Question Is there a correlation between intelligence and morality? I can imagine an intelligent person giving a sophisticated analysis to a complex moral question before acting as warranted by his/her analysis. On the other hand, I can imagine a person of lesser intelligence acting in a moral and caring manner without much reflection, because he or she has been raised to be kind and considerate, and because kindness and consideration have always been part of the person's personality. Conversely, it is pretty easy to see examples of immoral behavior from both more intelligent and less intelligent people as well. It seems logical that intelligence would confer a greater ability to be moral, but everyday life does not seem to show any firm correlation between the two.

Accepted:
August 31, 2010

Comments

I think that how one sees the relation between intelligence and morality might well depend on how one conceives of morality. If one had a strongly intellectualist conception of morality--as, arguably, Plato and certain early modern Rationalists, such as Leibniz, had--then one might well think that an agent's capacity for moral reflection might well depend directly on her intelligence, and so one might conclude that a more intelligent agent would at least have the capacity to be a more moral agent as well (although, of course, s/he might fail to exercise that capacity). By contrast, if one thought that morality was a matter of following the law (as, for example, early modern natural law theorists, such as Pufendorf, thought), or that it was a matter of habituation (as, at least on certain interpretations, Aristotle thought), then one might think that the capacity to be a moral agent would be altogether independent of one's capacity for moral reflection. Indeed, certain philosophers have suggested that one's capacity for moral reflection is most manifest in unreflective actions or choices, which would suggest that morality and intelligence could come unhooked altogether. To be sure, regardless of how one conceives of morality, 'real life' examples may well reveal that theories of morality do not capture the choices or actions of agents: one might take such examples to reveal a problem with one's conception of morality, or instead merely to manifest a problem with an agent's moral 'performance', that is to say, the agent's actual manifestation of moral capacities, which nevertheless does not constitute any relevant evidence against a given theory of morality.