Moral Minds

just finished reading "Moral Minds: How Nature Designed our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong" by Marc D. Hauser. If you are looking for a full book review and critique of the central thesis, then you've come to the wrong place but this book is a real trove of interesting information.

The main idea idea of the book is that moral sense is an innate capacity that develops over the lifespan. There is excellent background on Kohlberg, Piaget, Kant, Hume and Chomsky in the first chapter which he synthesises in to a theory of moral development.

Some highlights in terms of the book in terms of relevance to behavioural econ include

- A discussion of the Nisbett and Cohen work on "Cultures of Honour" that examines the extent to which moral codes emerge from the historical economic conditions in communities.

http://www.amazon.com/Culture-Honor-Psychology-Violence-South/dp/0813319935

- Discussion of Damasio's work on frontal lobe damage and consideration of future consequences and its relationship to moral reasoning. This is followed by a discussion of psychopathy, future reasoning and moral culpability.

- Discussion of Hamilton and Trivers and the relevance of evolutionary sociobiology to moral reasoning.

- I know at least one reader of the blog who will be interested in the work of Harbaugh who showed, among other things, that shorter children within an age group make higher offers in ultimatum games than larger children (attributed to social dominance). His work is available below

http://harbaugh.uoregon.edu/

- discussion of DeWaal and colleagues work on reciprocity among chimpanzees.

- discussion of Kahneman's work on remembered utility

- A discussion of Kacelnik's views on the evolutionary rationality of hyperbolic discounting. A brief non-technical discussion is below but worth reading these papers and corresponding literature. In general, the book has some great discussions of experimental work with animals and children.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/275/5296/29a?ck=nck

- there is a lot in the book on different research paradigms and thought experiments in moral judgment research such as,

The Ultimatum Game
The Prisoners Dilemma
The Trolley Problem

Anyway, there's lots more in there and you can get a sense of the overall narrative yourself by reading the book.