Reply to comment

Hi, everyone. Thank you all for participating in a great conversation last Tuesday. Your contributions and insights enhanced my own understanding of this topic, and I was interested to hear that this topic affected the way some of your thought about other parts of NBS.

Comments outside these questions are, of course, welcome, but if you’re looking for a starting place, here are some topics to comment on:
- Comments on the public/private domains of morality and how that ties in to social cognition.
- We spent quite a bit of time discussing language and genetics. Do you think our discussion about the genetic basis of in-group language can apply to a discussion of morality? Is it a metaphor? What makes it different? What makes linguistic variance easier to talk about than moral variance across cultures?
- What is "universal morality"? Several different definitions were voiced in class...
- How far can you reduce a definition of morality and still have it mean morality? For example, chimps (ability to adopt social rules), unborn children (gut intuition in response to environment), have some components of morality. Is it sufficient to call them a moral being?
- Is action necessary for morality? (ie: Tamara's example about the disconnect between what people think/say/do)
- Are we our "most moral" when we resist social pressures around us? What role do social groups play in moral action?

Also, I invite all of you to take some of the quizzes available on www.yourmorals.com. The website is run by psychologists at the University of Virginia, and Jonathan Haidt is one of them. You must register to see your results, but all you have to provide is an email address. Once logged in, please take the “Moral Foundations Questionnaire”, the first option in the list. If you could please email me (rwoodruf@brynmawr.edu) or Ian (imorton@haverford.edu) your response to the liberal/conservative scale and the histogram generated at the end of the quiz, that would be great.