2. What Kind of Moral Psychology?

Murdoch welcomed an interest in moral psychology in philosophy. Nevertheless, the route taken by Haidt and other moral psychologists in this blossoming field is different from the one she recommended to philosophers in their exploration of human life (see Bagnoli, Reference Bagnoli and Broackes2012; Diamond, Reference Diamond, Antonaccio and Schweiker1996, Reference Diamond2010, for an overview). Diamond characterizes Murdoch's approach to understanding human psychology and morality as ‘Reflective Empiricism’. She describes it as a form of empiricism that does not demand that one's engagement with the empirical sciences be empirical: ‘It is an empiricism of reflection on human experience, of humanistic reflection on experience’ (Diamond, Reference Diamond2021). ‘Experience’, then, is here conceived in the broadest sense of capturing one's way of relating to life (what phenomenologists have called ‘lived experience’). The ‘conceptual moral clarification’ that Murdoch suggests for reflecting on experiences in this broad sense involves attention to evaluative features of one's own language use and reflection on our inner moral lives. Some provisos aside, it suggests ‘an area of theory, reflection, meditation, contemplation, between ourselves and the simple empirical levels of action’ for the purpose of ‘moral clarification and understanding’ (Murdoch, Reference Murdoch1997, p. 180).

Haidt's empiricism is of a more recognizable kind. Like Hume, he treats moral concepts as ‘non-rational feelings’. ‘Experiences’ are perceived as inner occurrences causing outward behaviour such as uttering the words ‘It's wrong’ or offering reasons for why it is wrong. Thus, Haidt's account resembles the emotivist response in meta-ethics that Murdoch criticised, although he by contrast does not consider himself to be describing the function of moral language as delineating the ‘fundamental logical form of a moral judgment’ (Murdoch, Reference Murdoch1997, p. 177). Haidt is thus neither interested in reaching conceptual clarity about what we in different situations may speak of as morality, nor is he interested in moral clarity about what aspects of our life and experience should be of importance in making judgements that could be seen as moral. He is interested in the empirically tangible facts of morality, in the knowledge of the human moral sense that the use of scientific methods can provide.

Haidt's interest in the empirical facts of our moral psychology over the concepts used to understand these facts, or a self-understanding about what makes him foreground some features of the situation as facts, emerges in two ways in his telling of the story of Julie and Mark and in the conclusions he draws from the respondents’ reactions to it. The first is the suggestion that the story provides ‘empirical facts’ of an event on which the respondents are asked to take a stand. These are:

The second set of facts appear in the respondents’ reactions to these ‘facts of the story’ which are taken as evidence of further empirical ‘facts of moral psychology’ (Haidt, Reference Haidt2001, p. 829; Haidt, Reference Haidt2013, p. 45; Haidt and Björklund, Reference Haidt, Björklund and Sinnott-Armstrong2008, p.182). They appear when the respondents are asked to react to the story together with the following question: ‘What do you think about that? Was it OK for them to make love?’ (Haidt, Reference Haidt2001, p. 814).

This last question recurs with different variations in Haidt's works (Haidt, Reference Haidt2001, p. 814; Haidt, Reference Haidt2006, pp. 20–21; Haidt, Reference Haidt2013, p. 45). This quotation comes from his much-cited article ‘The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail’, which gives a more theoretical view on the implications of his experiments (Haidt, Reference Haidt2001, p. 814). In the unpublished study that the article references the wording is: ‘Was it wrong for them to have sex?’ (Haidt, Björklund, and Murphy, Reference Haidt, Björklund and Murphy2000, p. 15). Although the wording is shifting, the form of the question – ‘Is it x to do y?’ – remains the same, seemingly leaving one to determine what kind of judgement ‘action y is x’ is, or on what basis it is made.

In a strikingly similar manner to the meta-ethics and philosophical psychology that Murdoch criticized, Haidt then makes judgements on actions, perceived as an automatic (intuitive) pro- or con-reaction, the central feature of morality. Thus, his empirical psychology fits well with the meta-ethics, the form of logical behaviourism as well as existentialism, that Murdoch argued had privileged philosophical investigations grounded in an action being right and wrong, what she called ‘the choice-guiding words’ (Murdoch, Reference Murdoch1997, p. 79). Making these the salient moral questions, however, appeared to Murdoch as an utter poverty in the description of moral life and thought. She regretted that ‘goodness’ was no longer conceived as ‘a rich and problematic concept’ and that deep moral differences were only considered to appear in the choices of actions, and not in differences in the concepts used to describe actions (Murdoch, Reference Murdoch1997, pp. 72–73, see also Kronqvist and Elgabsi, Reference Kronqvist and Elgabsi2021).

