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Morality is like reading, not speaking
Speaking versus reading
Without any formal instruction, approximately 100% of humans learn to speak and approximately 0% learn to read. Talking comes easy and early, run by ancient mental structures that hoover up words and extract their meaning. Reading comes late and laboriously, piggybacking on bits of brain never meant to decode squiggles on paper.
Good-enough understanding
People understand the world exactly as well as they need to, and no better, a pattern called the illusion of explanatory depth. Everyone knows how to use a toilet, and mistakenly thinks they also know how a toilet works. Predictive processing theory explains why: the mind guesses what happens next and updates only when expectations don't match experience, so the model ends up good enough, errors go unnoticed until you run smack-dab into them, and each correction feels like the last.
How morality follows
Morality follows the same pattern. Don't hit, don't steal, take turns, and say please and thank you: almost everyone masters that much, because otherwise they end up friendless, if not incarcerated. Almost everyone also picks up a vague all-seeing, sky-dwelling God through simple osmosis. Beyond that, most people stay mushy on particulars, and they feel they have a coherent system right up until someone asks a specific question.
Nothing forces the repair, because pastors rarely quiz the pews and Trolley Problems rarely arrive on schedule. A sense of right and wrong with so little written on it is easily overwritten by any half-decent system of rewards and punishments.
Why does the brain pick up speech so easily?
Children around the world babble at about six months and say their first words near their first birthday, with no lessons. Linguist Eric Lenneberg proposed in 1967 that language is learned most readily during a critical period that fades around puberty. The strongest natural experiment came from Nicaragua, where deaf children brought together in special schools in Managua in the late 1970s and 1980s built a new sign language among themselves. Each new class of younger children made the grammar more regular and complete.
Why does reading borrow brain regions from other jobs?
Writing is only about 5,000 years old, far too recent for evolution to have built a dedicated reading circuit. Neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene describes reading as neuronal recycling, in which a region in the left fusiform gyrus that normally helps recognize objects gets repurposed for letters. This region is often called the visual word form area. A 2010 study by Dehaene and colleagues in Science found that it responds strongly to written words in people who read and only weakly in adults who never learned.
How was the illusion of explanatory depth tested?
In 2002, psychologists Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil of Yale reported in the journal Cognitive Science that people rated how well they understood everyday devices such as zippers and flush toilets. When asked to write out step-by-step explanations, participants rated their understanding lower afterward. In a 2013 study in Psychological Science, Philip Fernbach and colleagues found that explaining how a political policy would work made participants' views on it less extreme.
How does predictive processing work in the brain?
Hermann von Helmholtz proposed in the nineteenth century that perception is a kind of unconscious inference, in which the brain guesses what is out there from limited sensory signals. A 1999 paper by Rajesh Rao and Dana Ballard in Nature Neuroscience modeled the visual system this way: higher areas send predictions downward, and lower areas send back only the mismatches. Karl Friston later extended the idea into a general framework for how brains minimize prediction error.
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