The Yale Review

2 6 Y F A M I L Y , C O M M U N I T Y , T R O L L E Y P R O B L E M S , A N D T H E C R I S I S I N M O R A L P S Y C H O L O G Y P A U L B L O O M A young woman meets a much younger man and takes him into her home. He su√ers from terrible limitations. He cannot walk or talk or even sit up; he cannot be left alone and must be carefully fed. He often needs attention at night, and she spends the first years with him in a sleep-deprived fog. Still, this is the most important relationship of her life. She would die for him. She spends many years nursing him as he gradually becomes able to walk, to toilet himself, and to express and understand speech. After they have been together for over a decade, he becomes interested in other women and begins to date, and eventually he leaves her home and marries someone else. The woman continues to love and support him, helping to raise the children that he has with his new wife. If this younger man were a grown stranger o√ the street, the woman’s actions would be seen as saintly or insane. But, of course, this description summarizes a typical relationship between mother and son. In some regards, this makes her sacrifice all the more impressive, because now we can add additional considerations – if he’s not adopted, she keeps him inside her body for nine months, su√ering pain, nausea, and exhaustion. Then she gives birth, an act 2 7 R that is terribly painful and carries certain physical risks. She might then feed him from her own body for months or years afterwards. Knowing that they are mother and son changes how we think of the woman’s actions. The point of this story, told by Alison Gopnik in The Philosophical Baby, is that family is special. Knowing that this is her son transforms how we think of the woman’s obligations. If she were indi√erent towards her child, unwilling to sacrifice for it, treating it just as she would a stranger, this would be judged to be immoral, repellently so. We feel the same, though perhaps not to same degree, when the parent is a father instead of a mother, and when the baby is adopted rather than biological. These observations illustrate a problem in contemporary moral psychology, which is the field that explores the nature of moral judgment and moral action, including empathetic responses to the pain of others, altruistic behavior, the so-called moral emotions, such as guilt, shame, gratitude, and anger, and considered judgments about what’s morally obligatory, permissible, and forbidden . Psychologists in this area explore our moral sense, looking at how it is instantiated in the brain, how it develops in children, and how it evolved. The problem is that most research in this field, including my own, focuses almost entirely on how people make sense of, judge, and respond to the interactions of unrelated strangers. We have little to say about how people think of interactions that occur between parent and child, brother and sister, and other closely related individuals. We also often ignore moral judgments and moral feelings that concern spouses, close friends, colleagues, allies , and compatriots. I will argue here that these are the interactions that matter the most, and that our failure to explore them leads us to ask the wrong questions, design the wrong studies, and develop the wrong theories. Psychologists often look toward other disciplines for guidance, and we are right to do so. If one is interested in some domain of human knowledge or action, it makes sense to turn to the most developed theories of the nature of this domain. Put di√erently, if you are interested in how people think about X, you need to know all you can about what X is. Accordingly, much of the work on the psychology of language is rooted...