The name is absent

25

In fact, it is quite possible that moral nativism shows us how there can be conflicting moral
intuitions for different people, or even for a single person, with no satisfying means of resolution.
P&P in language, and the consequent proliferation of internal languages, provides a model for
understanding how there can be proliferation of incompatible moral systems, all causally
depending on the same repertoire of innate models, but each with its own implementation rules.

But is morality relevantly similar to language here? Are moral intuitions the result of
mental representations with a P&P structure? It is time to consider a possible alternative.

Uneven Progress

Peter Kropotkin suggested a different approach to understanding the psychology of moral
diversity, an approach suggesting absolutism rather than pluralism:

It is utterly impossible to divide this instinct [for altruism] from the influence of reason.
With the help of reason we create out of our innate feelings and tendencies that which we
call moral conceptions, so that the moral element in man is at once inherent and the
product of [cultural] evolution. We come into this world as beings already endowed with
the rudiments of morality; but we can become moral men only through the development
of our moral rudiments. Moral tendencies are also observed among social animals, but
morality as the joint product of instinct, feeling, and reason, exists only in man. It
developed gradually, it is developing now, and will continue to grow - which
circumstance accounts for the difference in moral conceptions among different peoples at
different periods. This variation led some light-minded negators of morality to conclude
that morality is something conditional, having no positive bases in human nature or
human reason. (1993: 252; italics added)

That is, we have innate knowledge of some very basic notions of right and wrong. With the help
of reason, we can develop these basics to produce more sophisticated and satisfying notions. The
uneven development of this process explains much of the world’s moral diversity. Those who

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