Jon Haidt's (2001) proposal for a moral intutionist theory of morality is criticized on psychological and philosophical grounds, including (a) the apparent reduction of social influence to one kind, overt compliance, and the virtual ignoring of the role of persuasion in moral and other decision making; (b) the failure to distinguish development of a psychological entity from its deployment or functioning; and (c) the failure to consider, in distinguishing cause and reason as explanatory concepts, the motivating power of reasons. Arguments for an evolutionary approach to morality are also faulted on the grounds that they assume that adaptation is served by nonmoral rather than moral (fairness- and benevolence-based) criteria. Finally, the authors suggest that an intuitionist approach such as that of Haidt may obscure important aspects of moral decision making.

The Social Intuitionist Model (SIM) of moral reasoning proposed by Jon Haidt and colleagues (Haidt, 2001; Haidt & Bjorklund, 2006) is criticized on the grounds that (1) its conclusions concerning moral reasoning are unwarranted by research reporting ‘dumbfounded’ responses by subjects whose initial judgments are challenged and judgments elicited from hypnotized subjects; (2) its account of moral change in the individual ignores a crucial temporal and developmental element of that change; 3) its hypothesis that moral change is primarily non-rational ignores the many cases of rational persuasion that conduce to such change as well as the rational resolution of internal but conflicting moral intuitions within the same individual; (4) it presents no evidence for its view that the universality of certain moral attitudes and dispositions betokens a genetic foundation (forged by evolutionary processes) for those attitudes and disposition; (5) in positing moral modules as the genetic basis for moral response, it fails to distinguish between those human responses that are rightly to be characterized as ‘moral’ and those that are social but non-moral; and finally, (6) it undermines the scientific nature of its thesis by what appears to be an inuring of it against empirical disconfirmation.

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