Haidt's choice of guiding question reveals this narrow scope. Asking whether it was ‘OK’ or ‘wrong’ for the siblings to ‘make love’ is targeted at registering a reaction of approval or disapproval in as neutral a language as possible. ‘OK’ perhaps succeeds better than ‘wrong’ in this ambition, although we may argue that ‘OK’ means the same as ‘(at least) not wrong’. Considering ‘the great variety of the concepts that make up a morality’ (Murdoch, Reference Murdoch1997, pp. 72–73), however, this focus on words that denote a positive or negative reaction becomes more strained. Words like ‘acceptable’, ‘permissible’, and even ‘good’ do signal approval, but they also endorse certain behaviour by linking them to a system of moral norms.

A reason why ‘wrong’ appears more guiding (cf. Royzman, Kim, and Leeman, Reference Royzman, Kim and Leeman2015, p. 299), and perhaps more moralizing, than ‘OK’ is that ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ imply the existence of rules or principles according to which we judge these actions. The same is true for ‘acceptable’ if understood as ‘acceptable according to a common norm’. ‘Permissible’, speaks even more to a legal framework – think only of the expression ‘permissible by law’. These words significantly direct our attention away from our affective responses. If asked whether Julie and Mark's action was permitted by law, we are asked to consider not what we feel but the legal framework according to which Julie and Mark would be judged. Then again, the deeper notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ speak not only to an understanding of social norms, but to ideals we ourselves wish to promote, as well as to actions we want to prohibit in the search for a meaningful life. Not condemning two siblings who have had sex on those terms is a far cry from thinking of ‘incest’ as a good to pursue in one's own life.

In suggesting that all significant moral words can be taken as evidence of a general pro- or con-attitude distinctive of our moral psychology, Haidt can then be seen as being ‘too impressed by words’ (Murdoch, Reference Murdoch1997, p. 72) in lending too much weight to our capacity to sort words into general categories. He can, however, also be seen as not taking words seriously enough, in disregarding the different kinds of evaluations that are involved in our moral vocabulary, which ranges beyond the anaemic ‘Is it OK?’ (cf. Murdoch, Reference Murdoch1997, pp. 317, 333). As Murdoch writes, ‘Words are tricky things and must be handled with care. We must not be too impressed by them – on the other hand, we must take them seriously enough’ (Murdoch, Reference Murdoch1997, p. 72).

Another instance of this failure to take words seriously appears in the other choice of words in Haidt's guiding question. Asking whether it was OK for Julie and Mark to ‘make love’ (Reference Haidt2001), and not to ‘have sex’ as it is stated in the unpublished manuscript (Reference Haidt, Björklund and Murphy2000), Haidt treats the two descriptions of their activity as interchangeable. Both seem to depict the same actions which we are now asked to evaluate. Here, he follows the philosophers who presuppose the possibility of distinguishing between judgements of fact and judgements of value, where the first is assumed to record objective states and the latter subjective ones. However, as Murdoch writes in one of her central critiques, ‘This originally well-intentioned segregation between fact and value’, a distinction that clearly works in specific situations, ‘ignores an obvious and important aspect of human existence, the way in which almost all our concepts and activities involve evaluation’ (Murdoch, Reference Murdoch2003, pp. 25–26).Footnote ¹

In a more ordinary context than Haidt's, we can imagine a person who tells himself ‘We didn't just have sex, we made love’ to reassure himself that what had happened was as important to the other person as it was to him. Or, who says ‘I was only in need of some intimacy’ when he fears that he might have been more invested in what happened than he dares to admit. We can also imagine a person feeling hurt and deceived by the thought ‘He was only out to score’ or by the other person saying ‘There was nothing more to it, I just wanted to f*ck’. In these contexts, what words come to a person and strike them as true are not just different words for the same activity. What words they use may be significant in the attempt to grasp what was important in an encounter, and the light it throws on their previous and continuing relationship with another person. Rather than serving as evaluations of predetermined facts, their words attempt to clarify the facts of their situation in a way that both presupposes and involves evaluation itself.

