Conscience: The Origin of Moral Intuitions

Moral values originate, not in the gods we invent, nor in some magical pure reason detached from all feelings, but in the neurobiology of attachment. Attachment – love – is the motivational platform for sociality in mammals and birds. Caring for kith and kin is expressed in a host of behavioural ways. As a social species adapts to its ecology, those ways become established as values and norms. In all social mammals, approval and disapproval motivate the learning of social norms, with the upshot that behaviour is shaped by social expectations. Additionally, personality features influence whether social norms are rigidly or flexibly internalized, shaping moral attitudes. Thus a conscience about what is right and what is wrong emerges in the developing human. A complex neural organization fills out, consisting of a dynamical blend of emotions and cognition, habits and skills, pattern recognition, self-control and empathy.