morality as an adaptive strategy to correct undesirable behavior

The theory being actively debated is whether morality is a system designed to promote cooperation. Recent work on the disgust reaction and how it activates moral thinking challenges this model. A more generalized model explains how both models agree.

To say that morality is a factor in decision making isn't precise enough. We need to identify the somatic-cognitive experience that is moral thinking, and place it in a behavioral framework. When we say that something is immoral, the mind-body is reacting to it negatively, communicating that the behavior or condition is unacceptable, deserves social opprobrium, should be punished, banished or destroyed. When we say that something is moral, we are applauding it and encouraging its spread. Some of these responses are internally directed, toward choices the active agent might make, and some of them are directed at the behaviors of others: morality can be used to promote behaviors, or even control the behaviors of others.

But in principle, what could be called the moral response is an adaptive, instinctive, response to a situation which demands an automatic, unreflective, unequivocal judgement or behavior. The disgust response fits easily into this pattern. But how does cooperation fit?

Cooperation is itself a survival strategy, and where disgust helps the active agent avoid harmful pathogens, Cooperation helps the active agent produce helpful behaviors. Because cooperation is so adaptive, a somatic-cognitive response that produces cooperation would also be adaptive. Sometimes cooperation produces joy. Sometimes we cooperate because it is just the right thing to do, in the absence of a somatic reward. Cooperation may be easy to produce, under some circumstances, but isn't always easy, and may need some help from emotions, training, and-or morality.

So what is the difference between joyful cooperation and moral cooperation? In the former, the payoff is immediate: the result is that both or all participants are better off as a result of cooperation. In the latter case, the payoff is not immediate, and may go to someone else in the community. "Moral" cooperation improves the community or other individuals, while the active agent pays the cost in health or energetic expenditure. But if there is a short term cost to the agent, there is a long term benefit of maintaining cooperative behavior as a norm of the community. Because of the danger to the active agent, in health and energy, more may be required to motivate the agent, and this is the somatic-cognitive force of a moral precept, whether learned or instinctive.

So the moral somatic-cognitive experience is one which produces, in the agent, acts which are contrary to the "rational" choice (that one which would conserve health or enhance private material gain), in service to the greater good. It is an adaptive, instinctive, response to a situation which demands an automatic, unreflective, unequivocal judgement or behavior, which the agent is frequently unable to explain, except by saying "it was the right thing to do".

Thus responses to a wide range of conditions, including pathogenic disgust, Haidt's "purity", and the imperative to cooperate, are all supported by invocations of "morality". In this case, we might sense that "morality" is just a catch-all category of responses whose ultimate causes are not given to us. They are adaptive and we just have them.