Natural Morality, Moral Natures and Human Flourishing

Response to " Natural Morality, Moral Natures and Human Flourishing "

The paper Natural Morality, Moral Natures and Human Flourishing, by Narvaez, addresses problems attached to unprecedented challenges in morality and humanity. As I started reading I thought I was going to maintain confused about moral natures and moral development, which are main topics in the paper. However, after I got into the reading I found myself become clear and thoughtful about natural morality of human beings in the modern world. The paper describes phenomena that human capacities are noticed to be diminishing and tries to find out reasons behind the phenomena. And the author chooses to go into great details about the reasons of lack of moral formation.

While I was reading the paper one question that kept running through my mind was in regard to the depth of the information about evolved responsive care. Why would Narvaez go into this much depth about what is evolved responsive care? One thought on this that came to mind was that as time goes by, patterns of parenting practices are emerged and changed, causing the difference of moral formation nowadays. Different caregiving strategies lead to different kinds of attachments. I think Darcia Narvaez does a great job at throwing that information about how secure attachment and insecure attachment affect children to react and behave under social circumstances. When he “overwhelms” the reader he makes it much easier for the reader to catch the line of reasoning behind the paper. The author also breaks into the detailed list of human-beings’ moral mind-sets and construct arguments and examples to show how certain situations evoke a particular mind-set.

  Another question did catch my attention. Will human nature change through real-life experience? While I was reading I noticed that the author did quote multi-ethics theory to show that early experience shapes moral functioning, fostering different moral natures. He uses phrases such as “Moral wisdom comes from understanding the nature of the world, requiring well-educated whole-brain intuitions and reliable ’personal’ knowledge.” This suggests that early responsive care does not have a determined impact on moral formation and current situation can be improved in our society by well-designed education. Also I want to add in one quote that I think is very important to think about to understand the paper. “Human nature is not so selfish, except that we have adopted a culture that shapes us in this way.”