helper over the hinderer. In some plays, there was a second act. The hindering figure was either punished or rewarded. In this case, the eight-month-olds preferred a character who was punishing the hinderer over ones being nice to it. This reaction illustrates, Bloom says, that people have a rudimentary sense of justice from a very early age.

Nobody has to teach a child to demand fair treatment; children protest unfairness vigorously and as soon as they can communicate. Nobody has to teach us to admire a person who sacrifices for a group; the admiration for duty is universal. Nobody has to teach us to disdain someone who betrays a friend or is disloyal to a family or tribe. Nobody has to teach a child the difference between rules that are moral—“Don’t hit”—and rules that are not—“Don’t chew gum in school.” These preferences also emerge from somewhere deep inside us. Just as we have a natural suite of emotions to help us love and be loved, so, too, we have a natural suite of moral emotions to make us disapprove of people who violate social commitments, and approve of people who reinforce them. There is no society on earth where people are praised for running away in battle.

It’s true that parents and schools reinforce these moral understandings, but as James Q. Wilson argued in his book The Moral Sense, these teachings fall on prepared ground. Just as children come equipped to learn language, equipped to attach to Mom and Dad, so, too, they come equipped with a specific set of moral prejudices, which can be improved, shaped, developed, but never quite supplanted.

These sorts of moral judgments—admiration for someone who is loyal to a cause, contempt for someone who betrays a spouse—are instant and emotional. They contain subtle evaluations. If we see someone overcome by grief at the loss of a child, we register compassion and pity. If we see someone overcome by grief at the loss of a Maserati, we register disdain. Instant sympathy and complex judgment are all intertwined.

As we’ve seen so often in this story, the act of perception is a thick process. It is not just taking in a scene but, almost simultaneously, weighing its meaning, evaluating it, and generating an emotion about it. In fact, many scientists now believe that moral perceptions are akin to aesthetic or sensual perceptions, emanating from many of the same regions of the brain.

Think of what happens when you put a new food into your mouth. You don’t have to decide if it’s disgusting. You just know. Or when you observe a mountain scene. You don’t have to decide if a landscape is beautiful. You just know. Moral judgments are in some ways like that. They are rapid intuitive evaluations. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands have found that evaluative feelings, even on complicated issues like euthanasia, can be detected within 200 to 250 milliseconds after a statement is read. You don’t have to think about disgust, or shame, or embarrassment, or whether you should blush or not. It just happens.

In fact, if we had to rely on deliberative moral reasoning for our most elemental decisions, human societies would be pretty horrible places, since the carrying capacity of that reason is so low. Thomas Jefferson anticipated this point centuries ago:

He who made us would have been a pitiful bungler, if He had made the rules of our moral conduct a matter of science. For one man of science, there are thousands who are not. What would have become of them? Man was destined for society. His morality, therefore, was to be formed to this object. He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong merely relative to this. This sense is as much a part of nature, as the sense of hearing, seeing, feeling; it is the true foundation of morality.”

Thus, it is not merely reason that separates us from the other animals, but the advanced nature of our emotions, especially our social and moral emotions.

Moral Concerns

Some researchers believe we have a generalized empathetic sense, which in some flexible way inclines us to cooperate with others. But there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that people are actually born with more structured moral foundations, a collection of moral senses that are activated by different situations.

Jonathan Haidt, Jesse Graham, and Craig Joseph have compared these foundations to the taste buds. Just as the human tongue has different sorts of receptors to perceive sweetness, saltiness, and so on, the moral modules have distinct receptors to perceive certain classic situations. Just as different cultures have created different cuisines based on a few shared flavor senses, so, too, have different cultures created diverse understandings of virtue and vice, based on a few shared concerns.

Scholars disagree on the exact structure of these modules. Haidt, Graham, and Brian Nosek have defined five moral concerns. There is the fairness/reciprocity concern, involving issues of equal and unequal treatment. There is the harm/care concern, which includes things like empathy and concern for the suffering of others. There is an authority/respect concern. Human societies have their own hierarchies, and react with moral outrage when that which they view with reverence (including themselves) is not treated with proper respect.

