Moral status of accidents.

No one is naive enough to expect that all moral beliefs are universal. Today, some countries legally beat and imprison homosexuals, and others recognize gay marriage; in some places, killing a bull is a sport, and, in others, it is an abomination; in some places, corporal punishment is the obligation of a responsible parent and, in others, grounds for forced removal. Indeed, the burden of proof seems to be on the other side: Is there anything universal about human moral cognition? In PNAS, Barrett et al. (1) test one candidate for a universal principle of humanmorality: that an action’s moral value depends not only on the action’s consequences but on the person’s intentions. A cognitive universal is a way of thinking that does not have to be invented by an individual or a culture, and does not have to be explicitly transmitted to the next generation by formal pedagogy. In general, scientists take two approaches to searching for such universals. One approach is to measure cognition before cultural influences are likely to operate, in young children and infants. The other approach is to measure cognition across a wide range of cultures, with a special focus on people in remote groups who have been least affected by intergroup contact. Ideally, these two approaches converge: Features of universal cognition that are observed in preenculturation infants are also observed in adults across a wide range of cultures. Cognitive universals can be contrasted with “cognitive technologies,” ideas that evolve or are invented, in one or a few specific places and times, and are transmitted through explicit teaching and modeling (2). The prototypical example of a cognitive technology is the integer count system. Count lists emerged independently in some (but not all) human cultures; through contact between cultures, a small number of counting systems have become statistically dominant in contemporary humans. Nevertheless, count systems are clearly technologies, not a cognitive universal: Specific ways of counting exact set sizes do not emerge spontaneously in childhood and have to be transmitted explicitly through both pedagogy and modeling. Morality in Early Development Is the idea that moral evaluations depend on intentions a universal or a technology? Conventional wisdom in developmental psychology is consistent with the cognitive technology view (3). In Europe and North America, 4-y-old children say that a boy who trips on a rock and accidentally knocks down a little girl is more naughty than a second boy who wants to hit the girl but trips and misses. Only by 7 y old do children clearly say the second boy was naughty because he intended harm (4). The developmental shift toward intent-based moral evaluation is explicitly promoted by parents and teachers in these cultures: When this scenario happens in a playground, adults instruct the boy to consider his sister’s feelings (she feels sad, scared) and the girl to consider her brother’s intentions (he didn’t see her; it was an accident). Could the idea of moral evaluations based on intentions, rather than consequences, be a specific cultural invention, a cognitive technology like an integer count list? On the other hand, recently, some developmental psychologists have challenged this consensus. Some aspects of very young children’s spontaneous social behaviors appear sensitive to others’ intentions. For example, 4-y-olds spontaneously share stickers with a puppet who accidentally knocked down their jointly built tower, but do not share stickers if the puppet knocked down the tower intentionally (5). Even more dramatic results come from studies of preverbal babies. Ten-month-olds reach for a puppet who was unknowingly unhelpful to a third character, but do not reach for a puppet who was knowingly unhelpful (6). Apparently, some sensitivity to intentions in moral evaluations emerges spontaneously early in development, before enculturation. Still, it’s unclear how to resolve the conflict between the traditional experiments (asking for children’s moral evaluations) and the newer spontaneous measures used with infants and toddlers. Also, all of the children in all of these experiments share a cultural context: They come from families that are exclusively “WEIRD,”— Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (7). If the role of intent in moral evaluation is a cognitive