The descriptive attempts to pin down the meaning of moral language in the meta-ethical case, or the ‘empirical facts’ of the ‘human moral sense’ in the moral psychological case, then, do not pay attention to the ‘normative-descriptive character’ of our language use (Murdoch, Reference Murdoch1997, p. 324). They do not acknowledge how the descriptions they offer serve as descriptions and evaluations at the same time, revealing not only facts about ‘morality’ and ‘sexuality’ in a merely descriptive way, but expressing their own understanding of the role sex, love, and intimacy ought to have in human life.

3. The Language of Family Relations

The story about Julie and Mark is carefully crafted to avoid legitimizing the intuitive reaction that something is seriously the matter with a brother and sister deciding to have sex. Against the objection that incestuous sex could cause harm to potential offspring, the respondents are pointed to the fact that Julie and Mark used two forms of birth control and will not repeat their actions (Haidt, Reference Haidt2013, p. 46). To the objection that Julie and Mark may experience emotional harm, it is noted that they both consented to and enjoyed having sex. To the objection that their relationship might be harmed, it is said that they in fact grew closer. To the objection that others might disapprove, they are reminded that keeping it a secret means no one will know. The story is even set in France to avoid the possible objection that their actions could have harmful legal consequences, since French law permits consensual sex between closely related persons.

The set-up of the experiment thus depends on the agreement that these ‘facts of the story’ determine whether Julie and Mark's actions were OK. A ‘fact of the story’ that is given no weight in the conclusions drawn from the experiment, however, is the first statement, ‘Julie and Mark are brother and sister’. When Haidt asks ‘Do you think it is acceptable for two consenting adults, who happen to be siblings, to make love?’ (Haidt, Reference Haidt2006, p. 21), the fact that Julie and Mark are siblings appears as an accidental feature of the story. What is placed centre stage in the presentation of facts is rather that they are consenting adults.

Here a picture of free individuals, again characterized by their choices, makes itself known. The ‘taboo violation’ of incest is placed by Haidt in analogy to earlier discussions of the wrongness of premarital, homosexual, or polyamorous sex. For if we (or those of us who comply with Haidt's idea of liberals) have come to see that these forms of sexual relations, once considered taboo, are acceptable when consenting adults engage in them, then why should we not also think that sex between brother and sister could be a similar ‘taboo violation’ that may prove to be acceptable between consenting adults (cf. West, Reference West and Soble2012, pp. 317–319)?

What may be felt by the respondents, however, is that the fact that they are siblings is not an accidental feature of the story but the fundamental fact to consider when attempting to morally take a stand on what it means for them to have sex (Jacobson, Reference Jacobson and Timmons2012, pp. 301–303). What is so wrong with the story, on this score, is precisely that they are siblings. As one of the respondents immediately answers, ‘I think incest is wrong anyway’, ‘I don't think it's accepted. That's pretty much it’ (Haidt, Reference Haidt2013, pp. 46–47). This also throws a different light on the state of ‘moral dumbfounding’ that the respondents are reported to experience.

The empirical set-up of the experiment suggests that Haidt and his colleagues discover a state of ‘moral dumbfounding’ in their respondents. Yet, considering the effort made to combat possible objections in the telling of the story, it appears misleading to say that the researchers simply discover a fact about the human psyche. The state of ‘moral dumbfounding’, in which the respondents ‘reach deep into their pocket for another reason, and come up empty-handed’ (Sommers, Reference Sommers2005; see also Haidt, Reference Haidt2013, pp. 45–47), is rather produced by the way the story is told. Haidt even admits that he ‘had to write some bizarre stories to give people these flashes of moral intuition that they could not easily explain’ (Haidt, Reference Haidt2013, p. 48).

In other words, the psychic state that Haidt claims to be empirically observable, and the facts of our psyche that he contends belong to it, is a logical derivative of how he frames the story and interprets people's responses to it. It is only by positing the ‘facts of the story’ used to counter the respondents’ arguments as unassailable to criticism that the respondents appear as dumbfounded. It is only insofar as we accept this framing of the story that it makes sense to think of people's responses as offering post hoc rationalisations, and not as sufficient reasons, for thinking that incest is morally wrong. Consequently, it is only by methodologically establishing what the ‘facts of the story’ are and what the ‘relevant’ reasons are for approving and disapproving what is happening in the story that certain empirically observable responses appear as ‘facts of moral psychology’ (Haidt, Reference Haidt2001, p. 829; Haidt, Reference Haidt2013, p. 45; Haidt and Björklund, Reference Haidt, Björklund and Sinnott-Armstrong2008, p. 182).