There is a purity/disgust concern. The disgust module may have first developed to repel us from noxious or unsafe food, but it evolved to have a moral component—to drive us away from contamination of all sorts. Students at the University of Pennsylvania were asked how it would feel to wear Hitler’s sweater. They said it would feel disgusting, as if Hitler’s moral qualities were a virus that could spread to them.

Finally, and most problematically, there is the in-group/loyalty concern. Humans segregate themselves into groups. They feel visceral loyalty to members of their group, no matter how arbitrary the basis for membership, and feel visceral disgust toward those who violate loyalty codes. People can distinguish between members of their own group and members of another group in as little as 170 milliseconds. These categorical differences trigger different activation patterns in the brain. The anterior cingulated cortices in Caucasian and Chinese brains activate when they see members of their own group endure pain; but much less than when they see members of another group enduring it.

The Moral Motivation

In the intuitionist view, the unconscious soulsphere is a coliseum of impulses vying for supremacy. There are deep selfish intuitions. There are deep social and moral intuitions. Social impulses compete with asocial impulses. Very often social impulses conflict with one another. Compassion and pity may emerge at the cost of fortitude, toughness, and strength. The virtue of courage and heroism may clash with the virtue of humility and acceptance. The cooperative virtues may clash with the competitive virtues. Our virtues do not fit neatly together into a complementary or logical system. We have many ways of seeing and thinking about a situation, and they are not ultimately compatible.

This means that the dilemma of being alive yields to no one true answer. In the heyday of the Enlightenment, philosophers tried to ground morality in logical rules, which could fit together like pieces of a logical puzzle. But that’s not possible in the incompatible complexity of human existence. The brain is adapted to a fallen world, not a harmonious and perfectible one. Individuals contain a plurality of moral selves, which are aroused by different contexts. We contain multitudes.

But we do have a strong impulse to be as moral as possible, or to justify ourselves when our morality is in question. Having a universal moral sense does not mean that people always or even often act in good and virtuous ways. It’s more about what we admire than what we do, more about the judgments we make than our ability to live up to them. But we are possessed by a deep motivation to be and be seen as a moral person.

Moral Development

The rationalist view advises us to philosophize in order to become more moral. The intuitionist view advises us to interact. It is hard or impossible to become more moral alone, but over the centuries, our ancestors devised habits and practices that help us reinforce our best intuitions, and inculcate moral habits.

For example, in healthy societies everyday life is structured by tiny rules of etiquette: Women generally leave the elevator first. The fork goes on the left. These politeness rules may seem trivial, but they nudge us to practice little acts of self-control. They rewire and strengthen networks in the brain.

Then there is conversation. Even during small talk, we talk warmly about those who live up to our moral intuitions and coldly about those who do not. We gossip about one another and lay down a million little markers about what behavior is to be sought and what behavior is to be avoided. We tell stories about those who violate the rules of our group, both to reinforce our connections with one another and to remind ourselves of the standards that bind us together.

Finally, there are the habits of mind transmitted by institutions. As we go through life, we travel through institutions—first family and school, then the institutions of a profession or a craft. Each of these comes with certain rules and obligations that tell us how to do what we’re supposed to do. They are external scaffolds that penetrate deep inside us. Journalism imposes habits that help reporters keep a mental distance from those they cover. Scientists have obligations to the community of researchers. In the process of absorbing the rules of the institutions we inhabit, we become who we are.

The institutions are idea spaces that existed before we were born, and will last after we are gone. Human nature may remain the same, eon after eon, but institutions improve and progress, because they are the repositories of hard-won wisdom. The race progresses because institutions progress.

