Morality: Nature or Nurture (Essay Sample)

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Morality: Nature or Nurture
Morality is an essentiality in a human’s life. Everyone, deep down in the subconscious mind, contemplates on what is the moral and right thing to do in a predicament or dilemma before taking action. Particularly for children and adolescents, discerning right actions from wrong ones and shaping their characters is one very vital aspect. The act of being a moral person demands that one has to think and act morally perceptibly. The big question is whether morality is genetically inherited, or acquired from one’s environment, or maybe both.
According to two scholars, Piaget and Kohlberg, moral actions are the brainchild of moral reasoning. Morality is apparently guided by one’s thoughts and where they are steered regarding a certain dilemma (Greene, 2010). Another psychologist, Haidt, has a completely different opinion; that morality and moral intuition are aligned. People have instant gut feelings about everything based on their characters and personalities. Founded on this moral intuition is created.
Going by Haidt’s theory, human morality is controlled and guided by human emotions. Could human morality really be run by the moral emotions while moral reasoning struts about pretending to be in control? (Haidt, 2010). Apparently, people make their morality decisions based on what feelings a given situation arouses in them.
Gathering all the data on moral development from different scholars, I believe that their opinions have a juncture. It is an established fact that most personalities are hereditary. Case in point, adoptive children tend to differ in personality from their adoptive parents in contrast to their biological parents. In fact, in multiple occasions, children from a similar family have completely diverse personalities in spite of having been brought up in a similar environment and by the same parents. These findings go further to prove that the common environment shared by any given family’s children has practically no perceptible influence on their respective personalities. Back to the question on morality and its source, is it all nature, or nurture, or both?
The fact that a family’s environment bears no discernible effect on children’s personalities does not render it worthless. Children need healthy environments for a reason. Personality is not all that makes up a person. There are such elements as attitudes, behaviors, values, beliefs, perceptions, and politics. These factors are capable of being influenced regarding one’s surroundings.
Morality may not necessarily be a factor of personality. It is likely to be a product of one’s attitudes, beliefs, definitely values, and perceptions (Reifman& Cleveland, ...