Instead of describing the difficulty of knowing what to say in this case as an effect of a psychological state whereby one's cognitive abilities are overruled by affective responses, the respondents could therefore better be described as conceptually confounded. Their reactions match the experience of a clash of concepts, as well as an uncertainty about what more general description is to count as the most relevant in thinking about the story: say, ‘incest’ or ‘consensual sex between adults’. This bewilderment is particularly fitting considering the ordinary significance of a brother and sister having sex is not allowed to weigh in on the respondents’ understanding of the story.

In a more everyday setting, identifying two people's actions as ‘incestuous’ is itself reason enough to recognize its problematic character (Jacobson, Reference Jacobson and Timmons2012, p. 301). Just as we only need to acknowledge ‘rape’ or ‘sexual abuse’ as the correct description of a set of actions to recognize their wrongness, so saying ‘They are brother and sister’ or ‘It's a case of incest’ is meant to bring the conversation to a full stop. Certainly, we may bring in further reasons to substantiate why we think of this as wrong, or why we think one ought to think of what happened under these descriptions. Nevertheless, by bringing their actions under a certain description and acknowledging the pertinence of that description a point is marked at which reason-giving or ‘justification comes to an end’ (Wittgenstein, Reference Wittgenstein1969, §192).

This move, however, is deliberately blocked in the experimental situation. To be counted as serious, any response must concern the specific ‘facts of the story’ that Haidt has dictated are ‘relevant’ to judging the story about Julie and Mark (Haidt, Reference Haidt2001, p. 829; Haidt, Reference Haidt2013, pp. 45–47). Thus, appealing to descriptions of what is happening – ‘a brother and a sister having sex’ – that in an ordinary case would merit agreement about the kind of action it is and its moral character (Diamond, Reference Diamond1988, p. 267) is consciously excluded (Haidt, Reference Haidt2001, p. 814; Haidt, Reference Haidt2013, pp. 44–47).

Yet, there is something misleading in speaking of the wrong the respondents, and we as readers, experience here as a moral wrong. The wrongs that ordinarily inhabit the moral demands we teach our children – say, not taking things from each other but sharing, not harming each other but articulating our disagreements verbally – centrally speak to temptations in our life. In our moral education, they usually appear as prohibitions, quite often in relation to our brothers and sisters, such as ‘Don't hit your brother’ or ‘Don't eat all the sweets! Remember to share with your sister’. Thus, our understanding of these prohibitions rests on the recognition that we may desire to act contrary to the moral imperatives.

Compared to these cases the incest case appears strange, which adds to the confoundment of the respondents. In the ordinary case ‘incest’ is perceived as a form of behaviour that does not need to be prohibited with words such as, ‘Don't sleep with your sister’, nor is it a cause for temptation. As one respondent exclaims, ‘It's just not something you are brought up to do’ (Haidt, Reference Haidt2013, p. 47). Incest, as anthropologist Robin Fox argues, ‘is generally avoided rather than prevented’, not because family members may not mate due to biological aversion, but because they often have a too ‘close association with each other’ (Fox, Reference Fox1967, pp. 73–74; cf. Lagerspetz et al., Reference Lagerspetz, Antfolk, Gustafsson and Kronqvist2017 on the Freud-Westermarck controversy on incest aversion or avoidance). Without taking a stand on the origin and prevalence of this lack of desire for intercourse with siblings, it helps to remember that as siblings we usually grow up together in childhood, a time where sexual desire, in the way considered by Haidt, is not a central feature of our life. The point at which sexual desire becomes more prevalent coincides with our moving away from the family (see Fox, Reference Fox1967, p. 74), seeking another form of closeness and intimacy than the one offered by the family into which we were born.

A better way of approaching the story, preferable to asking whether it is morally wrong, is therefore to say, as Diamond does in a discussion of why we do not eat our dead (cf. Haidt, Björklund, and Murphy, Reference Haidt, Björklund and Murphy2000), that speaking of a moral wrong ‘is not too weak for that, but in the wrong dimension’ (Diamond, Reference Diamond1995, p. 323). That a brother is not someone about whom I should have sexual fantasies is part of the concept of a brother (Diamond, Reference Diamond1995, p. 325). Learning the concept is not just a way of denoting certain genetic relationships but involves learning how to respond to the kind of being a brother is, the kind of care and concern that seeing that this is my brother demands of me, the thinkable and unthinkable ways of showing someone a brotherly love. Saying ‘He is your brother’ is thus both a reason for doing certain things with him and for taking certain attitudes to him, and a limit on other kinds of actions and thoughts.