The member of an institution has a deep reverence for those who came before her and built up the rules that she has temporarily taken delivery of. “In taking delivery,” the political theorist Hugh Heclo writes, “institutionalists see themselves as debtors who owe something, not creditors to whom something is owed.”

A teacher’s relationship to the craft of teaching, an athlete’s relationship to her sport, a farmer’s relationship to her land is not a choice that can be easily reversed when psychic losses exceed psychic profits. There will be many long periods when you put more into your institutions than you get out of them. Institutions are so valuable because they inescapably merge with who we are.

In 2005 Ryne Sandberg was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. His speech is an example of how people talk when they are defined by their devotion to an institution: “I was in awe every time I walked onto the field. That’s respect. I was taught you never, ever disrespect your opponent or your teammates or your organization or your manager and never, ever your uniform. Make a great play, act like you’ve done it before; get a big hit, look for the third base coach and get ready to run the bases.”

Sandberg motioned to those inducted before him, “These guys sitting up here did not pave the way for the rest of us so that players could swing for the fences every time up and forget how to move a runner over to third. It’s disrespectful to them, to you and to the game of baseball that we all played growing up.

“Respect. A lot of people say this honor validates my career, but I didn’t work hard for validation. I didn’t play the game right because I saw a reward at the end of the tunnel. I played it right because that’s what you’re supposed to do, play it right and with respect…. If this validates anything, it’s that guys who taught me the game … did what they were supposed to do, and I did what I was supposed to do.”

Responsibility

The intuitionist view emphasizes the moral action that takes place deep in the unconscious, but it is not a determinist view. Amid the tangled jostle of unconscious forces, the intuitionist still leaves room for reason and reflection. He still leaves room for individual responsibility.

It’s true this new version of individual responsibility is not the same as it appeared in the old rationalist conceptions of morality, with their strong reliance on logic and will. Instead, responsibility in this view is best illustrated by two metaphors. The first is the muscle metaphor. We are born with certain muscles that we can develop by going to the gym every day. In a similar way, we are born with moral muscles that we can build with the steady exercise of good habits.

The second is the camera metaphor. Joshua Greene of Harvard notes that his camera has automatic settings (“portrait,” “action,” “landscape”), which adjust the shutter speed and the focus. These automatic settings are fast and efficient. But they are not very flexible. So sometimes, Greene overrides the automatic setting by switching to manual—setting the shutter speed and focusing himself. The manual mode is slower, but allows him to do things he might not be able to achieve automatically. In the same way as the camera, Greene argues, the mind has automatic moral concerns. But in crucial moments, they can be overridden by the slower process of conscious reflection.

In other words, even with automatic reactions playing such a large role, we have choices. We can choose to put ourselves in environments where the moral faculties will be strengthened. A person who chooses to spend time in the military or in church will react differently to the world than a person who spends his time in nightclubs or a street gang.

We can choose to practice those small acts of service that condition the mind for the moments when the big acts of sacrifice are required.

We can choose the narrative we tell about our lives. We’re born into cultures, nations, and languages that we didn’t choose. We’re born with certain brain chemicals and genetic predispositions that we can’t control. We’re sometimes thrust into social conditions that we detest. But among all the things we don’t control, we do have some control over our stories. We do have a conscious say in selecting the narrative we will use to organize perceptions.

We have the power to tell stories that deny another’s full humanity, or stories that extend it. Renee Lindenberg was a little Jewish girl in Poland during World War II. One day a group of villagers grabbed her and set off to throw her down a well. But one peasant woman, who happened to overhear them, went up to them and said, “She’s not a dog after all.” The villagers immediately stopped what they were doing. Lindenberg’s life was saved. This wasn’t a moral argument about the virtue of killing or not killing a human being or a Jew. The woman simply got the villagers to see Lindenberg in a new way.

