Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture, and Wisdom

by Darcia Narváez, Darcia Narváez

Moral development has traditionally been considered a matter of reasoning—of learning and acting in accordance with abstract rules. On this model, largely taken for granted in modern societies, acts of selfishness, aggression, and ecological mindlessness are failures of will, moral problems that can be solved by acting in accordance with a higher rationality. But both ancient philosophy and recent scientific scholarship emphasize implicit systems, such as action schemas and perceptual filters that guide behavior and shape human development. In this integrative book, Darcia Narvaez argues that morality goes “all the way down” into our neurobiological and emotional development, and that a person’s moral architecture is largely established early on in life. Moral rationality and virtue emerge “bottom up” from lived experience, so it matters what that experience is. Bringing together deep anthropological history, ethical philosophy, and contemporary neurobiological science, she demonstrates where modern industrialized societies have fallen away from the cultural practices that made us human in the first place.

Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality advances the field of developmental moral psychology in three key ways. First, it provides an evolutionary framework for early childhood experience grounded in developmental systems theory, encompassing not only genes but a wide array of environmental and epigenetic factors. Second, it proposes a neurobiological basis for the development of moral sensibilities and cognition, describing ethical functioning at multiple levels of complexity and context before turning to a theory of the emergence of wisdom. Finally, it embraces the sociocultural orientations of our ancestors and cousins in small-band hunter-gatherer societies—the norm for 99% of human history—for a re-envisioning of moral life, from the way we value and organize child raising to how we might frame a response to human-made global ecological collapse.


Integrating the latest scholarship in clinical sciences and positive psychology, Narvaez proposes a developmentally informed ecological and ethical sensibility as a way to self-author and revise the ways we think about parenting and sociality. The techniques she describes point towards an alternative vision of moral development and flourishing, one that synthesizes traditional models of executive, top-down wisdom with “primal” wisdom built by multiple systems of biological and cultural influence from the ground up.

Genres: Psychology, Science, Neuroscience, Parenting, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Evolution

458 pages, Hardcover

First published August 25, 2014

Reviews

[Rob Kall · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. Big thinking about very important topics bringing a unique perspective that must be addressed. The cover and the title should not daunt you. This is a very readable book that explores ways that humans have raised children since time immemorial-- ways that create mentally healthy children and adults-- ways that industrialized civilization has thrown away. This book helps explain the epidemic of crime and sociopathy, greed and hoarding, paranoia and lack of empathy.

[Torzonborz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Events that happened in the last few years led many ordinary people, including myself to think, that things are going into the wrong direction. Any intellectually honest and capable people should see that we are doing absolutely crazy things, risking the destruction not only of our own living space, but also the human race. Carefully observing our history, we could see a pattern displaying a vicious cycle of ever worsening madness.

"A problem well stated is a problem half solved." Moving forward from our anxious state observing the trends, we should start to think about how and why did we get here, and how to fix. This book should be an extremely useful tool in our journey. Carefully reading, it will give some convincing ideas about why are we the current state of affairs. The book is written in a language which is more accessible for biologists and psychologists, but anyone reading the book could grasp it's basic ideas, if ones manages not to focus on the jargon.

How did we got into a moral state which enables the wasteful destruction of our natural resources, and how is it possible that our current ethic is going against the flourishing of both human and non-human nature?

Morality emerges from biology, and the early care giving experienced by kids will set the baseline for their worldview and ethics.

Our morality is shaped not only by our culture or our genes, but it's depending on multiple other inherited factors like our development niche, epigenetics, microbiome, and ecology.

There are also a feedback loop from our culture, which we could see currently acts in a generation by generation worsening of the situation. With unhealthy child-rearing practices, we breed a generation which will have less healthy culture, and thus their child-rearing practices will worsen, placing the coming next generations into an a downward spiraling loop.

Humans have a dynamic development system, and in those systems, influences and variables set at the beginning will determine the baseline for future outcomes in a big way. We, as other mammals, need responsive care to flourish. Since at birth we only have our brains partially developed, it is extremely important to foster an environment which will lead to proper and balanced development of our grey matter. We also need the ability to connect to others in healthy way, to have multiple forms of attachment. Currently Western child-rearing practices focus on warmth and and protective attachment, but companionship care is often missing. Companionship care is a prerequsite for being able to properly cooperate with others, or to be able to have communal imagination.

Other than child-rearing practices, the elevated level of stress also leads to ethics non-optimal for human development.

To summarize the message the book gave to me, if we want to change course, we need to change our culture and our worldview. It should be more inclusive, we should take into account the well-being of other human and non-human beings. The new culture would also enable us to have
more optimal child-rearing practices, emphasizing responsive care, companionship care, adjusting our schedules to babies and not vice-versa.
We should be able to create development niche for the next generations with less stress.

That could turn the vicious downward spiral upside-down, and we could hope for future generations who live a more relaxed, more cooperative life, embracing our natural strengths. One what would preserve our living space and would respect non-human beings who share this planet with us.

[Wing · Rating 4 out of 5]

Professor Narvaez gently and surely explains how moral cacostasis develops through developmental stressors and toxic acculturation. She provides ample evidences to support her thesis. To be moral in the normal and flourishing sense is to be human. In other words, it is to be empathic, cooperative, and communally imaginative. She explains clearly through psychology and neuroscience how our modern societies have gone awry if not insane. The perceived need for vicious imagination is the root of evil. It is also the root of ills such as narcissism, depression, and anxiety. She offers ways to escape from cacostasis into social homeostasis and hyperstatsis. Neuronal plasticity is the key, and is the reason why transformation and insight can be possible in spite of developmental and cultural defects. What may appear utopian are actually wildly practised in various societies and cultures. Again, Professor Narvaez provides a cornucopia of anthropological observations to backup her claims solidly. A healthy worldview is never impossible or irrational. Indeed, it is congruent with the ultimate reality and purpose of our existence.

[K · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent. A formal review is forthcoming.