Your Morals Are as Vague as Your Idea of How a Toilet Works

Ask someone how a toilet works and you will get a confident pause. Everyone knows how to use one, but almost no one can explain the valves and siphons inside. The writer Adam Mastroianni argues that moral beliefs work the same way: they feel solid until they are tested, and then they turn to mush.

He offers a simple test for any human skill. Is it like speaking or like reading? Nearly everyone learns to talk simply by growing up, while almost no one learns to read without lessons and practice. Speaking arrives early and easily, using ancient brain wiring. Reading arrives late and laboriously, and it has to be taught. Developing a clear value system seems to be more like reading, he suggests, because studies indicate that few people get very far with it.

About two decades ago, the sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton interviewed hundreds of American teenagers about religion. No matter their stated faith, few could say anything specific. What emerged was what Smith and Denton called moralistic therapeutic deism, a vague notion of a distant and friendly God who mainly wants people to be nice and content, helps out when asked, and otherwise keeps to himself. They suspected many adults never move past it, since the teenagers likely picked it up from their parents.

Psychologists, Mastroianni says, found the same shallowness from the other direction and called it the illusion of explanatory depth, meaning people think they understand things far better than they do. As Mastroianni puts it, people seem to "understand the world exactly as well as they need to, and no better." The reason is how the mind learns. Under what scientists call predictive processing theory, the brain constantly guesses what will happen next and updates only when its guess is wrong. So folk physics and folk morality both stay just detailed enough to get by.

That basic level is not hitting or stealing, taking turns, and minding manners. Master that and you stay liked, and out of jail. Unless a pastor cold calls people in the pews with theological quizzes, or ordinary life regularly throws you into Trolley Problems, those wrenching hypotheticals where you must choose who lives and who dies, nothing tells you your ethics are broken. Mastroianni suggests that thinness could explain why a decent system of bonuses and penalties can so easily fill in for conviction, since there is little firm belief there to begin with.