Saying that Julie and Mark are brother and sister, therefore, is not merely a matter of marking a certain fact about them, albeit a fundamental one. Saying that it is part of the concept of a brother and a sister that they do not think of their relationship as sexual rather involves a moral stand on the kind of relationship it is. Taking a person as one's sibling or living a life with a person as being one's close kin sets a limit to our thought – but not as a matter of what it is possible for us to think of as a psychological fact. Rather, it brings out what we are able to imagine as meaningful possibilities in our life. Therefore, it is also problematic to argue that thinking of the fact that they are siblings is best characterised as a reason for disapproving: in this kind of relationship, certain kinds of possibilities are just out of the question (cf. Jacobson, Reference Jacobson and Timmons2012, p. 301).

4. What Belongs to Our Concepts?

Saying that it belongs to the concepts of being brother and sister that one does not have sexual fantasies about each other is not to say that it is unintelligible for people ever to entertain such thoughts. Neither is it a claim about what is unimaginable in relation to ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ in another time and place. Despite worries to the opposite, Diamond's remarks about what belongs to our concept of a brother is not a conservative remark about the word's meaning (Diamond, Reference Diamond1988; Eriksen, Reference Eriksen2020). Rather, the worry about conservatism presupposes a more substantial view of what it means for something to be a concept than we have introduced so far, for instance that concepts are fundamental, and therefore unchangeable, facts about our life.

The conceptual clarifications we have offered, however, do not introduce concepts as fundamental facts. Rather, we have attended to the language used to describe moral questions to emphasize differences in the evaluative features and ethical implications of the descriptions used to portray the ‘facts of a story’. This we have done to delineate how thinking of our descriptions, how we speak of something as a fact, as a value, or as something in between, can be considered as distinct from judging whether something is a fact. So, if someone asked whether the wrongness of incest is similar to the recording of a fact, something that can be true or false, such as ‘my brother lives in France’, or to the elucidation of the meaning of a concept, such as ‘a brother is a male sibling’, we would say it is closer to the latter. If someone asked whether not having sex is an accidental feature of a particular relationship between brothers and sisters, such as ‘my brother and I have always been close’, or whether it is a significant aspect of how we conceive of the kind of relationship between any brother or sister, we would say it belongs to those features of being ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ we deem significant for the kind of concept it is. It is ‘part of the concept’. This is one way of elucidating how thinking about our concepts, thinking through our use of words, involves an area of reflection ‘between ourselves and the simple empirical levels of action’ (Murdoch, Reference Murdoch1997, p. 180).

Insofar as clarifying the concepts with which we think is part of thinking about how we think, we are also invited to see how our thinking may change. We can think differently. We have pointed to such differences in how Haidt and we think about the ‘facts of the story’, and we have also offered other ways of taking these facts. Where Haidt suggests that we should describe the respondents’ reactions as morally dumbfounded, we have suggested that it is better to think of them as conceptually confounded. Something similar can also happen in the way we think of a brother and sister having sex. What Haidt's experiment shows here is only that we may need to consider further aspects of how the story of their encounter and relationship is told if we are to see how our thinking about ‘incest’ can change.

By attending to the descriptions of a sexual relationship between sister and brother in another fictitious story, we can consider a case that does not immediately invite a feeling of bewilderment or conceptual confoundment. In George R. R. Martin's The Game of Thrones and subsequent screen adaptations, the queen, Cersei, who has an erotic relationship with her brother, Jaime, says they are ‘more than’ brother and sister. They ‘belong’ together, they are ‘lovers’ and in love (Martin, Reference Martin2013, pp. 485–486); Game of Thrones, 2011). This love for her brother is no momentary fluke, no curious one-time desire. They experienced their relationship in this way since they were children. To themselves, they are not brother and sister but lovers.

Their understanding of themselves, however, is socially awkward, even in a setting in which marriage between brother and sister in some ruling classes is not prohibited. They acknowledge that others do not see what they see, and so they keep their love a secret. No one is allowed to know how they feel for each other, and what they do. The queen's children eventually turn out to be bastards from the affair with her brother, to whom she is of course not married. As this surfaces, both of them are faced with uncomfortable feelings in family life, social pressure, and religious punishment; things that they had tried to avoid by keeping their relationship a secret (Game of Thrones, 2015a and 2016).

