The Embodied Dynamism of Moral Becoming Reply to Haidt (2010)

Jon Haidt (2010, this issue) has done a great service to the field of moral psychology by drawing our attention to the importance of intuition in moral evaluation. He has proposed provocative new models and hypotheses that can be tested in experimental situations and has inspired additional models and theories about intuition. But there is much more work to be done. Here are four things that need deep study before a truly synthetic moral psychology theory is possible. STUDY HOW MORAL FUNCTIONING IS EMBODIED Our tools for adaptation are inextricably intertwined: body and thought, reasoning and emotion, reasoning and intuition, and person and context (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991). Although science likes to separate component processes for closer analysis, sometimes this gives the wrong impression—as if one can truly separate the person from the 2 situation, reason from emotion, or intuition from unconscious reason. As Lakoff and Johnson (1999) point out, reasoning, like intuition, is not only an evolved capacity shared with other animals, it is shaped and bound by our unique bodies and brains. That is, we think in and through our bodies, making our reason primarily unconscious, metaphorical, and imaginative. Thinkin