Perhaps the following may help explain. There exists a moral grammar
or set of rules which are being transfered genetically and then there
is nurture which massages these principles according to cultural,
religious, social norms.
Nazi parents found it easy to turn their children into conscientious
little monsters. In some countries, young men are raised to believe
that they have a moral obligation to kill their unchaste sisters.
Gruesome examples like these suggest that morality is a matter of
nurture rather than nature — that there are no biological constraints
on what human beings can be persuaded to believe about right and
wrong. Marc Hauser disagrees. He holds that “we are born with
abstract rules or principles, with nurture entering the picture to
set the parameters and guide us toward the acquisition of particular
moral systems.” Empirical research will enable us to distinguish the
principles from the parameters and thus to discover “what limitations
exist on the range of possible or impossible moral systems.”
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Received on Tue Oct 31 23:20:14 2006
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