We have the power to choose narratives in which we absolve ourselves of guilt and blame everything on conspiracies or others. On the other hand, we have the power to choose narratives in which we use even the worst circumstances to achieve spiritual growth. “I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard,” a young dying woman told Viktor Frankl during their confinement in a Nazi concentration camp. “In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously,” she said. She pointed to a branch of a tree, which she could see from her bunk window and described what it said to her in her misery. “It said to me, ‘I am here—I am here—I am life, eternal life.’” This is a narrative of turning worldly defeat into spiritual victory. It’s a different narrative than others might choose in that circumstance.

As Jonathan Haidt has put it, unconscious emotions have supremacy but not dictatorship. Reason cannot do the dance on its own, but it can nudge, with a steady and subtle influence. As some people joke, we may not possess free will, but we possess free won’t. We can’t generate moral reactions, but we can discourage some impulses and even overrule others. The intuitionist view starts with the optimistic belief that people have an innate drive to do good. It is balanced with the pessimistic belief that these moral sentiments are in conflict with one another and in competition with more selfish drives.

But the intuitionist view is completed by the sense that moral sentiments are subject to conscious review and improvement. The philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain recalls that when she was a little girl in Sunday school she and her classmates sang a little hymn: “Jesus loves the little children/All the children of the world/Be they yellow, black or white/they are precious in his sight/Jesus loves the little children of the world.” The song is not the sort of sophisticated philosophy that Elshtain now practices at the University of Chicago, but it is a lesson in seeing humanity, planted early and with reverberating force.

Redemption

Erica’s family was not perfect. Her mother was haunted by demons. Her relatives were pains in the ass much of the time. But they had engraved upon her a sense that family was sacred, that country was sacred, that work was sacred. These ideas were crystallized by emotion.

But as Erica got older, she entered a different world. Some of her old ways of being went dormant—sometimes for good and sometimes for bad. Day by day, she became slightly different, often in superficial ways—how she dressed and talked—but also in profound ways.

If you had asked her about the old values, she would have told you that of course she still embraced them. But in fact, they had become less consecrated in her mind. A certain strategic and calculating mentality had weakened the sentiments that her relatives had tried in their messy way to instill in her.

By the time she found herself in that hotel room with Mr. Make-Believe, she had become a different person without realizing it. The decision to sleep with him was not the real moment of moral failing. That moment didn’t even feel like a decision. It was just the culmination of a long unconscious shift. She had never consciously rejected her old values. She would have fiercely denied it if you’d asked. But those old ways of being had gained less prominence in the unconscious jockeying for supremacy inside. Erica had become a shallower person, disconnected from the deepest potential of her own nature.

In the weeks after, when she thought about the episode, she became newly aware that it really was possible to become a stranger to yourself, that you always have to be on the lookout, and to find some vantage point from which you can try to observe yourself from the outside.

She told herself a story about herself. It was the story of drift and redemption—of a woman who’d slid off her path inadvertently and who needed anchors to connect her to what was true and admirable. She needed to change her life, to find a church, to find some community group and a cause, and above all, to improve her marriage, to tether herself to a set of moral commitments.

She had always seen herself as a hustling young Horatio Alger girl. But she’d been through a period in which she was consumed by her quest. She would now right herself and sail on to better shores.

The redemption narrative helped Erica organize her view of herself. It helped her build integrity—integrating inner ideals with automatic action. It helped her attain maturity. Maturity means understanding, as much as possible, the different characters and modules that are active inside your own head. The mature person is like a river guide who goes over rapids and says, “Yes, I have been over these spots before.”

In the following months, Erica rediscovered her love for Harold, and couldn’t imagine what she’d been thinking before. He would never be an earthshaking titan like Mr. Make-Believe. But he was humble and good and curious. And with his disparate curiosities and research frenzies, he was engaged in the most important search, the search to find meaning in life. People like that are worth staying close to. In any case, he was hers. Over the course of many years they had become intertwined, and their relationship might not be inspiring or exciting and dynamic all the time, but it was her life, and the answer to any malaise consisted in going deeper into it and not trying to escape into some mythical land of make-believe.