| | More pragmatic Haidt
If morality really does vary by culture, class, politics, and era, then psychologists need a definition of the moral domain that is not based on a list of specific content areas (e.g., justice, rights, and welfare). To meet this need, Haidt and Kesebir (2010, p. 800) proposed an alternative approach that defines moral systems by their function:
Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible
This functionalist approach has at least two advantages over content-based approaches. First, in its emphasis on moral systems it encourages psychologists to look outward, beyond individual minds and psychological mechanisms. Moralities emerge as large numbers of people interact with each other, constrained and enabled by culturally and historically specific sets of institutions and technologies. A second advantage is that this definition makes it possible to recognize a wide variety of societies as constituting moral systems, at least descriptively, even if those societies are structured in ways that many researchers believe to be normatively immoral (e.g., patriarchies and theocracies).
Source:
Mapping the Moral Domain
Recap:
There's no particular reason that man needs such a thing as morality. Instead, it's just a process that you can enter and start debating about mid-stream (if you want to).
Ed
p.s., A bonus quote (from the same article):
Clearly, many values are moral values, even if morality is defined only in terms of welfare and fairness concerns (e.g., benevolence and universalism). However, in seeking to identify a list of the most important values, there is a risk that some common moral concerns or intuitions will be missed. For example, reciprocity, loyalty to one’s team or tribe, and concerns about bodily and spiritual purity are ubiquitous in anthropological accounts of morality, yet they do not appear among Schwartz’s ten values. This may be because Schwartz began with an atheoretical exploratory factor-analytic approach, using Western populations. Even if Westerners care quite a bit about reciprocity (see Cialdini, 2001, ch. 2), they might not list it when asked about their most important trans-situational goals. Individuals are often unable to access the causes of their moral judgments (Haidt & Kesebir, 2010; Wilson, 2002). Furthermore, atheoretical descriptive approaches are limited in their ability to explain why people hold the values they do.
Recap:
Individuals are often unable to access the causes of their moral judgments, but that shouldn't lead us to go back and to check our premises about whether morality is indispensable or not. No, we shouldn't worry about basic or fundamental issues like that. It is perfectly fine that people do not know why they judge things the way they do. I mean, that kind of post-modern, institutionalized ignorance couldn't possibly lead to any kind of societal or worldwide disaster or anything.
:-}
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Atheists may have many other virtues, but on one of the least controversial and most objective measures of moral behavior—giving time, money, and blood to help strangers in need—religious people appear to be morally superior to secular folk.