The authors of this story know very well that the queen and her brother, having this sexual relation, cannot be just brother and sister without simultaneously downplaying the kind of social conflicts their characters are facing. Doing that would mean being unrealistic about the human relationships they attempt to portray. On the contrary, they must describe their struggle, their awkwardness, their despair when feeling that they are doing something socially unacceptable, and, even for themselves, conceptually confounding. They must depict how they try to overcome the conflict between being brother and sister on the one hand, and being lovers on the other. They need to show what it means to live a life inside this conflict.

This difficulty comes out in them not speaking to each other as brother and sister but as a couple, something which they can only do in secret. In keeping their desire for each other a secret, they know they cannot escape that they are raised by the same parents, that they have a common brother, and are conceived as brother and sister in their social circumstances. In public they cannot do what couples or parents do; the brother can never be a father to his children for ‘they would be stoned in the streets’ (Game of Thrones, 2015b). Still, he cares about them in ways they will never know (Game of Thrones, 2015a). The confrontation between how they see each other and the view of someone who is ignorant of their vision culminates in a scene in which one of their children hears the rumour about ‘mother’ and ‘uncle Jaime’ and understands, perhaps, that he is a child to them and so is disgusted by their presence (Game of Thrones, 2012).

Martin's book and the films based on it describe a conflict between the characters’ own understanding and that of those in their social environment. Yet, the reader and viewer are invited to care for the plight of these characters, to acknowledge the conflict between an individual's or couple's self-understanding and that of their surrounding community. They thus tell a story of a sexual relationship between a brother and sister which we do not have to condemn as wrong, and in relation to which we rather may be moved to think that the pressure a community's ordinary understanding is exerting is illicit.Footnote ² It is similar stories of conflict and confusion that have fuelled changing attitudes and legislation around same-sex love and relationships, not least through the slogan, also accepted by many liberals, that ‘love is love’. Such ways of framing stories about sex and love have changed, or are continuously changing, our perception of what the relevant ways are of thinking about an individual relationship as well as what it means to be a man or a woman. (Erotic attraction, affection, and attention are no longer seen as a prerogative of the ‘love between man and woman’.)

Now, Haidt's interest is not to change our understanding of incest as wrong. Neither is ours, nor necessarily Martin's. As long as there is no upsurge in real-life Julies and Marks, and the anthropological evidence continues to show that ‘incest is generally avoided rather than prevented’ (Fox, Reference Fox1967, pp. 73–74), we have no reason to question our historically and culturally situated, and perhaps even psychologically grounded, understanding of sisters and brothers as beings with whom we are not to have sex. In fact, considering the lengths to which Haidt goes in convincing us of a case that is not harmful, we may have good reason to endorse our ordinary understanding of it as something odd and out of the question.

The problem we have pinpointed in Haidt's story is rather that it fails to be a convincing story about sexual morality, and thereby also about morality. The story is designed to show how we cannot avoid thinking of incest as wrong despite our liberal tendencies to think otherwise. In contrast to the example from Game of Thrones, it does not present us with a description of their relationship that would allow us to think about it beyond our social conventions. It does not invite us to see just how their sexual encounter leads them to ‘feel even closer to each other’ (Haidt, Reference Haidt2001, p. 814) by challenging and changing the concepts they use to understand themselves, the descriptions they find fitting to their relationship. In these respects, his account of the empirical facts of our moral psychology is more conservative than ours. It conserves a picture of morality as bounded by the facts and does not consider the changes we may undergo in thinking about what makes morality an indispensable feature of our life and language.

Haidt's thinking about what may be learnt morally by considering his story thus stems and suffers from too general a picture of what conceptual and imaginative resources are needed to untangle the issues involved in a brother and sister deciding to have sex on the spur of a moment, and how we ourselves are morally implicated in how we think of such a story. What do we, for instance, take as a ‘fact of the story’, and what as a ‘fact about our moral psychology’? What descriptions are in turn revelatory of the historically situated and conceptually seeped lives that we live? What is the contribution of the kind of beings we are and become to the family relations we are born into and the relationships we form in other ways? Furthermore, Haidt relies on a picture of what sex is and what it means to speak of it as ‘OK’, which renders his story too abstract. It does not register the various moral words we call up to think of our relations to each other, as well as our historically and culturally shifting concepts of ‘having sex’ and ‘making love’. Deciding to ‘make love’ with one's brother or sister is described in terms suitable to the decision to ‘play a game of Scrabble’.